The united states. The mason dixon line (which most people extend to the 36th parallel) has a ton of super interesting ways that it dives the US, with religion, education, political party, etc.
The East German farms are bigger because they were collectivized under Soviet rule and then privatized as a whole after reunification. Btw, the unemployment situation has improved a lot, but differences are still there although they shrank a lot over the last decade.
Auf der A9 ist das ist immer sehr beeindruckend, wenn man auf bayerischer Seite die ganzen kleinen Felder sieht, dann an einer Linie vorbeifährt und plötzlich riesige Felder bis zum Horizont sieht.
It’s good that things are improving in the east. There are always differences in regions within countries but it takes a lot to heal from the effects of Soviet rule (Russia may take generations to get over the trauma and currently isn’t going in the right direction).
@@andreavoigtlander1087 yes, in the early years after reunification it was the only economic sector that was more competitive than its west German counterpart.
It would be maybe also interesting to see the difference between North and South Italy, since there the difference is even bigger then in Germany even tho the south is already a part of Italy for many many years
@@shraypuri4824 because South Italy didnt inustrialize and they were not influenced as much by the liberal ideas of the french revolution unlike the North
@@shraypuri4824 Climate. North tend to be cold, a temperate region which forces people to innovate. The south is mildly Mediterranean which is super hot during summer and mild winters; perfect for agriculture. North is closer to industrious kingdoms and empires such as France and Germany while the south maintains traditions. Don't forget that North was the beginning of the Renaissance which made science more funded, sponsored and made possible than the south. Italy was divided into city-states and northern city-states are more progressive compared to the southern city-states. Finally, it was from the north was the idea to unite all city-states to form Italy.
As an Eastern German who moved on trash: It still feels that in the east the idea of maybe not throwing something away, because one day you might need it, seems stronger in the eastern parts. Probably a leftover from the times where even if you had the money, you couldn't buy what you might wanted.
This video is BS. It says west Germany was independent. Utter toosh. It was under the US's direct control. Just like the whole country is now. 43,000 US troops while the govt tries to start wars with its neighbors.
In know a lot of people from Romania who work in Germany and Germans always find it strange when they find a big bag with smaller bags in it..Romanian people for sure know what I am talking about, the idea is: we do not always throw away the bags from stores, but instead keep them and when we know that we need them, we will bring our own bags from home instead of buying new ones in the store. Also food waste is lower, especially amongst more conservative people because "we cannot throw food in the trash while the children in Africa are starving" a common phrase by a lot of Romanian moms.
Actually the east of Germany is pretty nice if you have a good Job. The Houses are not only Cheaper, they are also bigger, its not that dense, the Countryside is beautyfull. The East of Germany is a very nice Region
that's like saying Montana is nice if you landed a good job, since it has beautiful scenery, cheaper, etc, but objectively, majority would not want to live there. And, as such, it's sparsely populated. People want a full extent of goods and services, I think most people would dread lacking basic stores or services in rural or poorer areas. I also think that educated and wealthy would not want to live surrounded only by uniformly working class families.
@@maaz322 Montana is a bad example, because US States are way bigger then german "Bundesländer" (federal states). I build a house in the vicinity of the ore mountains in Saxony between two major cities. (Zwickau and Chemnitz). We have no problems with goods and services so far, because major cities are quite near, since Germany is small. You can travel across Saxony from Thuringia to Poland in about 2 hours. Across the same latitude you need 10 h in Montana. Saxony has 4 million inhabitants, Montana 1 million. The housing here in this area is affordable, because the land is cheaper. The building costs are quite the same all over Germany. For 500.000 Euros we got a quite big plot in a quite, second row street and a house above standard level. I lived in Potsdam, near Berlin before. I justed checked againt, but a similar plot near Berlin costs 480.000 Euro alone, without the costs of building a house. This is insane. Even two academics can't afford that. We financed our house with my salary as a teacher and my wifes as a caretaker of older people. It worked out for us, because both jobs are in high demand in Saxony. And I think that is the reason not many people tend to move to the eastern states. There are not too much working places for higher educated people. Families with two "worker" jobs are paid to low in respective to bulding prices (not plot prices).
A very good topic. What many people don't know is that only the Soviet-occupied part of Germany had to pay reparations to the USSR. Huge amounts of factories, railway tracks, agricultural machinery and other things were dismantled and taken to the USSR.
Good. The West should have done that as well. I doubt the amount of reparations given to the Soviets were enough for the damage the Nazis caused, but at least they repaid.
@@Zakrovik No, the West hasn't payed to the Sovjets. And also UK, France and the US do not demand reparations until a peace treaty is concluded. The peace treaty would never be signed and the Four Plus Two Treaty (1990) settled everything. And yes, Germany destroyed a lot and should rightly pay, but the allies did not want to make the same mistake as after the First World War. Europe needs a strong Germany.
@@Zakrovik yeah well the Soviets didn't deserve those reparations after what they did to eastern Europe after WWII. West Germany paid reparations to the west
Aside from street lights Berlin also has very visible infrastructure differences - For example, while tram lines were still operating in East-Berlin, it's Western counterpart decommisioned and dismantled all tram lines in the West in order to have a more car-centric city. This is nowadays a problem for city planners, since for a more extensive public transport new lines have to be built in the Western part of the city from scratch again, while in the Eastern part the systems are still up and running.
That is also only partly true. The reason, why the trams in the east are running better is only because of LESS traffic because of less people. The systems in the east are in a horrible condition and people not as mobile as in the West. The problem in the West is, that much of the funds are coming from the government and are not refinanced. So you have kind of a bubble in the West, because the government (Socialdemocrats and Socialist) kind of repeated the shit from the East.
This definitely reminds me of different post soviet countries like when I visited ukraine last year, they had tramlines everywhere also my mom talks about it during Soviet rule many people used public transportation or just walking
sounds like we are back in communism then. Why would wealthy people prefer to drive a freakin public transport? It shouldn't even exist anymore, everybody should have enough money for a car these days
@@sten260 car-centric lifestyles are not sustainable in the long term in regards to urbanization. If everyone is granted a free car to use in large metropolises and city centres, the traffic jams would cause the cities to immobilize completely. There's no solution to this issue even building more roads, autonomous cars, hyperloop-bogus and other "ingenious" concepts. I love the convenience of the car but they just take too much space in cities.
4:25 Actually, that was because many small farms were put together under 1 control in the early years, for which LPGs, Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaften (Agricultural Production Cooperative) were created to manage them. But yes, there is a tendency of people growing some stuff themselves here, which isn't nearly as present in the west
@@EmperorProd I mean, I used 3 to show what LPG means, which was what I was talking about, combined with the fact that I'm German but sure, the comment is invalid because I used "German Words"
Just one little correction: you can't say east Germans were not allowed to leave the country. That's not correct. It was just difficult to go to western countries. But 1. It was not impossible, just difficult depending on the situation and 2. Travelling to the east European states was very common. You could also visit other communist countries like Vietnam if you had the money.
But the fact is that for a long time more wanted to go from East to West Germany than vice versa. The "anti-fascist rampart" prevented few from moving west to east, but many to the west.
The last point of East Germans not being able to travel during Soviet times is a lie. I'm a Bulgarian, have met many elderly Germans that used to be part of the East. Have heard stories from them, they've always loved travelling to Bulgaria for Vacations even during Soviet times. Tbh many of the old photos of my city ( Varna ) is made by East German Photographers who used to travel here frequently for vacation during the summer. Many have also complained how the city was a lot better during the communist era, lmao D:
Let me say something to some points, which are not as accurate as they should be: 1:00 "Seperate areas of occupation were established depending on where each side had invaded." That's only partly true. A large chunk of East Germany was invaded by American and British soldiers. The western allies had fought their way to the western shores of the river Elbe. That means whole Thuringia, half of Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt was occupied by western allies. But they traded that chunk of land away for a tiny part of Berlin. This was agreed in 1945 during the Yalta conference. 4:36 Demographics. Here you get to a key point, why the East is different from the West. 2 Million mostly young people left East Germany for a better life in the West in the years between 1990 and 2010. That was a brain drain, which cripples the East in so many ways. And almost every other map you show is influenced and distorted by exactly that brain drain. 5:45 Trash and simple interpretation: more money means more consume means more trash. That's very likely the best explanation. 5:49 "But that could also be something cultural. Although it's odd, since the evironmental concern is higher in the West" I don't think so. Both can't be the case. The evironmental concerns are pretty much evenly distributed among Germans. I wonder where you get that from? Votes? (EDIT: Oh yes, you do. LOL) If it was from votes, let me tell you, that one of the main driving forces for the reunification was an enviromentalist movement in the GDR. And most of these people still live in the East. But the higher concern today is wealth distribution, that's why they do not vote for the green party. In the eyes of most (fortunately not all) West Germans every East German is some kind of right wing racist idiot, who doesn't care about anything. That bullshit is pushed by mass media. And I absolutely do not like this trend. 6:00 "Perhaps more people live of their land." Bad guess. Private land ownership is very low in East Germany. Land is mainly owned by big companies nowadays. And that's due to the fact, that the socialist state owned most of the land before and that land was sold out by the "Treuhand" after the reunification. Google "Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft" or short "LPG". Private land owners were force to join the LPG by the communists after WW2. And that's why the size of farms is bigger in East Germany (4:25). And that's why private land ownership is way higher on average in West Germany. If all your information is from maps, you will miss important facts. And all your conclusions are very distorted, simply you do not get the main point, why the East and the West is different: That brain drain that crippled the East.
Also alot of the east german economy is run by the west, wich leads to most of the profits to the west. When the economy is hit by some event its always the factorys in the east that are getting closed first.
You made a small mistake, LPGs weren't stateowned. They were coops (=Genossenschaften) so the land was still in the hand of the farmers but many farmers worked together on ther farm land. There are still a lot LPGs in eastern Germany, I 've been in a village once were (almost) everybody works for the LPG. They had their own cantine and their village butcher sold the meat of the very own animals. People from the towns nearby go to the village and buy the local meat, vegetables, potatoes or lunch in the cantine.
@@leaval1178 Regarding trash, maybe there are still remains of a culture of re-use driven by shortages of products in a range of areas under communism.
@@derorje2035 Although that was quite murky. Yes, _technically_ the land was still owned by the farmers in the cooperative - but they usually couldn't sell or buy any of it, all the buildings, machines, and so on were owned by the LPG, and the individual farmers didn't have much influence over how the land was used. They couldn't just leave the LPG, and the most influential leader of an LPG was often appointed by the SED from outside, not by the collective. So while they still technically owned the land, and it was technically a collective endeavour, that didn't mean much in practice.
A German friend told me that when Germany was split in two, West Germany changed its capital to a small town like Bonn because they always had in mind the reunification and restoration of Berlin as the nation's capital, which would have been much harder to do if they had changed the capital to a powerful city like Hamburg.
@@ijh867zter6, maybe. There's always some shady backstory in everything that happens everywhere, so I wouldn't be surprised. Anyway, I shared what a friend from Bonn told me.
This is my first comment on youtube, but I really felt like I have to say this.If you make videos like this, you should really team up with people from both sides you are talking about. As an eastern German I can say that the facts you were talking about were right, but your conclusions about the reasons were terribly wrong. Most of these things could have been explained easily to you by someone who knows about the culture and history of the country. For example are not many people working in eastern germany in agriculture and most of the farm land is not owned by private farmers. During GDR times farmers were expropriated by the state and the farmers were forced to go into agricultural production communities. These communities often still exist as private companies. So only a low amount of people is owning all the farm land. Another Example is the relation of tents to campers. It was way more common in the gdr to go camping and it was allowed to camp in other countries of the eastern block. So saysing the eastern germans were not allowed to leave the country is wrong. But it was very difficult to get a camper, since they were expansive and you had to wait more than a decade for them so there are not many old campers in the eastern part and nowadays most people can't afford.
Agree with content about the LPGs but not the travel. Our family only went camping because as teachers, my parents had no access to holiday complexes or hotels that was afforded to workers in factories, not out of choice. Camping was the only option.
Totally agree, same with the "trash" map. In the east, we still have the mindset of not throwing things away so fast, because we could need them later. I think the "guesses" in this video fit the typical western view on east germany, but most are not true. They leave a bad impression on our beautiful east.
@@UnknownUser-fm4tq and quite a lot of the products that were produced in the GDR were built to last. As an example I bought a oven door that was produced in east Germany and I just had to clean it, sanded it a bit down and repainted it. Works great and I couldn't have bought a new Ofen door that was made out off thick cast iron nowadays. Also I'm gonna make a bet and say that the old oven door is gonna last longer than the new bigger one I bought for the top part of my smoker. Which btw was way more expensive and thinner....
I was born in former east Germany in the early 2000s and my grandparents were very involved when it came to raising me. Born after the unification, my homecountry was always considered a western country, when actually the former sowiet influence still played a role in my upbringing. It was kind of like being too western for the east, yet still too eastern to fully belong to the western nations. Many people my age take big pride in being from the former GDR. They hold on to artefacts of their parents youth and feel some kind of nostalgia for a seemingly more simple time, which they never got to live in. (The German word for East is Osten or Ost for short, so we even got the word Ostalgie, to describe this feeling) The older generation sometimes longs for this as well, saying things like "of course we were locked in, of course the system was kind of set up for failure, of course there were things like espionage, but the huge majority of us still had easy, good and affordable life's with everything they needed"
I was also born and raised here in the East and I'm probably as old as you. The GDR definitely had also good influences on the people: frugality, equality for women, better work ethic, helping each other without asking for reward, ... But in the end we're living in a capitalized world and the communism can't exist in that. And the second thing is that it was still a dictatorship (no communistic system can be lead democratic and there would always be people who would exploit this system). So as long as you did what they told you to do there was almost no problem. But if you wanted to travel, had another opinion, ... you had no happy life. I am really grateful to live in the BRD and I don't honor the GDR but we should be proud of our grandparents who gave this country also good characteristics and made the best of it, just as they always do!
Can I ask a question? I hope it doesn't sound disrespectful... I was told that in East Germany you weren't allowed to grow flowers in your front garden- is this true?
@@raincloudsradio8900 I've never heard of this, so ig it's a hoax. The only thing my grandma told me is that after WW2, it was more common to grow fruits and vegetables in ones garden, than to grow flowers.
5:06 it's true that the population density is higher in the West, but this has also been the case prior to the Cold War. Especially the region around the Rhine river, which is part of the "blue banana", has always had the highest population density in Germany, and the Ruhr region with its coal mining and steel production was basically the economic center of Germany during the Industrialization era. Of course the Iron Curtain and its fall deepened the situation, since, as you mentioned, company HQs move to more economic stable regions (which leads to higher economic growth, which leads to higher population influx), but the roots of the different population densities lie in the decades before WWII.
