Yet more evidence for the theory that Communism “deep froze” social attitudes.
Now yes, you can rejoinder with a comparison to Nazi voting patterns.
But look…
- The borders of the former DDR are very cleanly delineated. The AfD’s share of the vote there ranged from 19% in Mecklenburg-Vorprommern to 27% in Saxony. In contrast, they only got 12% in Bavaria, the most nationalist Wessie state.
| State[8] results in % | CDU/CSU | SPD | AfD | FDP | LINKE | GRÜNE | all others |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Saxony |
26.9 | 10.5 | 27.0 | 8.2 | 16.1 | 4.6 | 6.7 |
 Thuringia |
28.8 | 13.2 | 22.7 | 7.8 | 16.9 | 4.1 | 6.5 |
 Brandenburg |
26.7 | 17.6 | 20.2 | 7.1 | 17.2 | 5.0 | 6.3 |
 Saxony-Anhalt |
30.3 | 15.2 | 19.6 | 7.8 | 17.8 | 3.7 | 5.7 |
 Mecklenburg-Vorpommern |
33.1 | 15.1 | 18.6 | 6.2 | 17.8 | 4.3 | 4.9 |
 Bavaria |
38.8 | 15.3 | 12.4 | 10.2 | 6.1 | 9.8 | 7.5 |
 Baden-Württemberg |
34.4 | 16.4 | 12.2 | 12.7 | 6.4 | 13.5 | 4.5 |
 Berlin |
22.7 | 17.9 | 12.0 | 8.9 | 18.8 | 12.6 | 7.0 |
 Hesse |
30.9 | 23.5 | 11.9 | 11.6 | 8.1 | 9.7 | 4.4 |
 Rhineland-Palatinate |
35.9 | 24.2 | 11.2 | 10.4 | 6.8 | 7.6 | 3.9 |
 Saarland |
32.4 | 27.2 | 10.1 | 7.6 | 12.9 | 6.0 | 3.9 |
 Bremen |
25.0 | 26.3 | 10.0 | 9.3 | 13.5 | 11.0 | 4.3 |
 North Rhine-Westphalia |
32.6 | 26.0 | 9.4 | 13.1 | 7.5 | 7.6 | 3.8 |
 Lower Saxony |
34.9 | 27.4 | 9.1 | 9.3 | 6.9 | 8.7 | 3.6 |
 Schleswig-Holstein |
34.0 | 23.3 | 8.2 | 12.6 | 7.3 | 12.0 | 2.7 |
 Hamburg |
27.2 | 23.5 | 7.8 | 10.8 | 12.2 | 13.9 | 4.5 |
- While the share of the vote for the Nazis in March 1933 did indeed rise from the west and south to the north and east, it was a gradual incline, not a cliff.
Share of the Nazi vote in March 1933.
And even this map is to a large extent an artifact of the bloc voting habits of German Catholics, most of them concentrated in the south and west, and of whom almost half traditionally voted for the Center Party.
And there was also the Bavarian People’s Party locking away 28% of the vote in Bavaria.
Meanwhile, Saxony – the most pro-AfD state in Germany today – was actually far more Leftist than average in 1933. Communists and Social Democrats got a combined 48% of the vote there, relative to the national average of 37%.
