Last night (Tuesday), via ZDF (Channel Two of the German public TV spectrum), they ran a documentary show at 8:15 PM called 'Legacy of Trust'. It was a 45-minute piece which talked about the end of the DDR (East Germany), and how the companies/factories that existed from 1945 to 1990....came to a sudden conclusion.
I strongly recommend the piece (entirely in German) because it really does talk about the expectations of the East Germans, and how they really got the raw 'end' of the stick after the Wall collapsed. It's worth watching.
We might as well be humble and admit....that just about everything that was within DDR for that 45-year period was 'fake'. Factories hired people to manage things, but you could have put an idiot in charge of a soap factory, and it really didn't matter. You could say that you were producing 40 cars a day via, 3,000 employees....when you had a 7-year waiting period for customers to get their ordered vehicles....it just didn't matter. If you did make third-rate chocolate....well, it didn't matter. You didn't have real competition, so that marginal chocolate was better than nothing.
The documentary team did a great job of going back to the people of that period, and talking over their expectations....then waking up one day to find that the factory wasn't going to exist, and there was no plan 'B' for people to be happily employed. Blame? Well....it goes back to Chancellor Kohl, and the team around him. They balanced the books, reviewed quality of the products, and basically made the decision to shut down the vast number of production facilities in East Germany.
If people had known this end of the deal before the Wall came down? I would go and speculate that most would have preferred for the Wall to remain.
Some business ventures continued on. Some breweries survived. Some distillery operations continued on. Vita Cola is still around (not in great numbers but still, it survived). Rondo coffee is still around. Zeha sports shoes? They almost died out, but then they found this odd life as a luxury shoe for the upper class. Spreewald Gurkens? They survive on today and still considered a good dill pickle.
The rest? They just dissolved away.
It's not a top ten or even a top hundred topic with most Germans. But it does explain this hostility that still brews in eastern Germany, and why life has never really moved on.
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