This is definitely not true, my friend. Yes, the Ruhr region was always the industrial heart of Germany because of its sheer size. But the birthplace of german industrialisation lies in Saxony, especially between Chemnitz, Zwickau, Freiberg and the Ore Mountains. The German mechanical industry were born in and around the city of Chemnitz. Chemnitz itseld was called "The German Manchester" because of its huge pioneering factories. Especially Southern Saxony was also the region with highest population density in whole of Germany until the industrialisation had began in the Ruhr region. And Saxony was until WW2 one of the wealthiest regions in all of Europe, for most centuries the wealthiest region in Germany. Your argument applies to Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, but regions like Saxony and also Thuringia or Middle Germany with the Leipzig-Halle-Magdeburg triangle were heavily industrialised regions and in many ways equally or even more developed than many parts of Western or southern Germany. That's a fact many West germans don't know or like to forget. East Germany wasn't always poor and underdeveloped. It was a crucial part of Germany until WW2. The same applies to Berlin, which concentratred massive industrial, economical, financial and political power until the city got divided. Especially Bavaria benefited massively from the decline of Berlin and East Germany. Siemens, AEG, Audi, Allianz, Lufthansa, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, Knorr-Bremse, Telefunken, Osram, Edeka and many others were born and grown up in Berlin and East Germany. They left because of the division. Short: Berlin and East Germany are the unlucky losers of german history. Bavaria is the biggest lucker in german history.
@@kanister21 The concept of the Blue Banana is not the answer to all questions. Read my comment and read especially about the history of Berlin, Saxony, SIlesia, Middle Germany and you will learn
I dunno, but there's a lot left out or misrepresented in this vid. e.g. the economic collapse of East was to large part caused by 1:1 exchange rate and privatisation almost always meant not that HQ moved to West but that company from the West bought and immediately closed the East German company etc etc. One can clearly see that in East German case there was less of actual reforms or privatisation and more of market share and labour force takeover- you just have to look at Czechia: both regions had similar GDP/ capita and still have similar GDP PPP/ capita and were and still are similarly highly developed but Czechia didn't have Western cousin to be bought out by so they had to repair their own roads and homes and reform their economy by themselves and it took them more time but the same time they managed to preserve most of their industrial base and even many established communist brands are still around and thriving.
I mean it was probably one of the toughest tasks to successfully execute. There are interviews with former politicians who were responsible during that time and they said that they were always aware of the social and political tension a more realistic ( lowering wages and exchanges rates according to the true status of the economy) unification could rise amongst the community. Basically, they were giving out theses presents in order to not make them feel like 2nd class German citizens. It is a very short-sighted view but one could also say that something like these never has really happened before. I also want to add that the big migration waves to West Germany probably were the main reason why the East has a hard time till this day. People just wanted to leave the socialistic past behind and start a new life in West Germany where they knew people always had it better than themselves in the East.
Not to mention he breezed over the fact that the USSR was officially State Atheist. Plus for some reason he equated the (United Socialist Soviet Republic) to Conservatives? Imagine saying that Nazism its equated to Zionism(Israeli Religious Nationalism). Polar opposites in many regards.
@@reintaler6355 Im not sure if your aware of this, but the term "reactionary" doesn't mean anything, and if anything describes Liberals, as they over react to everything. Its essentially just a slur, and not even an accurate slur at that. So by "Reactionary" I assume you mean....umm...people who arent communist? Like some kind of anti-communist sentiment? Which is for some reason conservative? Im 100% down to let conservatives take credit for being against mass genocide, well liberals seem to be in quiet support.
The reason for the camping difference is also that there weren't a lot of cars in the gdr. Why would you buy a trailer, if you are still waiting for your car.
@@zenmonk5403 Nah, they weren't terrible cars in most ways, EXCEPT emissions, where they were truly awful. You can even see old footage of GDR cars being run in rallies.
8:46 No, in the old GDR, citizens could leave the country for holiday for example, but only in other European Soviet-influenced states ofc. Hungary, I believe was a popular destination
Cuba too, and it's not even in Europe Edit: You and your family could freely travel to Poland and Czechoslovakia But you needed a traveling permit to Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the USSR and Cuba. Traveling to Cuba was also very expensive, so it was not common
Living in east Germany myself, i belief the main reason for the lower trash production is the low availability of goods in the GDR. Since people were not able to just buy any new product anytime they wanted to they stored old things instead of throwing them away because maybe they could use them in the future. This still happens today in almost any family.
Private household waste does not differ at all between East and West. I have no idea where this map came from, but if there is more industry in the west and south then more garbage is produced here too and it shows household and industrial garbage combined.
@@switch12345678 Yes Garbage like nazi ideology, that were used after the World War II by the german intllingence in countries like Croatia, with all the support or the USA.......
Many of the economic differences have decreased in severity since 2011-14, they are still there, but less pronounced. Fun fact though, the UK government through the London/South of England focussed economic planning of the last 50 years (and neglect of the North in terms of not providing structural support when manufacturing/heavy industries were failing there and not building modern infrastructure there) has managed to create an even greater economic divide without the country being split than the divide was in Germany in 2011-14 let alone now.
A single hub primary hub that gets all the resources is never going to create more prosperity than something like the systematic but lawfully ankered distribution of resources to those who need it. Strong side gives 5% on top of earnings and capital earnings tax to weak side. That's the type of policy that shows solidarity. I think Solidarity should be part of the constitution, just as a goal in spirit
The unemployment map here is from 2013. There is now a stronger north-south divide. In particular, North Rhine-Westphalia in the west with the Ruhr area as a former coal mining area has the same unemployment rate as some eastern German states. The current energy crisis could also exacerbate the problems in the industrial regions in southern Germany.
"East Companies went bankrupt" that's not quite right. After the Borders were opened the GDR continued to break appart. While 95% of all Companies still belonged to the State they tried to sell those as fast as possible to gain some money out of this situation. While no one from east germany (who would have been interested in) would have been able to buy those Companies there suddenly were some rich western germany Guys who not only have had money, but West german Mark. A currency that was worth A LOT in eastern germany back then. Some of those rich Men bought those Companies and continued (and sometimes upgraded them) their work. Some very few bought the Companies and gave those former "Managers" a chance to buy the Company later for same price plus Bonus (many very old Companies have been saved this way) but most of those rich guys (not only western germans but also foreigners) bought cheap companies, shut them down, took everything with worth and left right after this. some of those "corpses" are still there and belongs to those rich guys... well. at least meanwhile the Politics started to do something about this. slowly.
They wont admit it - same thing happened in the rest of eastern Europe. Here in Bulgaria industry and agriculture was PURPOUSLY destroyed and sabotaged - the new neo-liberal goverment purpously let factories and companies fall into the hands of absolute nobodies and bandits, now called "entrepreneurs." lol They let these people just take the bank shares of the bulgarian industry, and let it die, for a very simple reason - the new goverments were pro-western, and they wanted to ensure our countries will be now forever dependent on western economies. Hell, if anything forced privatization is actually anti-free market lol - they used economic plans for privatization. And guess what happened to the agriculture? - the backbone of most east-european countries? They sent LIQUIDATION - not privatization, but liquidation commitees to destroy all state regulated institutions of agriculure, which used to help farmers all over sell their produce, make sure they arent cheated, and guarantee compensation if a natural disaster occurs. So yeah, all that "were now richer" is a myth - its only a half-truth, cuz only an insignificant percent actually got rich, while the rest got even poorer than before.
You feel it until today. I know many people that have had a good job until the borders were opened. Some of the companies they are working for has a very good international quality and some products of it you never get in the East (too expensive), because of export to the West. The worker were qulified a lot. And suddenly many people lost their job and being unenployment for more than 10 years show you, that society does not need you. There are no jobs, even when you apply for a job 100 times. And when you are old, you live in poverty and you think about the good old times.
@@nomoneynodeal7690 Many old buildings got new purposes of use like living Environment or Clubs. In my Hometown is an old factory that became a green house for example.
7:20 I mean poland was also under russian influence, but poles became even more catholic and one of them even got elected as the pope, so there must be other big reasons
The politicians of the GDR played a big role in the religion. They weren't religious and therefore never considered the church to be helpful or relevant.
@@Penqvino this! there were own made politics of socialism in GDR separated from the sowjets, walter ulbricht a leader of GDR come from leipzig heart of german socialism, so u have maybe an anwser
Didn't the Poles have more of a resistance to the Soviets? The East Germans literally embraced communism and were even stricter than their Russian counterparts
There are many more differences between West and East Germany. I looked up this topic because of a seminar project at the University Leipzig (where I was as an Erasmus student). If you have a rent appartement in an East German city, the owner comes most likely from the West. East Germans are underrepresented in the management of big corporations in the East, in the courts, in journalism etc. In 2018, 4 out of 154 German Ambassadors (2.5 %) came from the East. Only 2 out of 200 (1 %) of the Generals of the Bundeswehr came from the East. East Germans make steadily about 17 % of the academic staff at universities, just like in the total population. This is a rare exception.
Yes, true elite positions are almost 100% populated by west Germans - East Germans are discriminated against. "Academic staff" not being an elite position ...
I've lived in a small town in east Germany since 2017 and it has changed a lot in that short period of time, there are a lot more foreigners and their children around so that map needs an update, and now there have come many Ukrainians. On one hand its more interesting because town is not as empty on other its a huge change especially for the older people that are afraid of foreigners.
As someone from east germany that lived quiet some time in west germany I can say something about the trash numbers. In east germany the people were insentivised to have their own compost, for small gardens, or behind the house. This still reduces „biological waste“ a lot because it does not go into the trash can, but to a compost. Also… people produce vegetables in the gardens and dont have to bus them, but I think the numbers of kilogramms of food that dont go in the regular trash but in compost are way more important.
@@sten260 is this a joke? east germany was certainly less developed, but unless you literally live in a feudal society (which the gdr absolutely was not) nobody relies on subsistence farming, much less vegetable gardens. that's only the shit anyone does only if they have enough free time to pick it up as a hobby
@@ok8012 during USSR a lot of people had to grow their own food, there was no way USSR was able to produce enough food for every person in the country with their horrible economic system
I was really just thinking about this, and I'm happy you have made a video on it! I believe that this divide will stay the same for a long time, due to how different it still is to this day. But that's just me.
The situation in the east has improved quite a bit since the GFC. Because of ever higher rents in western cities, more and more students choose to study in the west. That combined with the good education and investment, cities like Dresden or Leipzig are becoming tech hubs in their own right with e.g. Global Foundries setting up in Dresden, Intel in Magdeburg and Tesla in Grünheide
Large Companies like Intel choose east over west because of financial support. West is and was financially stronger and to minimize the gap between west and east there was a law made by the German Government. That's the only reason why huge production companies choose east over the west atm.
@@MoraKingdom yeah there are still more financial incentives for companies to settle in the east, but thats not all lets take Intel @ Magdeburg, another location that was scouted was in bavaria and there the first thing that happened after it became public was the founding of a group with the goal to prevent Intel from choosing that location and another point especially relevant for massive projects like the Intel fab is space, at the loaction in bavaria they just had that space and pretty much no chance to get an adjacent plot in the future while in Magdeburg they can double or triple the size without much hassle
There's an interesting book called “The Making of the German Post-War Economy”, by Christian L. Glossner which discusses the philosophical overview and geopolitical forces that shaped West Germany's economy after WWII.
They were actually reunited in 1990 not 1940, and since German Reunification Day is 3 October, it hasn't been quite 32 years. However, thank you for this video. In 1989 after the Wall fell, I had a discussion with a friend. I said Germany would be reunited within the year. He said it would take a decade at least. I was technically right, with over a month to spare, but in some ways, he was overly optimistic, as this video shows.
Separation didn't start with the wall, it startet in 1945. With different currencies, different laws, etc. The wall just made it more strict and stands as a symbol.
The core problem is the lack of entrepreneurs. And the lack of support for entrepreneurs. The already successful ones left after the nationalization of their companies in the Sovjet Zone/GDR. And started anew in West Germany. And many more potential entrepreneurs followed. The bulk of the industry in my (West German) hometown was started by local residents. Living in the town or nearby (not necessarily born there). If you rely on "foreign" (out-of-town) investors you have two main problems - you're in competition with all others hoping for the (big) "foreign" investor - you have mostly just one subsidiary of many. Always with the risk of being less profitable than other subsidiaries. This is not something which can be fixed short term at all. And it needs the understanding of the local people in charge (politics, administration).
Fantastic video! Keep up the good work man, you not only show the facts but explain them with sufficient knowledge. That's what makes this channel special.
Another interesting divide is Japan where the east and west are divided by the battle of Sekigahara and the Itoigawa-Shizuoka fault lines, which results in cultural differences
The percentage of non-religious people in Eastern Germany may also be high because Eastern Germans were not protesting against the prosecution of the churches that much, they might have been accepting the whole situation. In the traditionally Catholic Poland, the societal effect of the Communist rule is now backfiring, resulting in a deeply conservative Catholic country. Hungary, although divided by religion, has a centuries-old tradition of religious freedom, so there, too, could the end of the Communist era trigger the opposite effect.
I think being a former communist country doesn’t always mean a country still remains atheist. Like you said, Poland is 90% catholic today but Eastern Germany is like Czech Republic where 90% is atheist.
Religion disappears with education. If you have a scientific explanation for your observations, you don't need anything like "it was gods will". If people are too stupid to understand things, they are going to believe things. Unlike expected, education is an important factor in the east.
@@holger_p Bullshit! (I don't often say this, but in this case I have to) Religion and science are not opposite. If they were, we should close all universities of the world as soon as possible. It's always these "nature-science" human beings who think that they've eaten wisdom a thousand times but are not able to answer easiest questions! "Einbildung ist auch eine Bildung." as the Germans say
@@SELBLINK_in_your_area Why closing universities ? Close churches, that's enough. (well remain them open, if people enjoy them, it's just no source of knowledge, maybe it's a source of joy) No, it's not human beings eaten wisdom, it's human beeings accepting their dumbness, their not knowing, their need to learn and do research. It's the Religion who claims to know everything and to answer everything, it's for people who cannot accept to not know something. It's exactly what you say: "not able to answer easiest questions ..." and accepting it. A question is never easy, the answer can be easy. And of course the inventend answer is always easier to geht, than the researched answer. So religion is for people who want easy answer. It's for believers, not for thinkers. You try to put emotions in the game, shame of not knowing something. With emotions you destroy logic. It's as easy as this. Emotions make you lie.
@@holger_p You call me a liar and so I will report your comment. Religion is "easy answers", aaah. No, it's not! Otherwise there wouldn't be the science of Theology. Knowledge and wisdom came to us by the Bible! It's the word that God gave to us, a holy truth and highest-levelled law. God's Law of the Holy Bible is ranked in top of any constitution of a state on Earth! Although the churches are not strictly needed, they can lead us on our path of faith and truth finally finding God. He already proved himself, he came to us as human Jesus Christ but how could anyone who died yet come to life again? Can you explain the resurrection in a scientific way, why this was possible and who Jesus was if not God? (one of the three parts in trinity) You should believe, yes, but what you tell is bullshit again because I am rather a thinker and do believe, too. Furthermore, a lot of scientists (I mean more than just physics/biology/chemistry) believe in God, too! (e. g. some of the philosophers) As I've already said, *IT IS NO OPPOSITE!* The belief in God - Father Almighty, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and the belief in the Holy Catholic Church don't bring you away from thinking and scientific argumentation. Religion and science must work together instead of against each other! Universities and churches should unite.
