William Cook

Alternative für Deutschland’s success tells the tale of Germany’s forgotten East

Back in the early 1990s, a few years after the Berlin Wall came down, I went back to the house in Dresden where my father was born. The house was on the outskirts so my father and grandmother survived the bombing – they got the last train out of Dresden before the Red Army arrived. The family I found there had been there since 1945. They’d been expelled from Silesia when Stalin handed the region over to Poland, and had ended up in Dresden along with so many other displaced Germans. They’d been living there for half a century, three generations under the same roof. They didn’t own this house – like almost everything in East Germany, it had been owned by ‘the people’ (i.e. the government). They were excited by their new future in a reunited Germany, the ‘blooming landscapes’ Helmut Kohl had promised them. I wondered what would become of them. Ten years later, I went back again to find out.

What had become of this East German family and the dormitory town they lived in was a pretty good paradigm for what’s been happening in Eastern Germany as whole. The town centre had been spruced up, the infrastructure was brand new, but there wasn’t much going on – it felt like a museum. The house was a lot smarter too, kitted out with all the latest mod cons, but the man who’d greeted me ten years before was out of sorts – his daughter had gone west and he was unemployed. His daughter was one of the winners of German Reunification, he was one of the losers, and he knew it. His life would have been better if the Wall had never come down.

I thought about that family when the German election results came in last Sunday.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in