This is the 40th
anniversary of the Deutsche
Demokratische Republik. Or DDR, the dictatorial
state better known as East Germany. It is the last
anniversary this state will ever celebrate. But the leader, Erich
Honecker, doesn't know that yet. Outside, protesters
clash with the police. And just one month later,
excited crowds will flood the border dividing
East and West Berlin. By the time of the
41st anniversary, the DDR had vanished. It's land and people taken
over by that other German state, the BRD or FRG, but has the DDR ever gone away?
In Berlin Remnants of this history
are hiding in plain sight in traffic lights, iconic
buildings, or subtle distinctions where the
Berlin Wall one stood. But if you zoom out and
look at the map, the signs are not so subtle. The difference in job
opportunity, attitude to vaccination obesity
rates, or religion show divided country. And people that grew
up in East Germany still feel a gap with
their former neighbors. It's not just people on the
street that feel this way. Angela Merkel led
Germany for 16 years. When she left office in
2021, she could finally share her grievances. Growing up in East
Germany, she felt judged by the people in the
West after unification. I didn't experience
East Germany, I was born in 1990. Just a few months
after the Berlin Wall fell in November 89. As I was growing up,
this date was special. When meeting new people,
we checked if we were born before or after the wall. The only moment of
similar importance I can think of is 2001. To me, these two dates
felt like a world apart. As I get older, I see just
how recent this all is. 2001 happened
22 years ago. That means almost twice
the time has passed as there did between the
fall of the wall and the fall of the Twin Towers. I don't know how
to describe how this feels, but it
feels wrong somehow. 33 years also means
that a generation has passed since the fall
of the wall, so a new generation wants to
understand this date. And I want to
understand it, too. When it comes to
East Germany, I was mostly taught about
the Berlin Wall, about the secret police that
spied on their people. But I feel there's
more to this story and the people living it. In this video, I want
to look at the history of the DDR, how it
was established, how it was to live there. And what is the modern
legacy of this state? So this video is about
East Germany, and yes, that means we'll be
talking about the Stasi, the secret police. And to dodge their
intense surveillance, you need tools to
hide your identity. And so East Germans
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for sponsoring this video, and let's get back
to those East Germans. I had the opportunity
to talk to Katja Hoyer, who just wrote
a brilliant book about this very subject. Katja is a visiting
scholar at King's College UK. She wrote a book on
the German Empire, and now one about the DDR. We'll get to Katia
in a bit, but first, let's set the scene. It's 1945, and the Allies
defeat Nazi Germany in the biggest conflict
the world has ever seen. Already before the end
of the war, the Allies have been talking about
what to do with Germany. It must be tamed. So they settle
on a division. France, Great Britain,
the US, and the Soviet Union divide Germany
into four zones. Each of them will
administer a zone. After a few years,
these zones change to two states, the
Bundesrepublik Deutschland and the Deutsche
Demokratische Republik, the Federal Republic of
Germany and the German Democratic Republic. The former capital
Berlin was surrounded by the Soviet zone, but
it was also divided. I went to Berlin to show
you where you can still find this division. And that meant I had to
take a lot of subways. I don't know about you,
but when it comes to these two states, I was always
told that the biggest difference between East
and West was the ideology. Communism versus
capitalism. And that this shapes
everything, how the rest of the history
will play out. But these two states
actually had very different starting points. If you look at this map
of Germany before the Second World War, You see
that after the war, it lost a lot of territory. This means that
suddenly 12 million Germans lived outside
of the new borders. They had to leave
their homes or were violently forced to
move to the new Germany. And because of geography,
a lot of these people were settled in East Germany. So many that a
quarter of the DDR consisted of refugees. All these people need
supports, food, homes. But that is not
the only difference between East and West. In 1950, West Germany
had a population of 51 million. It had the Ruhrgebiet,
the industrial heartland of Germany. They got financial
support from the West. If you compare this to
the DDR, they have a way smaller industrial
and demographic base. A population of just
about 18 million. It's a mostly agrarian
society with little energy sources except
for brown coal. And then they also
have the luck of being liberated by
the Soviet Union. So I am at this Soviet
memorial for fallen soldiers that died
fighting in Berlin. And I think this
really shows what kind of state East
Germany is going to be. Let me show you. It's really Soviet
propaganda at its best. It's really the Soviets
liberating the Germans. And at the main piece,
this one big soldier with a child on his
arm, a big sword in his hand, crushing
National Socialism. The Nazis behaved
