East Germany Versus Bushland
By Johann Legner

By now, everyone knows that the German East constitutes an enormous challenge to the national economy of federal Germany. Less obvious is its political clout. Yet in the last four elections for the Bundestag, the new states have always voted with the victor and they secured the chancellorship for Helmut Kohl in 1994 and Gerhard Schröder in 2002. Two years ago foreign policy, especially the rejection of the confrontation with Iraq as prosecuted by Washington, may have played a role -- in light of the narrow majority perhaps even a decisive one. After President George W. Bush's reelection, the temptation for Germany's Red-Green coalition to reinterpret the next election campaign, especially in the East, as a vote against the policies of the U.S.-administration will be overwhelming.

In fact, anyone who declares the United States a threat to world peace and propagates keeping as much distance from Washington as possible will find resounding majorities in the East. Commonly this is held to be mainly due to the persistence of old "enemy concepts" hammered into the public consciousness over decades by the SED (Socialist Unity Party). In actuality though, a completely new anti-Americanism already developed some time ago, which does however build on the former prejudices. A change of power in the White House would have at least unsettled many of those who are very sure of themselves in their negative verdict. This clear win by the Republicans, however, just served to strengthen it considerably.

Major elements in this new anti-Americanism are foreignness and fear. The bulk of East Germans still has absolutely no personal experience regarding life in the United States. Furthermore, much of what defines society there is completely alien to the average East German and the everyday life he knows. This is the case especially for religion. To the majority of people in the NewLänder, every religious avowal is suspect. They grew up in a system that labeled religious people as backwards and pitted science against religion. Moral concepts of Christendom are deemed unserviceable to politics. Even members of the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) often have little use for the sociopolitical ideas of the Christian churches. The East German majority appears similarly bewildered by the cultural and ethnic diversity in the United States. A large number of East Germans cannot stomach the idea that humans of such extremely diverse origins should live together.

Along with this alienation regarding American society, there is a fear, which rejects on principle any policy that questions the status quo. It is not the love of peace supposedly developed so strongly within the socialist-paternalistic dictatorship that causes people to stand against the war in Iraq, but their aversion to changes whose outcome seem dubious to them. The East's society is altogether static and filled with mistrust towards any policy that orients itself more strongly towards the challenges of the future rather than focusing on the preservation of what has already been achieved. This attitude has many sources and the demographic history of the East is surely one of the most fundamental ones. For many decades now, East Germany has been a country of emigration. The continuous emigration of the very people who want to be responsible for shaping their own lives and are willing to accept certain risks in doing so increased again after the fall of the wall. Those who are discomfited by the idea of a new beginning are the ones who were and are still left behind today. They find it simpler to lament their own straightforward misfortune than to take a chance on their happiness. They experience the rhetoric of a George W. Bush as threatening specifically because it is tied to certain expectations for the future.

Two years ago, Schröder addressed this mentality quite aptly when he characterized the policy of the White House with the word "adventure." In many places this term is surely ambiguous and can also be tied to a sense of forward momentum and the hope for a better future. In Germany's east however, owing to the alleged or actual dangers, one is averse to any and all adventures.

Had the enforced regime change in Baghdad been justified with the need to secure the U.S. energy supply, this would have been met, albeit with some sniffs of superiority and guilty conscience, with greater understanding in the new federal states. For pulling the chestnuts out of the fire, i.e. securing the oil reserves, the evil Americans could have counted on the clandestine approbation of the East Germans. But with every further sentence that Bush utters about his vision of a free, democratically governed Iraq, the whole enterprise becomes more and more intolerable for many East Germans. In this the former GDR citizens differ greatly from the people who grew up in the people's republic of Poland.

However, those who want to parlay the extreme distortion of U.S.-policy into political capital do not necessarily have to follow a consistent course against Washington. Gestures of symbolic refusal and oblique argumentation are sufficient. East Germans in turn do not expect a clear stand against the big brother across the Atlantic either -- because this too would be too much of a change. Berlin politics therefore are presented with the possibility of a double-tracked strategy between their diplomatic activities on the one hand and the domestic debate on the other. And so the temptation to verbally distance oneself, without having to derive a re-orientation of foreign policy from the new language every time, increases. In light of the red-green governing coalition's political weakness, especially in the East, this double strategy, already tried and tested in the summer of 2002, will surely dominate the next two years of political discourse in the new federal states until the parliamentary elections.

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Johann Legner, a German journalist, is currently the deputy chief editor of the Cottbus daily newspaper  "Lausitzer Rundschau," once the district daily of the SED - the ruling communist party in the GDR - and today owned by the Holtzbrinck-media-group. He was the spokesman of the Commissioner for the Stasi Files from 1996-2000. The office of the Commissioner (formerly also known as the Gauck Authority) is responsible for the hundreds of miles of Stasi (East German secret police) files.

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For more information on the office of the Commissioner for the Stasi Files, please see the AICGS discussion with Mr. Legner on The Stasi Files and German Transitional Justice.

This essay appeared in the December 3, 2004, AICGS Advisor. It was translated from the original German by Sarah Fichter. For the German version, please go to:

For the original German version, please click here.

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) alone. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies.