Sponsored: Use my link to start your 7-day free trial with Blinkist and get 25% off of a Premium Membership! www.blinkist.com/felifromgermany *Correction regarding cars: there were other cars available as well, such as the Wartburg, or the Barkas among others. Most of the times, people were glad to be able to get any cat though.

My entire family is from the East, and I was born right around the Wende, so I obviously have no memories of the GDR, but I did very much grow up in its shadow - something you only realize later when you leave your small bubble and notice how differently the people from the former West grew up. One of the weirdest things is the way in which you hear about the GDR from history books or documentaries, or even videos like yours - as in, you hear about the worst parts. The authoritarianism, the censorship, the travel bans, the state surveillance, the families torn apart. And then you listen to your relatives, and they too include all of that, but it's all filtered through the memories of them just living their normal lives there, and you can tell they often try to make sense of that dichotomy: the repressive state, and how much simpler their lives were. And how they were happy there. It gets very complicated. People aren't a monolith and there are lots of East Germans with very different opinions and experience of course, so this is just from what I've gathered from my relatives growing up here. Anyway, here's some of the things I noticed and/or just want to add: - Pretty much everyone I know has a very complex relationship to the GDR. In a part of the country that's nowadays known for its extremes, I oddly enough don't know anyone who has a black and white take on their past growing up in East Germany. The "it wasn't all bad" is an almost memeable cliché but in my experience it's very much true, no matter how strongly they voice their disdain for huge aspects of their very restrictive lives, chances are you will hear a "... but not everything was bad" sooner or later. My mom sometimes gets this pensive look after telling me about her frustrations with the country who denied her the education she wanted for whatever arbitrary reason, about how difficult it was for her to even so much as exchange letters with her best friend from school who went to the West with her family - and then tells me that despite everything, she had a good childhood. She was happy there. - To quote my mom: We had a lot of worries, but money wasn't one of them. - I'm often struck by the contradictory nature of the people, and the country itself. You hear talk about this lost sense of community, that everybody was in this together, that they were socialised to be part of a collective and look out for one another - and the same people tell you about how they had their suspisions about who might be an informant and kept their mouths shut in front of them. - Some, especially older generations, feel like nothing they worked for ever mattered and nobody takes them seriously. The poor, dumb East German who lived all their life in the bleak, grey squalor of the GDR and has never known the wonders of consumerism and, idk, Western music or something? These people weren't aliens from some distant planet, they were just regular people living their normal lives as best they could, worked just as hard and had vibrant inner lives, created art, had fun, partied etc. It's strange seeing some people even in this comment section talk about East Germans like they were all just joyless victims. It's all a bit patronizing. (This sounds like I'm taking this personally, but just as a sidenote: I don't have a lot of skin in that game, I'm finding myself more offended on behalf of my family, which is kinda silly cause I know they'd just laugh at the assumptions above and tell you that there's no party like a student party blasting the "illegal" mixtape that you taped yourself from the West radio stations you weren't supposed to listen to. :)) - You will find East Germans who see the Wende not as the reunification of Germany, but more of an annexation of the East. The BRD got bigger while the DDR just stopped existing. Lives for West Germans didn't significantly change, relatively speaking. Everything changed for East Germans, and a lot of people didn't know how to deal with that. Again, my mom speaks of that time quite candidly, how the euphoria made way quickly for this unshakable sense of unease. It was scary not knowing what was next when she grew up in a country that barely ever changed. - Some see themselves as "second class citizens", really lean into this victim complex - I won't deny that there's some justified resentment, but feed into that long enough and add to that a general distrust of authority, economic hardships, high unemployment, no prospects, disdain for immigrants and people who they deem "other", etc. and you have yourself a perfect breeding ground for far-right populist movements. And of course, these groups see that, sniff out the potential and take full advantage of it to gain a foothold in these "vulnerable areas". Seeing this happen to my home state has been upsetting, to say the least. Hence the very conflicted feelings I have about home. - Ok, so Plattenbauten may not be the prettiest housing, but at least these things had indoor toilets and central heating! My grandparents lived in a pre-war building with an outhouse and a coal oven and they would have killed for a modern WBS70 apartment. Their application got denied, though. Because of course you had to apply. - There's obviously more to Ostalgie, but I think a lot of it is just simple nostalgia. People are nostalgic for their youth, even if the country you spent it in was repressive. - Watching Western TV and listening to West radio was only technically illegal, but virtually everyone who could* did it. There was no way for the government to stop that. People could consume Western products, you just had a harder time getting your hands on them, especially if you didn't have relatives in the West who could send you packages. They weren't completely closed off from the West or ignorant to what was going on there. I get the impression it was and still is really the other way around: people from the West just don't know a lot about the East, other than what's right on the surface. (* If you lived in the Valley of the Clueless, a.k.a. Dresden, you couldn't.) - I remember very specific foods from my childhood, both the homecooked food and the generic kindergarten stuff, that I later learned is apparently one of these GDR remnants? The spirelli with that sickeningly sweet tomato sauce with fried Jagdwurst, anyone? Jägerschnitzel? Quarkkäulchen? Having Soljanka at least once a week, and so on. - I only recently learned that the Muttiheft (a little notebook first graders get, a way for teachers to write notes to the parents - in most cases moms, hence the name, "mom booklet") is another weird GDR remnant. If we did especially well in our classes we always got a little stamp of a bee in it. "Das gibt'n Bienchen in's Muttiheft" is a thing my mom says to this day, mostly ironically. - There's some small linguistic differences, for instance: remember overhead projectors? We call them Polylux, and the first time I used that word with a friend from Hessen they had no idea what I was talking about. - East Germans actually traveled quite a lot, within their confines of course. A lot of the people I know are passionate campers to this day - back then it gave you some sense of freedom, and I guess now it's another form of Ostalgia. We went camping quite a lot when I was a child and the destinations remained largely the same: all the former Eastern bloc states. My favorite was always Bulgaria. Took a while for my family to venture out into the newly opened West, I think our first trip there was Italy sometime in the mid to late 90s. - I was legit shocked to hear how many people have never known the Experience that is the Trabbi. They were still everywhere when I was a kid. My mom had hers until 1997 and there's nothing like the sound and smell and general lack of comfort of a Trabbi. It was literally just made of plastic. It was so ugly. I loved it. - That said, there were other cars around of course! The Wartburg was one, I do still remember the one my uncle drove. Cars from other Eastern bloc states as well. - You guys in the West are missing out on Vita Cola, honest to god the superior cola in every way. Glad it made a comeback after being driven off the shelves after reunification. - My hottest take: the East German national anthem was a banger and we should have kept it. This got a bit out of hand, sorry for that! Greetings from Leipzig, not my home by birth but my home by choice :)

