During the period when Germany was divided into East Germany and West Germany, the East Germans wanted to move to West Germany because of repressive politics, too much control, too much poverty and so

During the period when Germany was divided into East Germany and West Germany, the East Germans wanted to move to West Germany because of repressive politics, too much control, too much poverty and so on... Me. Why did the East Germans want to run away? Cheng Yinghong The average citizen of a society has a car, a wooden house in the countryside, a vacation allowance, basic necessities are subsidized by the government, and education and medical care are guaranteed. Why can't such a system be sustained? This is what I thought after visiting the East German Social Exhibition Museum (DDRMuseum) in Berlin, Germany. This museum is located at One Liebknechtstrasse in Berlin. Liebknecht was the leader of the German ****production party and was killed by a rightist mob in 1919. After the reunification of the two Germanys, many of the place names inherited from the former East Germany reflecting the history of socialism and ****productivist ideology remained unchanged, such as Marx Engels Square, Rosa Luxemburg Square and so on, reflecting the united country's respect for history. In a German travelogue on the Chinese Internet, the author of an old introduction to Berlin commented on these street names: "The names written in the book are of course the names before the merger of East and West Germany, and I guess the streets are still the same now, but the names have been changed. Aren't Marx, Lenin, 'Liberation' and Liebknecht too exciting for some people in West Germany?" In fact, the place names remain the same and are right under the author's feet. The East German Social Exhibition Hall has two special features. The first is that it introduces the vanished system mainly from the point of view of social life, and the second is that most of its exhibits can be interacted with, so that people can touch the exhibits and activate electronic devices to "bring them back to life", thus gaining a more realistic impression of the era. The first thing you see when you enter the exhibition hall is a family car produced in East Germany. The history of East Germany's family car can be traced back to 1954, when a member of the Politburo of the East German Party proposed that West Germany's Volkswagen produced the Beetle small family car, and that East Germany should come up with a similar product. 1958 East Germany's Trabi was put into production, and it was soon launched on the market. This Trabi was so small that it was hard to imagine how Germans, who were all tall on average, could fit comfortably in it. But the small space was not the problem. The real problem was the after-sales service of the car. Repairs were very expensive, parts were in short supply, and if a garage wanted to replace a part, the owner often had to find a way to do it himself. In order to save money, many Germans do their own car repairs, in the words of the show's description: the dining table of many Germans' homes is the workbench for car repairs. Second was the price of the car; for most East Germans cars were a luxury. Lastly, there was the waiting list for a purchase license, which typically took sixteen years (this was in the exhibit description, unbelievably). But despite this, amazingly, many East German families found ways to save up and patiently waited more than a decade to buy a car. By 1985, half of East German households had cars. This proportion could be considered to be at the level of developed countries, not to mention at that time, but also in the world today. In fact, as far as satisfying daily transportation is concerned, there is no need for East Germans to purchase a car. East Germany had well-developed railroads, highways and city buses, which were subsidized by the state and were very cheap, sometimes even free of charge. Although the trains are outdated and slow, and so are the cars, which often miss their stops; compared to many places in the world where transportation is inadequate, East Germans should be in good condition. There are many other things that East Germans should feel content with. The most basic foodstuffs, mainly bread, are so low in price that some people feed them to their dogs. While other goods, especially meat and fruit are still in very short supply. Education and health care were free, although facilities and services were not ideal. East Germans generally enjoyed the benefit of annual vacations away from home, which could be as far away as the coastal regions of the Baltic Sea and other socialist sister countries, or even Scandinavia. If the vacation was within the country, the government issued vacation coupons to vacationers, offering substantial discounts on transportation and lodging, with low-wage earners even paying as little as one-third of the cost.As of 1982, the German labor unions had six hundred and ninety-five resorts throughout East Germany offering vacations to their working brethren. The unions in East Germany did not just administer the benefits of vacations, unit cafeterias, and movie tickets; they also had a bit of bargaining power with the government or factory leaders over wage packages, though basically cooperating with rather than embarrassing the leaders. Employment opportunities are open to the public, and notices are posted directly in front of the factories, so the backdoor and understudy routes that the Chinese became accustomed