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I had a similar experience growing up in East Germany, and there it definitely wasn't "faith". Part of it at least - not sure if I'm qualified to fully analyze it (I'm not) - is how equal we really were. Yes that includes the "rulers". If you look at the house the head of the GDR lived in for decades in the closed-off area for the ruling elites, called Wandlitz, it was nothing special at all. The first journalist who when the wall fell got to report from Wandlitz, a regular GDR citizen, was unimpressed and "not jealous", in his own words. Any craftsman could do better, even in the GDR (I know because my grandfather was one and our house looked better than that of Honecker). House of Erich Honecker: https://bmg-images.forward-publishing.io/2021/12/04/58cb9e33... (Yes I know they shot people at the border. That has nothing to do with my point though. - The last time I pointed out that GDR elite at least did not behave like e.g. Ceaușescu in Romania or Putin now and did not try to get rich but actually believed in their mission, somebody complained, but that they used deadly force of arms and surveillance to achieve it does not negate that.) When the wall came down I was in the middle of the three-year education after the initial mandatory ten years, preparation to study, and we found a partner class of equal level in Bavaria and visited one another even before official reunification. We saw a completely different culture there. Some kids drove a BMW they got for birthday, others had little, there was very little cohesion in their class while ours was a wonderful group. Mind you - my class had an extreme variety of people from all over the GDR because we learned a very popular profession. We had a classmate whose parents were diplomats who lived in Western Europe and all over the world and could travel freely, we had children of workers, and of people high or low in some hierarchy, a grand mix. It did not matter! We were all as one and material differences just did not matter at all, they were tiny to begin with, compared to the vast differences (from our PoV) even among the middle class in the West. For us too visiting others without any preparations was daily normality. Of course, in the GDR we didn't even have phones at home for many people. My own mother had the chance to get a phone because she was important enough in her job, but she didn't want one to avoid getting called at home... so yeah, you just showed up at someone's home and it was normal. We also didn't have significant existential pressures. Sure, what education and job exactly you wanted took some effort, but it wasn't even remotely as big a deal to get and to keep one, and to find a home, as it is now. Yes quality and diversity of stuff you can buy and do is many levels above what we could do now, we wanted the wall gone and reunification for a reason. Also, our environment was in a terrible state, West German did a gigantic and remarkable job cleaning it all up. So, when I say what I did above, I certainly don't vote for reinstating that system, but maybe there is something to learn. It's much more stressful now, and it's hard to say why that is and why we couldn't have at least a look at that part of living in the East. I also remember quite a few community projects. Lots of people simply got together and did stuff. For example, building a wonderful, amazing and today impossible (too unsafe!) playground, two small valleys with a hundred meters each of various wooden forts and many installations like wooden trains. Or they build several hundred garages together, my father went there too. Or, my grandfather simply spontaneously built a stone wall to support some sandstone wall - on a public stretch of the mountain road. No money was ever involved, nobody got paid. Companies/factories in the area donated machines and materials (I mean, they were people-owned and not private anyway) - serving the people was part of their mission to begin with. All the big companies had to produce some consumer goods too in addition to their normal portfolio, because the GDR was severely lacking those. So, much was born of necessity, but it still had some good parts, the cooperation for example. It also was much easier to make friends when you went somewhere. I know my parents - certainly not especially gifted in how-to-connect but quite ordinary - easily made friends and even met them later and invited them to visit us at home, and they did, in various vacations. Not just in the GDR, even in Hungary, another East Bloc country, where we went on vacation a few times. It wasn't just once, it was quite a regular occurrence, be it neighbors old and new, or people you just met. For the children it was so easy I don't even need to bother to describe it. |