Acquainted with a guy who grew up in East Germany, he told me something that has stuck with me: "You didn't starve...but you never felt Full either." He meant Body and Soul.

Spent 14 years of my 22 year military career in Germany. 1969-1991. Was there for the fall and reunification. Thanks for the update...

You handled this difficult topic very well, Feli. As someone from Thuringia and knowing that you are from Bavaria, I expected much more ignorance and prejudices, but you managed to present the topic in a very objective way and got most facts right. So a big thumbs up from me! It would have been great had you been able to talk to someone from the East and present their views. Maybe you could do it in another video, considering that a lot of your viewers seem to be interested in this topic. Sadly, there are still a lot of people - especially in the West - who choose to talk negatively about " those on the other side". They stay stuck in their prejudices without being open to travel to the other part of the country and see with their own eyes what the reality there looks like. As long as these people exist, the "Wall in the heads" won't come down entirely. But your way of handling the topic really gives me hope for the future. btw: The structural challenges of East Germany are not only the result of being part of a socialist country for 40 years, but also of being the part of Germany that has never really been industrialized. Most parts of East Germany have always been agrarian-oriented, and I'm not sure whether the situation would look much different had there been no separation. And another thought: While we agree on the fact that there are a lot of different regional cultures in Germany, people from the West of Germany often forget that the parts of the former GDR also consist of several regions. So there isn't really an "East German culture", because there's a huge difference between someone from Saxony and someone from Mecklenburg or Berlin. The cultural differences people perceive between themselves and people from the Neue Bundesländer therefore _might_ be the result of the separation, but it also might just be another regional difference which is common throughout Germany.

If being apart for 40 years created such a disparity in Germany I can’t imagine how much more difficult it would be if Korea ever reunited

I was born in 1979 in Zschopau, Saxony and moved to Cologne in August 1990 because my father found a job offer in our local newspaper for the same job he worked in before in Cologne and he know that he would be unemployed soon. So i only experienced life in the GDR as a child. Feli did a good job with this video. It's a difficult topic but she explained the major points really well. What i want to add is that social security was really high in the GDR the medical system wasn't always using state of the art equipment but it was really good nontheless. All children were getting all necessary vaccinations per default. There were mandatory doctor visits for infants and toddlers. Feli already mentioned the childcare facilities that took care of children from a few months after birth til start of school which allowed the women to have a normal job and also made sure that everyone found a job after school. Yeah to get to the 'good' jobs or to go to university you had to be in line with the socialist and communist doctrine or at least you had to appear to be in line. In the 80s watching west german TV wasn't officially allowed but as everyone did it the government didn't really fight it anymore and english speaking music was also normal. I still remember discussing the latest TV episodes of Alf or 'The Fall Guy' (Ein Colt für alle Fälle) with my schoolmates, and these 2 TV series were shown on one of the west german public TV channels. Also LPs like Michael Jacksons Thriller were being produced by the east german record label Amiga and sold (in small number) in shops in the GDR. You had to be lucky to get one of these but you could legally do so. I still remember my parents telling me the stories when they went into the city and saw a line of people in front of a shop they just got in line because they knew something special was being sold there but they had no idea what it was. And once they waited in line for 2 hours they bought the stuff even if they wouldn't have done so had they known what it was from the start. So the GDR wasn't nearly as bad as North Korea just to make that absolutely clear. But as the money went mostly into the social net there were little to no investments into infrastructure or keeping the buildings in good shape. It all just looked grey and the streets were in really bad shape. The east german part of the Autobahn was mostly still in the state from the 1930s. This has greatly improved in these last 30 years and there is no clear difference between East and West there anymore. But the people who lived there had to go through radical changes and they often found that people from west germany were now their new bosses they had to work for. And to this day most Companies in east germany are owned and run but west germans. Also some people who had never experienced capitalism before were victims of some shady deals and offerings because they were a bit naive and believed the promises. All of this is still present in the minds of many east german people. But yeah you have to really talk to the people to find out about this as a visitor or a tourist.

Years ago I had a co-worker from East Germany, who surprised me one day by saying how much she missed living in the GDR. It was very difficult for me to understand how anyone living in a wealthy, industrialized democracy like Austria could ever make such a claim. According to her, life was simpler back then. You lived a modest lifestyle, you got "exotic" fruits like bananas and pineapples from Cuba, and every year her family went on vacation to places in Yugoslavia or Bulgaria. According to her, EVERYONE had a job and you didn't have to worry about things like utility bills. As a matter of fact, it was illegal to be unemployed. Now she lives in a "free" capitalist society, where she was unemployed for the first time in her life, and although she earns a good salary, most of it goes to pay bills, so there's no money for vacations or "exotic" fruits. The paradox: when she was "unfree", she was able to go on vacation, now she's "free" but too broke to go anywhere. I also discovered that one of my friends is from the former GDR. It's not something he talks about often, but he did mention the day he ran away from East Germany, running for his life while being chased by the border police. He scaled over a huge barbed-wire fence while under gunfire and didn't stop running until he made it into West Germany. I was speechless, to say the least!