to in the late Cultural Revolution do not seem to be common in the GDR. The control of employment and the allocation of quotas by the labor and personnel bureaus seemed to be either non-existent or unimportant. In addition, many city people in East Germany had their own vacation cabins in the suburbs and countryside, called dacha, as in the USSR. where they not only spent holidays and weekends, but partied and had barbecues. The East Germans were generally celibate, and many beaches and parks were bustling with naked people on weekends and holidays, which was more liberal than in the West. There are many photographs of this in the exhibition halls. The government was initially opposed to this, but later tolerated it. In the 1980s, young people in East Germany used a wide variety of recorders and cameras, all of which were made in Germany and were of very good quality, much better than those in the Soviet Union. If you compare East Germany with West Germany in terms of material life, there was actually little difference between the 1960s and 1970s as far as the so-called hardware was concerned. The furnishings of East and West German homes at that time, if you look only at the furniture and electrical appliances, there were no noteworthy differences between the two sides. There are two photos in the exhibition, one is the living room and the other is the kitchen of an East German family. The equipment and layout of the family's living room may not be so bad as the average level of today's Chinese urban family, right? So why, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, did millions of East Germans have to drive their automobiles - which used to be a symbol of their superiority over other countries within the socialist system - across the border to West Germany? Unlike some other former Eastern European countries, the East German system was not revolutionized or slowly eroded by reforms, but was swept away by the flood of de-countrying. And before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the liberalization of Hungary had already created the spectacle of East Germans flocking to Hungary. In post-Cold War narratives, the fall of the Berlin Wall is often mistaken for a sign of revolution in Eastern Europe, when in fact it was not, and East Germans were overpraised. This is how history exaggerates the significance of symbolic signs. The real revolutions happened in countries like Romania and Poland. What happened in East Germany was the fall of the wall, the fall of the wall and the triumphal exodus. Why did East Germany, which was arguably pretty good in many aspects of material life, collapse. That's a big question, and one that people today would probably all have a very abstract answer to, but the contents of this exhibit gallery can provide some concrete clues. For example, in one corner there is a cell for political prisoners, and the explanatory text mentions that from 1949 to 1985, the GDR a****** incarcerated two hundred and fifty thousand political prisoners, an average of nearly seven thousand per year. The population of the GDR, from its foundation to its collapse, never exceeded 20 million, so this is a very alarming ratio. The mass incarceration of political prisoners has always been the main method by which closed states have been maintained, and East Germany seems not only to have been no exception, but to have stood out, and may have been the reason for its lack of violent revolutions and tenacious resistance movements. In contrast, West Germany had no political prisoners. Not only did it not have any, but there was a vigorous New Left movement in the 1960s, centered in West Berlin, which was surrounded by the GDR. Revolutionaries from Marx, Engels and Lenin to Mao and Guevara were idolized by the youth. None of those New Leftists, by contrast, have ever been jailed for their political ideas or ideological problems. Another example is that a society that relies on the state to subsidize the basic necessities of life is also likely to be a privilege-ridden system on the inside, and not as egalitarian as it appears to be. There is a refrigerator in the exhibition hall that belonged to the family of a high-ranking East German cadre, and it is filled with all kinds of famous wines and fresh fruits, which is unimaginable to the average East German living in a shortage economy and rationing system, despite the fact that their daily bread is very cheap. One might ask: could this refrigerator be fictionalized in order to discredit the Red Party in East Germany? To be sure, unlike the other exhibits, this refrigerator could not have been an original removed from the home of any cadre who copied it; all those fruits were waxed. But think of it this way: if privileges still exist in societies where goods are plentiful and a market economy is practiced in the supply of consumer goods, isn't it even more inevitable that privileges for consumer goods in a rationing system where goods are in short supply? The "little birch stores" in the history of Soviet Eastern Europe were the places where those special supplies were distributed. It is for these reasons that for forty years after the creation of East Germany, and especially for nearly thirty years after the erection of the Berlin Wall, countless people were willing to risk prison and even their lives in an attempt to escape to West Germany. From the methods of their escape, people today can also see that the general standard of living in East Germany was actually higher than in many other