| NSDAP | DNPP | Party Center | SPD | CNG | The Bavarian People’s Party | Other | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total | 43.91% | 7.97% | 11.25% | 18.25% | 12.32% | 2.73% | 3.63% |
| Prussia | 43.73% | 9.05% | 14.22% | 17.01% | 13.21% | 2.78% | |
| Bavaria | 43.03% | 4.11% | 3.01% | 15.53% | 6.27% | 24.21% | 3.84% |
| Lower Saxony | 44.96% | 6.52% | 1.25% | 26.25% | 16.49% | 4.53% | |
| Württemberg | 42.00% | 12.41% | 16.94% | 15.03% | 9.33% | 4.29% | |
| Baden | 45.36% | 3.64% | 25.35% | 11.93% | 9.75% | 3.97% | |
| Thuringia | 47.60% | 12.41% | 1.19% | 20.62% | 15.28% | 2.90% | |
| Hessen | 43.73% | 2.85% | 13.59% | 21.70% | 10.88% | 7.25% | |
| Hamburg | 38.85% | 7.99% | 1.92% | 26.90% | 17.59% | 6.75% | |
| Mecklenburg-Schwerin | 48.54% | 16.79% | 0.79% | 24.51% | 7.30% | 2.07% | |
| Oldenburg | 46.50% | 11.39% | 14.76% | 18.17% | 6.40% | 2.78% | |
| Braunschweig | 49.05% | 7.61% | 1.71% | 30.45% | 8.77% | 2.41% | |
| Anhalt | 46.11% | 8.39% | 1.31% | 30.78% | 11.43% | 1.98% | |
| Bremen | 32.65% | 14.47% | 2.29% | 30.35% | 13.17% | 7.07% | |
| Lippe-Detmold | 47.09% | 6.88% | 2.41% | 28.00% | 8.24% | 7.38% | |
| Lübeck | 42.79% | 5.64% | 1.06% | 38.27% | 8.17% | 4.07% | |
| Mecklenburg-Strelitz | 51.61% | 15.90% | 0.73% | 22.57% | 7.12% | 2.07% | |
| Waldeck | 70.85% | 9.34% | 2.16% | 10.47% | 3.27% | 3.91% | |
| Schaumburg-Lippe | 43.36% | 7.79% | 0.48% | 39.07% | 5.66% | 3.64% |
So yes, I’m pretty skeptical of the Jaymannian notion that there are deep-grained HBD differences that massively predispose East Germans to far right politics.
Specific circumstances explain things far better.
In 1933: Poorer, non-Catholic, less industrialized, possibly less bright (Saxony seems to have a higher IQ than northern East Germany) regions voted for the Nazis.
In 2017: The territories of the former DDR that were not exposed to decades of Hollywood diversity propaganda voted for the AfD.
In other words, the Ossies are politically just like the Visegrad nations (Poland, Hungary, Czechia, etc.) on this particular question. Even though the social differences within this general region – e.g. atheist in the DDR and Czechia, with nudism and a penchant for porn thrown in, respectively; highly prudish and conservative in Poland – are otherwise quite considerable.
Sounds plausible to me. I just wonder what exactly went wrong in West Germany in the last 40 years.
Whatever happened to Norddeutschland between the thirties and today?
I’ve wondered a bit, if it had something to do with the occupying powers. If in the West, they somehow so thoroughly destroyed the idea of nationalism that it ceased to exist politically. For instance, the East German National Anthem, while still seeming a bit wan in areas, seems way more nationalistic than the third stanza of Deutschlandlied.
All that is probably too abstract though, because it doesn’t explain Sweden, etc. A better explanation would probably be the Turkish guest workers being the multicultural agenda-crystal. Or East Germany from emigration being more working class.
This is the illumination that I had today too – that Eastern Germans should really be counted as Eastern Europe, and this will be the reason why Ossis will become villified even more and this will be used to explain why they voted for AfD. You don’t have similar “problems” in the rest of Europe
I forget how TV reception in the DDR worked. Didn’t they try to block reception from the West and then stop in one year? And wasn’t there some state where it didn’t come in? I wonder if that last bit shows on the map… I wonder what sort of adoption rate differential there was in terms of years, since East Germany was poorer.
I have noticed that the TV in Latin America seems radically different politically. At least, in terms of normative social values. I can’t imagine a strong, non-black father on US TV ads, or a masculine little boy who wants to be a firefighter. I think it is quite possible that a lot of the change has been driven from Hollywood.
Do Germans move around within Germany or do all of you live where your grandparents lived?
They didn’t get Westfernsehen in the north-east and south-east (including the region around Dresden) of the GDR:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tal_der_Ahnungslosen
Is sometimes adduced even today as explanation why people in Dresden with their PEGIDA marches are so extraordinarily horrible by West German standards (not that convincing imo though).
No, we’re all living on the farms where our great-great-great-great-grandparents lived in 1800 🙂
On a serious note, there is of course a lot of mobility and internal migration (probably significantly less though than traditionally was the case in the US), a prime example being the outflow from East Germany towars the west since reunification. “Flexibility” (that is being willing to move around for jobs) is also heavily propagandized in public discourse in my impression.