I grew up in what used to be Eastern Germany and work in the used to be Western part for a few years now. I agree that environmental awareness and outspokenness is more common in the western part. Although it might be added that there are a lot of environmental activists in the East too. However, I perceive the reality of daily life in the western part as generally more wasteful. It is much more common to have a car-centric lifestyle, to have larger apartments or single-family-homes, buy new gadgets, new clothes and travel more and farther. That is contrasted by how I grew up. Even if we were able to afford new stuff, that didn't mean we also did so. A TV set would only be replaced if it's broken beyond repair. Also, there often is only one TV set per family household. Clothes are used for decades, although they might be demoted from good clothes to stay-at-home clothes over time. Single use plastics were only reluctantly adopted. For most of my childhood up until the early 2000s, food could be bought mostly unpackaged. Traveling by train or bike is more the norm than the exception for a lot of people. Funnily, most of that is not driven by consciousness or environmental concern, but by historical and often still present economic circumstances. Things are changing though. Younger generations, including millennials (yes, we are not the youngest anymore but still young enough in this context) tend to adopt similar lifestyles all over the country. Then again, that is often driven by economic circumstances too.
I am from Croatia and once I met the person from the former East Germany and we had a lot in common and we could easily understand each other regarding some views to the world. On the other side people from the former West Germany were like child robots to me:).
@@qwert314oderwat he probably means that the Easterners are mean and cynic, while the Westerners (in Eastern view) are too naive and obedient (to the rules of society).
@@rcl5555 Das klingt bisschen komisch wenn man bedenkt, dass sich in Westdeutschland zur Zeit der Trennung die Punkerbewegung entwickelte und viele junge Leute demonstrierten. In Ostdeutschland war die Loyalität zur SED wichtig für Schulabschlüsse und Jobs. Das heisst eigentlich war es zumindest zu Zeit der Trennung genau umgekehrt.
“If you invest all your energy in economics, world commerce, parliamentarianism, military engagements, power and power politics, -if you take the quantum of intelligence, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming that you embody and expend it all in this one direction, there there won't be any left for the other direction. Culture and the state - let us be honest with ourselves - these are adversaries.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche,
camping and hiking and 'healthy outdoor pursuits' were heavily promoted within the USSR with millions of miles of organised hikes, hostels etc, and were very, very popular. "Tramping" is an entire lifestyle culture in Czech Republic (or was in 2010 era)
As someone coming from the East, you can also see the big difference in architecture, especially in neighbourhoods and suburbs. The East have bigger houses, but small flats, which are both colourful and traditional. The West has more of a variety of houses, different looks and styles and sizes
East Germans may not care about the environment as much as West Germans (I think it's because having enough money is their first concern), BUT we are definitely a big fan of recycling! Not only did we have to repair everything (buying new wasn't an option, either the product was sold out or expensive), we also valued trash separation a lot. My grandfather separated every butter wrap for example, to recycle the aluminium in one can and the paper layer in another. We also produced products to last and still value quality over having the newst stuff. My old East German vacuum is still running, while my grandma recently bought her third vacuum in ten years.
While you are talking about the east-west division, I am also seeing in your maps a clear north south division, with the south much richer, and prosperous than the west north. It would be interesting to also analyze that.
One factor for the richer south is the automobile industry which is mostly located around Stuttgart. Germany has two big industrial centers, the Ruhrgebiet and the Metropole region Stuttgart. While the Ruhrgebiet lost a lot of industry, the automobile industry is one of the factors, why Germany is rich. The automobile industry is still developing and growing and provides for Germany but mostly for the south.
In many ways it does make a lot of sense to divide Germany into North, South, and East. The differences between East Germany and the rest are at a scale that those between North and South are not as much visible, but if you were to look only at West Germany, the North-South divide is also quite significant. I think this goes back centuries when North Germany was influenced by the protestant Prussians and South Germany by the catholic Austrians. Also, South Germany is more mountainous and has more natural resources, while North Germany has little in that regard but very good farmland. North Germany also has direct access to the North Sea and Baltic Sea, while the South has access to the Rhine and Danube. The state North-Rhine-Westphalia sits in the middle of the two. Both in its geographical location, but it also had a lot of coal and has the Rhine go right through it, which makes it perfect for heavy industry. Generally speaking, the protestant North Germany has always been the heartland of the social democrats, while South Germany has more dominant conservatives. But I think that is a result of the cultural and economic factors mentioned above.
@@mareikes5923 regarding car manufacturers, it's not just Mercedes and Porsche in the Stuttgart area, it's also Audi in Ingolstadt and BMW in Munich in the South. Baden-Württemberg has always been a great area for smaller businesses and small-time entrepreneurs, they are the real reason the area is wealthy. The tech industry is also very strong in the Stuttgart area, IBM's first quantum computer is located there. The south is WAY more than just cars.
One thing to note for the trash difference ist also that a recycling mentality in east germany developed because of the shortage of supply
2 года назад+7
Yes. I was born in East Germany in the early 1980s and I recall from elementary school some sort of collection campaigns of paper or glass for recycling.
@@Zireael83 It was outright capitalism! You supplied capital (handcart) and your labor on a freelance basis - I could earn good pocket money by collecting old paper and glass from people. ;)
I recently moved from north west Germany to the old DDR part and I must say something: all those stereotypes about east Germany are only that: lies. People are here more friendly with newcomers like me (I'm spaniard), towns and villages are more beautiful, I'm getting more money for the same job, landscapes are incredible... even weather is better! The only thing I don't like is that they drive their cars like italians. In fact, east Germany reminds me north of Italy which I love.
Stell dir mal vor du hättest keine spanischen Wurzeln sondern, sondern im nahen Osten und wärst 2014/15 nach Dresden gekommen. Ich glaube, du hättest dann eine andere Meinung.
@@olpqay Blödsinn. Ich war ein paar mal bei Pegida, da sind regelmäßig auch Ausländer als Redner aufgetraten, auch Muslime und Schwarze, sogar auf Englisch wenn sie kein Deutsch konnten. Es ging nie um stumpfen Ausländerhass, sondern um die Forderung nach einer qualitativen Einwanderung anstatt unserer (bis heute anhaltenden) quantitativen Einwanderung. Warst du mal da? Ich habe bei Pegida auch unter den "Spaziergängern" viele Ausländer getroffen, viele Tschechen, Polen, Russen, Ukrainer, ... sind mitgelaufen. Und die meisten standen dem politischen Islam und der Masseneinwanderung ebenfalls skeptisch gegenüber.
The East has higher birth rates which I would consider positive when thinking about demographic shift. Probably it has to do with more traditional values. Still, a lot of people from the East would go to the West due to a lack of opportunities.
Birth rates inversely correlate with wealth pretty much everywhere in the world (richer = fewer babies, this holds true when you compare societies or individuals within the same society). So I'd expect the poorer East to have higher birth rates even if all else was equal.
@@sten260 Africa has birth rate that leads to population explosion. The East of Germany with 1,6 children/woman even below sustaining the population but still more than other regions in Germany.
"Traditional values" lol, did you miss the part where the majority of eastern Germans aren't religious and the farming regions are all corporatized? The Communists delivered one punch against traditions and capitalism delivered the other. Edit: The real reason is likely lower wealth and better access to child care, both mentioned in the video.
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs By that logic, East Germany would have been quite wealthy in the 1970s - because that is the time the birth rate in the GDR fell below replacement. :)
regarding the trash, I have a theory. I think in East Germany due to the scarcity of many goods under Socialism people became very frugal and also quite creative. So instead of throwing something away, people may be more likely to reuse it or turn into something else (for example making jam from strawberries after their best before date). Generally I think that DIY stuff is a bit more common in the Eastern Block states. I also was surprised to see how many people in my town go foraging for berries, elderflower or mushrooms. Given that that is sort of also an old people thing to do and the East is older than the West it sort of makes sense.
You said there are many more farms in the east but it’s the complete opposite. You even showed the map that showed that the farm SIZE is bigger in the east and the logical consequence of that is that there are less farms there
You can still see the old borders from satellite view on google maps. Farm sizes in the East were state owned and therefore much bigger than in the west where farmlands were private owned. Via satellite you see the small patches in the west and big patches in the east.
Very good video! Just pointing out the facts without making one part looking better than the other one. I want to add some points to this: *1. Electoral results:* The German party DIE LINKE ("The left one") still gets better results in the East because it developed from the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) and after the so-called "unification" it first continued as PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism). Later it united with the West German WASG (Wahlalternative Arbeit und Soziale Gerechtigkeit = Vote Alternative Work and Social Justice), but people still have in mind rather the past of SED and PDS. A main point of the Left Party is to reach social justice for people in East Germany, so East Germans tend stronger to choose this party than West Germans. Saarland was an exception because of the popularity of Oskar Lafontaine. (but he has left politics yet) Although its name changed, DIE LINKE Party still targets a new social order of democratic socialism. (instead of capitalism) *2. Another difference:* Germany is very different between North and South. The dialects sound different and there is different culture. It's hard to explain, but I try to give an example by the point of religion: Although my region in West Germany where I live has an officially high number of Christs who are church members, the belief is much stronger in the South at least concerning my generation. I've came to know some people (but it will be many more) who are still church members but either don't believe in the church or don't believe in God at all. They just stay members because you have to pay a small amount of money (Bearbeitungsgebühr) if you want to leave the church. There is also the church tax but its amount depends on your income, so people who have no or just a low income don't have to pay the church tax and so many of them stay church members because leaving would be more expensive or because they just don't think about it that much.
You shouldn't use datasheets from 2011. There is a lot going on in Germany in many terms. Last year, there was a net outflow from regions like Baden-W. and Hamburg to regions like Saxony and Brandenburg. East German cities started to become more and more expensive and are now hubs of gentrification. Some dark spots are persistent, like Sachsen-Anhalt and Mecklenburg, but they are also rural Bundesländer anyways. As a Non-German, I think that the "Aufbau Ost", the rebuilding of the GDR (DDR), showed awesome results. The German East is very beautifully rebuilt and looks more refurbished as the West. Also, thanks to the underdevelopment, rural areas in the poorer regions look still natural and untouched.
Infos from an East German person: 3:40 lots of companies got sold to foreign investors, some of them Westgerman. Some used the opportunity to buy up oponents on the market and simply close the factories. native Eastgerman people most of the time didnt have the money to buy their own factories. 6:10 Socialist societies produced less trash since everything you could throw away could be used for something else. Reperation and upcycling were always a thing, since ressources were shorter and most of the high quality goods that were produced were shipped to capitalist countries to get some rare "westmoney" for the state. 8:20 the high amount of extremist voters mostly roots in worse living conditions and a feeling of inferiority. Additional the difference between west and east haven't changed a lot since '89. sure, both are richer now, but the east is still as far away as he was ~30 years ago. Eastern Germany is seen like p.e. the Southern States of the US - as kind of rednecks. This leads to an anti-position in the population and high anti posture against "those on the top" 8:45 Eastgermans were alowed to travel. but travelling to capitalist states was quite hard and without family there and some kind of safety net for the state (so you come back) pretty impossible.
although i live in east germany i can say from my own experience that it is also very easy to live in east germany whenever i am in west germany and drive through cities there they are usually dirtier than the ones in east germany (an exception is berlin)
The West has always been more densely populated (going back centuries, if not millennia), so that isn't too surprising, although yes, that difference is certainly exacerbated by the other difference in prosperity and opportunity among the two regions.
Finland has a interesting divide between Sweden controlled west and Novgorod(Russia) controlled east considering that the border was established in 1323.
When the GDR was established, it was 100 times more democratic than most "democratic" colonial empires of the West, which had plenty of slaves that werent allowed to vote, but were forced to make wealth for them. lol
Looking at the comment section, same goes for 'party x is not extremist'. 😅 If so many people feel the need to say that, there might be something in the bush after all...
“You see the mistakes of one system-the surveillance-and the mistakes of the other-the inequality-but there’s nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. “And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.” --Anna Funder
Found it quite striking that although the east of Germany obviously has the higher unemployment rates, the Ruhr area appears to be doing not that great in this sense either (I'm guessing due to the closure of a lot of the coal/mining and steel industry?).
Yep, the Ruhr area is suffering from the end of its traditional industries (as you said, coal and steel). It has struggled with that transition for a few decades now, with ... mixed results. In the end, the effect is similar - relatively rapid de-industrialisation led to a decline in wealth and employment.
North and south Germany to a lesser extent. There are also divides between specific cities or regions and the rest of the country, such as South Schleswig (North Schleswig is part of Denmark), Bavaria, Berlin, Hamberg, etc.
1. East Germany was a shop window to the West and as such, it was much richer than all other communist states. 2. Generally, this divide has more to do with former Prussia being an rural state with predominant agriculture sector and rest of German kingdoms getting much more industralised in XIX century. 3. AfD has little to do with conservatism, it is a populist party like Spanish Vox fuelled by economical discontent.
West Germany would have been just as poor as East Germany, if the french took the Rheinland for a few decades like they did after WW1, and if the US didnt help Germany with the Marschall plan. Especially if they had to pay all the victors reparations, without outside loans, there wouldnt have been an "economic miracle" - it would have been a second Weimar republic disaster.
The AfD is less fueled by economical discontent. The AfD rose to power during the migrant crisis as a reactionary anti-immigration party. They literally went from being a brand new fringe party to getting around 15% of the vote.
@@danielschnitzer7044 that's not true. It was the euro crisis. They did get more popular after Merkel made a speech welcoming everyone which accelerated migration in Greece and Italy to Germany
@@meganoobbg3387 No! Agreed that the Marshall plan may have speeded up the reconstruction a little, that's all. The German government simply spent the money more wisely than Britain or France did. The latter two received much more in aid than Germany.
"We needed 40 years to overcome East Germany. Sometimes in history, one has to be prepared for the long haul and not ask after four months if it still makes sense to keep up our demands." ~Angela Merkel
Great video, but one thing I would like to add- while these maps are interesting the color scale is not linear to a linear scale in raw data. That is to say if for example, for the disposable wage we scale the color as white equal to zero and darkest blue equal to highest then the difference would not be this staggering. But I guess the main purpose of the maps is to show the difference between east and west but this is an important detail to keep in mind, because by looking just at the map's color scaling it might seem that eastern Germany is a developing nation compared to western which is not the case at all. Even eastern Germany is much more developed than most parts of the world.
Eastgermany is cooler because we can drive 60 with our Simson Mokicks 😂 Also i think the east makes less trash because we are used to shortage from soviet days and so we reused a lot of things which would had landed in the trash in west germany And as for the trailer issue, i think the answer is the powerlessness of the eastern cars because as an example the 26hp Trabant already had power problems without a trailer Though it is a good car XD
In the first 5 seconds of the video when he talked about his last video, I decided to subscribe because I'd like to watch videos about such content. I'm not joking.
It's also interesting what is recently changing. Berlin is the fastest growing city nominally in Germany (even though thousands are moving from Berlin to other cities right outside of it) and many new start ups are found there. So the importance of Berlin will rise once again. But it's not just Berlin. In general more people move to cities in East Germany because of space and cheaper apartments.
Growing from 3.3 million to 3.6 million from 2000-2021 is just 10%. It's really not that much. Maybe it's a high rate in germany, but on low level. It's mainly urbanisation, cause the overall population in Germany doesn't really grow.
