You mean *West* Germany. The East didn't want to teach that concentration camps, informants, secret police, militarized societies, or one party states were actually bad and were actually fuller into the Prussian legacy than West Germany would have dared.
A few yrs ago I had a coworker who was raised in East Germany. At the time, I was surprised by his R wing ideology. I know better now. If we look into the factors that led to both WW’s, there is a stark difference between the two. W. Germany evolved. E. Germany was a continuation.
Down, in specific cases, to literally re-using the concentration camps and making a specific point to hire Gestapo agents and leaders as part of the Stasi. Ulbricht and Honecker were very much Hitler's actual successors in practice.
There’s this concept in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that the oppressed become oppressors unless there is a conscious & liberating educational process. I think the cycle of punishment w/out consciousness plays into why we see oppressors cycle back around.
I think there's a different dynamic here - Nazis and Communists had to pull from same personnel pool of violent people with antisocial tendencies when staffing their regimes and occupation regimes
That makes sense. I was speaking more to the people of E. Germany vs. W. Germany in that they were not citizens of a liberal society in which social consciousness & education broke the cycle. Oppressor/Oppressed often flip & victimization plays into fascism.
The Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Ravenbrück concentration camps were all national memorial sites under the GDR. Commemoration of Nazi crimes was central to legitimizing politics of the SED and framed around heroic anti fascist resistance.
A very shallow and superficial commemoration given the regime for very obvious reasons could not condemn much of how Nazi Germans actually work lest people get ideas.
No accident AfD is stronger there
The electoral maps of the last few elections are amazing. Outside of Berlin there are a few tiny bastions of non-AfD but other than that it nearly perfectly matches the DDR/FRG border.
It’s really not that simple. bsky.app/profile/hist...
And 12 times as many Californians voted for Trump as did West Virginians.
Exactly - also with so many parties in the German system, largest vote share can often be even less indicative.
My point is that size of vote doesn’t track with political or social environment, that ratio does. If it was just size of a population you’d have to conclude that the US is much more Irish than Ireland.
But this gets used to make the AfD into a product of the east the same way people ignore blue voters in flyover country and republicans in democratic voting states. It looks like a stark division of east and west which is more a matter of degree
In the same way clearly the US south is clearly more Republican, to say that it is just a Southern party because it gets blowout elections obscures it’s popularity where it loses at the state level and is also an outgrowth of they political culture
yeah i didn't say nobody in West Germany votes AFD, i said accurate Holocaust education could sway the marginal voter into supporting the CDU/CSU.
There is plenty of Holocaust education in the East and the West. The young people who grew up post 1989 are also more likely to vote AfD in most ex GDR districts than the older generation who were socialized under socialism
Yeah in ways you can't say are strictly economic either.
Nope. I’d be curious to see how it plays out in Berlin.
Some ethnographic studies of AfD supporters in the former East Germany have found the East German party line toward Nazism (almost totally disregarding the race ideology) has played a role in modern AfD’s relative success there
There are only so many antisocial assholes in a population, they'd run into issues staffing their secret police if they had repudiated them