Why Germany is still divided

This is the 40th anniversary of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Or DDR, the dictatorial state better known as East Germany. It is the last anniversary this state will ever celebrate.

But the leader, Erich Honecker, doesn't know that yet. Outside, protesters clash with the police. And just one month later, excited crowds will flood the border dividing East and West Berlin.

By the time of the 41st anniversary, the DDR had vanished. It's land and people taken over by that other German state, the BRD or FRG, but has the DDR ever gone away? In Berlin Remnants of this history are hiding in plain sight in traffic lights, iconic buildings, or subtle distinctions where the Berlin Wall one stood.

But if you zoom out and look at the map, the signs are not so subtle. The difference in job opportunity, attitude to vaccination obesity rates, or religion show divided country. And people that grew up in East Germany still feel a gap with their former neighbors.

It's not just people on the street that feel this way. Angela Merkel led Germany for 16 years. When she left office in 2021, she could finally share her grievances.

Growing up in East Germany, she felt judged by the people in the West after unification. I didn't experience East Germany, I was born in 1990. Just a few months after the Berlin Wall fell in November 89.

As I was growing up, this date was special. When meeting new people, we checked if we were born before or after the wall. The only moment of similar importance I can think of is 2001.

To me, these two dates felt like a world apart. As I get older, I see just how recent this all is. 2001 happened 22 years ago.

That means almost twice the time has passed as there did between the fall of the wall and the fall of the Twin Towers. I don't know how to describe how this feels, but it feels wrong somehow. 33 years also means that a generation has passed since the fall of the wall, so a new generation wants to understand this date.

And I want to understand it, too. When it comes to East Germany, I was mostly taught about the Berlin Wall, about the secret police that spied on their people. But I feel there's more to this story and the people living it.

In this video, I want to look at the history of the DDR, how it was established, how it was to live there. And what is the modern legacy of this state? So this video is about East Germany, and yes, that means we'll be talking about the Stasi, the secret police.

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I had the opportunity to talk to Katja Hoyer, who just wrote a brilliant book about this very subject. Katja is a visiting scholar at King's College UK. She wrote a book on the German Empire, and now one about the DDR.

We'll get to Katia in a bit, but first, let's set the scene. It's 1945, and the Allies defeat Nazi Germany in the biggest conflict the world has ever seen. Already before the end of the war, the Allies have been talking about what to do with Germany.

It must be tamed. So they settle on a division. France, Great Britain, the US, and the Soviet Union divide Germany into four zones.

Each of them will administer a zone. After a few years, these zones change to two states, the Bundesrepublik Deutschland and the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. The former capital Berlin was surrounded by the Soviet zone, but it was also divided.

I went to Berlin to show you where you can still find this division. And that meant I had to take a lot of subways. I don't know about you, but when it comes to these two states, I was always told that the biggest difference between East and West was the ideology.

Communism versus capitalism. And that this shapes everything, how the rest of the history will play out. But these two states actually had very different starting points.

If you look at this map of Germany before the Second World War, You see that after the war, it lost a lot of territory. This means that suddenly 12 million Germans lived outside of the new borders. They had to leave their homes or were violently forced to move to the new Germany.

And because of geography, a lot of these people were settled in East Germany. So many that a quarter of the DDR consisted of refugees. All these people need supports, food, homes.

But that is not the only difference between East and West. In 1950, West Germany had a population of 51 million. It had the Ruhrgebiet, the industrial heartland of Germany.

They got financial support from the West. If you compare this to the DDR, they have a way smaller industrial and demographic base. A population of just about 18 million.

It's a mostly agrarian society with little energy sources except for brown coal. And then they also have the luck of being liberated by the Soviet Union. So I am at this Soviet memorial for fallen soldiers that died fighting in Berlin.

And I think this really shows what kind of state East Germany is going to be. Let me show you. It's really Soviet propaganda at its best.

It's really the Soviets liberating the Germans. And at the main piece, this one big soldier with a child on his arm, a big sword in his hand, crushing National Socialism. The Nazis behaved differently on the Eastern Front.

Hitler fought this insane war of annihilation against the Soviets. 20 million Soviets had died, their lands burned, villages exterminated. So when they entered German lands, they wanted revenge.