So did Razib Khan wuss out from posting your comment on his blog like a little bitch? So much for being the brave speaker of truth that he markets himself to be.
I wonder whether any of this might be influenced by Germany being more dismembered in the East. For instance, whether there were refugees from Silesia that settled there as opposed to the West.
Another possibility I just thought of was language. In the West, I believe they were required to learn English. In the East there was a choice between Russian and English, if I recall.
The most communist part of Berlin in Weimar Germany was the district of Wedding. That is now an AfD stronghold.
German media is thoroughly Atlanticist, so much so that it’s largest conglomerate, Axel Springer, actually has a clause in its corporate constitution/charter stating that it must pursue Atlanticism in its media outlets. Germany’s media is riddled with CIA agents and friends, not a well-kept secret.
Jayman was and will always be a fucking idiot.
The real explanation is Slavic descent 🙂
(though the % on this anonymous chart is much higher than I’ve seen elsewhere, and is probably exaggerated)
https://s13.postimg.org/efj0i5agn/R1a_Germany_Austria.png
Particular prize for idiocy if anyone thinks that having a particular Y-chromosome haplogroup is the same thing as being of Slavic descent.
As I posted here, and on Sailer several years ago, since at least
Charlemagne’s death in 814 AD, the Elbe-Saale frontier has
been more salient in Europe than the Oder-Neisse border.
The Elbe-Saale line separated the Saxons in the west from
the Polabian Slavs in the east. It is my understanding that
a group of Polish historians is collaborating with a group
of Gqerman historians on a vast project to better understand
what the Polish call Slavia Germanica and the Germans Germania
Slavica, i.e., the area between the Elbe-Saale rivers and the
Oder-Neisse rivers. The Czech historians might also be
involved.
The key fact about Europe is that the weather deteriorates
as you go east since the isotherms are vertical, and not
horizontal, as is usually the case. Thus France has better
weather than Germany, Germany better than Poland, and
Poland better than Russia. This contributes to higher
population densities in Western Europe than in Central Europe.
Hence the population pressure in Europe historically
has been west to east (Drang nach Osten). When you travel
through Poland from Warsaw to Poznań, Poznań definitely
feels more western, the quality of light is different. I even
feel it traveling from Warsaw to Łódź, only 100 miles south-west.
Conversely, east of Warsaw you definitely feel you are in Eastern
Europe, and not only because you start seeing onion-domed churches.
I subscribe to the view that the climate, quality of the soil, etc
explain many differences among nations. E.g., I don’t think
it’s accidental that the modern nation-states like France, Germany
(within the Holy Roman Empire), and Poland all arose during the
medieval warming period.
By the way, Poland is still trying to overcome the legacy of 44 years
of Marxism-Leninism so it needs to be a bit puritanical. Per capita
no country suffered as much destruction during WW II as Poland,
not even Russia. E.g., neither Moscow nor St. Petersburg were
completely destroyed during the war.
Plus Germany is a small country by American standards, about
equal in area to Poland. The Polish border basically runs through
the suburbs of Berlin. France is roughly the size of Texas, Germany
is much smaller, and Britain is smaller still. This makes
it easy to move. Your relatives will only be a couple of hours away
by train or by car
This has nothing whatsoever to do with any Nazis or IQ (which is not a thing, anyway).
Protest vote, with geographical distribution reflecting unequal (between east and west) socioeconomic conditions. Struggling east vs. burgeoning west, mostly satisfied with the status quo.
prurient? in Poland?
obscurient language?
Communism (or lack of liberalism) seems the better explanation than the HBD/Nazi stuff.
Interesting that the combined AfD/CDU-CSU vote seems to have been highest in Bavaria. Especially given that CSU, CDU’s sister-party in Bavaria, markets itself as quite an ethnocentric party (supporting Viktor Orbán, criticizing Merkel on migrants). CSU is also reportedly considering not sitting with Merkel in the Bundestag.
Best European countries can hope for is conservative/nationalist coalition governments. In Germany, a coalition of AfD, CSU, FDP, and CDU split-offs is theoretically possible. Maybe that could happen in 5-10 years.
