35 years of reunification: The replica West has failed

The East Germans who worked full received an average of 50,625 euros last year. That was a good 2500 euros more than in the previous year. Good news, undoubtedly.

But as is well known, everything in life is relative. This applies in particular to a country that was shared for 40 years – and it is still in a way. And this, although it has been reunited for almost as many years.

Because in the field of the old Federal Republic, full -time employees came to a gross wage of around 64,000 euros last year. That was a good 13,400 euros more than in the east. The western eastern salary difference grew again to 21 percent.

That can’t surprise. East Germany lies in almost all decisive parameters behind West Germany, whether with economic strength, added value, productivity, investments or research. The people here are older on average, although life expectancy is lower. And they become less, which is not only due to the lower birth rate, but also due to the still persistent emigration in the country.

In addition, prosperity remains distributed extremely differently. In 2022, for example, in the west per inhabitant was inherited nine times as much assets than in the supposedly new countries. The fact that no DAX group is sitting in the east has not changed since 1990.

So if a round anniversary is celebrated again on October 3, when big speeches are made again and political balance sheets are drawn, then it is time to finally make yourself honest: the so -called building east has failed as a replica.

Germany remains not only economically, socially and demographically shared, but also politically and culturally. The election results speak for themselves.

Of course, some East German cities are better renovated than West German municipalities, and this is the case with lower living costs. And of course there are plenty of suspended regions in the West with high AfD results.

Nevertheless, on average, the data only allow one conclusion: German division has not dissolved in the 35 years. Rather, it has solidified in such a way that it cannot be equalized in the next 35 years. The sociologist Steffen Mau recently expressed it a little more friendly in the title of his clever book: Germany, he wrote, was “unevenly unevenly”.

This insight does not reduce the great achievement that all Germans have had the same basic and freedom rights since 1990. There is nothing to reduce the gigantic transfer services. And there is nothing to reduce the progress in the east since 1990, in the infrastructure, the environment and also prosperity. Nobody here wants to seriously back the GDR, the voters of AfD, BSW or Left.

Nevertheless, it can be observed how its own East German identity has formed in the decades, which is inherited from generation to generation. At the same time, the mutual resentments grow again. At the latest with the above-average election successes of the AfD in the east, the Ossi contempt has also returned, which in turn shows corresponding reactions. Or vice versa.

What to do? The first step would be to recognize failure, sober, factual, differentiated – and without well -being blamed. Even if it is right that what to complain about today, especially from mistakes in the early 1990s, results: they were largely born from dilemmata and overwhelming.

The second step would be to think of East Germany again, not as expensive but dysfunctional copy of the Federal Republic or even as a blue danger zone that you prefer to leave yourself. But as a area in which many things that also turn the West, only a few years earlier and around a lot more drastically.

In the third step, East Germany, which has always been an involuntary experimental field since 1945, could be promoted, unlike before. Not with large investments that do not work in the end anyway and even more transfer funds, but with a focus on research, start-ups, digitization-and this in model regions in which exceptional rules actually apply.

The idea is not new. And there are many other ideas. But at best, they have been debated at best, never in the center of a society, the elites of which are almost completely West German.

That has to change. We Germans have to stop lying about the unit itself, in east and west. Otherwise our country remains what it has been for 80 years: shared in many areas.