Saxony... Is east Germany still have DDR effect...?

Question

After the fall of Berlin wall East germany unite with west. Do yo think East Germany still in bad conditions or its gouing to rebuild???

Answer 1

If Saxony was in the US,---95 % of airport"security" personal would be Saxons-Unpleasant creed and horrible dialect!

Answer 2

Actually after the billions of Euros the West pumped into the East for the last 18 years to rebuild it the East is in much better shape than the West.

This is one of the factors why so many Western Germans are, well let's be honest, utterly pissed about the East, cause they get the feeling that all their hard earned tax money goes to the East but the people in the East still cannot stop complaining about everything. Very complicated situation.

I'm currently living in the West and the hatred of most people I met here is BIG. There is actually this joke, that whenever an Eastern German complains how much better life was back in the DDR people offer him to help him rebuilt it.

The situation seems to get more and more aggressive. Occasionally I can't wait to go to the States again.

Very sad, cause Germany is such a nice country!

Answer 3

After the fall of the Berlin wall and reunification of the 2 sides East Germany developed fastly. And lot of people who live in West pay lot of taxes which transfered to development of East Germany. And there is a small efect are still remain after reunificatio because people in East Germany lived lot of problems during DDR....

Ola http://turk.us/

Answer 4

Many places there look better than in the West now because many of the buildings were renovated in the last few years. I've been to Weimar and Erfurt in Thuringia recently and these towns are quite beautiful. I've also heard that Dresden in Saxony is very beautiful again. Also many of the smaller towns and villages look very neat now. The first time I went to East Germany was in 1990 short after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the reunification, and it looked very shabby then, and this has changed a lot since then.

But there are still more social problems in the East than in the West, such as more unemployment, more votes for extremist parties and more xenophobia.

And I don't know where Masterswot is living, but where I live (in the West, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, very near to the former border) I don't see any hatred against East Germans and actually almost half of the people I've studied with and I work with now are from the former GDR. I absolutely don't hate the people from there, they are just like all others to me.

The high level of xenophobia and the many votes for extremist parties in the East do worry me but it does not mean that all East Germans are bad, those I know are absolutely normal people and not xenophobic and all that.

Answer 5

Here is part of the conclusion of my MA thesis (2003).

"In conclusion, this author feels that the collapse of the GDR was perhaps as simple and effective as could have been hoped for, with few casualties and little obstruction to reform once the process had started. On the other hand, the building of a new state from the FRG and the remnants of the GDR has been mishandled. Drakulic wrote that we could not expect people from the former communist countries to take over Western values, the onus being more on the Westerners to change their way of living to help everyone, rather than just themselves, (1991, pp.138-9) however this was exactly what happened. The desire for an economic solution to the social and political problems faced in the short term, without real thought about the future, led to a rushed unification process that did not give the East a chance to work out its own past difficulties. Rita Carter gives us cause to hope, stating that feelings become weaker as a memory recedes into the past, and even if a memory is perfectly recalled, it loses its immediacy with the passage of time. However she also writes that this applies in reverse to the future; as “the prospect of a painful visit to the dentist tomorrow is probably more upsetting than the thought of your own death”. (2002, pp.244-5) Therefore even if memories fade, the problems of the present will continue to hold greater sway over the people than the potential benefits of the future."

The East will not become a valid part of unified Germany until the people who were "verraten und verkauft" (betrayed and sold) in the East, those who haven't worked for 15 or more years after their jobs were destroyed, have died. The West won't help them, and they can no longer help themselves.