differently on the Eastern Front. Hitler fought this insane
war of annihilation against the Soviets. 20 million Soviets had
died, their lands burned, villages exterminated. So when they entered
German lands, they wanted revenge. In Berlin, the Soviets
looted the city for months and grabbed
everything they could. You know this famous
picture of the liberation of Berlin by the Soviets. It's really some good
propaganda It was staged but also photoshopped
because the Soviet soldier Well, let's say he had
more watches on his arm that he needed to tell the
time It's not really the picture the Soviets want
to paint of liberation. On a larger scale,
art factories, whole laboratories were packed
up and sent east a third of the industrial base of
East Germany was robbed and Soviet soldiers r*ped
2 million women Women that had to survive by striking
deals with their r*pists. So this exact memorial
has been jokingly called the Memorial to R*pists. And next to all
this, Stalin wants big war reparations. Huge sums of money. It's not the best
start for East Germany. So you have a nation
broken, looted and pillaged Who are going
to be the leaders of all this rubble? The soviets have one rule. We can't have former nazis
ruling the country. So to Stalin the most logical
solution to that was to send back some of the
german communists that had spent the war in russia
because they'd fled the nazis beforehand and
had proved themselves incredibly loyal
to the point where they sometimes betrayed their
own friends and colleagues to prove to Stalin
how loyal they were. These people had been
through the biggest purges under Stalin. They were true communists. The Soviets have
one party rule. East Germans have the SED The Social Unity
Party, that leads the DDR. The Soviet state
is there for their workers and farmers. They show it in the
hammer and sickle. DDR is their worker
and farmer state too. Look at their logo. You have the hammer,
the ring of rye. But they're also there
for the intellectuals. Look at the compass. So, now we have a brand
new state with some good socialist branding. How do they do? Out of the gate,
not very good. These true communists
want to impress their teacher, so they
collectivize farms. This doesn't go very well. It leads to big
food shortages. They go so fast with
communist reforms that even Stalin was like,
chill out dudes, I just need my money. And he's getting it. For the first year, 60
percent of the total industrial output of East
Germany went straight to the Soviet Union. So instead of
rebuilding, the reforms and the reparations,
they completely wrecked the economy. This is not good
news for the workers rebuilding the country. They are making
16 hour days. And when they come
out of their shift, there's nothing in the
shops to buy for them. And that gets worse
and worse and worse, and people get very
unhappy about that. It's now almost a decade
after the war ended, and lives just don't seem to
be getting any better. This chart shows what's
happening because of that. Hundreds of thousands
of people are leaving East Germany to
live in the West. And even though the
borders to West Germany are closed, Berlin
is a big loophole. Here you can just walk to
the West, take a train. And this leads to two
big crises that will define East Germany. Crises that will give East
Germany the two things we always connect to the DDR. The wall and the
secret police. And the first of these
crises starts at a prestige project. These strikes make the
leaders very nervous, but they completely
mishandle the situation. They are naive and
don't have any idea what's going on in the
life of these workers. I describe a scene
in my book where the, this sort of angry mob
of workers goes up to the government building and
demands to speak to the leader, Walter Ulbricht,
to talk about living and working conditions. And Walter Ulbricht sits
on the inside and says, Oh, it's beginning to
rain, surely they're going to disperse, they
won't want to stand out there in the rain. You know, he's that
naive still at that point, and so detached
from what people want. These strikes don't
stop in Berlin. They spread across the
whole of East Germany. A million people
take to the streets. The situation gets so
out of hand that the Soviets have had enough. They step in. And once again,
Soviet tanks are rolling into Berlin. At least 55
protesters are killed. Thousands are arrested. This is not the best
PR for communism, and it leads to one thing
we immediately connect to East Germany. After this crisis,
the situation does get a bit better. The Soviets send help,
reparations get lowered, reforms are cancelled,
food is easier to get now. But the situation is
still worse than in the West, so people
still want to leave. And this leads to
the second crisis. This one will have a
lasting impact in the streets of Berlin. By 1961, 3 million Germans
had left East Germany. And it's the people that
can afford it to go first. This is a huge
brain drain. You have doctors,
dentists, and skilled workers
leaving the country. Almost all through
the Berlin loophole. This is a nightmare
scenario for these East German leaders. If they don't do
anything, there will be no one left in this East
German socialist utopia. So what are they
going to do? Nothing drastic, right? Let's see what the leaders
have to say about this. Ah, well, I guess