I spent 4 years in Frankfurt when my dad was stationed there. Germany felt the most like home to me and is still the home of my heart. For my father it was his 2nd tour in Germany. His first happened when the physical wall was being built. When the wall came down! We were watching it on TV, and we all were in tears. My father loved Germany so much and wanted to jump on a plane to be there. When my daughter was in high school (she was born in 89, just before the wall fell) she was involved in an exchange program with a school from Leipzig. They stayed with us for 2 weeks and our kids did the same with them. It was wonderful meeting the kids; for me it was a view into a part of the country I couldn't see. Danke schonn for you videos Feli.

Finally a video about this topic. As a tourist you have to see both sides, Leipzig, Dresden and Potsdam are very cool cities, in general the East is very underrated, there is so much beautiful nature too.

"It’s been over 30 years since the fall of the Berlin wall..." And I remember it like it was yesterday. The opening of the route through Hungary, the people at the border, the border guard lieutenant who opened the gate under his own authority, the people on both sides hacking at the wall -- with home tools, then power tools, then heavy machinery from the Western side pulling whole sections down... Almost makes me cry to think about it...

I was another U.S. soldier stationed in Fulda (11th Armored Cavalry Regiment) (So1989-1992 and I remember when the wall came down. I saw a bunch of wide-eyed East Germans that came to Fulda to look around in amazement. I didn't understand, then I drove over to Eisenach and saw how different the two countries were! So many Germans wanted their country to be one again. As an outsider, it was incredible to watch!

I'm the daughter of a US Army officer and we were stationed in Aschaffenburg at the time when the wall came down. I was only 8 but I remember watching the news reports live. It was a fascinating time to be in Germany. We visited Berlin as a family two weeks after the official unification the following year. The atmosphere was incredible. My dad had been to West Berlin before, but we'd never gone as a family because security between checkpoints was so intense, so it was amazing that all this happened while we were still living there. I really want to visit Berlin again to see how it's changed, back in 1990, there was a very stark difference between East and West Berlin. This was a fasinatng video to watch, thank you!

Ok, little nitpick - the Trabant was the standard, but not the only GDR car, e.g. Wartburg was another quite common one.

Servus and Hello! East german dude here - as my name easily gives away to any speaker of german... 😅 And I apologize in advance, this is probably gonna be a long one, which - among other things - may disprove your theory of easterners' bad english skills. Though - granted - I don't count myself as part of the older generation ... just yet. 😅 But I was born in 1986 so whenever that Bruce Springsteen song comes own I proudly shout "born in the DDR"! 😂 First let me quickly adress two misconceptions you unfortunately repeated in your video: East Germany was technically not a one party system. There were several other parties but politics were of course under full control of the SED. The other parties served as an all too transparent veil, mimicing some form of political opposition which in reality did not exist. Second there were other cars than the infamous Trabi. Wartburgs were produced in Eisenach, near the famous castle of the same name and imports from eastern europe included Ladas from Russia and Škodas from Czechoslowakia, which are now part of Volkswagen group and very successful throughout europe. And with some good connections and a lot of money you could even get your hands on west german cars. And actually I don't blame you for not knowing this. But it depicts very nicely how little people in the west actually know about the east, beside some standard textbook facts. As for "eastalgia". I don't think people really miss the dictatorship here. They miss the life they had inside it. More than today there was the feeling that, except for a few people at the top, we were all sort of in this together. We dealt with the same hardships, the same injustices, the same random hypocricies of a dictatorial regime. When protesters shoutet "we are the people" at the rallies which eventually brought down the wall - a slogan which has since been stolen and is being abused by the far right - they meant it. We - all of us - are the people. If you look at how divided society is today it's easy to understand how one can miss that feeling of ... well ... being in it together. One should also keep in mind that the process of reunification was very fast, less than a year, and very painful for many easterners. Westeners like to complain about the "Soli", which btw easteners paid too. But that's nothing compared to what we faced. You meintioned it in your video. You can ask people from the east for their job and when they tell you what they did before and after reunification those two will more often than not be two comoletely different things. And many will tell you about the struggle of finding anything at all after being laid off. Also keep in mind that unemployment didn't exist in the east. This was an entirely new concept for the people affected by it. So the general reunification euphoria wore off pretty quickly and gave way to a harsh reality which gave you political freedom but at the same time presented you with economic insecurities you have never known before. What good is the opportunity to travel the world if you can never afford it? All this laid the seed for eastalgia. Cause life back than may not have been better. But it sure as hell was easier, simpler. Less things to worry about cause you couldn't do anything about them anyway. I spent three years studying in Würzburg, which is in Bavaria aka "the west". I soon accepted that I was "der Ossi" the "easterner" to most people there. Jokes of how we all must have been living under a rock for 40 years were as abundant as they were annoying. This has been discribed as the "wall in the heads" which proved and still sometimes proves much harder to tear down than the one made of concrete and barbed wire. An example: I work in a hotel on the east german baltic sea coast today. Westerners who for some reason (valid or not) complain to me at the reception sometimes jump very quickly to stuff like "the east sucks" or this or that didn't go down the way it should have cause we are stupid easterners who have no idea what we're doing. I'm being insulted for my origin at the very place of my origin. Funny enough those people are the same who are very quick to call easterners racists whenever the far right does well at some election. Oh the irony... I'm rambling ... sorry... Moving on: Much has been achieved in 30 years. Much more is still to do. After the complete collaps of the east german economy during reunification many people moved away. This brain drain is a huge problem and imo at least part of the reason for the far right's success and low vaccinations alike. Politics call for "more easterners in positions of leadership" basicly all the time. A nice sentiment. But it's not really the queation who is in a position of leadership, it's much more important where this position of leaderhsip is. Take my home town of Leipzig which managed to attract two iconic german car makers Porsche and BMW who both opened plants there. Porsche now builds much more cars in Leipzig than they do at their home plant in Stuttgart. The HQ remains there. BMW now makes just as many cars in Leipzig as they make in Munich. The HQ remains there. The money is in the west. The decisions are being made in the west. Those miracled positions of leadership are in the west. And this is not gonna change. Why would any large company move their HQ to east Germany? Of course they remain where they were once founded. The big companies once founded in the east, both before and after seperation, are dead, gone and long forgotten. Germany is famous for industry and machinery. But there won't be a new Siemens, Bosch, Volkswagen or Bayer in the east. They may all have plants here. Their homes will always be somewhere else. Well ... as predicted this got really long! Kudos to anyone who made it all the way! 😅 Greetings from east Germany. And never forget: the sun rises in the east! 😉

