30 Years After Reunification, Germany Is Still Two Countries... Why Eastern Germans are embracing the far right.

Pedro_P

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West Berliners watched East German border guards demolishing a section of the Berlin Wall in 1989.Gerard Malie/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
▼ BERLIN — Nov. 9 marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. There will be no lack of commemoration — but there will also be very little celebration. Today the country is once again divided along East-West lines, and growing more so. As it does, the historical narrative of what really happened in the years after 1989 is shifting as well.
Only a few years ago, when my country consecutively celebrated the 25th anniversary of the wall’s demise and of German reunification in 1990, the official mood was one of victory and hope.
President Joachim Gauck, a former East German pastor who had played a role in the Communist regime’s demise, then later oversaw the declassification of the archives of the Stasi secret police, praised the East German masses who, in their “desire for freedom,” stood up to “overwhelm” the “oppressor” — an uprising, he said, in the tradition of the French Revolution. A year later, he spoke optimistically about German reunification, stressing the dwindling differences between eastern and western Germans.
He wasn’t entirely wrong: After the mass unemployment and deprivation following the breakdown of the socialist state economy during the transition years of the 1990s, the economy in eastern Germany has been on a slow, steady recovery. Regional identities, once solidly split between East and West, were softening — the Allensbach Institute, a polling organization, found that since 2000, more people on both sides of the old border were identifying as simply “Germans.”
Then came the migration crisis. Germans across the country reacted angrily to Angela Merkel’s decision in September 2015 to allow in more than a million refugees, but the backlash in the former East Germany was especially toxic. In Clausnitz, a mob tried to prevent a group of newly arrived migrants from exiting a bus. In Dresden, a protester carried a mock gallows through the streets.
The crisis has passed and the rage has cooled, but the scar remains in the form of rabid support for the far-right, xenophobic Alternative for Germany party, known by its German initials as AfD. On Sunday, the eastern states of Brandenburg and Saxony will hold elections, and the AfD is expected to score record results — up to 25 percent, compared with national polls showing a stagnating 11 percent to 14 percent.
At the same time, a recent Allensbach survey shows that voters in places like Brandenburg and Saxony once again feel distinctly “Eastern”: While 71 percent of West Germans replied this summer that they felt simply like Germans, only 44 percent of Easterners replied the same way.
The migrant crisis didn’t cause this division, though. Nor did the continued regional economic divide. The causes are deeper, but  (▪ ▪ ▪)

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soothsayer

this needs an O V Bismarck to address the issue. the geographical unification is only re drawing the borders but cultural and political outlook always dominates

asr335704

This will be possible only when the people from both the parts will bond with each other and truly recognize each other as their own. Otherwise it will continue to remain like this - a long way to one truly unified country.