Skip to content

Stasi State or Socialist Paradise?

Metadata

Highlights

In Russia itself, post-communist catastroika produced the greatest peacetime economic collapse in modern history. — location: 63 ^ref-9523

To judge any country simply on Western media reports, selective statistics or the views of dissidents is to accept a one-dimensional picture, and that is what most commentators have done with the communist-run countries. — location: 102 ^ref-30379

It is quite possible that the denigration of the GDR by the West German establishment has more to do with atoning for what it failed to do after the war, i.e. bring to justice all those who played a prominent role in the Nazi regime and to re-educate a new generation about the evils of Nazism. — location: 139 ^ref-22671

Nazis, with the collaboration of the big financiers and industrialists, had perpetrated a cruel historical experiment on the nation. — location: 157 ^ref-8836

In contrast to what happened in the Soviet zone, the western occupying forces chose to ignore these demands carried by overwhelming majorities. Similar referendums were also held in Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia), in the British zone, both of which also gave majorities for expropriation. However, with the immediate onset of the Cold War and the West’s fear of the spread of socialist thinking, these democratic decisions were vetoed by the western occupying powers.[1] — location: 170 ^ref-63148

it was the Western allies’ surprise introduction of a new currency in the three zones occupied by the Western allies and West Berlin which led the Soviet Union to close transit routes to West Berlin (an island within the centre of the Soviet zone), because the now superfluous old currency would have undermined the economic stability of the East. — location: 188 ^ref-36533

It was this unilateral action that led directly to the Soviet blockade and the resultant Berlin Airlift. — location: 191 ^ref-2521

East Germany found itself largely separated from its traditional western German market as well. — location: 211 ^ref-31499

anything connected with the idea of an alternative form of society is still seen as a threat. — location: 2163 ^ref-28973

The GDR, on the other hand, underwent a thorough de-nazification process which was, horror of horrors, carried out by the Nazis’ erstwhile enemies, the communists. In that sense the GDR always represented an unflattering mirror held up to West German society. — location: 2169 ^ref-11940

leadership was divorced from the people’s everyday concerns and had a paranoid fear of the enemy and about subversion. That is why it placed the state’s security interests above a trust in its own people.[87] — location: 2191 ^ref-30461

many of those who lived in the country have come to recognise and regret that the genuine social achievements they enjoyed have been dismantled. It is perhaps little wonder that many East Germans do not feel there has been a unification of two states, but that they have been taken over and treated as a colony of the West. — location: 2210 ^ref-43059

’Two thirds think that in essence it was a good time, and that the principles on which the GDR was based were also good’.[90] — location: 2231 ^ref-36854

well’. In contrast, 78 per cent of West Germans saw the GDR as ‘overwhelmingly bad’. — location: 2234 ^ref-30200

just like Cuba or Venezuela today, has rarely been criticised or attacked for having failed to create a genuine socialist democracy but rather for ‘having the effrontery’ of attempting to do so in the first place. — location: 2279 ^ref-10712

We can learn from this short-lived attempt at building such a society, even though it took place in a Cold War context, under adverse circumstances not of its people’s own choosing. — location: 2286 ^ref-53333

One important impact made by the GDR and the socialist world is often overlooked, and that is the positive effect they had on social policies in the West. — location: 2287 ^ref-3180

it was often noted by trade unionists in West Germany that when negotiating with employers the GDR was invariably an important but invisible presence at the negotiating table, i.e. there was always an awareness on both sides of what was happening in the GDR in terms of workers’ rights. — location: 2289 ^ref-50573

the establishment of the welfare state in most western European countries was largely in response to the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution. — location: 2291 ^ref-21000

large scale attacks on the welfare state in the West have coincided with the demise of the socialist world. Now there is no concrete alternative on offer, the capitalist world has taken the gloves off. — location: 2302 ^ref-8394