I went to Berlin in 2019 to continue my German language studies. I got my student accommodations through the Goethe Institut and was assigned to a house in what had been East Berlin. Es war sehr interessant! My landlady was a retired widow who spoke Russian as her second language, which was great for me since that forced me to speak only German all the time. I spent a lot of time in the garden chatting with her and her adult daughter about the differences and life in the GDR. The daughter felt in many ways that she grew up in a museum that has no name and no address. When the unification happened great swathes of what had been her culture disappeared literally overnight, replaced by Western culture. When she went to the university in the West she found that most of her fellow German students were more like the European, British or North American student. They had so many common cultural icons from TV movies and music, while her childhood was centered on cultural icons that ceased to exist.

My wife learned German as an exchange student in the late 90s in Sachsen-Anhalt (i.e. an area that a decade before was DDR). When she meets Germans, they're always surprised to hear an American speaking with an Ossi accent. We were watching Deutschland 83 not too long ago and with nearly every bit of advice given to the East German agent before going undercover in the West about "say this, not that", she'd say "I say that, not this!"

I was 11 years old in November of 1989 when The Wall came down. I remember watching the news about it on ABC News with Peter Jennings and I remember crying about it, considering my German ancestry. It was history happening and I think even at 11 years old, I was old enough to appreciate the significance of it. It amazes me to this day that I grew up with two Germanys and a united Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia on the map as well as a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

I grew up in West Germany and had no connections to the East. In 1985 I spent a few days in Berlin as part of my training, and on that occasion we also went to East Berlin for a day. Without exaggeration, it was like visiting another planet. I couldn't have felt any stranger in Tibet or Tahiti. I hadn't felt very comfortable in West Berlin before. The sheer size of the city was intimidating to me. But when we got back to our hotel that evening, it was actually like a return to my world.

Exceptionally well done, Feli! Great job explaining an incredibly complicated history without prejudice or judgment.

I am always so amazed how well you can go back and forth fluently between languages, you are such a smart intelligent beautiful person 👍 Thank you for all the information ❤️

One thing that changed with reunification and the fall of the Soviet Union was that Germany was no longer ground zero in the Cold War.The US steadily reduced their military footprint in Germany. Military exercises (REFORGER) were scaled back. As a German, you were less likely to get stuck behind a tank convoy coming home from work. Farmers no longer had to fill out claims when their fields were damaged during these exercises.I was way to young to remember but my German/Estonian parents lived in Germany during this time.

On my only trip to Berlin, I took a train from Frankfurt to get there. The train's speed was quite fast at the start of the trip. Once we got much past the old East German border the train slowed to more usual speeds. When I asked my German travel companions why we were slowing down, their explanation was that we were now using old tracks built during "East German" times and the tracks were not up to "West German" standards and hence not able to handle the higher speeds. That was my first experience of the differences. That was about 15 years ago so probably no longer an issue.

God, 30 years... I was an American kid who loved Knight Rider and saw the videos of The Hoff singing at the wall. I was nine, and too young to really appreciate the full scale of what had happened. Freedom might be repressed, but can never be purged from the human heart entirely.

Feli handled a very difficult topic with a lot of grace. Certainly that comes from growing up in Germany and seeing some of the differences first hand, I'm sure... But she also did an amazingly good job for somebody that does not have a living memory of the iron curtain, the Cold War, or a divided Germany. I grew up in the tail end of the Cold War, but I'm still old enough to remember when the existence of two Germanies, closed borders between East and West, and an Iron Curtain that divided the continent of Europe and pretty much the whole Communist bloc from the Western world was a fact of life. Even though relations got better between the US and the Western allies and the Soviet bloc as time went on, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the iron curtain and the divide between East and west, both in Germany and in the larger world, happened so quickly that many of us couldn't believe it... It was a fundamental change in the world that we knew, and a lot of people didn't know it was coming. Because of that, I can easily understand why there's still such a divide between East and West Germany, the unification happened so quickly that there would have been so little time to prepare for it.

I'll never forget going to East Berlin in 1981. What an eye opening thing that was for me as a 21 year old college student with long hair. I was SO watched by "people" while I was there. I was also there during the fall of the wall, the reunification, etc. So many things I could share about those times. Feli as you mentioned, so much, that there's no way one video can cover ALL of it.

156 years after the U.S. Civil War ended, we still have some of the same issues between the old confederacy and the rest of the U.S., though they're not as extreme as when I was a kid. Of course, our SE states have never been a hotbed of socialism or atheism. I suspect there would still be some regional differences even if the country has never been split, with the west having greater access to the outside world, and much of the east having been part of the large state of Prussia. It was funny hearing "GDR", because even as an American I was used to seeing"DDR", though verbally it was mostly just called East Germany.

