Crossposted from https://thebrainbin.org/m/germany@feddit.org/t/1945027
A small town in eastern Germany banned the installation of new Holocaust memorial plaques that mark the last known residence or workplace of Jews and other victims of the genocide.
The motion was proposed by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)…
Was it cheap l just chapter 8 I should read? Thankfully it was only 3 pages and it was a slow day at work.
I understand the desire for reparations especially after WWII (or the Great Patriotic War if you prefer), but in contrast to the US Marshall plan it seems very short sighted.
The author then mentions that East Germany had social services on par or in excess of West, but “the sex appeal” of higher salaries and more consumer goods in West Germany led to a brain drain in the East. To prevent this (and cross border raids) border crossings were prohibited. None of which to my western eyes make the Eastern Germany a nice place to live
Taking all this into account it seems obvious why the the East struggled to keep up with the West and why even now, there’s an infrastructure gap between the two sides of Germany
Yeah it probably sucked to live in the occupation zones/East Germany from 45 to the sixties. And then shit started to decline in the 70s so yeah sucked. Point is you can’t just make economic prosperity and the liberal conception of freedom (being able to say anything and get nothing) happen out of the most adverse of circumstances. The U.S.S.R. hadn’t centuries to plunder colonies and accumulate the requisite wealth to fuel a global economic system for instance. It was always against the grain.
Two counterpoints
The USSR inherited the largest land empire in history, which was built by a feudal if not colonial power. It was self sufficient in terms of food and minerals.
Secondly Japan was able to build an industrial power post Meiji reforms with very little in the way of natural resources. Taiwan and South Korea did so as well, albeit with financial support from the USA.
The USSR quite notably developed from its starting point as the backwater of Europe in 17 to the second place industrial power by the 50s? I guess I would get a bit to charitable for you if I talked about the ways imperial relationships between regions and Russian chauvinism were challenged in the Soviet Union, and I don’t think this is the place for a reasonable discussion of failures like wartime deportations, but I do think relationships changed somewhat.
But the point was the DDR, which was in the context of postwar realpolitik and animosity, simultaneously. I think Japan might be more complex because a cursory examination of the history notes their colonial adventures in Korea and China. Funny how that comes before an industrial base in merchantalist and capitalist regimes.
I’m not arguing that they didn’t have an industrial base, they didn’t. But they had access to huge resources, courtesy of colonisation of the previous regime, which is probably partly why they only took ~30 years to be the #2 industrial party in Europe. Probably helped that the competition had been bombed to the stone age. And circling back to East Germany, if you want to talk about colonial plundering, that the USSR stole most of their industrial capacity. Which would go some way to explain why the DDR experiment failed in ~50 years
Japan began industrialisation before their poorly thought out adventures, but the industrialisation probably did influence their decision making I’ll give you that.