In Berlin, the Soviets looted the city for months and grabbed everything they could. You know this famous picture of the liberation of Berlin by the Soviets. It's really some good propaganda It was staged but also photoshopped because the Soviet soldier Well, let's say he had more watches on his arm that he needed to tell the time It's not really the picture the Soviets want to paint of liberation.

On a larger scale, art factories, whole laboratories were packed up and sent east a third of the industrial base of East Germany was robbed and Soviet soldiers r*ped 2 million women Women that had to survive by striking deals with their r*pists. So this exact memorial has been jokingly called the Memorial to R*pists. And next to all this, Stalin wants big war reparations.

Huge sums of money. It's not the best start for East Germany. So you have a nation broken, looted and pillaged Who are going to be the leaders of all this rubble?

The soviets have one rule. We can't have former nazis ruling the country. So to Stalin the most logical solution to that was to send back some of the german communists that had spent the war in russia because they'd fled the nazis beforehand and had proved themselves incredibly loyal to the point where they sometimes betrayed their own friends and colleagues to prove to Stalin how loyal they were.

These people had been through the biggest purges under Stalin. They were true communists. The Soviets have one party rule.

East Germans have the SED The Social Unity Party, that leads the DDR. The Soviet state is there for their workers and farmers. They show it in the hammer and sickle.

DDR is their worker and farmer state too. Look at their logo. You have the hammer, the ring of rye.

But they're also there for the intellectuals. Look at the compass. So, now we have a brand new state with some good socialist branding.

How do they do? Out of the gate, not very good. These true communists want to impress their teacher, so they collectivize farms.

This doesn't go very well. It leads to big food shortages. They go so fast with communist reforms that even Stalin was like, chill out dudes, I just need my money.

And he's getting it. For the first year, 60 percent of the total industrial output of East Germany went straight to the Soviet Union. So instead of rebuilding, the reforms and the reparations, they completely wrecked the economy.

This is not good news for the workers rebuilding the country. They are making 16 hour days. And when they come out of their shift, there's nothing in the shops to buy for them.

And that gets worse and worse and worse, and people get very unhappy about that. It's now almost a decade after the war ended, and lives just don't seem to be getting any better. This chart shows what's happening because of that.

Hundreds of thousands of people are leaving East Germany to live in the West. And even though the borders to West Germany are closed, Berlin is a big loophole. Here you can just walk to the West, take a train.

And this leads to two big crises that will define East Germany. Crises that will give East Germany the two things we always connect to the DDR. The wall and the secret police.

And the first of these crises starts at a prestige project. These strikes make the leaders very nervous, but they completely mishandle the situation. They are naive and don't have any idea what's going on in the life of these workers.

I describe a scene in my book where the, this sort of angry mob of workers goes up to the government building and demands to speak to the leader, Walter Ulbricht, to talk about living and working conditions. And Walter Ulbricht sits on the inside and says, Oh, it's beginning to rain, surely they're going to disperse, they won't want to stand out there in the rain. You know, he's that naive still at that point, and so detached from what people want.

These strikes don't stop in Berlin. They spread across the whole of East Germany. A million people take to the streets.

The situation gets so out of hand that the Soviets have had enough. They step in. And once again, Soviet tanks are rolling into Berlin.

At least 55 protesters are killed. Thousands are arrested. This is not the best PR for communism, and it leads to one thing we immediately connect to East Germany.

After this crisis, the situation does get a bit better. The Soviets send help, reparations get lowered, reforms are cancelled, food is easier to get now. But the situation is still worse than in the West, so people still want to leave.

And this leads to the second crisis. This one will have a lasting impact in the streets of Berlin. By 1961, 3 million Germans had left East Germany.

And it's the people that can afford it to go first. This is a huge brain drain. You have doctors, dentists, and skilled workers leaving the country.

Almost all through the Berlin loophole. This is a nightmare scenario for these East German leaders. If they don't do anything, there will be no one left in this East German socialist utopia.

So what are they going to do? Nothing drastic, right? Let's see what the leaders have to say about this.

Ah, well, I guess that's fine then. Berlin is a big place. The streets are packed.