that's fine then. Berlin is a big place. The streets are packed. Every day thousands
travel the streets of this city on foot,
by bike or in cars. But if you look down
at the streets, you can see something special. Because you can see
these people are actually crossing a border. This is the border that
divided East and West for nearly 30 years. The Berlin Wall. The wall went
through houses. It split families
and friends. And it put the most
recognizable Berlin landmark in a dead zone. To show you how the wall
looked, I went with my friend Michal to get
my drone cherry popped. Unfortunately for me... The drone
wouldn't perform. A previous trip
to the beach gave us some trouble. Um, there's a pro tip. Don't land your
drone in the sand. But Michal got it fixed. I repaired it because
I'm an engineer. So here's me flying
a drone for the first time to show you
how the wall looked. You've probably seen
images of the wall, right? But that's actually
only the western part of the wall. When it was finished, the
whole wall consisted of screens, fences, patrol
zones, a death strip. Soldiers that manned
guard towers and had to shoot people on sight. At least 140 people
were killed or died at the Wall,
connected to an escape. But for the leaders of
East Germany, this barrier was a great success. Let's look at the graph
of people leaving again. After they built
the Wall in 1961, it completely flatlines. And in some way, it calmed
this whole situation down in East Germany. Those that stayed behind
had to try and make something of this state. So how was it to
live in East Germany? At this point, I think
it's hard to look past how the state was portrayed. We remember the Stasi. We remember the wall. East Germany is a
place where a Soviet invasion would start. It's part of an evil
communist bloc that is the archenemy of the West. If we look beyond that for
a moment, how does this society actually look? Yeah, so Walter Ulbricht is kind of a classic socialist in the
sense that he's building up or trying to build up a
society that is classless and therefore leveled out. So the idea is that you
have No luxury at the top in terms of
consumer goods and so on and so forth, but also
no absolute poverty. and everybody kind
of works in a modest society. This classless society
receives a lot of benefits from the government. One of the most important
of these is housing. I'm at what used to be
called Leninplatz and behind me, you have
everything I used to think of was East Germany,
these ugly Plattenbau buildings, prefab
buildings, but for the people that were living
here, they were great. They were spacious, they
had warm water, there was a lot of community
inside these buildings, so not that bad. And they're also
a lot cheaper than in West Germany. A family of four
would spend 4 percent of their
income on rent, compared to almost 21 percent
in West Germany. And because this is a
socialist state, there's a lot of social mingling. The architect lives
next door to the factory worker. There are no gated
communities here. But this is not the
only thing the state is focusing on. They provide
free child care. This allows women to
work, and they enter their workforce in huge numbers. By the end of the
GDR, over 90 percent of women are in full
time employment. That's a rate
never achieved by any other country,
again, in history. Education is strong. University is free. A third of the working
class gets to go to university, compared to 5
percent in West Germany. People are literates, they
are reading tons of books. The DDR is a place
with the highest living standards of
all the Soviet bloc. It's something that
people are proud of. So after the first hard
years, there's a society where basic needs are met. Let's be clear, this
is a dictatorial state. One party rule, no free
press, the secret police spying on all the people. It's not like North Korea. Where even today
people die of famine. There are bodies
lying in the streets. It's very possible to
have a meaningful life. Despite all this, the
rulers of the party do have a problem. Because when the
basic necessities, the housing, education
and food are provided, people want more. They want stuff
to aspire to. In the West, they have
new cars, they have tape recorders, they
have consumer goods. In the 70s, the new
leader in East Germany understands they
also have to provide some of this luxury. And there's one Western
luxury item that provides more than just a good fit. You have this kind
of idea of great open lands, freedom, cowboys,
chewing gum, uh, the prairie, you know, the
genes, genes kind of were symbolic or emblematic
of, of that idea of, of American freedom. And boy, people
wanted them badly. So you have this
weird moment, you have these communist
leaders, they are believing in socialism. They want to build
this egalitarian state with no luxury, right? Well, they understand
people really want genes. They're going to
give it to them. Importing the symbol
of the free west. They import 1 million
genes for a population of 16 million. And it created
complete chaos. People just freaked out. They ran into the shops. There weren't enough
changing rooms. People were buying,
uh, on bulk. They were trying to
basically buy more than they actually needed. And, uh, it was chaos. Importing luxury goods
is all fine, but stuff like this is showing the
cracks in the system. You can't just keep
