Considering the seemingly permanent division between the two Germanies ITTL, I want to explore the effects of ITTL Communism on East Germany.
The Economist
Has East German Identity Evolved Into Something Too Alien For Its West German Counterpart? The Burgeoing Ostlander Movement Believes So.
January 11, 2018
By Kevin Stewart
East Berlin
The city of Berlin has come to define the Cold War, where the superpower struggle has literally divided nations. Berlin, the historic German capital, has been broken in two, separated by a massive concrete wall and soldiers from every major country of the Red and Blue blocs.
In the Eastern portion of the city, reunification, followed by "liberation of the German people from the capitalist imperialist puppet," has long been a wedge issue that every politician would follow.
However, in a recent election to the city Soviet, a once fringe party has won several seats: The Ostland Gruppe (OG), known unofficially as the Ostlander movement. Among their platform was an end to the Cold War, and a recognition of the West German regime. Once politically toxic, especially in East Berlin, the movement is part of series of movements throughout the world challenging Cold War politics.
But there other platform, the renaming of the DDR into the Ostland Volks Republik, or OVR, has attracted attention through its assertation that East Germans have become a seperate people entirely after decades of Communist rule.
The Party Leader
In a modest Berlin flat 10 kilometers from the wall lives the OG leader, Hermann Ichiyama.
His appearance and background would suggest that he would be a fierce Liberation [1] style political figure. He has mixed German and Japanese heritage, some clearly Asiatic features, and is fluent in Russian. In many Eastern bloc nations, it has become increasingly common for people to mix Russian into their speech unconsciously.
"Zdravstvuyte" he says before switching back to German. "Lovely to meet you."
I asked him why a common baby would want to avoid any further confrontation and war with his Western counterpart, but I can see him already narrow his eyes at the word.
"Oh yes, I was the sign of new, cosmopolitan Germany," he said with some sarcasm. "As I child, I united my school into a vanguard-against me."
Ichiyama was born in 1959, and grew up in Dresden, a city still rising from the ashes of the Second World War. His father, Tendo Ichiyama, was a Japanese diplomat in the city's consul. His mother, Hilda, was a local baker. His background made him a target of bullies.
"They would call me a Jap mongrel and my mother (who still worked) a Jap whore," Ichiyama says with unusual passivity. "They would take my books and and throw them into the river".
Ichiyama explains that in the early Cold War (outside Berlin) most East Germans were not solidly behind Communist, as propaganda would suggest, but felt bitter over the lost of Germany's dominance and division in too.
"Yes there were some Nazis, and many held prejudice against outsiders, but most saw Communism has something that had turned Germany into little more than an appendage of Russia. My heritage was a symbol of that."
There was little also separating East German and West German society as well. Most East Germans still continued to hold unto old traditional values of their West German counterparts.
"Most of the children I grew up with had mothers who stayed home," Ichiyama continued. "Homosexuality was still discouraged."
His father's promotion to an office in East Berlin in 1971 had given his family greater standing. But a young Hermann saw the move as asylum.
"Escaping from my old school was like escaping from a political prison," Hermann says with a smile.
In East Berlin, Hermann found a city on the verge of change. He met kids, who like him, had mixed heritage, and who had their mothers working outside the home. Prejudice among Germans was common, but in Berlin he found an escape.
"I felt like a belonged somewhere," Hermann says with a sad glaze in his eye.
Their was a colorful word the rest of the country had for the changes hitting Berlin.
"Berlinwahnsinn," Hermann said with a smile. "Berlin Insanity."
In the UASR, many rural people had a similar word for the social changes that rocked the country after the 1950s. Metropolis Madness.
But like the people living in the hinterlands of the UASR, the people living throughout East Germany would discover that the changes rocking East Berlin would soon hit them-whether they like or not. The political and economic reforms of the 1970s would have profound-and beneficial to many-changes throughout the Eastern bloc and the Soviet Union.
But this would have profound implications on the East German identity, and futher divide them from the capitalist brothers living West of the Weser[1].