In general yes, but in this particular case this indeed indicates higher percentage of Slavic ancestry than in the west. In this seen also in other genetical studies: even though there is a significant difference between Polish/German, eastern Germans are a bit more similar to Poles than western Germans:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ruediger_Lessig/publication/7783096/figure/fig3/AS:[email protected]/Fig-4-Correspondence-analysis-Two-dimensional-plot-of-the-distribution-of-populations.png
What’s the tag for inserting the images?
No, the CSU cowards have already backed off from that. And calling them “ethnocentric” is misguiding (they’re only really right-wing by the standards of demented lefties…Seehofer has demanded a so-called “Obergrenze” – an upper limit of 200 000 “refugees” a year; that’s simply national suicide at a slightly slower pace, no solution at all). Their core belief is simply that the CSU should be the natural governing party in Bavaria, forever, plus a bit of Catholicism (which is a problem since the Catholic church in Germany has become extremely subversive and is one of the main promoters of open borders and mass immigration). The CSU is mostly about access to patronage networks imo, just like the Christian Democrats in the rest of Germany.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few months though…if the CSU joins a coalition with the Greens on the federal level and allows them to push through their nation-wrecking agenda, they might well be severely punished for it at the Bavarian state elections in autumn 2018.
Depends on the circumstances. In Europe, R1A is a marker for Slavic and Baltic peoples and is indeed suggestive of Slavic descent, particularly for areas that border Slavic ones.
The CSU might as well join the CDU at this point. They are not that different.
No one serious would assert it was simply ethnic traits. Historically it was the Junker estate class political domination of the then vast Germanised lands east of the Elbe which gave it its peculiar character. The vote for the Nazis was large in the East as a result of the organisational ability of Richard Darre in supplanting the Junker influence and winning the agricultural constituency of the East (and north) for Hitler. Darre’s harvest festival in Saxony was bigger than the Nuremberg Rally
Definitely. Bavarians are politically closer in attitudes to Ossis than they are to those from the former Western Germany north of Bavaria/Baden-Wurttemburg.
I would recommend that people not overthink this.
Using Occam’s Razor, a much simpler explanation suggests itself.
Remember that the East German people suffered through decades- 2 generations worth, of genuine, official, insane leftist government.
Even though the country reunited 28 years ago, there is still a very large number of people with direct, living memories of what living under demented socialist rule looks and feels like.
These people are never going to buy into SJW fantasies, and they’re going to take action in protests and at the ballot box to protect themselves from Wessie socialist idiocy.
Hence the large success of AdF in the East . . .
The problem with this theory is that the former-Commie Left Party, which supports Chavez, also does well in eastern Germany.
“Even though the country reunited 28 years ago, there is still a very large number of people with direct, living memories of what living under demented socialist rule looks and feels like.”
Hmm, interesting.
Do you know what the word “ostalgia” means?
I agree, most traditional parties are about access to certain jobs and perks of power. CSU wants to keep its hold on Bavaria, it is a good life. I am skeptical about whether ruling with the Greens would hurt CSU: not much dramatic gets decided in Berlin, other than lots of empty and boring talk. Greens will continue signalling their extreme pro-migrant views, and CDU-CSU will continue trying to split the difference and try to avoid another disaster like 2015.
This is a slow catastrophe, year by year it will get worse. Most Germans seem to be ok with it as long as it is not too visible and disruptive – they accept CDU-CSU as being able to best manage this disaster. Maybe the strategy is to die out before the worst of the migrant consequences happen – that can take another 15-20 years. This is what happens when people stop living as families, and become just isolated individuals – future ceases to be that important. By historical standards any society that fails to keep itself going – via children – is a failure by definition. No matter how well they live, if there is no future, it is a failure. It is sad. Come east my distant cousins…
Yes, but there are also plenty of East Germans who hate the Linke and haven’t forgotten what their predecessors did.
Obviously it’s difficult to generalize, but you often read comments on the internet by East Germans who state that Germany’s development in recent years (the major parties undistinguishable on most issues – like in the GDR Volkskammer, state-supported campaigns against dissenters, censorship) reminds them of the GDR – and that they don’t want a repeat of that; so I think there is something to DanC’s interpretation.
I really don’t think that’s how it works.