Thank you die this video 👍. Even after more then 30 years, Germanys unification is still incomplete. And honestly I doubt it ever will. I say this beeing a person from Thuringia, born at the state border to Bavaria and now living in Erfurt. As already mentioned in earlier comments, the current economic and therefore political situation is caused by how the eastern part was treated after 1990: many closed downs of companys for more or less good/bad reasons caused a huge rate of unemploymlent. In a tv report it was stated, the economic strenght of eastern Germany in mid-90s was only a half compared to 1990. This lead to a huge disappointment on the unification within the population in the area, fear of loosing properity, anger on how the life experiences of many people where denied (even until today). Thus caused many (young) people to leave their home for better work and income. The increased popularity of parties such as the AfD is the result of all this points and the (as it seems) missing will to finally resolve the differences such as work time or income (its not true anymore that living in the eastern part of Germany is always cheaper than in the western/southern part especially in relation of income). However it is necessary to say, that the way how people treat each other does got better over the last three decades in most cases.
I seriously wonder if there should have been a Marshall Plan-style program in the 1990s for eastern Germany and Eastern Europe more broadly. Perhaps it could have given them a bigger economic boost and allowed them to stabilize better. Instead, some of those nations have fallen deeply behind, with no catch-up in sight. With the events of the last year added in, as an American I can't help but wonder if we and other major countries should have done more.
@@thunderbird1921 In fact billions of Euros were spent e. g. into infrastructur such as highways and railway system in eastern Germany (so-called "Aufbau Ost"). This however lead to other issues, where the western parts felt disadvantaged because of lacking investments in those areas. But I agree there should have been a much broader plan to help the eastern parts of Germany and Europe in general after 1990.
@@thunderbird1921 You will be surprised to learn the west-Germany didn't use a single $ from the Americans. The "Wirtschaftswunder" in the 50's happen because they still had a strong industry and the Morgentau plan was never fully realized.
Wow! Alton IL newspaper image. I grew up near there. I also saw the line in 1989 flying to Berlin from Frankfurt at night. Back in 1989 it was almost as stark at night as the line between North and South Korea. East Germany was largely dark on the ground until you got to Berlin, which was well lit by both the East and the West.
im from germany and i can say that east germans gets also disciminated from the western after the the unification and even the discrimination is now weaker it is still fell able
as a german that was born in the east and moved to the west for work, i can say that i think that most of the stuff in this video seems true^^ was a real culture shock moving here. i didn´t know that this part of germany is so religious. i thought that most modern western countries don´t have many religious people anymore because religion should have stayed in the middle ages ^^
You should have more respect for religion, it was religion that brought us out of the middle ages! Interestingly, the most non-religious part of Germany is also the part that seems to be stuck in the middle ages. Perhaps that Christian work ethic has something to do with why East Germans are so lazy.
Was recently looking at bauland prices in Germay and was a bit confused about the still stark price differences between western and eastern germany. I really thought 30 years of development would have improved it a lot. Turns out to not really be the case.
property in the new states is cheap compared to western states. But at the same time wages are lower there and there's less work, while companies in the economic heartland of Germany face problems to hire enough staff
"the industry in east germany wasn't that bad, the problem is that it was state-owned" - [from what I remember from school in Germany, correct me if I'm wrong] the way east German industry worked was that every (state-owned) industry was on it's 'own'. When these industries had what looked like unacceptable looses to the government, they bundled them up into complexes with other very profitable industries. Then, after the wall came down, these complexes where either shut down or sold. (For the technology they used or just for the build space) Because, even tho east Germany wasn't ahead from west Germany it had some valuable technologies that west Germany didn't. (e.g. use of lignite to generate power)
That the industry was state-owned also ment those factories owned their production to the state. That meant in reality when they enter unification the factories had debts with the state, which was not a fortunate situation to start with. Secondly, the privatisation policy of the time was focused on selling and gaining the highest proceed - and less on maintaining production and workplaces.
I'v also heard that in Soviet Russia, the state gave positive benefits to companies that were actually faltering- much different to capitalism, whereby if your company fails, it fails. Of course the Soviet way cost the state alot of money for not much reward...
@@raincloudsradio8900 there are actually articles and books by Stalin in which he argues for building unprofitable, but strategic factories to achieve independence from the West in machinery building - at the expense of producing fewer consumer goods. This partially explains why common people always lived with shortages - but at least their country could single-handedly produce tanks from its own steel and with completely domestic parts - a success, I guess?.. Khrushchev BTW tried to introduce a market element in otherwise fully planned Soviet economy, and people even liked that (read up Kosygin reforms). Unfortunately, he was ousted shortly before it took place and it was then slowly rolled back by his successor.
great vid! pretty much spot on I'd say. stats will have changed - in some case to the better, in others to the worse. I think 2 addtional considerations may be worthwhile: 1) number of universities and their (re-) founding date, and how student numbers developed since, and 2) in 1990s gov funding allowed large investments, which in several cases was exploited by capitalists who set up huge production facilities but closed them down the moment they were less profitable - making people even less happy and financially secure in eastern Bundesländer (plus maybe 3) quite a few gov-linked organisations were moved to eastern parts in order to improve income levels there, e.g. Umweltbundesamt and similar)
In East Germany, pensions for women are often higher. In East Germany, many women went to work themselves. But in the west, many women stayed at home and now need their husbands' pensions. In the east, however, the pensions are even lower. But with every pension increase, the East gets a bonus for the increase. This should happen until the areas have become equal. But there are more pensioners in the east than in the west.
well, it is 32 years after the unification... we should watch out, if there are really pensionists left who worked in the GDR. This system is over-due.
Watching videos like this is very interesting because it makes me think if Germany still has these problems and divide after 30 years of reunification, how bad it would be for North and South Korea. South and North Korea divide is much bigger and North Korea is far worse than East Germany ever was, so I can imagine the problems will be like this but x10 worse. So many people in my country are now against reunification, especially since young people already have it hard and have no relatives in the North.
I think the separation of Korea is just going on for too long now (~70 years), so that every time there are less people left with some kind of relation to the other side of the border (family, friends etc.) or even remember the time when the country wasn't separated. For younger and even middle-aged people this must feel like an ancient legend or fairy tale or something. In Germany, separation lasted "only" 30-40 years, so many people still had relations to the other side. Also, separation wasn't as strict as in Korea. People could visit each other, send letters and keep contact. I think, if Korea ever would be reunited, it will be a much harder challenge because it will feel like 2 completely different worlds.
What is "worse"? Neither East Germany had nor North Korea has to suffer from capitalism! If South Korea accepts the 3 conditions which are inscripted at the Unification Memorial in Pyongyang, reunification can be great in Korea in 2040 or later! I think the time of unification in Korea is not there yet, but maybe it will be there in app. 20 years.
@@andreaslojen8616 Furthermore, Germany didn't have anything like the Korean war so both political systems could grow in the condition of peace. Korea has not officially ended the war yet but only made a weapon usage stop. Czech Republic and Poland entered the EU, so now there are only open borders around Germany now. (the other borders were open ones even before) No borders divide us German people from our neighbour people anymore! Iron Curtain has fallen years ago.
@@andreaslojen8616 yes and also the world wanted reunification in Germany but China doesn’t want a unified Korea because they don’t want to lose the control they have of North Korea and Japan doesn’t want a strong unified Korea beating them. We are so different now so now we don’t feel close to them anymore especially only 80 year olds will have relatives in the North. I don’t want reunification unless it can work well which is unlikely.
@@johnpark7972 It can work, though it has to be a lot more gradual than the German Reunification. Kind of what the East African Federation is trying rn
About the farms. At the end of the DDR the farm collectives were privatized and the workers made shareholders, a few very well connected Stasi officers and political figures who had access to western currency bought those shares up for cents on the dollar and built massive farms that way, while the workers wanted western currency fast and sold easily. One heir of nobility stated, that his familys land was taken by the communists to end the nobility and their big farms but nowadays the new farms of the old communists are way bigger than those of the nobility ever were. On Population density. middle germany (the former DDR) always was less populated, because the big population centers of the west were often where industry was and the east was much more farming country while the industrial part (Breslau etc) is in nowadays Poland. Also a very important division is the headquarters of important newspapers and TV-production, not counting Berlin none of the big newspapers are from the former DDR also none of the big TV-productioncompanies are based there, leading to a lack of understanding of the people and a lack of representation of genuine east german sentiment within the political discourse of Germany as a whole.
The area of the former GDR is divers in itself with highly populated areas in Saxony, Berlin or even Thuringia. Those part were traditionally strong in industry. On the other hand Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Brandenburg or the Northern half of Saxony-Anhalt are sparsely populated and agriculture was traditionally more dominant. But in general the density of jobs financed by the government or federal institutions is in the West 4 to 5 times higher than in the East.
Also interesting to note is that West Germany was benefiting from the immigration of highly educated East German people to supplement their shortage for highly educated workers, after the fall of the wall. This drained said workforce from east germany itself and uplifted the economic development in f. e. bavaria.
8:30 eastern Germany is near the "Mecklenburgische Seenplatte" which is basically a wetlands-foresty type of region with many rivers, lakes and forests with small camping grounds. Usually you travel there via Kajak and migrate from camp to camp and sleep in your tent. I guess that this used to be one of their go to activities in vacations and persists to this day.
You said that east Germany only had better results in 2 of the categories but I as a west German would actually say 4, the fact that they produce less trash per person is better and also the fact that east Germany has less foreigners is better.
thank you for your comment, you are right. i have nothing against foreigeners and have many as friends. but i really like walking through streets and not only hering foreign languages spoken but also german, same with traditions etc. having imigrants is a good thing but probably not if they made up over 90% of the people that are living in some regions. integration doesn´t work like that. i know many that don´t even bother learning german anymore. that was different in the past. the imigrants back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s... in west & east, at least tried joining an and make some of the german culture their own (and learn the language). i like the german language so this development is definitely something a can not feel very good about.
That farm size difference seems backwards to me. I am no expert, and if anyone can enlighten me, I'll appreciate it. First, small farms impede mechanization, and mechanization allows one farmer to handle more land, increasing efficiency and freeing workers for other industries. Second, I though that one of the drivers of the British industrial revolution was farm consolidation, with landlords combining many small farms into one, with the displaced farmers taking factory or other industrialized jobs like railroads, construction, etc. Or maybe I am missing something, or maybe I have my history upside down.
small farms in east germany were united in a low amount of really large farms. the previous owners still worked tha land, but under just one large organisation. see LPG - landwirtschafliche produktionsgenossenschaften. (agricultural production cooperative) farms in the west underwent no huge unifications.
Yeah, East German farms are large for two main reasons: 1. Soviet land reforms combined smaller farms into large mechanized agricultural units. 2. The land up there is for the most part flat and wide-open, so there are few natural boundaries that would limit the size of each plot. You can see on the map that farms in north-eastern _West_ Germany are also larger, for the same reason.
You can find these differences in every country. And about foreigners not living in the east of Germany, well it’s less job opportunities so go figure.
I recommend 'The Shortest History of Germany' by James Hawes. It looks at how the former borders of the Roman Empire are still visible in modern Germany.
![Twenty One Pilots - The Line (from Arcane Season 2) [Official Audio]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/XCz7WUotXs8/mqdefault.jpg)
*Are there any other countries in which a similar 'division' or a big difference can be visible between two areas?*
Try NORTH and SOUTH India
east and west china
if in some far away future Korea unites, I wonder if it will be similar to Germany
The united states. The mason dixon line (which most people extend to the 36th parallel) has a ton of super interesting ways that it dives the US, with religion, education, political party, etc.
Northern and Republic of Ireland would be cool
The East German farms are bigger because they were collectivized under Soviet rule and then privatized as a whole after reunification.
Btw, the unemployment situation has improved a lot, but differences are still there although they shrank a lot over the last decade.
Economically has definitly become better over the years particually in Thüringen
so they are way better
Auf der A9 ist das ist immer sehr beeindruckend, wenn man auf bayerischer Seite die ganzen kleinen Felder sieht, dann an einer Linie vorbeifährt und plötzlich riesige Felder bis zum Horizont sieht.
It’s good that things are improving in the east. There are always differences in regions within countries but it takes a lot to heal from the effects of Soviet rule (Russia may take generations to get over the trauma and currently isn’t going in the right direction).
@@andreavoigtlander1087 yes, in the early years after reunification it was the only economic sector that was more competitive than its west German counterpart.
It would be maybe also interesting to see the difference between North and South Italy, since there the difference is even bigger then in Germany even tho the south is already a part of Italy for many many years
Why is southern Italy poor they have access to sea unlike north
Good idea!
🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹
@@shraypuri4824 because South Italy didnt inustrialize and they were not influenced as much by the liberal ideas of the french revolution unlike the North
@@shraypuri4824 Climate. North tend to be cold, a temperate region which forces people to innovate. The south is mildly Mediterranean which is super hot during summer and mild winters; perfect for agriculture.
North is closer to industrious kingdoms and empires such as France and Germany while the south maintains traditions. Don't forget that North was the beginning of the Renaissance which made science more funded, sponsored and made possible than the south.
Italy was divided into city-states and northern city-states are more progressive compared to the southern city-states.
Finally, it was from the north was the idea to unite all city-states to form Italy.
As an Eastern German who moved on trash:
It still feels that in the east the idea of maybe not throwing something away, because one day you might need it, seems stronger in the eastern parts.
Probably a leftover from the times where even if you had the money, you couldn't buy what you might wanted.
I think this mindset is the same throughout all ex eastern bloc
This video is BS. It says west Germany was independent. Utter toosh. It was under the US's direct control. Just like the whole country is now. 43,000 US troops while the govt tries to start wars with its neighbors.
In know a lot of people from Romania who work in Germany and Germans always find it strange when they find a big bag with smaller bags in it..Romanian people for sure know what I am talking about, the idea is: we do not always throw away the bags from stores, but instead keep them and when we know that we need them, we will bring our own bags from home instead of buying new ones in the store. Also food waste is lower, especially amongst more conservative people because "we cannot throw food in the trash while the children in Africa are starving" a common phrase by a lot of Romanian moms.
Many russians still think this way. And a bag with bags is a thing here too, I suppose every family has it, it's a real thing.
@@illuminati3417 Same in Poland - the bag of bags and a trashcan (or rather few of them as recycling is mandatory) under the kitchen sink is a meme.
Actually the east of Germany is pretty nice if you have a good Job.
The Houses are not only Cheaper, they are also bigger, its not that dense, the Countryside is beautyfull.
The East of Germany is a very nice Region
that's like saying Montana is nice if you landed a good job, since it has beautiful scenery, cheaper, etc, but objectively, majority would not want to live there. And, as such, it's sparsely populated. People want a full extent of goods and services, I think most people would dread lacking basic stores or services in rural or poorer areas. I also think that educated and wealthy would not want to live surrounded only by uniformly working class families.
@@maaz322 Montana is a bad example, because US States are way bigger then german "Bundesländer" (federal states). I build a house in the vicinity of the ore mountains in Saxony between two major cities. (Zwickau and Chemnitz). We have no problems with goods and services so far, because major cities are quite near, since Germany is small. You can travel across Saxony from Thuringia to Poland in about 2 hours.
Across the same latitude you need 10 h in Montana. Saxony has 4 million inhabitants, Montana 1 million.
The housing here in this area is affordable, because the land is cheaper. The building costs are quite the same all over Germany. For 500.000 Euros we got a quite big plot in a quite, second row street and a house above standard level.
I lived in Potsdam, near Berlin before. I justed checked againt, but a similar plot near Berlin costs 480.000 Euro alone, without the costs of building a house.
This is insane. Even two academics can't afford that.
We financed our house with my salary as a teacher and my wifes as a caretaker of older people.
It worked out for us, because both jobs are in high demand in Saxony. And I think that is the reason not many people tend to move to the eastern states. There are not too much working places for higher educated people. Families with two "worker" jobs are paid to low in respective to bulding prices (not plot prices).
@@maaz322 Isn't Montana a nice place to live?
@@noamuth89 Grüße nach Lichtenstein oder so :D
@@avior2951 Nah dran :) Grüße zurück.
A very good topic. What many people don't know is that only the Soviet-occupied part of Germany had to pay reparations to the USSR. Huge amounts of factories, railway tracks, agricultural machinery and other things were dismantled and taken to the USSR.
Good. The West should have done that as well. I doubt the amount of reparations given to the Soviets were enough for the damage the Nazis caused, but at least they repaid.
@@Zakrovik No, the West hasn't payed to the Sovjets. And also UK, France and the US do not demand reparations until a peace treaty is concluded. The peace treaty would never be signed and the Four Plus Two Treaty (1990) settled everything. And yes, Germany destroyed a lot and should rightly pay, but the allies did not want to make the same mistake as after the First World War. Europe needs a strong Germany.
@@Zakrovik that wouldve caused world war 3
@@Zakrovik yeah well the Soviets didn't deserve those reparations after what they did to eastern Europe after WWII. West Germany paid reparations to the west
@@77belts without the soviets the nazis wouldve won, quit shoveling far right propaganda into your mouth
"they were reunited in 1940"
That is impressive they reunited before they were even divided.
Aside from street lights Berlin also has very visible infrastructure differences - For example, while tram lines were still operating in East-Berlin, it's Western counterpart decommisioned and dismantled all tram lines in the West in order to have a more car-centric city. This is nowadays a problem for city planners, since for a more extensive public transport new lines have to be built in the Western part of the city from scratch again, while in the Eastern part the systems are still up and running.
That is also only partly true. The reason, why the trams in the east are running better is only because of LESS traffic because of less people. The systems in the east are in a horrible condition and people not as mobile as in the West. The problem in the West is, that much of the funds are coming from the government and are not refinanced. So you have kind of a bubble in the West, because the government (Socialdemocrats and Socialist) kind of repeated the shit from the East.
@@schadelharry4048 trains *
This definitely reminds me of different post soviet countries like when I visited ukraine last year, they had tramlines everywhere also my mom talks about it during Soviet rule many people used public transportation or just walking
sounds like we are back in communism then. Why would wealthy people prefer to drive a freakin public transport? It shouldn't even exist anymore, everybody should have enough money for a car these days
@@sten260 car-centric lifestyles are not sustainable in the long term in regards to urbanization. If everyone is granted a free car to use in large metropolises and city centres, the traffic jams would cause the cities to immobilize completely. There's no solution to this issue even building more roads, autonomous cars, hyperloop-bogus and other "ingenious" concepts. I love the convenience of the car but they just take too much space in cities.
4:25 Actually, that was because many small farms were put together under 1 control in the early years, for which LPGs, Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaften (Agricultural Production Cooperative) were created to manage them. But yes, there is a tendency of people growing some stuff themselves here, which isn't nearly as present in the west
Ah yes German Words
@@EmperorProd I mean, I used 3 to show what LPG means, which was what I was talking about, combined with the fact that I'm German but sure, the comment is invalid because I used "German Words"
@@Hendricus56 I think he just meant that that is a very long word and that is quite german
@@badvideosto yea
@Safwaan idk how but it is not that hard for me to pronounce
Sure its not accurate
Just one little correction: you can't say east Germans were not allowed to leave the country. That's not correct. It was just difficult to go to western countries. But 1. It was not impossible, just difficult depending on the situation and 2. Travelling to the east European states was very common. You could also visit other communist countries like Vietnam if you had the money.
The DDR Museum in Berlin talked about this, which I appreciated. A family vacation to Cuba was actually very reasonably priced.
But the fact is that for a long time more wanted to go from East to West Germany than vice versa. The "anti-fascist rampart" prevented few from moving west to east, but many to the west.
yeah, my dad went to a few eastern european countries past the iron curtain when he was touring with his rugby team
@@devenscience8894 cause it was a fellow comrade country
Who is His name?I mean out host Portuguese man
The last point of East Germans not being able to travel during Soviet times is a lie. I'm a Bulgarian, have met many elderly Germans that used to be part of the East. Have heard stories from them, they've always loved travelling to Bulgaria for Vacations even during Soviet times. Tbh many of the old photos of my city ( Varna ) is made by East German Photographers who used to travel here frequently for vacation during the summer. Many have also complained how the city was a lot better during the communist era, lmao D:
Love Bulgaria from Germany
Yay communism! The worst system ever to be invented.
of course the city was better because of no immigration bullshit
Let me say something to some points, which are not as accurate as they should be:
1:00 "Seperate areas of occupation were established depending on where each side had invaded." That's only partly true. A large chunk of East Germany was invaded by American and British soldiers. The western allies had fought their way to the western shores of the river Elbe. That means whole Thuringia, half of Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt was occupied by western allies. But they traded that chunk of land away for a tiny part of Berlin. This was agreed in 1945 during the Yalta conference.
4:36 Demographics. Here you get to a key point, why the East is different from the West. 2 Million mostly young people left East Germany for a better life in the West in the years between 1990 and 2010. That was a brain drain, which cripples the East in so many ways. And almost every other map you show is influenced and distorted by exactly that brain drain.
5:45 Trash and simple interpretation: more money means more consume means more trash. That's very likely the best explanation.
5:49 "But that could also be something cultural. Although it's odd, since the evironmental concern is higher in the West" I don't think so. Both can't be the case. The evironmental concerns are pretty much evenly distributed among Germans. I wonder where you get that from? Votes? (EDIT: Oh yes, you do. LOL) If it was from votes, let me tell you, that one of the main driving forces for the reunification was an enviromentalist movement in the GDR. And most of these people still live in the East. But the higher concern today is wealth distribution, that's why they do not vote for the green party. In the eyes of most (fortunately not all) West Germans every East German is some kind of right wing racist idiot, who doesn't care about anything. That bullshit is pushed by mass media. And I absolutely do not like this trend.
6:00 "Perhaps more people live of their land." Bad guess. Private land ownership is very low in East Germany. Land is mainly owned by big companies nowadays. And that's due to the fact, that the socialist state owned most of the land before and that land was sold out by the "Treuhand" after the reunification. Google "Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft" or short "LPG". Private land owners were force to join the LPG by the communists after WW2. And that's why the size of farms is bigger in East Germany (4:25). And that's why private land ownership is way higher on average in West Germany.
If all your information is from maps, you will miss important facts. And all your conclusions are very distorted, simply you do not get the main point, why the East and the West is different: That brain drain that crippled the East.
Those are important points that were missed. I'm glad that someone points towards them.
Also alot of the east german economy is run by the west, wich leads to most of the profits to the west. When the economy is hit by some event its always the factorys in the east that are getting closed first.
You made a small mistake, LPGs weren't stateowned. They were coops (=Genossenschaften) so the land was still in the hand of the farmers but many farmers worked together on ther farm land.
There are still a lot LPGs in eastern Germany, I 've been in a village once were (almost) everybody works for the LPG. They had their own cantine and their village butcher sold the meat of the very own animals. People from the towns nearby go to the village and buy the local meat, vegetables, potatoes or lunch in the cantine.
@@leaval1178 Regarding trash, maybe there are still remains of a culture of re-use driven by shortages of products in a range of areas under communism.
@@derorje2035 Although that was quite murky. Yes, _technically_ the land was still owned by the farmers in the cooperative - but they usually couldn't sell or buy any of it, all the buildings, machines, and so on were owned by the LPG, and the individual farmers didn't have much influence over how the land was used. They couldn't just leave the LPG, and the most influential leader of an LPG was often appointed by the SED from outside, not by the collective.
So while they still technically owned the land, and it was technically a collective endeavour, that didn't mean much in practice.
A German friend told me that when Germany was split in two, West Germany changed its capital to a small town like Bonn because they always had in mind the reunification and restoration of Berlin as the nation's capital, which would have been much harder to do if they had changed the capital to a powerful city like Hamburg.
Bonn isn't a small town. 400,000 people live there.
@@nickbell4984, "relatively small". There... Now you can sleep at peace.
@@luisalmeida1391 ok but it's not small by any means.
Bonn was chosen because it was close to where chancellor Adenauer lived and he didn't want to move. That's the whole reason.
@@ijh867zter6, maybe. There's always some shady backstory in everything that happens everywhere, so I wouldn't be surprised. Anyway, I shared what a friend from Bonn told me.
This is my first comment on youtube, but I really felt like I have to say this.If you make videos like this, you should really team up with people from both sides you are talking about. As an eastern German I can say that the facts you were talking about were right, but your conclusions about the reasons were terribly wrong. Most of these things could have been explained easily to you by someone who knows about the culture and history of the country.
For example are not many people working in eastern germany in agriculture and most of the farm land is not owned by private farmers. During GDR times farmers were expropriated by the state and the farmers were forced to go into agricultural production communities. These communities often still exist as private companies. So only a low amount of people is owning all the farm land.
Another Example is the relation of tents to campers. It was way more common in the gdr to go camping and it was allowed to camp in other countries of the eastern block. So saysing the eastern germans were not allowed to leave the country is wrong. But it was very difficult to get a camper, since they were expansive and you had to wait more than a decade for them so there are not many old campers in the eastern part and nowadays most people can't afford.
Thanks for the explanations, quite interesting.
Thank you for your comment
Agree with content about the LPGs but not the travel. Our family only went camping because as teachers, my parents had no access to holiday complexes or hotels that was afforded to workers in factories, not out of choice. Camping was the only option.
Totally agree,
same with the "trash" map. In the east, we still have the mindset of not throwing things away so fast, because we could need them later. I think the "guesses" in this video fit the typical western view on east germany, but most are not true. They leave a bad impression on our beautiful east.
@@UnknownUser-fm4tq and quite a lot of the products that were produced in the GDR were built to last. As an example I bought a oven door that was produced in east Germany and I just had to clean it, sanded it a bit down and repainted it. Works great and I couldn't have bought a new Ofen door that was made out off thick cast iron nowadays. Also I'm gonna make a bet and say that the old oven door is gonna last longer than the new bigger one I bought for the top part of my smoker. Which btw was way more expensive and thinner....
I was born in former east Germany in the early 2000s and my grandparents were very involved when it came to raising me. Born after the unification, my homecountry was always considered a western country, when actually the former sowiet influence still played a role in my upbringing. It was kind of like being too western for the east, yet still too eastern to fully belong to the western nations.
Many people my age take big pride in being from the former GDR. They hold on to artefacts of their parents youth and feel some kind of nostalgia for a seemingly more simple time, which they never got to live in. (The German word for East is Osten or Ost for short, so we even got the word Ostalgie, to describe this feeling)
The older generation sometimes longs for this as well, saying things like "of course we were locked in, of course the system was kind of set up for failure, of course there were things like espionage, but the huge majority of us still had easy, good and affordable life's with everything they needed"
I was also born and raised here in the East and I'm probably as old as you. The GDR definitely had also good influences on the people: frugality, equality for women, better work ethic, helping each other without asking for reward, ... But in the end we're living in a capitalized world and the communism can't exist in that. And the second thing is that it was still a dictatorship (no communistic system can be lead democratic and there would always be people who would exploit this system). So as long as you did what they told you to do there was almost no problem. But if you wanted to travel, had another opinion, ... you had no happy life.
I am really grateful to live in the BRD and I don't honor the GDR but we should be proud of our grandparents who gave this country also good characteristics and made the best of it, just as they always do!
@@misterm3596 I totally agree with you!
Can I ask a question? I hope it doesn't sound disrespectful... I was told that in East Germany you weren't allowed to grow flowers in your front garden- is this true?
@@raincloudsradio8900 I've never heard of this, so ig it's a hoax. The only thing my grandma told me is that after WW2, it was more common to grow fruits and vegetables in ones garden, than to grow flowers.
I'm from former soviet republic and I must say that I can absolutely feel you :)
5:06 it's true that the population density is higher in the West, but this has also been the case prior to the Cold War. Especially the region around the Rhine river, which is part of the "blue banana", has always had the highest population density in Germany, and the Ruhr region with its coal mining and steel production was basically the economic center of Germany during the Industrialization era. Of course the Iron Curtain and its fall deepened the situation, since, as you mentioned, company HQs move to more economic stable regions (which leads to higher economic growth, which leads to higher population influx), but the roots of the different population densities lie in the decades before WWII.
This is definitely not true, my friend. Yes, the Ruhr region was always the industrial heart of Germany because of its sheer size. But the birthplace of german industrialisation lies in Saxony, especially between Chemnitz, Zwickau, Freiberg and the Ore Mountains. The German mechanical industry were born in and around the city of Chemnitz. Chemnitz itseld was called "The German Manchester" because of its huge pioneering factories. Especially Southern Saxony was also the region with highest population density in whole of Germany until the industrialisation had began in the Ruhr region. And Saxony was until WW2 one of the wealthiest regions in all of Europe, for most centuries the wealthiest region in Germany.
Your argument applies to Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, but regions like Saxony and also Thuringia or Middle Germany with the Leipzig-Halle-Magdeburg triangle were heavily industrialised regions and in many ways equally or even more developed than many parts of Western or southern Germany.
That's a fact many West germans don't know or like to forget. East Germany wasn't always poor and underdeveloped. It was a crucial part of Germany until WW2. The same applies to Berlin, which concentratred massive industrial, economical, financial and political power until the city got divided.
Especially Bavaria benefited massively from the decline of Berlin and East Germany. Siemens, AEG, Audi, Allianz, Lufthansa, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, Knorr-Bremse, Telefunken, Osram, Edeka and many others were born and grown up in Berlin and East Germany. They left because of the division.
Short: Berlin and East Germany are the unlucky losers of german history. Bavaria is the biggest lucker in german history.
@@arctix4518 Interesting to meet you here. You already said what i was just gonna say. I remember you from comments from years ago.
@@avior2951 Really. Well i feel honored :D
@@arctix4518 it is true what he said. Read about the historical development of the "blue banana" in central europe.
@@kanister21 The concept of the Blue Banana is not the answer to all questions. Read my comment and read especially about the history of Berlin, Saxony, SIlesia, Middle Germany and you will learn
I dunno, but there's a lot left out or misrepresented in this vid. e.g. the economic collapse of East was to large part caused by 1:1 exchange rate and privatisation almost always meant not that HQ moved to West but that company from the West bought and immediately closed the East German company etc etc.
One can clearly see that in East German case there was less of actual reforms or privatisation and more of market share and labour force takeover- you just have to look at Czechia: both regions had similar GDP/ capita and still have similar GDP PPP/ capita and were and still are similarly highly developed but Czechia didn't have Western cousin to be bought out by so they had to repair their own roads and homes and reform their economy by themselves and it took them more time but the same time they managed to preserve most of their industrial base and even many established communist brands are still around and thriving.
