6 Dec

For my last post, I would like to say a couple of things about East and West German relations as well as Cold War relations following WW2. First off, we talked about the early mass exodus of people from the GDR in the 1950s, prompting the construction of the Berlin Wall. It makes perfect sense that the FGR would not recognize such a regime. If your country is that unpopular with its citizens, where is the legitimacy of the government? People were fleeing their country, leaving what they had behind, and possibly family because they don't want to live in such a country, especially in a country that is in occupation by another foreign power, as unpopular as the Soviet Union. People were pouring through the West German border to escape a totalitarian regime that was imposed on them by a morally bankrupt power. People knew that Bolshevism was a very flawed system, and its revolutionary agenda is very problematic for the nations trying to recover from such a disastrous war. Also, the Soviet Union was pushing hard to take war reparations out of East Germany and further impoverish the people there. It's not like we were good friends with Stalin when we were Allies in the war, just by default, nobody really liked the communist power. I also believe that many East Germans fled in the early days because they feared the Communists. They remembered the retribution the Soviets brought as they pushed the Wehrmacht west, and into Berlin. The Soviets attacked the German people just as the Wehrmacht had done to Soviet citizens. The Western powers decided to bomb civilians instead of beat, rape, torture, and kill innocents. I would be very nervous about what the Soviets had in mind for me if I was a German in the Soviet occupation zone. Alright enough, the Wall went up and so began the East-West rivalry in full. Though people were not escaping in mass numbers, there were still people attempting to get out. This was a trend for the East German state and it required intense Stasi surveillance to keep people in line. However, people got used to it. We also talked about how when the Wall fell, because the Soviets crumbled and said they wouldn't strong-arm any of its satellite states, and reunification came, East Germans and West Germans just saw each other as a different type of people, not really just Germans. The Westerners were well-off, competed for high-paying jobs, a commercial culture, and a free market society. The Easterners didn't know what was going on. Competition for everything, the subsidies for food were gone, other state-sponsored programs no longer existed, they were poor to begin with, plus they were flooding west in the millions. There was a period of disillusionment, like, did we really want to be unified? However, such a huge change would inevitably be difficult at first, but things would definitely normalize, this is what happened because Germany hasn't torn itself apart which would have happened if the East and West couldn't agree or get along.