This video was so interesting for me, thank you! My dad grew up in East Berlin, but I've always lived in Sweden. There were so many stories that fascinated me as a kid, and I've always felt such a strong connection with Germany and with the German part of me - but in the last 14 years or so we haven't really been in contact more than (over the phone) maybe five times. But I really miss that part of my life and having access to that part of my family history. Your video brought back a lot of fond memories, and it gave me back some more of my sense of connection to all that. Thank you again :)

Feli, this was such an interesting and fascinating video about a topic that I knew nothing about. Thank you and well done. Glenn from Sarasota, Florida, United States 🇺🇸

While stationed in Germany with the US Army, I spent Christmas with a German family in what had been East Germany. This was in 1993 so I don't remember where. I do remember riding around in a Trabant and getting fussed at for shutting the door too hard!

I am 20 years old and from the East. My parents never spent any holidays in the western states when I was a child, since they didn’t feel comfortable there. In school I learned that we are one country and are supposed to try and put the past behind us, since we are all the same. I always believed that my parents were simply hung up on the “good old days” and unreasonably prejudiced against people from the old states. Now I am attending a university near Stuttgart in the West, and I now realize that I was naïve. This might still be the same country, but it definitely doesn’t feel like it.

Feli, I am amazed at the incredible information quality of this video! Much respect for you

I'm Polish and to be honest this kind of nostalgia of old "good" times is also present here among many people of the older generations, that tend to see the communist era through the lens of their young years forgetting the harsh living conditions and day to day struggles such as lack of basic products in the shops, overwhelming corruption, censorship and so on.

Thank you so much for this, Feli. I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall well although I was only about 12 years old. The world pretty much stopped in its tracks to watch those unforgettable scenes of people climbing and taking apart parts of the wall.

I was born in 1987 in a country that doesn't exist anymore. If I had the chance of time traveling, I would travel to the beginning, middle and end of GDR. To see with my own eyes how it was. Sure, I can ask elder people, but everyone has a different view. I also had no chance to learn in school about the GDR. My father said once, that you can't let people teach about that era who had lived in it. Fun fact: I still have my GDR vaccination book in use 😄

I love your videos that talks about interesting time periods in Germany.

Thank you for a very nice video! Some really minor remarks: • The GDR did not have a one-party sytem. There was a parliament (die Volkskammer) with the parties SED (formed when the KPD and SPD merged), the Peasant's Party, the Christian Party, the Liberal Party, and the National Democratic Party. However, there was no opposition in parliament, the parties formed one big coalition (the Nationale Front) which was mainly controlled by the SED. And yes, elections were rigged. After re-unification the parties merged with their West-German counterparts (the Christians with the CDU, most of the SED members left and joined various parties, the others merged with the FDP). • The eastern zone after the war was controlled by Soviets, not by Russians (Russia was part of the Soviet Union, but they're not the same). Also, thank you for calling the GDR "socialist". Many people mix up socialism and communism and just call everything "communist". • Just like the Turkish "Gastarbeiter" in the FRG there were foreigners helping the economy in the GDR too. They were mostly Vietnamese. And sadly, integration into society was handled even worse than with the Turkish people in West-Germany. Xenophobia was widespread. • You did not get arrested for watching western television. I grew up with "Sesamstraße" (Sesame Street), Muppet Show, McGyver and "Sendung mit der Maus" just as much as I did with "Sandmännchen", "Spuk unterm Riesenrad", and "Ellentie". Criticizing the government didn't get you arrested either, and there were a lot of jokes around how stupid the politicians are. However, organising anti-government protest with a couple of people would have been another matter. • Some other differences between GDR and FRG not mentioned in the video: There were neither jobless nor homeless people in the GDR. Also, there were no advertisments, neither on posters in cities nor on telly. • Language was slightly different between GDR and FRG, to an extent possibly comparable to Austria vs Germany today, with either different words for the same thing, or words used with a slightly different meaning or frequency (e.g., "Plaste" vs "Plastik", "Flugzeug" vs "Flieger", "Nicki" vs "T-Shirt", "Dederon" vs "Nylon", "Kindergarten" vs "Kita"). Some of this is still around today. • Other people have already remarked on the different car types. We used to have a Skoda for example. And I still sometimes use the word "Barkas" as German translation of "Van". • I think the main disappointment for most former GDR citizens was that the re-unification was not the merger of two sovereign countries forming a new and different country as a result, but that it was more of a take-over - all GDR institutions got eradicated and replaced with their FRG counterparts, job qualifications didn't get recognised (e.g., doctors had to re-take exams), factories and companies were given to new West-German owners, people lost their houses if before the war they had belonged to people now living in the west, etc; while life for West-Germans didn't really change. And yes, quite a number of people left at the time (you mentioned that). But mainly: Your videos are lovely, please keep making them! Also: I think it was absolutely brilliant how you handled the name change of your channel and the issues that caused it in the first place. Really elegant.

After visiting West and and East Berlin a few times in the 1980's I finally got to travel thru the east in 1991. Driving across the former inter-German border was like going 45 years back in time.

Great summary Feli! I totally agree with you on “if outsiders don’t know what to look for, they won’t notice the difference”. One either is informed about the topic or lived in Germany and heard conversations or talked about. Otherwise, it’s hard to tell.

My family moved from north east of Leipzig (Wartenburg) in the mid-1700's. I've been following your channel with interest as I study German in an effort to understand my heritage better. I am hoping to spend time there after the pandemic and I hope my German is at least passable. Thanks for the channel. :)

Feli, I was waiting for this episode for ages. Thank you so much

I think that you missed Wartburg as a car manufacturer Part of the Ostalgie is also the fact that "everybody" had a paying job (no matter how crappy the job was)

Visited Berlin in the early '70s. Shockingly, two different worlds a few yards apart.! Keep up the good (and interesting) work!

Thank you Feli. I wish all the best to everyone and I hope that in short time things will normalize. Merry Christmas and good luck.

Love your channel! Always fact based (unlike many other channels!) and a very friendly tone. Merry Christmas from Sweden!

There is a similar divide also in my country in Europe(Romania) between the western part of the country and the Eastern and Southern parts(except the capital that's in the south). Only that the divide can be traced even further back, to when the western part of today's Romania was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Eastern and Southern parts where under the influence of the Ottoman Empire Even after 103 years after the Unification, differences remain.