Thaks for that retrispective. I'm glad that I live in Pardubice in these good times.
I mean it was probably one of the toughest tasks to successfully execute. There are interviews with former politicians who were responsible during that time and they said that they were always aware of the social and political tension a more realistic ( lowering wages and exchanges rates according to the true status of the economy) unification could rise amongst the community. Basically, they were giving out theses presents in order to not make them feel like 2nd class German citizens. It is a very short-sighted view but one could also say that something like these never has really happened before. I also want to add that the big migration waves to West Germany probably were the main reason why the East has a hard time till this day. People just wanted to leave the socialistic past behind and start a new life in West Germany where they knew people always had it better than themselves in the East.
Not to mention he breezed over the fact that the USSR was officially State Atheist. Plus for some reason he equated the (United Socialist Soviet Republic) to Conservatives? Imagine saying that Nazism its equated to Zionism(Israeli Religious Nationalism). Polar opposites in many regards.
@@JamecBond To me the real reason seems to be the major reactionary wave that took place in the former socialist states after the Cold War
@@reintaler6355 Im not sure if your aware of this, but the term "reactionary" doesn't mean anything, and if anything describes Liberals, as they over react to everything. Its essentially just a slur, and not even an accurate slur at that. So by "Reactionary" I assume you mean....umm...people who arent communist? Like some kind of anti-communist sentiment? Which is for some reason conservative? Im 100% down to let conservatives take credit for being against mass genocide, well liberals seem to be in quiet support.
The reason for the camping difference is also that there weren't a lot of cars in the gdr. Why would you buy a trailer, if you are still waiting for your car.
And the thought of trying to tow anything with a Trabby is a scary thought 😀
@@scooter2099 But it worked!
And that car probably couldn't even tow a baby carriage
@@hardbassmonkey check this out haha watch?v=BQVvGC9W2bM
@@zenmonk5403 Nah, they weren't terrible cars in most ways, EXCEPT emissions, where they were truly awful. You can even see old footage of GDR cars being run in rallies.
8:46 No, in the old GDR, citizens could leave the country for holiday for example, but only in other European Soviet-influenced states ofc. Hungary, I believe was a popular destination
Bulgaria too
But only if were older and a good citizen.
Cuba too, and it's not even in Europe
Edit: You and your family could freely travel to Poland and Czechoslovakia
But you needed a traveling permit to Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the USSR and Cuba. Traveling to Cuba was also very expensive, so it was not common
@@waltervondervogelweide4638 ah I didn't know that
Definitely hungary. So much more people in hungary understand german than english, noticed when i visited hungary each time mainly around Balaton
Living in east Germany myself, i belief the main reason for the lower trash production is the low availability of goods in the GDR. Since people were not able to just buy any new product anytime they wanted to they stored old things instead of throwing them away because maybe they could use them in the future. This still happens today in almost any family.
Private household waste does not differ at all between East and West. I have no idea where this map came from, but if there is more industry in the west and south then more garbage is produced here too and it shows household and industrial garbage combined.
@@switch12345678 Yes Garbage like nazi ideology, that were used after the World War II by the german intllingence in countries like Croatia, with all the support or the USA.......
Many of the economic differences have decreased in severity since 2011-14, they are still there, but less pronounced. Fun fact though, the UK government through the London/South of England focussed economic planning of the last 50 years (and neglect of the North in terms of not providing structural support when manufacturing/heavy industries were failing there and not building modern infrastructure there) has managed to create an even greater economic divide without the country being split than the divide was in Germany in 2011-14 let alone now.
A single hub primary hub that gets all the resources is never going to create more prosperity than something like the systematic but lawfully ankered distribution of resources to those who need it.
Strong side gives 5% on top of earnings and capital earnings tax to weak side. That's the type of policy that shows solidarity.
I think Solidarity should be part of the constitution, just as a goal in spirit
The unemployment map here is from 2013. There is now a stronger north-south divide. In particular, North Rhine-Westphalia in the west with the Ruhr area as a former coal mining area has the same unemployment rate as some eastern German states. The current energy crisis could also exacerbate the problems in the industrial regions in southern Germany.
"East Companies went bankrupt"
that's not quite right.
After the Borders were opened the GDR continued to break appart. While 95% of all Companies still belonged to the State they tried to sell those as fast as possible to gain some money out of this situation. While no one from east germany (who would have been interested in) would have been able to buy those Companies there suddenly were some rich western germany Guys who not only have had money, but West german Mark. A currency that was worth A LOT in eastern germany back then.
Some of those rich Men bought those Companies and continued (and sometimes upgraded them) their work. Some very few bought the Companies and gave those former "Managers" a chance to buy the Company later for same price plus Bonus (many very old Companies have been saved this way)
but most of those rich guys (not only western germans but also foreigners) bought cheap companies, shut them down, took everything with worth and left right after this. some of those "corpses" are still there and belongs to those rich guys...
well. at least meanwhile the Politics started to do something about this. slowly.
They wont admit it - same thing happened in the rest of eastern Europe. Here in Bulgaria industry and agriculture was PURPOUSLY destroyed and sabotaged - the new neo-liberal goverment purpously let factories and companies fall into the hands of absolute nobodies and bandits, now called "entrepreneurs." lol They let these people just take the bank shares of the bulgarian industry, and let it die, for a very simple reason - the new goverments were pro-western, and they wanted to ensure our countries will be now forever dependent on western economies. Hell, if anything forced privatization is actually anti-free market lol - they used economic plans for privatization. And guess what happened to the agriculture? - the backbone of most east-european countries? They sent LIQUIDATION - not privatization, but liquidation commitees to destroy all state regulated institutions of agriculure, which used to help farmers all over sell their produce, make sure they arent cheated, and guarantee compensation if a natural disaster occurs. So yeah, all that "were now richer" is a myth - its only a half-truth, cuz only an insignificant percent actually got rich, while the rest got even poorer than before.
yeah, had seen some documentations about this. very sad :(
You feel it until today. I know many people that have had a good job until the borders were opened. Some of the companies they are working for has a very good international quality and some products of it you never get in the East (too expensive), because of export to the West. The worker were qulified a lot. And suddenly many people lost their job and being unenployment for more than 10 years show you, that society does not need you. There are no jobs, even when you apply for a job 100 times. And when you are old, you live in poverty and you think about the good old times.
What are they doing about this?
@@nomoneynodeal7690
Many old buildings got new purposes of use like living Environment or Clubs. In my Hometown is an old factory that became a green house for example.
7:20 I mean poland was also under russian influence, but poles became even more catholic and one of them even got elected as the pope, so there must be other big reasons
The politicians of the GDR played a big role in the religion. They weren't religious and therefore never considered the church to be helpful or relevant.
@@Penqvino this! there were own made politics of socialism in GDR separated from the sowjets, walter ulbricht a leader of GDR come from leipzig heart of german socialism, so u have maybe an anwser
Didn't the Poles have more of a resistance to the Soviets? The East Germans literally embraced communism and were even stricter than their Russian counterparts
@@raincloudsradio8900 yeah if u know the history of lenin and germany, then u know why ;)
The Poles have ambitions to be a power.
There are many more differences between West and East Germany. I looked up this topic because of a seminar project at the University Leipzig (where I was as an Erasmus student).
If you have a rent appartement in an East German city, the owner comes most likely from the West. East Germans are underrepresented in the management of big corporations in the East, in the courts, in journalism etc.
In 2018, 4 out of 154 German Ambassadors (2.5 %) came from the East. Only 2 out of 200 (1 %) of the Generals of the Bundeswehr came from the East.
East Germans make steadily about 17 % of the academic staff at universities, just like in the total population. This is a rare exception.
Yes, true elite positions are almost 100% populated by west Germans - East Germans are discriminated against. "Academic staff" not being an elite position ...
I've lived in a small town in east Germany since 2017 and it has changed a lot in that short period of time, there are a lot more foreigners and their children around so that map needs an update, and now there have come many Ukrainians. On one hand its more interesting because town is not as empty on other its a huge change especially for the older people that are afraid of foreigners.
As someone from east germany that lived quiet some time in west germany I can say something about the trash numbers. In east germany the people were insentivised to have their own compost, for small gardens, or behind the house. This still reduces „biological waste“ a lot because it does not go into the trash can, but to a compost. Also… people produce vegetables in the gardens and dont have to bus them, but I think the numbers of kilogramms of food that dont go in the regular trash but in compost are way more important.
Nice
so poverty.. west side do not have to grow their vegetables in their backyard
@@sten260 they dont do as much in my experience
@@sten260 is this a joke? east germany was certainly less developed, but unless you literally live in a feudal society (which the gdr absolutely was not) nobody relies on subsistence farming, much less vegetable gardens. that's only the shit anyone does only if they have enough free time to pick it up as a hobby
@@ok8012 during USSR a lot of people had to grow their own food, there was no way USSR was able to produce enough food for every person in the country with their horrible economic system
I was really just thinking about this, and I'm happy you have made a video on it! I believe that this divide will stay the same for a long time, due to how different it still is to this day. But that's just me.
The situation in the east has improved quite a bit since the GFC. Because of ever higher rents in western cities, more and more students choose to study in the west. That combined with the good education and investment, cities like Dresden or Leipzig are becoming tech hubs in their own right with e.g. Global Foundries setting up in Dresden, Intel in Magdeburg and Tesla in Grünheide
I think "more students choose to study in the east" is what you meant right?
Large Companies like Intel choose east over west because of financial support.
West is and was financially stronger and to minimize the gap between west and east there was a law made by the German Government. That's the only reason why huge production companies choose east over the west atm.
@@MoraKingdom yeah there are still more financial incentives for companies to settle in the east, but thats not all
lets take Intel @ Magdeburg, another location that was scouted was in bavaria and there the first thing that happened after it became public was the founding of a group with the goal to prevent Intel from choosing that location
and another point especially relevant for massive projects like the Intel fab is space, at the loaction in bavaria they just had that space and pretty much no chance to get an adjacent plot in the future while in Magdeburg they can double or triple the size without much hassle
@@lexel90 Also to be blunt...aren't east German workers cheaper but still well educated?
There's an interesting book called “The Making of the German Post-War Economy”, by Christian L. Glossner which discusses the philosophical overview and geopolitical forces that shaped West Germany's economy after WWII.
🤓
wusste garnicht, dass Lindner Bücher schreibt xd
Christian kann alles
They were actually reunited in 1990 not 1940, and since German Reunification Day is 3 October, it hasn't been quite 32 years. However, thank you for this video. In 1989 after the Wall fell, I had a discussion with a friend. I said Germany would be reunited within the year. He said it would take a decade at least. I was technically right, with over a month to spare, but in some ways, he was overly optimistic, as this video shows.
Separation didn't start with the wall, it startet in 1945. With different currencies, different laws, etc. The wall just made it more strict and stands as a symbol.
@@naturbursche5540 ok, not every difference started the same day, that's nitpicking. Currency was 48.
Curiously, a lot of this are result of the way the reunification was handled and not the division itself
The core problem is the lack of entrepreneurs. And the lack of support for entrepreneurs. The already successful ones left after the nationalization of their companies in the Sovjet Zone/GDR. And started anew in West Germany. And many more potential entrepreneurs followed.
The bulk of the industry in my (West German) hometown was started by local residents. Living in the town or nearby (not necessarily born there).
If you rely on "foreign" (out-of-town) investors you have two main problems
- you're in competition with all others hoping for the (big) "foreign" investor
- you have mostly just one subsidiary of many. Always with the risk of being less profitable than other subsidiaries.
This is not something which can be fixed short term at all. And it needs the understanding of the local people in charge (politics, administration).
Fantastic video! Keep up the good work man, you not only show the facts but explain them with sufficient knowledge. That's what makes this channel special.
Thanks!
Another interesting divide is Japan where the east and west are divided by the battle of Sekigahara and the Itoigawa-Shizuoka fault lines, which results in cultural differences
i think people from kyoto and tokyo dislike each other or just have a huge rivarly
The percentage of non-religious people in Eastern Germany may also be high because Eastern Germans were not protesting against the prosecution of the churches that much, they might have been accepting the whole situation. In the traditionally Catholic Poland, the societal effect of the Communist rule is now backfiring, resulting in a deeply conservative Catholic country.
Hungary, although divided by religion, has a centuries-old tradition of religious freedom, so there, too, could the end of the Communist era trigger the opposite effect.
I think being a former communist country doesn’t always mean a country still remains atheist. Like you said, Poland is 90% catholic today but Eastern Germany is like Czech Republic where 90% is atheist.
Religion disappears with education. If you have a scientific explanation for your observations, you don't need anything like "it was gods will". If people are too stupid to understand things, they are going to believe things.
Unlike expected, education is an important factor in the east.
@@holger_p Bullshit! (I don't often say this, but in this case I have to)
Religion and science are not opposite. If they were, we should close all universities of the world as soon as possible. It's always these "nature-science" human beings who think that they've eaten wisdom a thousand times but are not able to answer easiest questions! "Einbildung ist auch eine Bildung." as the Germans say
@@SELBLINK_in_your_area Why closing universities ? Close churches, that's enough. (well remain them open, if people enjoy them, it's just no source of knowledge, maybe it's a source of joy)
No, it's not human beings eaten wisdom, it's human beeings accepting their dumbness, their not knowing, their need to learn and do research.
It's the Religion who claims to know everything and to answer everything, it's for people who cannot accept to not know something.
It's exactly what you say: "not able to answer easiest questions ..." and accepting it.
A question is never easy, the answer can be easy. And of course the inventend answer is always easier to geht, than the researched answer.
So religion is for people who want easy answer. It's for believers, not for thinkers.
You try to put emotions in the game, shame of not knowing something. With emotions you destroy logic. It's as easy as this. Emotions make you lie.
@@holger_p You call me a liar and so I will report your comment.
Religion is "easy answers", aaah. No, it's not! Otherwise there wouldn't be the science of Theology. Knowledge and wisdom came to us by the Bible! It's the word that God gave to us, a holy truth and highest-levelled law. God's Law of the Holy Bible is ranked in top of any constitution of a state on Earth!
Although the churches are not strictly needed, they can lead us on our path of faith and truth finally finding God. He already proved himself, he came to us as human Jesus Christ but how could anyone who died yet come to life again? Can you explain the resurrection in a scientific way, why this was possible and who Jesus was if not God? (one of the three parts in trinity)
You should believe, yes, but what you tell is bullshit again because I am rather a thinker and do believe, too. Furthermore, a lot of scientists (I mean more than just physics/biology/chemistry) believe in God, too! (e. g. some of the philosophers) As I've already said, *IT IS NO OPPOSITE!*
The belief in God - Father Almighty, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and the belief in the Holy Catholic Church don't bring you away from thinking and scientific argumentation. Religion and science must work together instead of against each other! Universities and churches should unite.
I grew up in what used to be Eastern Germany and work in the used to be Western part for a few years now.
I agree that environmental awareness and outspokenness is more common in the western part. Although it might be added that there are a lot of environmental activists in the East too.
However, I perceive the reality of daily life in the western part as generally more wasteful. It is much more common to have a car-centric lifestyle, to have larger apartments or single-family-homes, buy new gadgets, new clothes and travel more and farther.
