Source: private photo of author with East German army belt (3rd September 2025)
Plenty has been written about East- and West-Germany and about Wessies or West-Germans and Ossies or East-Germans. Much of this focuses on similarities and how to make East-Germany resembling West-Germany.
Historically, a lot of these writings emerged in the wake of Germany’s re-unification in 1990. Much of it is – rather copiously – repeated on every – 10th, 20th, 30th, etc. – anniversaries.
Yet, there are – even after 35 years of one unified Germany – substantial notable differences between East- and West-Germany.
Perhaps, the East is indeed (and also will) – remain different from the West. In virtually all of this, the West sets the standard against which East-Germany, and worse, East-Germans, are measured – by West-Germans, to add insult to injury.
Interestingly, West-Germany’s population grew by 10% between 1990 and 2022 while East-Germany’s declined by 15%.
One might see this as a “demographic bleeding of East-Germany” and a brain drain. As a consequence, some areas in East-Germany are back to the population density of the year 1905.
Today, about 68 million (81.5%) are living in the West and 12.6 million in East-Germany (18.5%). In other words, East-Germany’s population is slightly less than that of Bavaria’s. Worse, the city of Istanbul has more people than all of East-Germany.
Some of the East-West differences exist not just demographically, but also due to historical reasons. For one, Allied Forces converted West-Germany into a democracy in the years following the victory over Hitler’s Nazis.
Meanwhile in East-Germany, a Stalinist cover up created a kind of a one-party-dictatorship that was set up as a “façade democracy” – with frequent but inconsequential elections, nevertheless.
In both cases, democracy came from above, and this is the key difference, West-Germans learned to live with democracy while East-Germans had no such luck.
In this context, many speak of an East-German “double dictatorship” – Nazism first and Stalinism later. Under both, East-Germans suffered. Formally, that ended in 1990, but traces of an anti-democratic tradition can still be detected in East-Germany today.
This has, at least partially, shaped the outlook of East-Germans and West-Germans. In the arrogant imagination of the Wessies, Ossies are depicted as “either communists or fascists”, as “backward” and “not ready for democracy”.
Significantly, the key institution that converted East-Germany into a marvellous lighthouse of capitalism with blooming industrial landscapes (Kohl) was the “Treuhand”.
The Treuhand is seen by East-Germans as a “reckless destroyer of East-Germany” while West-Germans still see it as a necessary force for good.
It was not only the Treuhand’s mistreatment of East-Germans that implanted a feeling of being “second class citizens”. Recent surveys still found that 2/3 of all East-Germans think they are “second class citizens”.
It is made worse by the fact that almost 30% of East-Germans have been pushed into the precariat. This is much different from chancellor Kohl (CDU) promising “blooming industrial landscapes” – a lie that got him, like his illegal dark money, elected.
Beyond that, it appears as if the wall that once separated East and West, is now replaced by an inner-German “financial wall” – the wealthy here and the poor over there.
To add to all this, East-Germany has – most likely very deliberately during the western takeover – been denied the opportunity to create its own financial, managerial, administrative, cultural, and political elite.
Even the de facto Führer of the neo-fascist Ost-AfD is a Wessie or west-import: Björn Höcke. In short, the western elite moved eastward but the eastern elite hardly ever moved westward.
Worse, it took the better part of 30 years until the first Ossie was assigned to Germany’s supreme court – the Bundesverfassungsgericht. The West had shut the door against their East-German cousins.
Worryingly, there was, and is, an overlaying of the East-German elite by West-Germany’s elite imported to the East to run businesses, factories, state administration, etc.
These Wessies, often in all their arrogance, are “transfer elites”. This too, aids the not all too wrong impression that East-Germans are second class citizens.
It does not get better when even top managers in companies in remote regions like Saxony maintain their prime place of residence in cosmopolitan Berlin. These travelling managers do not contribute to local life in Saxony. They are merely FIFOs: fly in, fly out.
To make matters worse, the large westward move of East-Germany’s non-elite population during the last 30 years left a very specific cohort of people behind.
The remaining population consists of the “left-behinders”, the obsolete, Hilary Clinton’s “deplorables”, the old, the less-educated, the white, and the male. In some areas in East-Germany, 100 women face 115 men in the age group 20 to 29 years old.
Worse, in Thuringia’s “Ilm county”, for example, the imbalance is 140-to-100. This is the “demographic masculinisation” of East-Germany.
