Saturday, November 13, 2021

Do East Germans Have a Different View of Life Than West Germans?

 We are thirty years beyond the Wall going down, and DDR ceasing to exist at this point.  Most politicians will say it's a unified people, and a unified nation.  Since Covid started up....there's been this chatter that older East Germans see a different reality unfolding, and they see elements of the old DDR regime in society and government.

Truth to the matter?

Well....lets go to some simple facts.

Eastern Germany today has a population of about 16-million (more or less), and you can estimate the age 45 or over crowd to make up around one-third of the sixteen million (figure 5.5-million people).

These are people who remember the political indoctrination....the daily input of propaganda...the use of TV and radio to assimilate society, and truth never being something that you could trust.   These people see elements of that life in daily events today.

The fact that Covid is a daily discussion and has never left the top three topic list since Spring of 2020?  That probably fits into this whole mental view of reality now.

The shutdown business....the curfew action....the 2G/3G chatter now?  This feeds into the mind of this particular society in the east.

I'm not saying they are radicals or extremists.  But you can put this group of people into a situation, and they don't attach 'trust' or 'gospel truth' to what they see.  

All of this bothering the news media, politicians and western Germans?  Yeah....to some degree.  Their 'trust-factor' or full confidence feeling is maxing out and they just can't understand why the eastern folks don't feel the same conviction on things. 

No comments: