Dear old work platform, it's not you, it's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding? Constant IT bottlenecks? We've had enough. We need a platform that just gets us. And to be honest, we've met someone new. They're called Monday.com. And it was love at first onboarding. Their beautiful dashboards, their customizable workflows got us floating on a digital cloud nine. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.
Welcome to the New Books Network. A couple of weeks ago, alarm bells went off around the West when a far-right party, the alternative for Germany, otherwise known by its German initials of the AFD, for the first time in the post-war period, won a state-level parliamentary election in Germany. The outcome raised considerable concern among Germany watchers around the world.
To be sure, the strength of right-wing populist parties has been the big news in many countries in recent years, including the UK, France, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and of course, even the United States. But Germany is the largest country west of Russia and has been thought to be a reliably democratic partner for decades. What's happening in Germany? Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.
that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpy and I'm Director of the Ralph Bunch Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. And we're fortunate to have with us today Markus Burick, an assistant professor of modern German history at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the histories of the GDR and post-socialism in Central Europe more broadly.
He's the author of Die Treuhand, Idee, Praxis, Erfahrung, which... basically describes how Western managers attempted to transform post-socialist East Germany from a planned into a market economy after German unification in the early 90s. And the book has had four editions since it first came out in 2018. His most recent book, published in 2022 with C. Lorke, is called Zwischen Aufschwung und Anpassung.
Eine kleine Geschichte des Aufbau Ost, and addresses the history of Germany since reunification. Thanks for joining us today, Markus Burig. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Great to have you. So I want to start by discussing these elections in Thuringia and Saxony, because of course, there's another one coming up this weekend in Brandenburg, the state of Brandenburg. So these are states, territories that are in the territory of the former East Germany, the former GDR.
And as I've already said, the election results rang alarm bells in Western capitals and publics because it was the first time in the post-war period that a far-right party had won a parliamentary election in Germany. Please tell us what you think is going on and how to explain this. Yeah, well, thank you, John. It's a pleasure to be here, as I said. But of course, it's a grim background to me being here.
on the podcast. So these election results in Eastern Germany very recently gained a lot of international attention. But to be fair, or to be honest, most people working on Eastern Germany and its trajectory after reunification were not that surprised by this development, right? years, we were talking about frictions between East and West Germany, rising levels of dissatisfaction, disappointment in the East. But I think for
After the turn of the century, these things seem to wither away slowly. So many people expect that reunification to be completed maybe after one or two generations. We will talk about this later on, I guess. But after, I think especially after 2014, 2015, after this turn in migration politics, the Alternative for Deutschland, AFD party, also changed. So the party was founded in 2013, and it was an anti-Europe party against the European Union, run by West German professors.
But then it turned into an anti-migration party. And especially in the East, the party radicalized itself. And this is connected with the name of Björn Höcke. who is the leader of the AFD and Pyringia, and he's more or less a clear-cut neo-Nazi, and a former history teacher who migrated from the West to the East in the 1990s, I think. And so this party was able to fill the gap, so to say, because like the traditional...
main parties in Germany, like the Conservatives, the Social Democrats, and also especially the Greens or the Liberals, are pretty weak in the East, traditionally. So they could never really gain a foothold in the East of the country after 1990.
And after 30 years of post-socialism in Eastern Germany, there is a lot of... um especially in the rural parts of these so the east is like a very it's a complicated it's a more complicated picture if you zoom in so um the bigger towns the university towns like Jena or Leipzig or Dresden are pretty well off. If you go there, they're very liberal, open-minded, diverse towns, sprawling towns refurbished after 1919. Very nice to visit.
But if you move out into the countryside, there's a huge feeling of the political elites forgot us. We are dominated by the West. Decisions are made without consulting us. And especially this migration issue in 2015, when Angela Merkel and the federal government decided to open the German borders to stabilize the European Union, really sparked...
the rise of the AFD in the East. And you could really observe in the last up to eight, nine years, how the party was gaining more and more traction in the East. despite they lack a clear leadership, right? So there is no charismatic leader to the AFD party. So the federal party leaders are pretty weak.
Björn Höcke, as I said, is more or less like a neo-Nazi person. So there is no attractive leader like in many populist parties in Western Europe or Eastern Europe. But despite this lack of a clear leadership, the party was really... fighting the election campaigns on this populist stance of you have been forgotten. So the people like the ruling class in Berlin or in Erfurt or in Dresden doesn't really care about you.
And I think this accelerated even after the takeover of the so-called traffic light coalition, like a left liberal government in Berlin. And this even fueled this... um disaffection in parts of the rural of rural eastern Germany and led to this And as I said, these results are, of course, staggering in a way. So the AfD became the strongest party in Thuringia with 33%, I guess.