That is contrasted by how I grew up. Even if we were able to afford new stuff, that didn't mean we also did so. A TV set would only be replaced if it's broken beyond repair. Also, there often is only one TV set per family household. Clothes are used for decades, although they might be demoted from good clothes to stay-at-home clothes over time. Single use plastics were only reluctantly adopted. For most of my childhood up until the early 2000s, food could be bought mostly unpackaged. Traveling by train or bike is more the norm than the exception for a lot of people.
Funnily, most of that is not driven by consciousness or environmental concern, but by historical and often still present economic circumstances.
Things are changing though. Younger generations, including millennials (yes, we are not the youngest anymore but still young enough in this context) tend to adopt similar lifestyles all over the country. Then again, that is often driven by economic circumstances too.
I am from Croatia and once I met the person from the former East Germany and we had a lot in common and we could easily understand each other regarding some views to the world. On the other side people from the former West Germany were like child robots to me:).
Selber Kinderroboter ey was soll das denn heißen
@@qwert314oderwat he probably means that the Easterners are mean and cynic, while the Westerners (in Eastern view) are too naive and obedient (to the rules of society).
@@rcl5555 Das klingt bisschen komisch wenn man bedenkt, dass sich in Westdeutschland zur Zeit der Trennung die Punkerbewegung entwickelte und viele junge Leute demonstrierten. In Ostdeutschland war die Loyalität zur SED wichtig für Schulabschlüsse und Jobs. Das heisst eigentlich war es zumindest zu Zeit der Trennung genau umgekehrt.
I think he means eastern were more family oriented while western more career oriented
I prefer democracy over communism even if that makes me a ''child robot'' 🤷♂️
“If you invest all your energy in economics, world commerce, parliamentarianism, military engagements, power and power politics, -if you take the quantum of intelligence, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming that you embody and expend it all in this one direction, there there won't be any left for the other direction. Culture and the state - let us be honest with ourselves - these are adversaries.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche,
camping and hiking and 'healthy outdoor pursuits' were heavily promoted within the USSR with millions of miles of organised hikes, hostels etc, and were very, very popular. "Tramping" is an entire lifestyle culture in Czech Republic (or was in 2010 era)
As someone coming from the East, you can also see the big difference in architecture, especially in neighbourhoods and suburbs. The East have bigger houses, but small flats, which are both colourful and traditional. The West has more of a variety of houses, different looks and styles and sizes
East Germans may not care about the environment as much as West Germans (I think it's because having enough money is their first concern), BUT we are definitely a big fan of recycling! Not only did we have to repair everything (buying new wasn't an option, either the product was sold out or expensive), we also valued trash separation a lot. My grandfather separated every butter wrap for example, to recycle the aluminium in one can and the paper layer in another. We also produced products to last and still value quality over having the newst stuff. My old East German vacuum is still running, while my grandma recently bought her third vacuum in ten years.
While you are talking about the east-west division, I am also seeing in your maps a clear north south division, with the south much richer, and prosperous than the west north. It would be interesting to also analyze that.
One factor for the richer south is the automobile industry which is mostly located around Stuttgart. Germany has two big industrial centers, the Ruhrgebiet and the Metropole region Stuttgart. While the Ruhrgebiet lost a lot of industry, the automobile industry is one of the factors, why Germany is rich. The automobile industry is still developing and growing and provides for Germany but mostly for the south.
In many ways it does make a lot of sense to divide Germany into North, South, and East. The differences between East Germany and the rest are at a scale that those between North and South are not as much visible, but if you were to look only at West Germany, the North-South divide is also quite significant.
I think this goes back centuries when North Germany was influenced by the protestant Prussians and South Germany by the catholic Austrians. Also, South Germany is more mountainous and has more natural resources, while North Germany has little in that regard but very good farmland. North Germany also has direct access to the North Sea and Baltic Sea, while the South has access to the Rhine and Danube.
The state North-Rhine-Westphalia sits in the middle of the two. Both in its geographical location, but it also had a lot of coal and has the Rhine go right through it, which makes it perfect for heavy industry.
Generally speaking, the protestant North Germany has always been the heartland of the social democrats, while South Germany has more dominant conservatives. But I think that is a result of the cultural and economic factors mentioned above.
@@mareikes5923 regarding car manufacturers, it's not just Mercedes and Porsche in the Stuttgart area, it's also Audi in Ingolstadt and BMW in Munich in the South.
Baden-Württemberg has always been a great area for smaller businesses and small-time entrepreneurs, they are the real reason the area is wealthy. The tech industry is also very strong in the Stuttgart area, IBM's first quantum computer is located there. The south is WAY more than just cars.
One thing to note for the trash difference ist also that a recycling mentality in east germany developed because of the shortage of supply
Yes. I was born in East Germany in the early 1980s and I recall from elementary school some sort of collection campaigns of paper or glass for recycling.
@ same for me, can confirm. as a child, you could even earn some money for collecting paper etc :)
@@Zireael83 It was outright capitalism! You supplied capital (handcart) and your labor on a freelance basis - I could earn good pocket money by collecting old paper and glass from people. ;)
What you can also see on the map is the north south divide in Germany which is older but still pronounced.
I recently moved from north west Germany to the old DDR part and I must say something: all those stereotypes about east Germany are only that: lies. People are here more friendly with newcomers like me (I'm spaniard), towns and villages are more beautiful, I'm getting more money for the same job, landscapes are incredible... even weather is better! The only thing I don't like is that they drive their cars like italians. In fact, east Germany reminds me north of Italy which I love.
@Tim Onk Ich bin nach Jena gezogen. .. well, nicht in Jena , weil richtig teuer ist (ich wohne alein) aber 25 min entfern mit dem Auto. So weit so gut
Stell dir mal vor du hättest keine spanischen Wurzeln sondern, sondern im nahen Osten und wärst 2014/15 nach Dresden gekommen. Ich glaube, du hättest dann eine andere Meinung.
@@olpqay Das stimmt. Es wäre eine ganz andere Geschichte my friend.
@@olpqay Blödsinn. Ich war ein paar mal bei Pegida, da sind regelmäßig auch Ausländer als Redner aufgetraten, auch Muslime und Schwarze, sogar auf Englisch wenn sie kein Deutsch konnten. Es ging nie um stumpfen Ausländerhass, sondern um die Forderung nach einer qualitativen Einwanderung anstatt unserer (bis heute anhaltenden) quantitativen Einwanderung.
Warst du mal da? Ich habe bei Pegida auch unter den "Spaziergängern" viele Ausländer getroffen, viele Tschechen, Polen, Russen, Ukrainer, ... sind mitgelaufen. Und die meisten standen dem politischen Islam und der Masseneinwanderung ebenfalls skeptisch gegenüber.
@@olpqay Ist Dresden also wirklich die erste sichere Stadt, wenn man aus dem nahen Osten flieht?
The East has higher birth rates which I would consider positive when thinking about demographic shift. Probably it has to do with more traditional values.
Still, a lot of people from the East would go to the West due to a lack of opportunities.
Birth rates inversely correlate with wealth pretty much everywhere in the world (richer = fewer babies, this holds true when you compare societies or individuals within the same society). So I'd expect the poorer East to have higher birth rates even if all else was equal.
ya africa has a high birth rate too, i don't think that's a positive
@@sten260 Africa has birth rate that leads to population explosion. The East of Germany with 1,6 children/woman even below sustaining the population but still more than other regions in Germany.
"Traditional values" lol, did you miss the part where the majority of eastern Germans aren't religious and the farming regions are all corporatized? The Communists delivered one punch against traditions and capitalism delivered the other.
Edit: The real reason is likely lower wealth and better access to child care, both mentioned in the video.
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs By that logic, East Germany would have been quite wealthy in the 1970s - because that is the time the birth rate in the GDR fell below replacement. :)
regarding the trash, I have a theory. I think in East Germany due to the scarcity of many goods under Socialism people became very frugal and also quite creative. So instead of throwing something away, people may be more likely to reuse it or turn into something else (for example making jam from strawberries after their best before date). Generally I think that DIY stuff is a bit more common in the Eastern Block states. I also was surprised to see how many people in my town go foraging for berries, elderflower or mushrooms. Given that that is sort of also an old people thing to do and the East is older than the West it sort of makes sense.
You said there are many more farms in the east but it’s the complete opposite. You even showed the map that showed that the farm SIZE is bigger in the east and the logical consequence of that is that there are less farms there
You can still see the old borders from satellite view on google maps. Farm sizes in the East were state owned and therefore much bigger than in the west where farmlands were private owned. Via satellite you see the small patches in the west and big patches in the east.
This was a very interesting and light-hearted video. Thank you!
Very good video! Just pointing out the facts without making one part looking better than the other one. I want to add some points to this:
*1. Electoral results:* The German party DIE LINKE ("The left one") still gets better results in the East because it developed from the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) and after the so-called "unification" it first continued as PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism). Later it united with the West German WASG (Wahlalternative Arbeit und Soziale Gerechtigkeit = Vote Alternative Work and Social Justice), but people still have in mind rather the past of SED and PDS. A main point of the Left Party is to reach social justice for people in East Germany, so East Germans tend stronger to choose this party than West Germans. Saarland was an exception because of the popularity of Oskar Lafontaine. (but he has left politics yet)
Although its name changed, DIE LINKE Party still targets a new social order of democratic socialism. (instead of capitalism)
*2. Another difference:* Germany is very different between North and South. The dialects sound different and there is different culture. It's hard to explain, but I try to give an example by the point of religion: Although my region in West Germany where I live has an officially high number of Christs who are church members, the belief is much stronger in the South at least concerning my generation. I've came to know some people (but it will be many more) who are still church members but either don't believe in the church or don't believe in God at all. They just stay members because you have to pay a small amount of money (Bearbeitungsgebühr) if you want to leave the church. There is also the church tax but its amount depends on your income, so people who have no or just a low income don't have to pay the church tax and so many of them stay church members because leaving would be more expensive or because they just don't think about it that much.
You shouldn't use datasheets from 2011. There is a lot going on in Germany in many terms. Last year, there was a net outflow from regions like Baden-W. and Hamburg to regions like Saxony and Brandenburg. East German cities started to become more and more expensive and are now hubs of gentrification. Some dark spots are persistent, like Sachsen-Anhalt and Mecklenburg, but they are also rural Bundesländer anyways. As a Non-German, I think that the "Aufbau Ost", the rebuilding of the GDR (DDR), showed awesome results. The German East is very beautifully rebuilt and looks more refurbished as the West. Also, thanks to the underdevelopment, rural areas in the poorer regions look still natural and untouched.
Infos from an East German person:
3:40 lots of companies got sold to foreign investors, some of them Westgerman. Some used the opportunity to buy up oponents on the market and simply close the factories. native Eastgerman people most of the time didnt have the money to buy their own factories.
6:10 Socialist societies produced less trash since everything you could throw away could be used for something else. Reperation and upcycling were always a thing, since ressources were shorter and most of the high quality goods that were produced were shipped to capitalist countries to get some rare "westmoney" for the state.
8:20 the high amount of extremist voters mostly roots in worse living conditions and a feeling of inferiority. Additional the difference between west and east haven't changed a lot since '89. sure, both are richer now, but the east is still as far away as he was ~30 years ago. Eastern Germany is seen like p.e. the Southern States of the US - as kind of rednecks. This leads to an anti-position in the population and high anti posture against "those on the top"
8:45 Eastgermans were alowed to travel. but travelling to capitalist states was quite hard and without family there and some kind of safety net for the state (so you come back) pretty impossible.
although i live in east germany i can say from my own experience that it is also very easy to live in east germany whenever i am in west germany and drive through cities there they are usually dirtier than the ones in east germany (an exception is berlin)
The West has always been more densely populated (going back centuries, if not millennia), so that isn't too surprising, although yes, that difference is certainly exacerbated by the other difference in prosperity and opportunity among the two regions.
Naah Saxony and Thuringia both were almost as industrialised as NRW. And had a really high population density as well.
@@blabladuweier8654 Not just almost. They were on par. Saxony and Thuringia were one of the industrial main hubs in germany.
Finland has a interesting divide between Sweden controlled west and Novgorod(Russia) controlled east considering that the border was established in 1323.
I'd love to see a video about it! Terveisiä Puolasta :)
siinä on kyseessä muinaisempi syy,kuin pähkinäsaaren rauha.
1:20 Whenever a country uses the word "democratic" in its name you can be sure it's the opposite 😂
When the GDR was established, it was 100 times more democratic than most "democratic" colonial empires of the West, which had plenty of slaves that werent allowed to vote, but were forced to make wealth for them. lol
Dr congo
Looking at the comment section, same goes for 'party x is not extremist'. 😅 If so many people feel the need to say that, there might be something in the bush after all...
Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)
Not only a country. Also if a political party uses "democratic" in its name you can be sure it is totalitarian.
“You see the mistakes of one system-the surveillance-and the mistakes of the other-the inequality-but there’s nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. “And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.”
--Anna Funder
Not sure if the inequality is a mistake
@@HouseJawn well, if 1% has billions of $$$ and the rest pay 3 months of their salary to see a doctor, yeah, inequality is a mistake.
@@HouseJawn It is. Unless you think that that's how capitalism works, and approve it. But still, it is.
@@HouseJawn wtf dude
You think today's surveillance is better?
Found it quite striking that although the east of Germany obviously has the higher unemployment rates, the Ruhr area appears to be doing not that great in this sense either (I'm guessing due to the closure of a lot of the coal/mining and steel industry?).
just read about "treuhand" and u know why ;)
Yep, the Ruhr area is suffering from the end of its traditional industries (as you said, coal and steel). It has struggled with that transition for a few decades now, with ... mixed results. In the end, the effect is similar - relatively rapid de-industrialisation led to a decline in wealth and employment.
Very informative video,it covers pretty much all the aspects of the topic.
Its a very nice work about my Country. Greetings from (East-) Germany.
North and south Germany to a lesser extent. There are also divides between specific cities or regions and the rest of the country, such as South Schleswig (North Schleswig is part of Denmark), Bavaria, Berlin, Hamberg, etc.
1. East Germany was a shop window to the West and as such, it was much richer than all other communist states.
2. Generally, this divide has more to do with former Prussia being an rural state with predominant agriculture sector and rest of German kingdoms getting much more industralised in XIX century.
3. AfD has little to do with conservatism, it is a populist party like Spanish Vox fuelled by economical discontent.
West Germany would have been just as poor as East Germany, if the french took the Rheinland for a few decades like they did after WW1, and if the US didnt help Germany with the Marschall plan. Especially if they had to pay all the victors reparations, without outside loans, there wouldnt have been an "economic miracle" - it would have been a second Weimar republic disaster.
it still has quite a bit too do with conservatism too though
The AfD is less fueled by economical discontent. The AfD rose to power during the migrant crisis as a reactionary anti-immigration party. They literally went from being a brand new fringe party to getting around 15% of the vote.
@@danielschnitzer7044 that's not true. It was the euro crisis. They did get more popular after Merkel made a speech welcoming everyone which accelerated migration in Greece and Italy to Germany
@@meganoobbg3387 No! Agreed that the Marshall plan may have speeded up the reconstruction a little, that's all. The German government simply spent the money more wisely than Britain or France did. The latter two received much more in aid than Germany.