Nice video, Feli. Watching on TV as the Berlin Wall was being torn down and the East German guards standing by and doing nothing is one of the most memorable events in my life. Incredible memories.

My father was stationed in Germany in the early 60's. We were there for 4 1/2 years. I actually went to a German school up to my 3rd grade. Later in life I served in the US Army and spent 3 years in Darmstadt, and 7 1/2 years at Wiesbaden. I was there when the wall came down. It was an exciting time for the people of Germany. My 3 daughters basically grew up in Germany, my youngest was born there, and my two oldest graduated high school while in Germany. We absolutely loved it there. Of all my military assignments in over 20 years, we loved Germany most of all.

"If you don't know what you're looking for..." That would make a great video. A street tour of things that show the difference between east and west or things that were changed or modified as a result of unification.

One of the main reasons for Ostalgie, in my opinion, is mainly that everyone had work. It didn't work economicaly but for the average person that didn't matter and they probably didnt even know. There was also a much stronger sense of community in the east, since it basicaly was communism. So being greedy and money orientated and the consumerism of today wasn't really a thing back then. So I can understand why the older generation looks back fondly on the time. But as the Nostalgie-part suggests it wasn't all rainbows, but that is not what people remember from their past.

Hello Feli. 40 years are a long time, at lot of things happened, in school for education, in the society, at work and wherever you like. It's not so easy to change that immediately and making a turn of 180 degrees in your believings in a few moments, that is tough. What was right in one moment,was wrong in the next. I'm not so sure if the people of West-Germany would have done that so quickly, if you never had that experience it's not so easy to talk about.. And the people from the East had to make a turn like that for the first time in the 50s as well. My grandparents were born at the time of the first world war and between them. The real reunification will come with every new generation more and more, they can change the believings and the culture and don't think so much about the differences anymore. That's our chance and of course the expats from other countries.

The first time I visited Berlin was in 1980. I went to West Berlin while living and studying in Italy as a quick trip to see what it was like. While we couldn't go into East Berlin, you could see it through the gate and over the wall. Then I visited again in 2002 on business. I took a walk through much of Berlin - East and West - and the difference was staggering. In West Berlin, the buildings were new, shiny, and commerce was lively. Pottsdamer Platz had been somewhat developed, but the line between the former East and West was quite clear. I remember seeing holes in buildings (on the East side of buildings) from WW II that still hadn't been fixed. The difference was shocking. Then in 2007 - 2008, while visiting family near Wurzburg, my brother, brother-in-law, and I took a trip to a monastery for haxe and bier. During the drive, we visited the westernmost part of East Germany and spent a little time in the former East Germany. While it was mostly rural where we were, it was again clear where the East began and the West ended. The vehicles and farm equipment was older in the East and houses looked a little less well cared for. Quite a shock that 60+ years after the war and almost 20 years after reunification, there were still visual distinctions between East and West.

This video, especially the discussion of “Ostalgie” , made me think of that film “Good Bye Lenin.” I saw that either when I was a Senior in high school or a Freshman in college. Great movie!

I used to work with a Vietnamese woman. She was actually born about the time that South Vietnam fell to North Vietnam. Like her parents, she clung to a country that no longer existed, like those in the DDR. She listened fanatically to a Vietnamese radio station that played music like Frank Sinatra (circa 1960), big band music popular to the late 50's/early 60's by the World War 2 generation. It was scary seeing that devotion in her. As if South Vietnam still existed.

I was about 20 year’s old when the wall fell. I’ve visited the GDR twice short before the fall. And because my mother’s family came from the Görlitz area and flet to the west in WW II, I had a great-aunt living there. I’m not an American, I live in Switzerland. That’s only to explain that I may have a different view. My great-Aunt could travel in my youth because she was retired then. I think somehow the GDR government would not count it as a loss if she would not return. She could visit us in Switzerland too. That’s because for the West German government she was german. She could change her GDR passport to an BRD passport for the time of her stay and therefore travel in Europe. Bevor she returned she gave her BRD passport back to the authorities and got her GDR passport back. For Görlitz it was luck in my opinion to have been in the GDR. I think for some other cities too. That’s because like that there were less renovations or demolitions of buildings to construct new ones. Also the «old» street plaster was left. Like that it has a beautiful old town now. What takes part in Paris in the film «Around the world in 80 days» with Jackie Chan was filmed in Görlitz. The backside is like Feli mentioned that the unemployment rate was super high when I last was there around 2004. What concerns the «ostalgie»: I think nobody misses the regime. But the products were not all bad. And somebody told me she is missing the social life. Everybody new there was a «spy» from the Stasi in each bigger building and sometimes they new even who it was. But life was not so anonymous like today or then in the west. There was more help among the neighbors than today. And you had not to worry about social security. That are the three facts that some people miss in my opinion.

I've always been curious about some of these topics but never figured out how to phrase them in questions. Very insightful video!

Great job Feli. This topic consumes me, and I am always interested to see how it comes up in literature. Thx for this video

Thanks for answering my question! I knew it would be a pretty difficult project the second after I hit send but a lot of other people were curious about it as well. Thank you for providing all those additional resources as well. Couldn’t imagine what it was like to be from East Germany during reunification, have a job all your life and suddenly The Party is gone so you’re “free” but also unemployed.

Oh my God! Thanks Felicia for this wonderful information!

You really put that well, with dignity and respect. Thanks!

Great post! Thanks for the insight.

EN: There is another difference: You can (at night) see the different light colo(r)s from space. The DDR lights are much more yellow. DE: Es gibt einen weiteren Unterschied zwischen West- und Ostdeutschland, der noch heute sichtbar ist. Die Lichter, die man vom Weltall aus sehen kann, sind in der DDR viel gelber.

