“There was oppression and brutality,” Katja Hoyer writes, but also “opportunity and belonging”
From this dismissive premise, cliché sprouts easily. The “East Germans” were caricatured as clueless and robotic, ill-dressed and housed in dimly lit concrete hutches. They were thought to drive ridiculous little Trabant cars, with plastic bodywork and powered by lawnmower engines. The food was notoriously awful too.
This “ideological sediment” of diehard loyalists determinedly recreated the Soviet system they revered. They faced a population traumatised by defeat , along with an economy crippled by their occupiers’ relentless demands for reparations. Harsh economic conditions prompted the workers’ uprising of 1953. It was bloodily crushed by the Soviets, dispelling any pretence that the place was run on behalf of the toiling masses.
Amid the great-power machinations, East Germans were real people, not cartoon characters from a cold-war comic book. They lived as best they could inside a political and economic system that mostly functioned badly and harshly. Their achievements—
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