Intriguingly, this not only aides those who voted for the AfD but in the men-dominated AfD’s East-German division, less then 20% are women.
The AfD is a party of reactionary, insecure, old, and frustrated men. These are concentrated in those regions labelled “regions of frustration” [Frustregionen].
Not only for those trapped in such Frustregionen, but the issue of re-unification has also not ended. Meanwhile, West-Germans see it completely different. To them, German reunification is done.
Most illuminating is the fact that students from East-Germany who study at universities in West-Germany hold more positive attitudes towards migrants and refugees compared to students from East-Germany who study at East-Germans universities.
Unsurprisingly, Merkel’s 2015 intake of Syrian refugees has only deepened the East-vs.-West division. Linked to that is the fact that East-Germans are by far less fearful of the neo-fascist AfD compared to West-Germans.
In fact, East-Germans are strong supporters of the AfD while being fearful of the environmental Green party. In the West, the exact opposite is the case.
All in all, it appears as if East-Germany is more than a geographical location. It is historically, culturally, demographically, and politically very different from West-Germany – not just in terms of location.
Its social structure, demography, politics, and culture are different. Worse, there is a solidification – a Verknöcherung – in East-Germany. These structures are hardening. They become more and more inflexible.
Such a Verknöcherung indicates that a freezing, congealing, and hardening can be seen since reunification. The West sees unification (West) or takeover (East) as an improvement of East-Germany. Meanwhile, the East sees it as a takeover. The takeover generated feelings of powerlessness and impotence – a Verohnmächtigung.
Much of this reaches back to the 1950s (West) and 1990s (East). As for the West, the introduction of democracy in West-Germany was flanked by economic growth while something else emerged when democracy was introduced in East-Germany.
During the 1990s, the introduction of democracy in the East was flanked by massive job losses, economic insecurity, recession, de-industrialisation, and a devaluation of life experiences, skills, and traditional professions. In short, democracy left a good mark in the West but a bad mark in the East.
Not unconnected to this is the fact that democratic political parties never really took root in East-Germany during the 1990s anywhere close to what had occurred in West-Germany during the 1950s. This, in turn, can be linked to a rather weak existence of what we know to be a civic society – defined by a free marketplace of ideas.
During the 1990s, this opened a non-democratic or even anti-democratic space which was, subsequently, filled by East-Germany’s far right and adjacent Neo-Nazis. In many cases, this led to right-wing extremist and Neo-Nazi violence.
Today, this period is known as the “baseball bat years” – violent and brutal skinheads, far right hooligans, and Neo-Nazis armed with baseball bats.
Some have even argued that the “baseball bat years” and the subsequent rise of the neo-fascist AfD represent a kind of East German revenge against a top-down political order imposed primarily from the West.
In other words, there has been a kind of defiance and recalcitrance against West-German elites. It runs under the slogan, “we will not have our country being destroyed by you”.
Defending East-Germany against a perceived enemy aided a falling back onto familiar structures and old ways of thinking. It did not contribute to a political openness – something which is, to a significant degree, still lacking in East-Germany. Perhaps it is lacking ever since the 1990s.
What made all this even more problematic is the fact that East-Germany has virtually no “country”-wide quality newspaper or news magazine. All of these – Frankfurter Rundschau, Tageszeitung, Handelsblatt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, FAZ, Spiegel, Stern, Die Zeit, etc. – are located in the West.
Their headquarters are almost exclusively either in Frankfurt (Main), Munich, and Hamburg with the possible exception of cosmopolitan Berlin.
Worse, only between 2.5% to 4% of the readership of Germany’s most important new publications, such as for example, the Süddeutsche, FAZ, and Spiegel are located in East-Germany. As a consequence, East-Germans tend to rely on online platforms and, worse, right-wing filter bubbles for their “news”.
This, as well as personal biographies through an upbringing in East-Germany virtually assured that many East-Germans still tend to not associate Hilter’s Nazism with the Holocaust, military attacks and the invasion of European neighbours, and Gestapo-style state terror.
Much of this aided a specific East-German identity that remains different from West-Germany. What has made it worse is that, since the 1990s, such an Eastern identity was shaped by western domination and Eastern submission.
As a consequence, many East-Germans mix a certain nostalgia with an overtly romantic image of East-Germany. This unique phenomenon became known as “Ostalgia”.
Such feelings are supported by a widespread conviction to have suffered a “collective fate” after 1990 – a fate defined by feelings of a devaluation of East-German’s life, of a de-recognition of one’s experiences, the constant negativity, slander, discretisation, and defamation.
