«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.

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  • Not at first, but later it was. West Germany became the rich relative for the East Germans. And for them, it’s still not really nice in the East today. Either the allegedly retarded people are disturbing or the prefabricated buildings. This unequal relationship simply persists. Only empowerment can help against this. We rebuilt the Palace of the Republic last March because the turn of 1989 was the first revolution of the 21st century. German unity was decided at this place.

  • Could this experience of humiliation be healed by introducing a quota for East Germans everywhere, including on Dax boards, analogous to a women’s quota?

  • That would be a signal. After all, there was a quota in the East. But it was enforced by West German administrations, which made sure that West Germans were hired for management positions. Incidentally, this was also the case with the judges from Baden-Württemberg who, thirty years after the fall of communism, still approved the Querdenker-Demonstration in the centre of Leipzig at the Higher Administrative Court in Bautzen. Because they are of the opinion that Corona is to be treated in the same way as influenza and they are responsible for this false report in the Saxon Administrative Gazette. However, the reporting again showed pictures of politically questionable demonstrations from the Eastern Federal States and was outraged by their approval, even though the judges were from the West. Such events have more to do with the course of reunification than with the GDR.

  • They have to do with concrete questions of power. If more women and more East Germans are to hold leadership positions, men and West Germans have to take a back seat.

  • What do you mean by cutting back? Women are half the population, every fifth person is East German. A lot has been going wrong here for a long time and we are finally talking about it. Just like the rights of black people or POC and their experiences of discrimination. The subtitle of my book is: How we grow together. Written separately. Growing together does not mean becoming like the majority society. We have to tell them about our own history, about our joy, our resistance - I called it occupy history. We must not leave the slogans of ‘89 to the right.

  • You have reached the top without an East German quota. You are the director of the Berliner Festspiele, a person of the cultural elite. Aren’t you a great example of how one only has to make an effort to be recognised as an equal?

  • I would love to tell you: you’re right. But I also went to the West for that, to Bochum, then to Zurich, Salzburg. I worked hard, and maybe I simply have talent. But maybe I’m just an accident in operation? I am the only East German director in Berlin. You know the quota. There was never equality of opportunity. Look at the distribution of wealth from 1989 to today in an East-West comparison. What am I a great example of? Certainly not for just rolling up your sleeves.

  • Do East Germans lack the elbow mentality and ambition to assert themselves?

  • You provoke, don’t you? As a professional journalist, that’s your trick. Otherwise it would just be an impertinent question. Or to put it another way: this whole elbow image is, after all, an epitome of the real misery that is eating up our world, that has desolidarised our society, and that is unhealthy right down to the fingertips. East Germans have not recovered from this to this day. 90 percent of East German rents go to West Germans. Wow, right? That’s where the elbows have led. Didn’t we want to change that in ‘89? And isn’t that why young people go out on the streets on Fridays? I would say: yes, against these elbows.

  • Many young people from the East go their own way with self-confidence. You don’t notice any differences there anymore. Should we stop looking at collectives?

  • I see it differently. I see many young people from the East suddenly rediscovering the East and the GDR a generation later. »Freiraum” in Leipzig, »Aufbruch Ost”, the »3rd Generation East”, »88vier” - they want to change something in our country today. They see in the GDR and the Wende period not only losers, not only victims and perpetrators, but also creativity, the cultural treasure of completely different experiences. That will heal and unite us. No final line can do that.

  • You write that even as a young person in the GDR you felt much more culturally connected to the West. Are East Germans only made so through attribution, similar to how migrants are reduced to their origins?

  • I was only made an East German by reunification, when everything that made up my living environment dissolved, literally: from the gutter to the light switch, from the traffic sign to my textbooks. And then, supposedly, we all only wanted bananas, cabbage and the D-mark and couldn’t speak English. But it was the AfD and Pegida that really made people like me think that: It can’t be that this now represents East Germany. And so I tried to reclaim my own life story, which was of course that of many people - against these Dark Germany images from Dresden and Chemnitz, but also against the official language of politics and the media in the West German-dominated reporting on the East.

  • You speak of a colonial matrix. Isn’t it the same colonialist thinking when leftists and Greens make sweeping accusations that East Germans are Nazis?

  • Robert Habeck did not equate East Germans with Nazis, but with a »developing country” (Entwicklungsland”) in terms of democracy, which I think he regrets very much. Because these paternalistic gestures immediately set off alarm bells today. And so he noticed it in himself. Because yes, even the best intentions can lead to paternalism, degradation and incapacitation. That is deep inside all human beings. There is no such thing as the bad West that came to the good East. Many in the East were highly susceptible to infantilisation. The ambitious politicians and advisors from the West then just took them by the hand and created a nursery.

  • What chance do you see of getting an unbiased conversation going between East and West after all these years?

  • Oh, that’s just beginning. The tone has changed. That’s good. Edmund Stoiber said in 2002 that it couldn’t be the frustrated people from East Germany who decide who becomes chancellor. But a new generation is growing up that is taking a different look at the history of East German life. A curious, also empathetic perspective.

  • What contribution can writers, artists, theatre people and exhibition makers make to this?

  • A big one. In contrast to the abolition of the East German economy or science, cultural development after the fall of the Wall has been able to take up cultural positions from the GDR. The Volksbühne in Berlin was the most important theatre in Europe for a good 25 years. It was the only place where reunification took place at eye level. Our task today is certainly to shape and loosen up the West German canon in the visual arts, but also the East German canon, which to this day marginalises the avant-garde that the GDR state suppressed.

  • Can culture be avant-garde in order to subsequently develop a pride in what the people in the East have achieved, in the GDR, in the revolution and since?

  • Pride, that’s also just a stick of butter on your head. It smells of Ostalgie. But we should change our culture of remembrance. The victims must be given a face, and so must the perpetrators. But we forget the memory of the resistance. We need more attention for the opposing forces, their wit and courage. Where are the humanists who consciously stayed in the DDR? Hermann Glöckner, Gabi Stötzer. We can be proud of the revolution of 1989 if we stand up to the attack on democracy of today, especially to all the bourgeois gravediggers with their agenda from the intellectual dark web. This no longer has anything to do with East-West, it’s about Weimar.

  • Aus: Politik und Kultur, Zeitung des Deutschen Kulturrats 12/20 S.43