Meeting a Boomerang
Outside the Swedish embassy, Gunther Freund is awaiting a visa to go to Sweden. By doing this, he is hoping to be able to take plane back to the West, even though he is risking arrest.
"I would feel closer to something that makes sense in prison than I do here," he said, while smoking a cigarette.
In Comintern slang, Freund it was is called a boomerang: a person who defects to a communist state, before returning after less than year. Freund, at 25, was a young student from Essen when he chose to defect last August, a decision he has come to regret.
"I was just a young stupid kid," he said angrily, "I believed too much in that red claptrap they throw around."
Freund, despite finding he had more free time from his job, was told he had to spend more of it participating in government and volunteer groups. He said the whole thing burnt him out.
"I never had free time," he said. "I was always contributing to society. It was like forced labor."
He also struggled with the East German language, which has become increasingly fast paced and dominated by Slavic dialects.
"Older people I have no trouble with, but guys my age talk too face and keep throwing in Russian words," he said with annoyance.
Cultural issues, like drug use and topless-ness, have also alienated people like Freund.
"People here have little shame," Freund said, "I understand a little hedonism is fine, but here they go all out."
Freund was also put off by the extreme arrogance shown to him by Red Germans [2].
"They always looked down at me and my blue roots, despite my hard work," Freund said, angrily.
The Boomerang phenomena has accelerated in recent years. In 2017, it was estimated that of the nearly 200,000 West Germans that have immigrated to East Germany, 20,000 have returned.
One boomerang, Fritz Geotz, recently started a right-wing online video channel called Wirklichkeit [3], and has been known for his bombastic tirades against the Reds.
Ichiyama compares this culture war to the one that has rocked Canada since the Red Turn
"Canada and America were nations with same demographics, but four decades of cultural divergence made them virtually distinct from one another. Even socialist Canadians were somewhat flabbergasted by what had occurred South of the border."
Harry McDevon, the author of Memoirs of Red Turn, in which he wrote about his own misadventures in Metropolis as a young Canadian teen in the early 1980s, has said that these differences have not vanished, even decades later when the North American border has ceased to exist. He compares white North Americans as like being from two distinct tribes at war with one another.
"To an outsider, the African tribes look almost similar," McDevon said in a phone interview, yet they still have different customs and cultures, and can easily tell each other apart. A New Brunswicker like myself and Mainer will also see each other as different, even if to an outsider, we share the same skin color".
"Imagine if suddenly 64 million West Germans (many of them like Freund) were forced to live with 34 million East Germans," Ichiyama asks rhetorically. "It would be chaos!"
Race and Intermarriage
West Germany has remained almost an entirely homogeneous society due to a cultural opposition toward ethnicity and immigration, with almost 95 percent of its population ethnically German. Strong incentives toward large families has prevented West Germany from suffering the demographic transition undergoing in communist states.
East Germany, meanwhile has gone in the opposite direction, with nearly 1/5 East Germans [4] being foreign born. The vast majority of these migrants are Slavic immigrants-an incredible irony as under the Nazi regime, the German people were seeking to wipe out the Slavic nations- from Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, as well Hungarians and Romanians [5]. Others have arrived from Red Asia (Vietnam, China, Japan, etc.), and West Africans have been a more recent wave.
East Berlin, the city Hitler dreamed of building his white-supremacist utopia, dozens of cultures and languages are spoken every day.
"There is a joke we Berliners have," Ichiyama says. "Our officers speak Russian, our chefs speak Italian, our cab drivers speak Romanian. What's the only language Berliners don't speak?" He pauses. "German."
Another trend that has been rising is intermarriage between Germans and other ethnicites. Though long promoted for the ideological goal of a world without nations, it remained largely niche in the mostly conservative German state. In 1980, only 3 percent of marriages were between German and non-German. By 2010, they rose to almost 15 percent of marriages. Over 1 in 10 East German children are born to mixed couples.
"Any common baby that tried to live in West German society would go through what I went through," Ichiyama said while narrowing his eyes. "They would liberate those children by forcing them into only German institutions."