This has been made worse, by the derogative term “Ossie” steaming from the West, businesses preferring to hire Wessies as well as on Western media. All of this has created a specific East-German identity based on:
- individual life biographies,
- life experiences before and after 1990,
- the implosion of social settings and belonging to a certain class,
- a social mobility directed downward,
- the destruction of local milieus no longer knitted together by state-socialist institutions,
- an aging society, and
- the hegemonic power of western media and politics as well as the cultural dominance of the West framing Ossies in a negative, if not derogatory way.
In any case, such an Ossie identity can hardly exist without a mirroring Wessie-identity. However, the reference point and key norm setting element in that is the West – not the East.
Yet, 40% of all Ossies still see themselves as “East-Germans” rather than as “Germans”. such a distinct Ossie identity is based on, at least, four underlining elements:
- Geography – those living in East-Germany.
- Birth – those born in East-Germany.
- Social-biographical – those with an East-German background.
- Emotional-Ostaligic – those with an emotional-nostalgic bond to East-Germany.
Since reunification reaches back 35 years, it is not at all surprising to find that young East-Germans have established an Ossie identity disconnected to the former regime of state-socialism (1945-1990). Simultaneously, the proverbial “wall in the mind” [die Mauer im Kopf] that divides the East from the West is shrinking.
Predictably, the “Ossie-vs.-Wessie” conflict is recognised by 61% of people in the West but only by 16% of East-Germans. Worse, for Ossie, the West remains present and important. In turn, for Wessie, the East is largely irrelevant.
This also means that the “East-vs.-West” dichotomy is significant for Ossies but not for Wessies. Plenty of people in the East see themselves as being the opposite to the progressive, enlightened, open, modern, forward-looking West.
In the mind of many Ossies, the West is weak, lacks German virtues, is overly concerned with environmentalism. This sparked an intense dislike of Germany’s Green party. Finally, the West is seen as being filled with migrants and refugees.
Meanwhile, Wessies do not see the East in that way. Instead, the East is largely immaterial to a Wessie identity. As for an Ossie identity, one of most important ideas is that,
“the West is how we [Ossies] do not want to be”.
Paradoxically, such attitudes are often represented by the neo-fascist AfD that regularly claims to represent “the East”.
This propaganda coup is done despite the fact, that the AfD’s de facto boss and self-appointed leader of the AfD’s East-German division – Björn Höcke – is a Wessie.
This seems to be inapt just as it was irrelevant that Adolf Hitler was Austrian by birth and military rank, not German. Far right propaganda, then and today, can make such contradictions go away.
What also does not matter is that, during an AfD rally in October 2022, an AfD apparatchik squawked “East! East! East-Germany!” into a megaphone enticing the crowd to join in. The AfD apparatchik wasn’t from East-Germany.
Instead, he was a party official from the West-German state of Baden-Württemberg. In all three cases, Hitler, Höcke, and the AfD-apparatchik from Baden-Württemberg, good far right populist propaganda can – usually – camouflage such contradictions.
Meanwhile, AfD propaganda has also been successful in trumping up resentment through repeatedly alluding to the all to often issued slurs and insults against Ossie broadcasted by Wessies and turbo-charged by the hegemonic media power of West-Germany.
Unlike in the West, the AfD has been vastly more successful in East-Germany. Worse, its East-German platoons are far more right-wing extremist.
All too often, this is spiced up by Nazi-styled language that uses, for example, the AfD’s beloved “völkische”. This is the coded language for Aryan to AfD followers, right-wing extremists, and adjacent Neo-Nazis, Meanwhile, it simply is the “Volk” – as in people – for everyone else.
The AfD’s membership in East-Germany reflects as much. While keeping in mind that Bavaria has more people than people living in East-Germany and that the AfD’s overall membership has increased from 16,000 in 2015 to over 34,000 today, roughly half of all AfD members live in East-Germany. In other words, the AfD is grossly overrepresented in East-Germany.
It might not come as a surprise that many strongholds of the neo-fascist AfD mirror the same geographical areas in which Hitler’s Nazis during the 1930s had already generated strong support.
Expectedly and not unlike Hitler’s Nazis, support for the AfD also shows a strong city-vs.-county divide. The AfD is strong in remote rural areas. In East-Germany, this is made worse by two factors: the westward move of the young and skilled and demography (an aging society). Put simply, these are geographical areas filled with old and frustrated men.
