Of "Ossis" and "Chavs"

Reading again about the stereotypes West and East Germans still have of each other I find myself reminded not only of racist disdain for "unsuccessful" minorities told they have only their dysfunctional "cultures" to blame for their problems, but a case where similar attitudes are shown toward people undisputably of the same ethnicity as the dominant group--the "chavs" in Britain. Where the prejudice there is obviously one of class, the "Ossi-Wessi" talk gives the impression that it is one of region. Still, poverty in Germany is by no means exclusive to the territory of the former German Democratic Republic, or people whose families lived there (15 percent of the residents of western Germany are officially classed as poor, and these by no means all arrivals from the East), and the economic nature of the issue makes class inextricable from it.

The comparison with the attitude of the more privileged groups in Britain toward the working-class people they denigrate as "chavs" has me thinking of another aspect, evident there (and elsewhere)--the tendency of upper-class persons who pride themselves on their supposed "political correctness," "wokeness," etc. to think of racism and other socially backward views as a failing of "the lower orders," who have only themselves to blame for their problems, unlike their enlightened, "college-educated" social superiors. Thus from the start has there ever been a tendency to identify racism, fascism, etc. with eastern Germany. None of this is to deny that such tendencies do appear more pronounced in eastern Germany, not least because movements like these find it easiest to gain adherents among those who feel disenfranchised, who really do appear to be more numerous in that part of the country than in others. All the same, in talking about such attitudes as if they were exclusive to them there is an undeniable element of scapegoating--as well as an evasion of the question of why so many are left so vulnerable to such appeals in the first place.