What Remains? The Political Culture of an Unlucky Birth
in German Politics and Society
The future political culture of eastern Germany and, with it, the relationship
between unified Germany’s once divided populations will
depend heavily upon how all Germans respond to a distinctive fact
about the east. The region experienced not one but, counting the
German Democratic Republic (GDR), two separate eras of dictatorship.
This fact can be, and has been, understood in two different
ways, with significantly different implications in each case. The first
is the perspective of the victim. According to this view, the citizens of
the GDR uniquely had to shoulder the burden of having been born,
in effect, “in the wrong place.” Not only did they endure greater
hardships than their western counterparts, such as the rebuilding of
Germany after World War II, but they suffered by themselves
through the debilitating consequences of Soviet occupation and their
inability, until 1990, to act upon the right to “free self-determination”
(to quote the original preamble of the Basic Law). As a result, according
to this argument, easterners were owed special treatment after
unification because of their distinctive misfortunes.
