When I talk about the fall of the GDR being a disgrace, I don't mean it in "bring back the wall" rhetoric, but in the perspective that it was a total disgrace for the Germans living in the east.
The fall of the GDR was not something that benefited everyone. Many East Germans had a whole life and a future built on the socialist system proposed by the GDR. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, all this stability and future plans that many had went down the drain.
Like with the fall of the USSR, the transition to capitalism proposed by the FRG and the insistence of other European countries and the United States, caused many East Germans to go through an economic crisis that was not so visible, as it was overshadowed by the FRG.
In this case we could compare it with what happened to the former Republics of the USSR after the fall of the it. In the transition to capitalism, many of these countries went through a very harsh crisis, but very visible, as they were not absorbed into an already formed capitalist country as it was in the case of the GDR.
I could give many examples of this, such as the birth of the "gopnik", which was born based on former Soviet Olympic athletes who, when they stopped having economic stability and jobs, began to steal and languish with Adidas tracksuits. This is because during their times as Olympic champions, they obtained quite a few Adidas tracksuits since they were sponsored by them. Another case would be the "meme" about comparing men with sad looks with that of Eastern Europeans who appeared in adult gay films. This was also due to the economic imbalance that all these countries suffered, causing many to have to resort to jobs of this type to earn some money. A much more documented and visually more obvious case would be the Black October of 1993 in Russia. Showing how the transition was crazy situation and how dissatisfied many people were, regardless of what political spectrum they supported. Everyone was dissatisfied with the change, and above all, with the country's new president, Yelstin.
When many people talk about the fall of the USSR, they never talk about what happened next: the increase in mortality, crime and extreme poverty.
Nor do they talk about how this greatly affected socialist countries that were not part of the Union, as it was in the case of Cuba. Che in an interview in 1964 predicted quite well what would happen to Cuba if the Soviet Union disappeared. It's impressive how many people have such a misconception of why Cuba is the way it is today. As el Che says here, when this exchange ceased, the industrial development of the country stopped since they didn't had any other country that supported them commercially as much as the Soviet Union did after the Embargo made by the United States since 1958 and that still happen today.
With all this I want to come to the question: has the fall of the USSR and the GDR brought anything good to the world? Because with everything I've researched and looking at how these countries are today, I can't find anything very positive about it on the social and political side. Economically it is a completely separate issue. But it is not as good as they want to make look because most of the capital is put into a certain minority group of people who do not contribute anything to the improvement of the conditions of these countries.
Whenever I hear someone on this subject, they always talk about the economic improvement, but never about how this fact affected socially. Because of the reunification, many of the factories where people worked in the GDR were closed. Many find themselves unemployed, not knowing what is going to happen to them, and their families in the future. Overnight, many Germans found themselves in a situation they had never experienced before; financial crisis. They can no longer afford many of the things they used to be able to afford during the communist government.
Although Germany today is one of the countries with a stable and large economy, this does not take away from the fact that it is largely at the cost of an endless number of causalities that affected too many people.
I do not agree with the authoritarianism of the GDR government, as it seems excessive to me in many cases, but it must be mentioned that they were largely successful in suppressing that harmful nationalism which was, in large part, what made a party like the National Socialist (which had nothing socialist about it, since it was only a way of deceiving workers into joining them) triumphed in Germany in 1933. And that compared to the FRG, they did not allow former supporters of this political party to end up in their own government, despite "trying" to move away from what they once were.
The same cannot be said of today's Germany, which is suffering from an accelerated resurgence of these harmful ideas.