on subsidizing this extremely expensive
welfare state, the housing, the education,
the childcare, and then also subsidize these
expensive consumer goods. And times are changing. You have a new generation
coming up that didn't experience the war,
and they see a system that is stagnating. There is no innovation. There is no progress. In the 80s, new cars
still have the same engine from the 60s,
and the people can't do anything about that. Yeah, you can't really,
um, say, write a letter to the newspaper and
expect it to be published, because it won't. you can't call in
any radio shows and say, well, look, you know, I
need, I'm really unhappy with this and you know,
what, what are you going to do about it? There's just no way
to express anger and frustration. And they can also
see how things are going in the West. I know that the wall,
it makes it seem like this is a society that's
Completely isolated. I mean, it's not possible
to travel to the West. But again, this is
not North Korea. There was contact between
families that lived in these different states. Western people went to
vacation in the East. You have the radio. Kids are listening to
Western rock music. And on a political level,
in the 70s and 80s, the leaders of the two blocks
are getting closer. Take this phone call
in the 80s between Honecker and Kohl. It's about the
placement of new rockets in West Germany. It's quite a serious deal. But listen how this
phone call starts. Just two men casually
discussing the weather in December. But as calm as this call
is, in East Germany, there is a storm coming. In the 80s, there
are mass protests. Not to bring down
the wall, but to reform the system. Voices that want
to be heard. The protest won't
be silenced. The situation becomes
unsustainable. This is also not
the 1950s anymore. The new Soviet
leader is all about openness and reform. He has plenty of
issues at home. He's not gonna crack
down anymore on protesters in countries
of their friends. So when Hungary opens
their borders, they tear a hole in the Iron Curtain. People can suddenly
leave the Eastern Bloc. This finally leads to a
collapse in the wall that divided East and West
for almost three decades. On 3 October 1990, just
a few days before the DDR would celebrate its
41st birthday, Germany sees reunification. Unity all in one,
over a million people here celebrating a
day that they never thought would come. A day in which Germany
became one country again. Tomorrow they can worry
about the future and the hundreds of billions the
new Germany will cost. So how does the
reunification look? Well, it has many faces. On the one hand, the
German government invests huge sums in East Germany. Richer East and
West Germans pay the solidarity surcharge. That basically
means higher taxes. These taxes are
even in place for some people today. It leads to investment
in roads, in phone lines, in bridges. Between 1990 and
2009, it was 1. 3 trillion euros. That's a lot of zeros. At the same time, a lot of
people lost their income. In 2005, still 20
percent of East Germans didn't have a job. And the social
benefits, well, they mostly disappear. Found this report by
the German government. It's all about the
state of Germany after reunification
30 years later. And it's fascinating how
easily visible the DDR still is in some maps. In the East, people are
way older because all the young people left
for the West to find a job, as you can see
in the employment map. And also the number
of empty homes. It's a lot bigger
in East Germany. And these social
circumstances go a long way to explain the
support for extremist parties in the East. Apart from all this
economic data, there is something I didn't know. This report talks
about old and new federal states. So this is not
a new country. It's not a reunification
of two equal states, politically and
legally, it is the West German state that has
expanded to the East and taken over everything
of East Germany. East Germany
just went away. And it's clear who
had to adjust to who. People raised in East
Germany see a different way of how people
work in a society. Just a few months
ago, there was a huge scandal in Germany. Well, the whole way
in which the GDR should be remembered
is still a very, very political issue. This is a story that goes
beyond simple narratives. Narratives that I
was also taught. Boiling down 40 years
of human experience to the wall and
the secret police. To a clear cut
competition between two ways of living. Communist versus
capitalist. But there are many in the
West who live this story. that identify with
this struggle. For them, hearing a
different perspective can feel like
hitting a raw nerve. But it is up to
historians like Katja to provide us with
these new perspectives. In East Germany, I think
that there's still a perception that it's
this sort of grey, monotone, um, existence
where people sat there for four decades not
doing very much until... They liberated
themselves, um, and the Berlin Wall fell. But talking to Katja
showed me how there was a world behind
the Iron Curtain. People were getting
married, having children, achieving things. And those kinds of
things, I think, are worth mentioning without
taking away from the idea that these people
lived in a dictatorship. They managed, despite and
within the dictatorship, to have meaningful lives. And that, to me, speaks to
the resilience of people.