countries. For example, the trunks and even seats of cars were modified to hide people in them; homemade human-powered airplanes and hot-air balloons; homemade improvised submarines and rowboats (some people drifted from the Baltic Sea to the Nordic countries); digging tunnels (in the most successful way of escape, an underground passage from East to West Berlin allowed fifty-seven people to escape over two nights), etc. These methods required a considerable amount of mechanical tools. All of these required a considerable degree of mechanical tools, equipment, and other conditions, and they were mostly accomplished by these escapees in their own homes. Although most of the escapees, instead of accomplishing their purpose, were sent to prison, and became an important source of the average of seven thousand political prisoners per year, there were, after all, many who made it to West Berlin or West Germany as they wished. It is conceivable that in a society of extreme poverty, where people's homes were empty, where the most basic tools in the homes of the common people were at best hammers and pliers, and where every move was watched by neighbors with no privacy, such an escape could only have been an extravagant pipe dream or even a myth. There is no other way for these escapees to escape but by the most primitive means, such as traveling long distances and swimming. By the standards of these societies, East Germany was already a paradise of advanced socialism (in the words of Soviet leader Brezhnev in the 1970s) rather than a rudimentary level of well-being, and in addition to the state benefits, the technology and materials required for these homemade means of transportation for the escape were a negative indication of this. People in such a society might think of the desperate flight of the East Germans in this way: what else can explain living in such a paradise and not being satisfied with it, but risking one's life to get out of it, except that one is in the middle of it all? On the other hand, in the eyes of the East Germans, explaining the word "freedom" to those who think that they were born in a blessed place is like a summer bug that can't talk about ice, isn't it? (RFA) Those who lived through the two totalitarian dictatorships of Hitler and East Germany, and especially those who experienced brutal persecution, are concerned about the lack of understanding of East Germany's history among the younger generation. The Central German Radio organized a public panel discussion on the issue of youth and East German history education. Germany experienced two totalitarian dictatorships, Hitler's and the ****production party's, in a period of about sixty years, from the 1930s to 1989. Many people experienced the persecution of these two dictatorships themselves or their relatives and friends. For this reason, these people and German society had a deep appreciation of how the dictatorships had deceived the general population and how cruel they were. Now, twenty-three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the complete introduction of democracy in Germany, many people have not lost their vigilance against the dictatorships that have left Germany. On March 5, on the same day, two events demanded that people never forget to be wary of the East German dictatorship. One was in Berlin, where people demanded that the Berlin city government not demolish a representative section of the Berlin Wall in the center of the city, in order to keep the history of those days visible. One was the public holding of a seminar on the education of young people and the ****producers on the history of East Germany by the Central German Radio. The title of the seminar was, "Don't talk to me about East Germany." The seminar was attended by Jahn, head of the research department for the management of the archives of the secret police, Prof. Schroeder, a sociologist specializing in the social problems of the ****producers at the Free University of Berlin, the Minister of Culture of the state of Saxony-Anhalt, Mr. Daughero and Mrs. Urbain, who used to be a secondary-school teacher and is now working for the student museum in Leipzig. At the beginning of the discussion, the moderator opened the chapter by asking Prof. Schr?der. "Mr. Schroeder, how dangerous do you think it is to hear that many students are not able to distinguish the difference between democracy and dictatorship and authoritarianism?" To this, Prof. Schroeder answered clearly, "It is very dangerous if people are not awake enough to the compulsion of dictatorship and authoritarianism. Because it will slowly take over your whole body and mind. It is very dangerous if you don't know from history the signs of dictatorships and authoritarianisms, what they used to do specifically, what democracy means to a person who has lived through a dictatorship, how they evaluate democracy. Today democracy has become natural for many people, but looking back in history, it is definitely not so natural to imagine that there is as much room for freedom, as many possibilities for development, as there are for people living in Germany today." According to Prof. Schroeder's research, one-third of the students now think that there were free elections in East Germany back in the day, and two-thirds of the teenagers even think that East Germany was not a dictatorship. For this reason, the seminar brought to light the need for more historical education in schools about the GDR. This is a report from Germany by special correspondent Tianyi.