In a future short, I suggest you do a video documentary about the Trabant and the Wartburg -- two of the most hilarious vehicles ever made. There are westerners (including Americans) who own and restore these cars, and I am surprised that they report replacement parts as very inexpensive.

Thank you for a very informative piece.

The Lives of Others. It's so good that I went to the cinema twice for it. Highly recommend it.

Thank you for covering this topic as it was one I was very interested in. You did a good job of explaining the main issues. Realistically, after 40 years of separation, it seems that it may take a few generations for most of the differences to disappear. I admire the German people for making such good progress in a relatively short time and with few signs of discontent. When the US went through reconstruction after our Civil War (or War Between the States if you prefer) it was a very difficult rift to heal and there are still some tense feelings 160 years later. Keep up the great work.

I visited Berlin a few times in the late 80s and again in 91 after the fall of the Berlin wall. I remember how strange it felt to be able to walk into what used to be East Berlin, and also to observe the differences in archtechture.

Wow, exzellente Kurzbeschreibung ❤ Gut gemacht 👌🏻

Hello Feli. Thank you for an informative video

It was required to take 2 years of German in my Catholic grade school. I had 2 German teachers one from E Germany, 1 from the West. I distinctly remember the difference in their accents. Both German & English.

Hey Feli. One impotant point you did wrong was, that there where more than one choices of cars. In The GDR there was the "Wartburg" produced too and a fiew people could buy the russian "Lada". The higher class mostly had western german cars as well. The most important thing after the borders between the both states where fallen, the big companies had their time of their live. The Treuhand, thing, killed overall the trust in the western system. The main argument of the eastern people is, that it wasn't all bad in the GDR. This is right. Time will hopefully fix those division issues. Thanks a lot for your Work. I love to see how you try to explain us germans to the US

Thanks. I was wondering how successful the reunification was. Good video.

Welcome back Feli !

i majored in international affairs in college so i'm here for the geopolitics 🤩

Feli you have such a kind smile 😃

Very nicely done. A well-balanced presentation.

this is a fascinating topic and I'm glad you chimed in on it. you're right that it is a huge and complicated topic for just one video. About five years after the reunification a news outlet surveyed east and west berlin citizens and found a small but sizeable portion of the residents wanted the wall to be put back.

I grew up in west germany, my dad fled from the east before the wall was build. He met my mother, they married and had 3 Kids, however, we regularly could visit the relatives in the east and although i was a little kid i do remember some few things.. We needed a visa to visit and they told us which route we were allowed to use.. we werent allowed to drive freely. My dad always suspected his brother beeing a Stasi Member because he was overly interested in the west and asked many many question. this lead to a very strange feeling in the family, we couldnt speak freely about our lives in the west. I also remember the situation at the border crossing very well, my mother always bought a west newspaper and everytime the east officer confiscated the newspaper, we always laught at it, but in hindsight this was the only way for the east people to get some news from the outside world.. When Germany reunited my dad found out his brother was a stasi member, just as he always suspected and the stasi had documents for all our family members, not only the members in east but also about my dad, my mom, me and my siblings.. They documented very well where we were going, things we said and so on..

Bless you for having the courage to take on this topic. I know it's not easy. I know most of us Americans are not well versed on Germans and Germany. I was blessed to be stationed in Berlin from '81 to '83. I got the chance to travel in the West a little, and I'd love to come back now that the wall is gone. I'm curious to see how the new German chancellor and his government will do as far as governing the country.

I appreciate this channel more than you'll ever know.

Thanks for making this video, I’ve been wondering about this same question for a long time

Having lived and worked in West Berlin in 1985, this is an interesting video. I have not returned the Berlin since, but it is one my list to do so I can see a unified Berlin.

My wife worked with a couple from East Berlin. As the DDR first started building the wall, the made their plans in secret. The started taking evening walks along an unfinished section of the Wall. The Stasi were wary of them at first, but their casual demeanor and slow gait soon became normal. One evening they were right as the narrowest area between west and east. The slipped into the west. It was hard because as Feli indicated, they never knew who was an informer. So they couldn't say goodbye to any family. Siegfried and Krista were OK folks and prospered in America. I always felt sorry for those left in the east under harsh rule.

My mom’s first fiancé, escaped from East Germany with his mother. They met in college in the States, in the late 1960s. In 1990, my mom and her sisters went on a Martin Luther tour. So needless to say, much of that tour was in the former East. The bus driver and the tour guide felt like they were on a tour themselves, because it was their first time in the former East. I then went Germany and Austria with my family in 1995. We visited with some family friends in Niedersachsen. They took us to Berlin, and thank goodness they did. Even five years after the Wall fell, they were still working on reconnecting the train lines between East and West. We were grateful to have native German speakers with us v

A lot of KZfaq commercials fail for me. But your demonstration of Blinkist sold me. I just signed up for the free trial. Well done.