Die Linke is also a distinctly Ossie phenomenon and it is the closest party to the “spirit” of the DDR there is.
https://www.electoralgeography.com/new/ru/germany2017/8_25_09_17_7_29_57.png
(as AP said as I just noticed)
Yes, good description of the mindset of Christian Democrats and many Germans in general.
I still believe (and hope) though that the 2018 elections will be a disaster for the CSU if they enter a coalition with the Greens and will consent to generous “family reunification” etc.
The people of East Germany are very fond of the DDR.
According to this 2009 poll:
According to that poll 40% of East Germans feel negatively about the GDR.
Ostalgia exists, but it’s not an unanimous sentiment.
It is an interpretation not backed by statistics.
On the other hand, it is a fact that the establishment parties are much weaker in East than West which helps the newcomer AfD.
Party membership statistics: http://www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/polwiss/forschung/systeme/empsoz/schriften/Arbeitshefte/P-PMIT17-NEU.pdf
Maybe, I hope you are right. What makes me skeptical is the slow nature of the process, incl. family reunifications. We know 100% that it is happening, and will happen via chain migration. But it is less visible, and media is in a better position to ignore it – except a few ad-hoc ‘happy” stories.
2015 was a disaster for German establishment because it was impossible to hide. The same had been happening before and since, but in a much less visible way. In that way the summer 2015 trek will not be allowed to repeat. Last I heard, Juncker is proposing 6 million Third World legal immigrants that – according to EU commission – Europe ‘desperately needs’.
It is probably too late. But I still think East-Central Europe could be preserved. In a way, 2015 was a good thing – it opened up a lot peoples’ eyes.
I can’t find 40% number for “feel negatively” in the article. I see “more good sides than bad sides” (49%) and “Life there was happier and better” (8%). The rest could reply ‘same shit’ or something.
Anyway, I realize that “very fond of” might not be a completely accurate summary. Rather, it seems to me, they object to demonization of the DDR. DanC @25 talks about “living under demented socialist rule”. I’m sure it was demented in its own way, but it’s really hard to find a rule that is not ‘demented’, one way or another.
I assume that’s the same poll:
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/13027/umfrage/beurteilung-des-lebens-in-der-ddr/
According to that 8% of the surveyed East Germans said the GDR had predominantly bad sides, and 32% said it had more bad than good sides.
I’m not in favour of demonizing the GDR either, by world historical standards it wasn’t that bad (and it probably was quite a bit better as a place to live than many of the dictatorships the West supported during the Cold war). And it’s no surprise quite a few East Germans feel nostalgic for it, since for many what came afterwards in the 1990s (mass unemployment, the feeling of being looked down upon by arrogant Westerners) was pretty disastrous. But a lot of East Germans also have negative memories of the GDR, and that’s no wonder given the real political repression there.
It’s definitely true that the inhabitants of central and eastern Germany, once the home of Slavic speakers, are to a great extent descended from those predecessors. Only the particular argument presented for that is invalid. In a comparative context, it is striking how close all the peoples of Northern Europe, Germanic, Slavic, even Fennic by language, are to each other biologically.
You can both be nostalgic (maybe because you were young) and understand that it was an overall bad system. Humans’ opinions are often not very logical or consistent.
”Yet more evidence for the theory that Communism “deep froze” social attitudes.”
People in Poland come back to be catholic. Cuba is another example of exception.
Maybe was a geographical convenience that exactly east part of Germany that was invaded by soviets after second war world and become part of Warsaw Pact as well happened with north part of Korea and that this places have many general differences to the respective cultural/recent epicenters of both countries [south of Korea and nortwestern part of Germany].
I have been to DDR many times on various conferences and even worked there one summer in 1970s. I would say if you offer people a chance to live in country like DDR of 1970s at least 75% population of the world would jump for it w/o hesitation. 75% of the world population has no chance to ever see in their lifetimes the standards of living DDR had to offer to everybody or have education system or medical care like DDR had.
“Ossies” aren’t East Europeans, but there are large swaths of Poland that are “Ossie” by history, and even a slice of Russia. They are properly classified as Central Europeans. So what happened to the “Wessies?” A couple anecdotes:
In the late ’90s, I attended a conference in Dresden, and as we drove through town, there were piles of stone here and there, including a rather large collection of rubble around the Frauenkirche, which was finally being rebuilt, and ultimately finished a few years later. The Ossie leadership decided, for many reasons, to leave a lot of ruins as is as war memorials. That is how they dealt with the war guilt while they got on with their own reign of terror.
