Of "Ossis" and "Wessis"

I remember how in the years immediately after German reunification, even in the United States where we take so little interest in social reality inside our borders, never mind outside them, those who were at least somewhat attentive to international life still heard something of the ways in which residents of what had been "West Germany" and "East Germany" stereotyped each other, calling each other "Wessi" and "Ossi." (To cite one small example of how this kind of thing was known far beyond the world travelers and the academics the words were actually included in the glossary of terms at the end of Larry Bond's techno-thriller Cauldron, precisely because the scenes depicting the German army made some references to resentments between members of the two groups.)

I thought all this Wessi and Ossi talk was a "narcissism of small differences," and thought it would all pass soon enough--not least because East Germany's existence was so brief in historical terms (1949-1990), but also because there was a bullishness about Germany's prospects. In the early '90s after all, the reunified Germany, like Japan, was one of those countries that Americans anxious that their country was in decline thought likely to do better than they, economically and in other ways. And given the fact that the two groups were supposed to be countrymen finally living out a supposedly longed-for reunification it also seemed that there would be enough sharing out of the benefits to wipe away the stresses of reunification, encouraging the passage of such perceptions.

Certainly by the 2020s!

However, looking back from this 32nd anniversary of German reunification--after a lapse of time almost as long as the old East Germany's existence--one seems to still encounter talk of cultural differences between the two regions, of which one can get the strangest impressions. Recently reading a Berliner Zeitung (Berlin News) interview with social scientist Thomas Kliche in which he described, as a "Westerner," going "East" and researching life there, his tone, and his interviewer's, struck me as that not of a man moving to another part of his own country just four hundred miles away from where he was born, but one going to a thoroughly exotic foreign land, or investigating some extremely marginalized minority group deeply alien to his personal experience. (Think of a senior university professor of genteel WASP background investigating the African-American inner city. In the 1950s.) The impression was reinforced by how the stereotypes evoke racist attitudes seen elsewhere, holding the disenfranchised to suffer not from society's prejudices or other inequities but (in an age in which blatant biological racism is still unacceptable) their own dysfunctional "culture," leaving them unequipped to survive and thrive in a dynamic capitalist society where everyone else does just fine, thank you, very much--as well as what lies behind sentiments. This is, of course, the familiar disdain of the privileged for those less well-off than themselves, whom they hasten to insist are the cause of all their own problems which are nothing whatsoever to do with, and no cause for impinging upon, the comfort of said privileged (in this case, stiffened by anti-Communist clichès about authoritarian mind-sets and such).

Rounding out the image of a quasi-racial divide are the stereotypes coming from the other side, which are quite in line with the resentment the disenfranchised feel for those who are in some degree "privileged," especially insofar as they stand on their privilege. (The "individualism" attributed to the Wessi would seem to not be that of the strong character who does what they think is right and is not afraid to go their way alone if that understanding of what is right requires it, but rather the type of personality quick to ask "May I speak to the manager?"--"Wessi" easily sounding like German slang for "Karen.")

Just what is in back of all this? I suppose the most important factor is the way in which reunification happened. West Germany basically annexed East Germany--which then got the hardcore neoliberal treatment as a Soviet-style economy was suddenly put inside of one of the most dynamic capitalist states on Earth without preparation, support or protection and permitted to collapse; and the West German government privatized the old East German assets, not to locals but to rich and powerful West German interests in a manner perhaps not so very different from what the rest of the old Soviet bloc saw; with the result the demise of a great many firms, and massive lay-offs, all as the West German government dismantled the old system of public services and the social safety net.

Traumatic as it was for those who did poorly out of it it would not have mattered quite so much all these decades later were it not for the fact that Germany as a whole did not do so well as many thought it would. Reflecting the generally lousy track record for the world as a whole in the neoliberal epoch Germany's performance (in spite of the bright spot of its genuine manufacturing successes) has been dismal, especially if one shifts their attention from the deflator-based growth numbers generally cited by analysts (which are quite bad enough) to numbers calculated using the Consumer Price Index instead to adjust for inflation. These show Germany's late '90s experience as essentially one of collapse with per capita GDP falling by a third and, if there was recovery afterward to near the levels of the mid-'90s peak, yet another collapse following the Great Recession from which the country never recovered--all as, of course, neoliberal reform meant that much less protection for the poor as the rich got much richer.

One reflection of this is the enduring gap in incomes between East and West, which have equalized only very slowly. Going by the data from the European Union's Eurostat agency it seems that in 2017, before the pandemic and the associated succession of other disasters, in the five states that, East Berlin apart, comprised the territory of East Germany (Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia), per capita Gross Regional Product was about one-third less than it is in the rest of the country (just 68 percent of its level), while it was more like three-fifths of what it was in the richest of the large West German states, Bavaria (62 percent of the Bavarian figure)--which, to put into terms of the American states comparable in nominal income, is to say that the former East Germany is about on a level with America's poorest state of Mississippi, the West on average about that of Pennsylvania, and Bavaria, Texas.

Moreover, even this likely understates the severity of the situation because, in complete contradiction of the stereotypes about passive, immobile Ossis unwilling to move for the sake of taking a better job, the reality is that East Germans have consistently done just that from the start--so much so that the east is "depopulating" (and in the process, likely raising the income average as so many of the unemployed, etc. simply relocate). There is, too, the question of the gap between the less and more affluent inside East Germany itself, which may mean still bigger differences in the typical experience of Easterners and Westerners (especially when one recalls that those "left behind" are disproportionately persons less able to take care of themselves, like the elderly, as seen when one looks at the age gap between Germany's regions).

The result of this blend of economic instability, stagnation and widening inequality is that in Germany, as in so many other places, people simply never got over the 1990s--the era's experiences and influences of that era, its expectations and its betrayals lingering on three decades after.