«This no longer has anything to do with East-West»

Interview with Ludwig Greven


Ludwig Greven: We have had an East German chancellor for 15 years. We had a Federal President from the former GDR. Why do East Germans still feel underrepresented 30 years after reunification, sometimes even more so than a few years ago?

Thomas Oberender: Because they are. Just a thought experiment: What if Bavaria had united with Austria and there was no longer a Bavarian general in Bavaria and only 1.5 percent of professors statewide were Bavarians? In the economic elite, 4.7 per cent would still be from Bavaria and in culture even 7.3. However, 80 per cent of the Bavarians would have remained in Bavaria after unification, so that the statistics there would look much worse. Bosses from Austria everywhere.

Apart from the superiority of West German elites, many in the East have the impression that their life experience in the GDR, in the revolution of 1989/90 and the transformation period afterwards is not recognised, as you describe in your book. Is that what drives so many people into a defensive attitude, also against migrants, although they are in a very similar situation?

I don’t think anyone is waiting for this recognition anymore. No, as recently as 1991, SPIEGEL had the headline »The onslaught of the poor”: Refugees, Aussiedler, Asylanten. There is an old history of contempt for the East and migrants, dating back to the times before the opening of the Wall, and it continues by simply continuing to pedagogise and ridicule instead of looking. I think there were two forms of modernity, one Western and one Eastern, the Eastern European one being a totalitarian system, clearly. But both were highly industrialised, geared towards mass consumption and looking at nature as a kind of warehouse. Both built computers and rockets and abolished the old elites. In many ways we were not so alien to each other.

But the relationship was very unequal.