"We needed 40 years to overcome East Germany. Sometimes in history, one has to be prepared for the long haul and not ask after four months if it still makes sense to keep up our demands." ~Angela Merkel
Angela Merkel - horrible person.
Great video, but one thing I would like to add- while these maps are interesting the color scale is not linear to a linear scale in raw data. That is to say if for example, for the disposable wage we scale the color as white equal to zero and darkest blue equal to highest then the difference would not be this staggering. But I guess the main purpose of the maps is to show the difference between east and west but this is an important detail to keep in mind, because by looking just at the map's color scaling it might seem that eastern Germany is a developing nation compared to western which is not the case at all. Even eastern Germany is much more developed than most parts of the world.
Amazing video. It is true. Thank you so much!
In your short history introduction you forgot that eastern Germany was given to Poland and was polanised and millions of german people were expelled
The extreme east was ceded to Poland, and became Pollinated. If those lands were returned to Germany they would have to be germinated. Lol!
I love how you used germinated and pollinated lmao
@@andrewhammel5714 🤣
That's why it was a comparison between west Germany and central Germany.
Eastgermany is cooler because we can drive 60 with our Simson Mokicks 😂
Also i think the east makes less trash because we are used to shortage from soviet days and so we reused a lot of things which would had landed in the trash in west germany
And as for the trailer issue, i think the answer is the powerlessness of the eastern cars because as an example the 26hp Trabant already had power problems without a trailer
Though it is a good car XD
In some aspects the very east of Bavaria has simillar results to East Germany.
Oh! Why is that?
Which aspects?
In the first 5 seconds of the video when he talked about his last video, I decided to subscribe because I'd like to watch videos about such content.
I'm not joking.
Amazing video, i’m glad that i just found your chanel.
It's also interesting what is recently changing. Berlin is the fastest growing city nominally in Germany (even though thousands are moving from Berlin to other cities right outside of it) and many new start ups are found there. So the importance of Berlin will rise once again.
But it's not just Berlin. In general more people move to cities in East Germany because of space and cheaper apartments.
Growing from 3.3 million to 3.6 million from 2000-2021 is just 10%. It's really not that much. Maybe it's a high rate in germany, but on low level. It's mainly urbanisation, cause the overall population in Germany doesn't really grow.
The importance of Berlin will not increase, because half of the city is still unemployed
It would be interesting a video about the differences between South states and North states of the USA
Thank you die this video 👍.
Even after more then 30 years, Germanys unification is still incomplete. And honestly I doubt it ever will. I say this beeing a person from Thuringia, born at the state border to Bavaria and now living in Erfurt. As already mentioned in earlier comments, the current economic and therefore political situation is caused by how the eastern part was treated after 1990: many closed downs of companys for more or less good/bad reasons caused a huge rate of unemploymlent. In a tv report it was stated, the economic strenght of eastern Germany in mid-90s was only a half compared to 1990. This lead to a huge disappointment on the unification within the population in the area, fear of loosing properity, anger on how the life experiences of many people where denied (even until today). Thus caused many (young) people to leave their home for better work and income. The increased popularity of parties such as the AfD is the result of all this points and the (as it seems) missing will to finally resolve the differences such as work time or income (its not true anymore that living in the eastern part of Germany is always cheaper than in the western/southern part especially in relation of income).
However it is necessary to say, that the way how people treat each other does got better over the last three decades in most cases.
I seriously wonder if there should have been a Marshall Plan-style program in the 1990s for eastern Germany and Eastern Europe more broadly. Perhaps it could have given them a bigger economic boost and allowed them to stabilize better. Instead, some of those nations have fallen deeply behind, with no catch-up in sight. With the events of the last year added in, as an American I can't help but wonder if we and other major countries should have done more.
@@thunderbird1921 In fact billions of Euros were spent e. g. into infrastructur such as highways and railway system in eastern Germany (so-called "Aufbau Ost"). This however lead to other issues, where the western parts felt disadvantaged because of lacking investments in those areas. But I agree there should have been a much broader plan to help the eastern parts of Germany and Europe in general after 1990.
@@thunderbird1921 You will be surprised to learn the west-Germany didn't use a single $ from the Americans. The "Wirtschaftswunder" in the 50's happen because they still had a strong industry and the Morgentau plan was never fully realized.
Thanks for your videos
Wow! Alton IL newspaper image. I grew up near there.
I also saw the line in 1989 flying to Berlin from Frankfurt at night. Back in 1989 it was almost as stark at night as the line between North and South Korea. East Germany was largely dark on the ground until you got to Berlin, which was well lit by both the East and the West.
If you look at the population density maps, that's where most of the population is concentrated, in the west, and around Berlin.
As an old retired Scotsman living in Germany. Found your presentation first class and interesting
im from germany and i can say that east germans gets also disciminated from the western after the the unification and even the discrimination is now weaker it is still fell able
Stimmt, aber das nächste Mal schreibst Du bitte deine englischen Sätze so, dass man sie auch versteht
@@Kameliius His English is completely understandable with only very minor errors….
my english is bad i get it
@@perfekterfail2049 stop using english at first place, if you have some self respect.Germany is an Yankee boot licker.
@@Kameliius Digga dann schreibt doch dein Kommentar auch auf English damit wir es auch verstehen.
I would love to see a video on how the British empire has influenced current borders today
Nicely done the graphics and explanation. 👍
For those wondering, the song at the end is "Elizabether Marsch" or "Geschwindmarsch nach Motiven aus Quadrillen" (it has 2 names)
God bless you
as a german that was born in the east and moved to the west for work, i can say that i think that most of the stuff in this video seems true^^
was a real culture shock moving here. i didn´t know that this part of germany is so religious. i thought that most modern western countries don´t have many religious people anymore because religion should have stayed in the middle ages ^^
I see this as a great win, as religious people are very adequate and very pleasant to talk to, given that I myself am not religious
100% agree, you don't need to be religious to be a decent human being
You should have more respect for religion, it was religion that brought us out of the middle ages! Interestingly, the most non-religious part of Germany is also the part that seems to be stuck in the middle ages. Perhaps that Christian work ethic has something to do with why East Germans are so lazy.
Was recently looking at bauland prices in Germay and was a bit confused about the still stark price differences between western and eastern germany. I really thought 30 years of development would have improved it a lot. Turns out to not really be the case.
property in the new states is cheap compared to western states. But at the same time wages are lower there and there's less work, while companies in the economic heartland of Germany face problems to hire enough staff
"the industry in east germany wasn't that bad, the problem is that it was state-owned" - [from what I remember from school in Germany, correct me if I'm wrong] the way east German industry worked was that every (state-owned) industry was on it's 'own'. When these industries had what looked like unacceptable looses to the government, they bundled them up into complexes with other very profitable industries. Then, after the wall came down, these complexes where either shut down or sold. (For the technology they used or just for the build space) Because, even tho east Germany wasn't ahead from west Germany it had some valuable technologies that west Germany didn't. (e.g. use of lignite to generate power)
That the industry was state-owned also ment those factories owned their production to the state. That meant in reality when they enter unification the factories had debts with the state, which was not a fortunate situation to start with. Secondly, the privatisation policy of the time was focused on selling and gaining the highest proceed - and less on maintaining production and workplaces.
I'v also heard that in Soviet Russia, the state gave positive benefits to companies that were actually faltering- much different to capitalism, whereby if your company fails, it fails. Of course the Soviet way cost the state alot of money for not much reward...
@@raincloudsradio8900 there are actually articles and books by Stalin in which he argues for building unprofitable, but strategic factories to achieve independence from the West in machinery building - at the expense of producing fewer consumer goods. This partially explains why common people always lived with shortages - but at least their country could single-handedly produce tanks from its own steel and with completely domestic parts - a success, I guess?..
Khrushchev BTW tried to introduce a market element in otherwise fully planned Soviet economy, and people even liked that (read up Kosygin reforms). Unfortunately, he was ousted shortly before it took place and it was then slowly rolled back by his successor.
great vid! pretty much spot on I'd say. stats will have changed - in some case to the better, in others to the worse. I think 2 addtional considerations may be worthwhile: 1) number of universities and their (re-) founding date, and how student numbers developed since, and 2) in 1990s gov funding allowed large investments, which in several cases was exploited by capitalists who set up huge production facilities but closed them down the moment they were less profitable - making people even less happy and financially secure in eastern Bundesländer (plus maybe 3) quite a few gov-linked organisations were moved to eastern parts in order to improve income levels there, e.g. Umweltbundesamt and similar)
Great video!
In East Germany, pensions for women are often higher. In East Germany, many women went to work themselves. But in the west, many women stayed at home and now need their husbands' pensions. In the east, however, the pensions are even lower. But with every pension increase, the East gets a bonus for the increase. This should happen until the areas have become equal. But there are more pensioners in the east than in the west.
well, it is 32 years after the unification... we should watch out, if there are really pensionists left who worked in the GDR. This system is over-due.
Watching videos like this is very interesting because it makes me think if Germany still has these problems and divide after 30 years of reunification, how bad it would be for North and South Korea. South and North Korea divide is much bigger and North Korea is far worse than East Germany ever was, so I can imagine the problems will be like this but x10 worse. So many people in my country are now against reunification, especially since young people already have it hard and have no relatives in the North.
I think the separation of Korea is just going on for too long now (~70 years), so that every time there are less people left with some kind of relation to the other side of the border (family, friends etc.) or even remember the time when the country wasn't separated. For younger and even middle-aged people this must feel like an ancient legend or fairy tale or something. In Germany, separation lasted "only" 30-40 years, so many people still had relations to the other side. Also, separation wasn't as strict as in Korea. People could visit each other, send letters and keep contact. I think, if Korea ever would be reunited, it will be a much harder challenge because it will feel like 2 completely different worlds.
What is "worse"? Neither East Germany had nor North Korea has to suffer from capitalism!
If South Korea accepts the 3 conditions which are inscripted at the Unification Memorial in Pyongyang, reunification can be great in Korea in 2040 or later!
I think the time of unification in Korea is not there yet, but maybe it will be there in app. 20 years.
@@andreaslojen8616 Furthermore, Germany didn't have anything like the Korean war so both political systems could grow in the condition of peace. Korea has not officially ended the war yet but only made a weapon usage stop.
Czech Republic and Poland entered the EU, so now there are only open borders around Germany now. (the other borders were open ones even before) No borders divide us German people from our neighbour people anymore! Iron Curtain has fallen years ago.
@@andreaslojen8616 yes and also the world wanted reunification in Germany but China doesn’t want a unified Korea because they don’t want to lose the control they have of North Korea and Japan doesn’t want a strong unified Korea beating them. We are so different now so now we don’t feel close to them anymore especially only 80 year olds will have relatives in the North. I don’t want reunification unless it can work well which is unlikely.
@@johnpark7972 It can work, though it has to be a lot more gradual than the German Reunification.
Kind of what the East African Federation is trying rn
About the farms. At the end of the DDR the farm collectives were privatized and the workers made shareholders, a few very well connected Stasi officers and political figures who had access to western currency bought those shares up for cents on the dollar and built massive farms that way, while the workers wanted western currency fast and sold easily. One heir of nobility stated, that his familys land was taken by the communists to end the nobility and their big farms but nowadays the new farms of the old communists are way bigger than those of the nobility ever were.
On Population density. middle germany (the former DDR) always was less populated, because the big population centers of the west were often where industry was and the east was much more farming country while the industrial part (Breslau etc) is in nowadays Poland.
Also a very important division is the headquarters of important newspapers and TV-production, not counting Berlin none of the big newspapers are from the former DDR also none of the big TV-productioncompanies are based there, leading to a lack of understanding of the people and a lack of representation of genuine east german sentiment within the political discourse of Germany as a whole.
The area of the former GDR is divers in itself with highly populated areas in Saxony, Berlin or even Thuringia. Those part were traditionally strong in industry. On the other hand Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Brandenburg or the Northern half of Saxony-Anhalt are sparsely populated and agriculture was traditionally more dominant.
But in general the density of jobs financed by the government or federal institutions is in the West 4 to 5 times higher than in the East.
Great video as always.
I've been looking for this
Germany is also devided in north and south aldi
Germany is one of my favourite countries in the EU! 🇩🇪
Fun Fact: The EU is a corrupt organization. They've always been a corrupt organization.
@ZegramoLeSchyzo you are right
I'm sorry.
Just kidding. Southern Germany is a great place.
Hm did mean West or East Germany? Or Bavaria?🤔😉😅😂
@@tommay6590 East
Also interesting to note is that West Germany was benefiting from the immigration of highly educated East German people to supplement their shortage for highly educated workers, after the fall of the wall. This drained said workforce from east germany itself and uplifted the economic development in f. e. bavaria.
Thank you. Very interesting
8:30 eastern Germany is near the "Mecklenburgische Seenplatte" which is basically a wetlands-foresty type of region with many rivers, lakes and forests with small camping grounds. Usually you travel there via Kajak and migrate from camp to camp and sleep in your tent. I guess that this used to be one of their go to activities in vacations and persists to this day.
You said that east Germany only had better results in 2 of the categories but I as a west German would actually say 4, the fact that they produce less trash per person is better and also the fact that east Germany has less foreigners is better.
unfortunatly less and less people think about that, their own culture and to preserve it
thank you for your comment, you are right.
i have nothing against foreigeners and have many as friends.
but i really like walking through streets and not only hering foreign languages spoken but also german, same with traditions etc. having imigrants is a good thing but probably not if they made up over 90% of the people that are living in some regions. integration doesn´t work like that. i know many that don´t even bother learning german anymore.
that was different in the past. the imigrants back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s... in west & east, at least tried joining an and make some of the german culture their own (and learn the language).
i like the german language so this development is definitely something a can not feel very good about.
@@Zireael83 u describe the main problem,
immigration yes but it needs adaption of local tradition at least in parts or no peace at all
That farm size difference seems backwards to me. I am no expert, and if anyone can enlighten me, I'll appreciate it. First, small farms impede mechanization, and mechanization allows one farmer to handle more land, increasing efficiency and freeing workers for other industries. Second, I though that one of the drivers of the British industrial revolution was farm consolidation, with landlords combining many small farms into one, with the displaced farmers taking factory or other industrialized jobs like railroads, construction, etc.
Or maybe I am missing something, or maybe I have my history upside down.
small farms in east germany were united in a low amount of really large farms. the previous owners still worked tha land, but under just one large organisation.
see LPG - landwirtschafliche produktionsgenossenschaften. (agricultural production cooperative)
farms in the west underwent no huge unifications.
Yeah, East German farms are large for two main reasons:
1. Soviet land reforms combined smaller farms into large mechanized agricultural units.
2. The land up there is for the most part flat and wide-open, so there are few natural boundaries that would limit the size of each plot. You can see on the map that farms in north-eastern _West_ Germany are also larger, for the same reason.
You can find these differences in every country. And about foreigners not living in the east of Germany, well it’s less job opportunities so go figure.
I recommend 'The Shortest History of Germany' by James Hawes. It looks at how the former borders of the Roman Empire are still visible in modern Germany.
as a german I just want to say well done, great graphs and explenations or hypothesis :)