Language
Russian is the lingua franca of the Eastern bloc. Anyone seeking to rise the ranks must be able to speak passable Russian, as well as anyone seeking to immigrate to East Germany.
But like American English, East German is becoming increasingly dominated by Russian phrases.
"Professional East German soldiers say "vintovka" instead of rifle," Ichiyama says. "East German politicians say golosovaniye instead of ballot."
Karl Wagoner, a linguist at the University of Berlin comments that Russian and other slavic languages are altering German the same way Norman French altered Anglo-Saxon English.
"The terms of the common man are still German," Wagoner said, "but the terms of the elite are all Russian." [6]
Wagoner claims this trend will only acclerate as more East Germans youths become accustomed to Russian, and by 2100, Wagoner believes that East Germans will be speaking a Russian-Teutonic creole.
Society and Culture
Angela Kutzenov, an East German woman of partial Russian ancestry, is a woman with little body shame, who would seem typical on the streets of Metropolis or Pittsburgh. She sits before me dressed like she was about to go to the beach.
"I can walk the streets in the nude during the summer," Kutzenov ,"because my body is a sacred, I'm taught."
Kutzenov is also American in her enjoyment of the flesh. She enjoys an open relationship with her lesbian girlfriend.
"Pleasure should never be a crime if there is consent," Kutzenov said firmly
She currently runs a counseling center for rape victims. Kutzenov notes that many rapes are caused by West German migrants, who see the East German attitudes toward sex as license to commit rape.
"These perverts forget that it is liberation is not about treating us woman like their toys," Kutzenov says angrily, "but about creating a world safe for all kinds of woman."
Ichiyama predicts that a sudden reunification would lead to a crackdown by West Germans against the East Germans and their libertine attitudes.
"Not all Wessies are rapists, but too many have a patriarchal attitude bred by their Kaiser-worship," Ichiyama says. "Our views would flabbergast them."
Religion too is also important. While Christianity has remained influential in West Germany, religion in the East has become more diverse, even as the Cultural Leap allowed Lutheranism and other German faiths to return.
Orthodox Christianity, Trinitarianism, Buddhism, Islam, and neopaganism has also grown considerably in the East.
"In the West, they love to call non-Christians heathens," Ichiyama said sarcastically. "Some even call them 'worst' than athiests."
West Germany also struggles with another troubling legacy: antisemitism. West Germany's Jewish community, remains stagnant and quiet, and the echoes of Nazism still linger.
"One teacher told me I could not get into school because I was a Jew," said Karl Goldberg, an West German Jew who moved East two years ago. "I could not believe that would happen despite supposedly burying Nazism. " [7]
East Berlin, by contrast has become a mecca of the Eastern Jewish Renaissance. East Germans rediscovering their buried heritage, combined with Soviet and Palestinian migrants, had led to creation of dynamic community.
"I actually got to be in a Maccabean recreation," Karl said, "that could never happen back home in Aachen, where they call it 'reactionary'."
Conclusions
Ichiyama feels no hatred toward his West German counterparts, only pity.
"They are brought up a certain way, and we must learn to tolerate that," Ichiyama said. "Trying to force them to accept us would only lead to war greater than the long visioned war to destroy capitalism. Let us just call ourselves Ostland, and focus on how we choose to live."
Today, over 3/4 of Germans believe unification will ever occur. While still a majority, this attitude was once unanimous only a generation. Which means Ichiyama and his Ostlanders may only gain political ground in the coming decades, as both societies, divided by the greatest political game of our time, remain separated by ideology.
[1] I think of Liberation becoming a blanket term for militaristic Red political movements.
[2] OTL, West Germans, for obvious reasons, were considered arrogant by their Eastern counterparts.
[3] German for 'reality', an unironic use of Newspeak.
[4] OTL, 1/7 Germans are foreign born.
[5] Non-slavic if you didn't know.
[6] Modern English is the same way. Casual words are Anglo-Saxon, while many official words are of Norman French descent.
[7] Antisemitism like this was common in the OTL Soviet Union.