The Case of the Disappearing Statistics

Not long ago I wanted to know the population of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1965--and found that such information is not conveniently available in the standard time series'. The World Bank, for example, has population figures only for Germany. Not the separate Federal Republic of Germany and German Democratic Republic, for that year, just the Germany that did not at the time, or for that matter, any time between the messy post-war period that had seen a separate German Democratic Republic established in 1955 and the reunification of Germany in 1990, exist as an unitary state. As it happened Wikipedia did have a time series, but I generally prefer to look at Wikipedia's sources for myself--and found that the link to the relevant German government web site led me to a 404 page, whatever had been there long since removed but not replaced since, with any other such listing also proving elusive.

One may wonder why something so innocuous as an authoritative figure for the population of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1965--an important country then as now, which no one concerned with such figures ignored--should be so hard to find in the time series' of 2025. The answer would seem to be that the government of said Federal Republic is insistent that it was the One True Government of Germany from 1949 to the present, and does not accept the existence of any other German state as having any legitimacy whatsoever, with what was reported, worried over or celebrated in the country or beyond it not a reunion of two German states wrongly divided with all its associations with equality, mutuality and reconciliation. Rather it was that German government which regarded itself as the One True German Government in a revanchist frame of mind recovering territory taken from it in the last war on terms that looked like annexation to those Germans who had been living under that other Not True German government, especially as the corporations of the Federal Republic (previously, the corporations of its Nazi and Wilhelmine predecessors) rounded out said annexation with looting and wrecking more characteristic of the spoliation of a Third World country to which the aforementioned World Bank has Laid Down the Law than any real attempt to reintegrate fellow nationals into the home country--after which, as conquerors so often do in the lands they take, that Government promptly set about erasing whatever acknowledgment it had been compelled to offer of there having been any other. Thus did we see, for example, the Federal Republic treating the veterans of the German Democratic Republic's armed forces as having "served in a foreign army"--a non-German army--and their service therefore not counting for any consideration from the German state where pensions are concerned. And thus did the German government provide a single time series for the population not of the Federal Republic and the Democratic Republic as a combined "Germany."

Anyone presuming to understand the attitudes of people in what we were once accustomed to speak of as "East Germany" would be well-advised to begin with the fact of that treatment of the works, institutions and people of the former East, the latter of which, all these decades later, remain "Ossis" in the land of the "Wessis," who feel themselves second-class citizens and indeed seem to act, and be looked at by their supposed national brethren from what we have been accustomed to speak of as the West, as if they were a much put-upon ethnic minority. However, as is only to be expected of it, the mainstream media in the United States, when deigning to write of things German at all, just about never does so, unsurprisingly given how it would get in the way of its hard and important work of collecting those brass checks for service rendered. That is far better served by the media's peddling the narrative about every last German having experienced what they insist to have been "reunification" as the blessed arrival of Freedom and cause for pure joy then and ever since, so much so that the mere association of David Hasselhoff with the memory of the Berlin Wall coming down made him, as one U.S. media outlet had it, a "rock and roll god" in that land--the more in as so many Americans find the thought of an actor they associate with cheesy television of yesteryear they scarcely know to have had a singing career at all being such a figure so amusing.