Meanwhile, in the West, the rubble was carted away and in many cases replaced with ugly ’50s and ’60s facades that became the commercial districts. History as evidenced in stone was essentially rewritten. I had a driver in Frankfurt say, rather unashamedly, that he would like to show me more of the old town, but the Americans bombed it away during the war. I felt obliged to point out that we were invited to that party by his parent’s generation. In a sense, I was a part of what went wrong in the west by adding to the guilt that was beaten into by the Wessies and continues to be beaten into them.
A few years later, I went to a further rebuilt and resurgent Berlin, and took a tour of an exhibit that very clearly laid out the crimes of the Nazis. Almost all of the Wall had been taken down at that point, except for the stretch directly next to this exhibit of Nazi atrocities. Yes, the DDR was mentioned on a few rather small plaques, but it was almost like reading the small print in a contract. One might almost be forgiven for thinking the Nazis built the Wall. I’m sure it was purely unintentional.
Later that evening in Berlin, we were taken on a tour, and when the host learned I was a fund manager, she asked if I could help raise funds to tear down the old DDR Party Congress hall, which was falling down and pretty ugly, but the question to me was not so much one of urban beautification as it was about further erasing an uncomfortable past, the one from 1949 to 1989, when the East Germans were complicit in their own imprisonment. I told her I’d be willing to raise money to put a dome over it to preserve the memories and stories that it held.
The Ossies are quite willing to live with their Nazi past because it specifically distracts from their DDR past, which many still perversely pine over. The Wessies have had 70 years of war guilt mercilessly beaten into them to the point where they never talk about the war but they constantly apologise for it.
Actually, “never ceased to be” is a better choice of words.
I’ve been there once, for a couple of weeks, in the 70s. I was a kid then. Decent material standards (certainly higher than Soviet). I remember a very nice amusement park somewhere (well, I was a kid).
And I saw exactly as many scary Stasi men there as I saw lynched blacks hanging from trees in the US.
Decent material standards (certainly higher than Soviet).
For the communist block the material standards were the highest there but what was most important I think they were more egalitarian than some other communist block countries. You did not see really poor people there and the intelligentsia, artists and party apparatchiks had good sense not to flash their higher status. There were not that many cars that were not made in DDR. In Budapest or Prague or Warsaw you could see many western cars driven by the elites. While I can’t prove it they were run most efficiently and I think they really did not have corruption like Poland, Bulgaria or Romania and obviously Russia. It was a German thing. You really can count on Germans do things right. They know how to run efficient administration that serves people with a minimum of hassle. I lived for a while in a typical hotel for workers and engineers in Dresden which had exceptionally high standards in terms of functionality, modernity, quality of furniture and facilities that I think exceeded what I saw in most dormitories on Amercican campuses several decades later. What I also liked it was lack of crowds, plenty of empty spaces, nobody was rushing, people were laid back and people at work were efficient however there was not pushing and stressing and there was no this typically American posturing and bragging about how good we are etc. I met quite a few older Germans who were POWs in USSR and few who were in California. And what I liked though at first I was taken aback that WWII bombings of German cities were refereed to as terrorist attacks exactly the same as American bombings in Vietnam were referred in communist press at the sam time. Nobody was questioning the figure of over 100k killed in Dresden. After reunification British and German historians began to drive the figure down to 25-30k. Brits would love to drive it down to 1.5k, I guess, so it would be close to the number of killed in Coventry of which we never can stop hearing about.
Few years later I had similar feelings and experiences in Sweden were I also worked for a while. Clearly Sweden was richer and more colorful than Germany but it had many similar qualities. Peace, calmness, modesty and very egalitarian society. So at that time I was willing to believe in the convergence theory of Brzezinski that capitalism and communism could meet and for me the meeting point was Sweden and DDR. Then BRD destroyed DDR and immigration policies as a part of neoliberalism are just putting the finishing touches and coup de grâce to Sweden so there will be no Sweden from 1970s and 1980s anymore.