Yes, this is the view of a West German who very likely did not have much contact with East Germans in her life and is reproducing all the stories she heard from other West Germans in her life. So yes, some of the points are correct, but only partly. I am an 40 year old East German, who had seen a lot of both parts of Germany. I grew up nine years in this other system. I had a West German girlfriend for five years and have many close West German friends. Please let me say something, where I don't agree: 1. We had a lot of West German products in the GDR. There was the so called "Intershop", where you could buy international products with foreign exchange ("Devisen" usually "Westmark"). I had LEGO as a child in East Germany. And our relatives from the west had always sent packages. 2. West Germans had a lot of products, which were produced in East Germany. For example IKEA had a factory in East Germany, which was shipped to West Germany. Or the press in Wolfsburg used to produce the VW Beetle came from East Germany. 3. East Germans were allowed to travel, but only in other block states without trouble (Hungary was a holyday resort). But it was possible to travel to other countries too, as long as you were not conspicuously against the system and you had to prove it. 4. Life in East Germany was not that bad for most people. I consider myself a happy kid and I have many good memories before the wall came down. 5. By what my girlfriend and their family told me, the differences weren't that big. Especially in the 60ies and 70ies. The living conditions were quite similar. That changed later, when West Germany transformed to a service society (tertiary sector) and East Germany was still an industrial country. 6. The economy wasn't that bad as it is always reported. It's like comparing Metric with Imperial. Of course it wouldn't fit. It's two different systems. The economy was bad, because it couldn't compete with a capitalist economy. If you suddenly have to apply Western standards on a low income high social expense system, everything goes down the drain. That's exactly what happened. Reunification simply happened too quickly. There was no time to adapt to new circumstances. This was one of the biggest mistakes and is the source of most of today's problems between East and West Germany. 7. That then of course many people leave the country is no wonder. Especially young people left. That's called a brain drain. Btw. that happens all around the globe. People go where they find work. That leeds to a negative feedback loop. When there are no progressive young people, there are no new companies. When there are no new companies, there are no new jobs. More people leave. If there is then also a difference in income and the employment offices demand the move, the catastrophe is pre-programmed. 8. When many young people leave the country, it leads to an aging population. Older people usually vote more conservative. If you are then treated as people of second class in media, you begin to display victim behaviour. This is the perfect breeding ground for extreme voting behavior. But you can find the same behaviour in some West German regions too. Everywhere where old structures no longer work. So it's not only the "Ossis"? It's the left behind who vote extreme. Btw. not every East German vote the AfD. The highest rate is 27% in Saxony. In comparision 12% in Bayern and Baden Würtemberg. 9. The solidarity tax was used on structurally weak regions. Yes, that was mainly East Germany. But also the Saarland or the Ruhr region. Every German citizen who pays taxes has to pay it - West Germans and as well as East Germans. It's a myth which West Germans tell each other, that they have to pay for East Germans. Which is a shame, since the West had accumulated all the workforce of the young East Germans, who paid their taxes in West Germany. 10. I wouldn't agree that there is that big of a division between East and West. That division of "Ossis" and "Wessis" is only in the mind of a few and the media make it worse. If you believe what people tell you, that will not change. The real division is between the rich and the poor. That shouldn't get worse IMHO. Feli please, come visit East Germany and get to know to the people before you judge.

Such a wide ranging topic with so many different opinions but overall the re-unification of Germany was a great thing for Europe. I cannot wait to visit Germany again - the beer, the bread, the marzipan!

Very interesting topic. I wish it was a longer video. Thanks for covering it Feli.

My one former middle-aged colleague colleague was from the former East Germany. I enjoyed talking to him, even though his political and other views were vastly different from my own. He didn't trust the EU or globalisation. He supported some of Trump's opinions (this was in 2017-2018, not sure if he'd changed his mind since then) as for as they were anti-globalist. His English was pretty good, but with a strong accent. He could speak Russian and showed me Russian cursive (mind blown). When he and a young girl had quite a strong difference of opinion about politics, the girl was worried that the friendship would be ruined. However, they remained friends, which is good, because we we working on a project in a small town and we used to socialise with our colleagues over weekends.

You are ALMOST correct. Technically, the GDR was a multi-party system. The CDU did exist, but was heavily undermined by IMs of the StaSi. Also, there wasn't only the Trabant, but also the Wartburg. You were not arrested for watching West German TV. I can attest to that because I lived in that times and we ALWAYS watched West German TV. It may have gotten you under surveillance, but you were not arrested for it. Both of my parents had StaSi files on them. But that's a story for another time. If you want to know more, let me know. I live in Texas now, so, Central Time. ;-) Last one: FDP is not "Libertarian" but "Classic Liberal" - huge difference! "Libertarians" in Germany are the AfD.

As a teen from saxony-anhalt (I feel like no one's ever from there? XD) I can confirm that most of my friends just try to find better stuff in the west asap. Like a lot of my friends applied to multiple universities in the western states and none in the east mostly because they're just more possibilities. I'd say a quarter of my friends stays here, a quarter moves to the western states, a quarter to Berlin specifically (me included xD) and the last one is going to travel/have an exchange year

Without a doubt one of your best, Feli.

Came across this a year after you posted. Well done!! I enjoyed my travels in (mostly west) Germany and appreciate answers to questions I did not ask when I had the chance. (I also love Cincinnati!)

I watched a documentary about East Germany where they mentioned that at a certain point the Stasi files were made public after the collapse of the USSR. One could browse the files to find out who informed on you to the Stasi if one wished. Naturally, some didn't want to know which of their friends or family informed on them. Others did want to know. Personally, I think I'd rather find out who betrayed my trust as tough as it might be to face that your siblings or cousins would do that.

Also a US soldier, stationed in Mannheim, 1990-1994. Shortly after reunification, a few of us entered East Germany, to have a look around. It was surreal. Like the exact opposite of "The Wizard of Oz", where the film changes from black and white, to full color. Everything was drab and colorless. No traffic, no one walking the streets, I don't recall seeing a soul. Hopefully, that's all changed now.

Love hearing the history of Germany! Thanks for answering this!

As an American, I attended the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, where the most lasting impression when being at the Olympiastadion for track and field (T&F) competitions was the perceived _kinship_ of the FRG people with those T&F competitors from the DDR. This was back in the era when the Soviet Union and the DDR had top T&F athletes. Whenever the stadium announcer spoke of a DDR competitor, or when a DDR athlete won an event, the stadium with predominately West German attendees roared with cheers for those East German athletes. That kinship of East and West Germans was something that I never heard of in the US prior to my trip to West Germany in 1972.

It's difficult not to be enamored with her energy and smile

I remember when my father wos go to DDR every year for christmas to purchase me and my sister a christmas gifts and new cloths . it wos somthing amaizing when we wos go to shop and therwos everythin so difirent like in Poland where shops wos empty

Very interesting one, Feli. Thanks!