Every day thousands travel the streets of this city on foot, by bike or in cars. But if you look down at the streets, you can see something special. Because you can see these people are actually crossing a border.

This is the border that divided East and West for nearly 30 years. The Berlin Wall. The wall went through houses.

It split families and friends. And it put the most recognizable Berlin landmark in a dead zone. To show you how the wall looked, I went with my friend Michal to get my drone cherry popped.

Unfortunately for me. . .

The drone wouldn't perform. A previous trip to the beach gave us some trouble. Um, there's a pro tip.

Don't land your drone in the sand. But Michal got it fixed. I repaired it because I'm an engineer.

So here's me flying a drone for the first time to show you how the wall looked. You've probably seen images of the wall, right? But that's actually only the western part of the wall.

When it was finished, the whole wall consisted of screens, fences, patrol zones, a death strip. Soldiers that manned guard towers and had to shoot people on sight. At least 140 people were killed or died at the Wall, connected to an escape.

But for the leaders of East Germany, this barrier was a great success. Let's look at the graph of people leaving again. After they built the Wall in 1961, it completely flatlines.

And in some way, it calmed this whole situation down in East Germany. Those that stayed behind had to try and make something of this state. So how was it to live in East Germany?

At this point, I think it's hard to look past how the state was portrayed. We remember the Stasi. We remember the wall.

East Germany is a place where a Soviet invasion would start. It's part of an evil communist bloc that is the archenemy of the West. If we look beyond that for a moment, how does this society actually look?

Yeah, so Walter Ulbricht is kind of a classic socialist in the sense that he's building up or trying to build up a society that is classless and therefore leveled out. So the idea is that you have No luxury at the top in terms of consumer goods and so on and so forth, but also no absolute poverty. and everybody kind of works in a modest society.

This classless society receives a lot of benefits from the government. One of the most important of these is housing. I'm at what used to be called Leninplatz and behind me, you have everything I used to think of was East Germany, these ugly Plattenbau buildings, prefab buildings, but for the people that were living here, they were great.

They were spacious, they had warm water, there was a lot of community inside these buildings, so not that bad. And they're also a lot cheaper than in West Germany. A family of four would spend 4 percent of their income on rent, compared to almost 21 percent in West Germany.

And because this is a socialist state, there's a lot of social mingling. The architect lives next door to the factory worker. There are no gated communities here.

But this is not the only thing the state is focusing on. They provide free child care. This allows women to work, and they enter their workforce in huge numbers.

By the end of the GDR, over 90 percent of women are in full time employment. That's a rate never achieved by any other country, again, in history. Education is strong.

University is free. A third of the working class gets to go to university, compared to 5 percent in West Germany. People are literates, they are reading tons of books.

The DDR is a place with the highest living standards of all the Soviet bloc. It's something that people are proud of. So after the first hard years, there's a society where basic needs are met.

Let's be clear, this is a dictatorial state. One party rule, no free press, the secret police spying on all the people. It's not like North Korea.

Where even today people die of famine. There are bodies lying in the streets. It's very possible to have a meaningful life.

Despite all this, the rulers of the party do have a problem. Because when the basic necessities, the housing, education and food are provided, people want more. They want stuff to aspire to.

In the West, they have new cars, they have tape recorders, they have consumer goods. In the 70s, the new leader in East Germany understands they also have to provide some of this luxury. And there's one Western luxury item that provides more than just a good fit.

You have this kind of idea of great open lands, freedom, cowboys, chewing gum, uh, the prairie, you know, the genes, genes kind of were symbolic or emblematic of, of that idea of, of American freedom. And boy, people wanted them badly. So you have this weird moment, you have these communist leaders, they are believing in socialism.

They want to build this egalitarian state with no luxury, right? Well, they understand people really want genes. They're going to give it to them.

Importing the symbol of the free west. They import 1 million genes for a population of 16 million. And it created complete chaos.

People just freaked out. They ran into the shops. There weren't enough changing rooms.

People were buying, uh, on bulk. They were trying to basically buy more than they actually needed. And, uh, it was chaos.

Importing luxury goods is all fine, but stuff like this is showing the cracks in the system. You can't just keep on subsidizing this extremely expensive welfare state, the housing, the education, the childcare, and then also subsidize these expensive consumer goods. And times are changing.

You have a new generation coming up that didn't experience the war, and they see a system that is stagnating. There is no innovation. There is no progress.

In the 80s, new cars still have the same engine from the 60s, and the people can't do anything about that. Yeah, you can't really, um, say, write a letter to the newspaper and expect it to be published, because it won't. you can't call in any radio shows and say, well, look, you know, I need, I'm really unhappy with this and you know, what, what are you going to do about it?

There's just no way to express anger and frustration. And they can also see how things are going in the West. I know that the wall, it makes it seem like this is a society that's Completely isolated.

I mean, it's not possible to travel to the West. But again, this is not North Korea. There was contact between families that lived in these different states.

Western people went to vacation in the East. You have the radio. Kids are listening to Western rock music.

And on a political level, in the 70s and 80s, the leaders of the two blocks are getting closer. Take this phone call in the 80s between Honecker and Kohl. It's about the placement of new rockets in West Germany.

It's quite a serious deal. But listen how this phone call starts. Just two men casually discussing the weather in December.

But as calm as this call is, in East Germany, there is a storm coming. In the 80s, there are mass protests. Not to bring down the wall, but to reform the system.

Voices that want to be heard. The protest won't be silenced. The situation becomes unsustainable.

This is also not the 1950s anymore. The new Soviet leader is all about openness and reform. He has plenty of issues at home.

He's not gonna crack down anymore on protesters in countries of their friends. So when Hungary opens their borders, they tear a hole in the Iron Curtain. People can suddenly leave the Eastern Bloc.

This finally leads to a collapse in the wall that divided East and West for almost three decades. On 3 October 1990, just a few days before the DDR would celebrate its 41st birthday, Germany sees reunification. Unity all in one, over a million people here celebrating a day that they never thought would come.

A day in which Germany became one country again. Tomorrow they can worry about the future and the hundreds of billions the new Germany will cost. So how does the reunification look?

Well, it has many faces. On the one hand, the German government invests huge sums in East Germany. Richer East and West Germans pay the solidarity surcharge.

That basically means higher taxes. These taxes are even in place for some people today. It leads to investment in roads, in phone lines, in bridges.

Between 1990 and 2009, it was 1. 3 trillion euros. That's a lot of zeros.

At the same time, a lot of people lost their income. In 2005, still 20 percent of East Germans didn't have a job. And the social benefits, well, they mostly disappear.

Found this report by the German government. It's all about the state of Germany after reunification 30 years later. And it's fascinating how easily visible the DDR still is in some maps.

In the East, people are way older because all the young people left for the West to find a job, as you can see in the employment map. And also the number of empty homes. It's a lot bigger in East Germany.

And these social circumstances go a long way to explain the support for extremist parties in the East. Apart from all this economic data, there is something I didn't know. This report talks about old and new federal states.

So this is not a new country. It's not a reunification of two equal states, politically and legally, it is the West German state that has expanded to the East and taken over everything of East Germany. East Germany just went away.

And it's clear who had to adjust to who. People raised in East Germany see a different way of how people work in a society. Just a few months ago, there was a huge scandal in Germany.

Well, the whole way in which the GDR should be remembered is still a very, very political issue. This is a story that goes beyond simple narratives. Narratives that I was also taught.

Boiling down 40 years of human experience to the wall and the secret police. To a clear cut competition between two ways of living. Communist versus capitalist.

But there are many in the West who live this story. that identify with this struggle. For them, hearing a different perspective can feel like hitting a raw nerve.

But it is up to historians like Katja to provide us with these new perspectives. In East Germany, I think that there's still a perception that it's this sort of grey, monotone, um, existence where people sat there for four decades not doing very much until. .

. They liberated themselves, um, and the Berlin Wall fell. But talking to Katja showed me how there was a world behind the Iron Curtain.

People were getting married, having children, achieving things. And those kinds of things, I think, are worth mentioning without taking away from the idea that these people lived in a dictatorship. They managed, despite and within the dictatorship, to have meaningful lives.

And that, to me, speaks to the resilience of people.