On the upswing, without East-German cities like Leipzig, Potsdam, Jena, Rostock, Magdeburg, Dresden, Halle, etc. Germany’s environmentalist “the Greens” party would have been unlikely to ever enter a state parliament in East-Germany.
Less in East-German cities but more in its regional areas, there seems to be a reluctance to the continuous demand for change. Some people simply grew tired of the many transformations demanded from them.
More than the West ever before, East-Germany had to change rather fundamentally post-1990 and this, quite often on at an extremely rapid speed.
As a result, many East-Germans grew tired of the changes that came, for example, with new and unfamiliar people like migrants and refugees and new environmental demands. The former is exploited by the AfD while the latter works against the Greens.
What was also exploited by the AfD was the fact that these demands not just came from above but also from the much-disliked West and still worse: the western elite. What emerged was a feeling of powerlessness against the despised west and its elite.
Virtually all of this facilitated the ascent of the AfD in East-Germany where, unlike in the West, democratic political parties had neither a long history nor were part of East-Germany’s civic society.
As a result, elections are still marked not by returning customers but by voters looking for a quick bargain – those with the loudest (i.e. right-wing populist) megaphone.
This advantaged the neo-fascist AfD and disadvantaged Germany’s democratic political parties. It also undeniably masked that the actual policies proposed by the AfD would disadvantage those who vote for the AfD.
Even the powerful and pro-business economic research institute, the DIW, noted this in a report entitled, “The AfD Paradox: The main victims of AfD politics would be their own voters” [Das AfD-Paradox: Die Hauptleidtragenden der AfD-Politik wären ihre eigenen Wähler].
Strangely, and this is unlike Italy’s Berlusconi, Hungary’s Orban, India’s Modi, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, and, of course, Donald Trump, Germany’s AfD has no charismatic leader. Instead:
- Weidel is a Swiss-based lesbian – the pretty-faced figurehead of neo-fascism.
- Chrupalla has the charisma of a phone booth.
- The unofficial Führer, Björn Höcke, is a weird and odd introvert.
Despite this, the AfD still holds a monopoly on far-right mobilisation when it coms to anti-refugee riots (Hoyerswerda, etc.) to PEGIDA (run by petty-criminal and right-wing fanatic Lutz Bachmann), to anti-COVID-19 rallies (organised by anti-Vaxxers and conspiracy fantasts), to today’s AfD rallies.
Yet, the massive anti-AfD rallies that occurred, even in East-Germany, in early 2024 and in the wake of a secretive AfD-plus-Neo-Nazis meeting on remigration [the code for ethnic cleansing], showed that this monopoly is not unassailable.
On the downside, what the AfD has achieved is a process of de-civilisation of political and social debates and conflicts in Germany. Germany’s political culture has changed as arguments have been replaced by shouting matches, insults, assaults, and threats directed against democratic politicians.
The impact of this is worse in East-Germany. It still does not have a robust social-moral as well as the social-cultural sophistication found in modern democratic societies.
This benefits the AfD. Perhaps, it does so more in Saxony – the geographical home of Dunkeldeutschland – than other East-German states. In 2023, Saxony’s main public polling institution, the “Sachsen Monitor”, reported that:
- 89% of the people in Saxony distrust political parties.
- 85% distrust the media.
- 79% distrust churches.
- 44% distrust courts and the legal system.
- 35% distrust science.
Not only based on these number and not only in Saxony, but East-Germany has created a political (un)culture that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
Worse, many of Germany’s long established democratic political parties – the social-democratic SPD, the neoliberal FDP, and the environmentalist Greens party – play an ever-diminished role in rural East-Germany. In many rural and remote areas, these parties have shrunk to the status of being inconsequential miniature parties.
In the end, democracy is severely challenged in East-Germany. Worse, what has emerged during the last 35 years and what might be called an “Ossie identity” does not seem to be encouraging for democracy.
Yet not all is lost in East-Germany. For one, the anti-AfD mass rallies in early 2024 have shown that the propagandistic victories of the AfD can be contested – even in East-Germany.
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Thomas Klikauer has over 800 publications (including 12 books) and writes regularly for BraveNewEurope (Western Europe), the Barricades (Eastern Europe), Buzzflash (USA), Counterpunch (USA), Countercurrents (India), Tikkun (USA), and ZNet (USA). One of his books is on Managerialism (2013).