GDR Ade: A young pioneer and the grace of late birth

If I, and unfortunately it happens more and more, again, once again, it becomes all over because of this crazy world, or in general because of the circumstances that my job brings – then I realize the fact that it is for a privilege, especially in a country where journalistically work.

For that, really, I’m grateful. I can ask strangers who are interesting or at least important. I can watch processes and party days up close, or, as with the AfD, behind a barrier grille. And I can fly with a president and then write critically (and yes, also a little mocant) about him without afterwards I lose my job or worse.

In the state in which I grew up until my age of majority, this would not even have been possible as a thought. That is why I would also have studied computer science in Dresden at the end of the 11th grade – as it is now that life is sometimes practicing in irony, one of our sons.

But I became a journalist. That means I wanted to become a historian at first, or even a philosopher, which is why, after completing a few trips through the non -socialist currency area, I wrote down in various subjects. After all, I was young and the life full of new opportunities.

What I only learned a few years later was that the journalists in East Germany were two hermetically closed cohorts. In the first, larger cohort, most of the SED had belonged. This activity officially called itself “agitation and propaganda” in the GDR, which I could understand because I had served as a wall newspaper editor of my young pioneer brigade (AKA school class).

The common thing was that many old SED editors were allowed to keep their jobs after 1989, in contrast to the Kalikumpels, Trabant machinists or LPG farmers. Because the western publishers balanced to buy the district newspapers. They were not located on the dilapidated printers or even the real socialist employee collective, but on the millions of subscribers.

And so the old central organs of the old state party simply appeared under mostly new names and with diametrically turned content. The editors were taken over for the sake of simplicity, they now wrote the other way around.

Only the editor -in -chief and other management posts were replaced, with West Germans. The same was true for the few East Correspondent positions of the large magazines, newspapers and agencies-and for large parts of the newly created public service broadcast.

Because, that was the logic of the elite exchange, which took place in almost all areas: only West Germans were considered politically unencumbered and naturally had a much better idea of ​​what the new time and the free market required. And so the second, somewhat smaller, but better paid journalist cohort.

The side effects were not considered or deliberately ignored. Or they were even wanted. Newly founded publications often survived only a few months. East Germans who were oppositional in the GDR or those who simply wanted to try journalism in democracy had little chance of a job. They were all occupied by long -established or western imports.

Of course there were exceptions, also in a few editor -in -chief. But they confirmed the rule. The same was especially true for national media, whose main editors were mostly in Hamburg, Munich, Hanover or Essen. There, all positions have long been occupied by people with the right training, the right contacts and the right, i.e. West German biography. And when these people hired new people, then especially according to these criteria.

The East Germans, and this experience can also be transferred to other areas, were particularly intended for buying the media products. They also briefly did that at the beginning – and afterwards less and less. Because what they could read there was mostly what the West German reporters brought from their occasional expeditions to the Wild East: Stasi scandals, neo-Nazi attacks, waste of funding.

There were exceptions here too. I remember some clever reports of journalists who tried to turn and fair. East correspondents in particular tried to take the perspective of the natives. But in their editorial offices, they only met with limited understanding. In the end, they sometimes also reported the usual.

A differentiated picture could not be created. This also applies to the larger, richer and victorious part 35 years after joining the smaller, poorer and historically inferior part of Germany. The imbalance is reflected more today, including the large, still exclusively West German media companies. This column can also be considered a small example.

Nevertheless, I can see on my East German myself how difficult it is to break out of the patterns that have grown since 1990. If I report on political extremism in the east in the media, which in particular consume West Germans, then I always try to describe reality, but at the same time use clichés unintentionally, although I would rather not think about how much of it is opportunism. And when I, as I just existed, described the real consequences of systematic disadvantage, I possibly act like a tidy East Impteritarian who, according to colonization, talks and excitedly exchanges voters from Björn Höcke.

Unfortunately, it remains complicated. Just like the ex-SED agitators of the ex-SED district newspaper, which I met with youthful arrogance and who became good colleagues, I can hardly escape my imprints. As Helmut Kohl formulated at the time, I had the grace of late birth.

This would now be a reasonable cowardly final sentence, especially since, as my boss will rightly show, I wrote far too elongated again. But there is still this new book that gives me hope that patterns will grow out at some point. It wrote a Leipzig “time” colleague, whom I really appreciate, as a person and as a journalist. August Modersohn, born in Berlin in 1994, describes many of the stereotypes in the western-eastern reportage band, which have ground themselves down in three and a half decades to break them at the same time.

He succeeds the measurement of a united country in which the west in slow motion understands the East German breaks and developments, including the erosion of old certainties and the upswing of a new, extreme populism. August encountered his protagonist, whether Mona in Duisburg or Gundi in Welzow, with a noticeable empathy – and opens it. And of all people in Freiberg im Breisgau, he hears a sentence that has already been varied in this column: “The east is only a pioneer.”