Brzezinski? I always thought it was Sakharov. Brzezinski, in my mind, is associated with the opposite: aggressive confrontation.
…today we see it as the combination of (more or less) the worst of both worlds: Chimerica.
https://theapricity.com/snpa/troeplate11.htm
Thanks.
“Later that evening in Berlin, we were taken on a tour, and when the host learned I was a fund manager, she asked if I could help raise funds to tear down the old DDR Party Congress hall, which was falling down and pretty ugly, but the question to me was not so much one of urban beautification as it was about further erasing an uncomfortable past, the one from 1949 to 1989, when the East Germans were complicit in their own imprisonment. I told her I’d be willing to raise money to put a dome over it to preserve the memories and stories that it held.”
One wishes the Confederate monument destroyers und stood this critical point. Those ugly concrete houses in Dresden that don’t begin to approach what was before? Keep a couple.
Nürnberg seems to be replacing, slowly, a lot of the post-war ugliness with modern buildings that reflect the medieval splendor of the town. Hopefully, many more places pick up the theme.
Would be interesting to see if different [old fashioned] european subraces [and its combinations] tend to produce different psychological trends as well cultural/ideological trends.
Talk to Jayman 😀 😀 “And where institutions come from?”
But it’s not a (sub)race thing, IMO, but rather a function of different history. HBD Chick gathered impressive data in support of her theory of out- in- breeding influence on culture. Hence, even Poles and (other than north-eastern) Russians, very similar genetically (indeed, in older cluster analysis we were often indistinguishable), having very different histories, can be also predisposed to slightly different cultures (but predisposed does not mean doomed to).
OTOH, despite being exposed to very different histories, there are also some traits in both Poles and Russians which make us very similar to each other, and different from the anglos. For example, we are often cantankerous and truculent, prone to infighting, and more open to treat conflicts in discussions as normal part of conversation.
Don’t think that’s it. Expellees from the East were settled all around Germany. In 1950, nearly 20% of the population in West Germany came from east of the Oder-Neisse line, and the number probably grew further during the 1950s as the GDR suffered its severe pre-Berlin Wall brain drain. (The GDR had around 25% Ost refugees in 1950, for comparison.)
In areas like rural Bavaria, this led to social tensions-often different religion, visibly different dialect, usually destitute, etc, and they were competing for resources. Adenauer’s greatest achievement, hands-down, was preventing the 12+ million former Easterners from becoming a permanent underclass. They could have caused some pretty big problems, had they not been integrated into West German society, and quick.
Please, NO. (-_-)
Yes, i know or ”know”, but you know if poles have very different cousin marriage–history than russians*
But physio-psychological features of populations are direct gene-cultural products too.
…today we see it as the combination of (more or less) the worst of both worlds: Chimerica
Agree.
prone to infighting
I’m not sure how you can disqualify this as an Anglo trait.
Do you have a saying “where there are two Poles, there are three political parties?”
No.
It is just my observation that the clock is ticking since the last time the descendants of the Germanic tribes, Anglos being descended from one or more, chose up sides and fought a major world war.
By infighting I do not mean fighting between two different Slavic nations, but the seemingly inherent disability to get to any political compromise, except in times of great need. Other than that, the prevalent attitude often seems to “better whole world dead than my opponent would win over me”
Actually I think the Occam’s razor is simply that all countries that were under Soviet hegemony have healthier attitudes to ‘diversity’ than ones corrupted by Western (American) hegemony because Sovietism shielded them from the West.
That’s because after some early failed experiments Soviet society ended up being more conservative than Western in more matters where it counts. Rather than ‘they hate loonie lefties because they lived under them already’. Soviets had nothing on westerners in the ‘loonie leftie’ department. The faliure was largely economic, not due to ‘demented leftie’ policies about trannies or gays or immigration (the Soviets look like Ultra-Fascists compared even to modern western ‘conservative parties’ on those issues). & after all as others are pointing out, nostalgia and even fondness for those times is actually quite a big thing in those areas.
I know it’s too much for some people (esp. Americans and ‘rightists’) to see any good in Soviet rule/culture, even if it is something that happened by accident rather than design, but is it really too hard not to notice that?