It came in second in Saxony with around 30%. And given the German tradition, the strongest party usually is forming the government. and is kind of nominating the prime minister, the minister president, president minister of the state. Of course, the major parties, the democratic parties don't want to let this happen. I think this is not a problem in Saxony because the conservatives came in first.
um with a very uh like not with a strong not with a strong margin but they were the strongest party but in thuringia it's a huge problem because like the right-wing populace gained um the majority of the vote so basically the democratic party need need to form an anti-populist government
And some scholars even call it like a Weimar government, right? Because this is what happened in the late years of the Weimar Republic when the democratic parties of the middle, like the social democrats, the conservatives and the liberals.
needed to form an anti-totalitarian party so so the situation is in political terms is pretty grim so we are facing a deadlock especially in tyringia i think the picture in saxony is a bit broader but not very good as well i think um it will be so it will be very difficult to handle the situation it's pretty new in germany after 1945.
But on the other hand side, we shouldn't be outright. So it's not a complete catastrophe, right? So we need to remind ourselves 70% of the electorate didn't vote for the AFD. The picture gets even more complicated if you look into another party we haven't mentioned yet, which is the Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht.
which is a quite a new party emerging at the start of the year like a split up like a party that's split up from the left party and it's a left-wing populist party basically combining anti-migration sentiment like right-wing anti-migration policies with left-wing demands towards an extended social state and also demanding peace negotiations with Russia, ending the war on Ukraine. And you can see the picture is quite messy in the East.
and there's a lot of talks going on uh on uh in in germany but also internationally how did we come here but as i said at the beginning for people that like me that were working on east germany and that grew up there as well it's not like a complete surprise but i think for many people it is a surprise because they for a long time they saw general reunification as a success story right like they live together happily ever after and after all these
dark periods of the 20th century, the World Wars, the Holocaust, the Cold War, confrontation between East and West. 1919 seems to be like a happy end to the German drama of the 20th century. And now... After 35 years, we see it's way more complicated. Well, maybe we should get into that now since, you know, you hinted that we would go in this direction. You know, this whole question of German unification, the happiness or otherwise with which it was.
undertaken and to the extent that it's been complete, I don't want to say completed, but realized, there was this expectation, I think it was a commentator, sociologist named Wolf Lepenis, who said around 1990 that it would take a generation for these two populations to kind of get reacquainted with each other. I mean, just the fact that they were German.
didn't necessarily and and maybe had one time you know shared a state a country uh that wasn't necessarily going to be enough uh to result in a kind of uh happy you know unification process and You know, as you say, now it seems to me a lot of people are questioning that. And indeed, it seems to me that it has seemed to me, I guess, for a long time. that this is a process that has resulted really in the creation of a kind of separate region of the country.
I mean, the question, I guess, in a way is how much can you compare it to the Americans in places like the American South or the Italian South or these sort of permanently? disadvantaged regions that have you know certainly sort of different kinds of politics than the rest of the country has and You know, Stefan Mao has recently come out with a book that has been getting a lot of attention. The book is called Unequally United or Reunited, I guess. And that seems to point to one of the important.
differences between East and West and Germany that's underlying some of these issues. But you know a lot more about this than I do. So you tell us. Thanks, John. It's a great question. And I think... Maybe we start from the beginning, as I'm a historian. I think if you look back into 1989, 1919.
Unification, reunification was a huge surprise. Not many people expected something like the downfall of the Soviet Union and the end, the demise of the GDR and reunification, even in summer of 1989, right? So people were quite... overwhelmed and things happen very quickly we call it like the peaceful revolution um after october november 1989 and you know the pictures of the opening of the berlin wall
and the demise of the Communist Party leadership and also like the first elections and the huge euphoria for unification internally, of course. Many East Germans hope for a better future very quickly. And they were promised like blossoming landscapes by the former federal chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Kohl. But also there was a huge support internationally from the US government, George Bush, and also Gorbachev.
the soviet union there were some kind of skeptics in france in the uk and in poland but to sum it up there was a huge euphoria and people believed um things will change very quickly and there's not a huge problem with unification because the language is the same the culture is the same and it's just like 35 years And it's not like in the Koreas, right? There was always a connection between East and West Germany. You could travel, you could send letters.
You could visit each other with restrictions, of course, but I think there was a strong connection. East Germans watched Western television, read Western books, and so on. So there was a strong sense of, okay, there might be some...
minor divisions, but mainly they are all Germans. And I think this was like the expectation in 1990. But even like in 1991, you could see this picture starts to... be it's disrupted by the impact of reunification right like the currency union privatization in the east Unemployment is rising. People get very unhappy, right? Easterners have been promised like a new economic miracle, a second German Wirtschaftswunder, like a wonderland in the East by the new government. But this didn't happen.
So they saw Westerners coming over, taking over the leadership positions in the East. They became the new heads of government. They were the new, like a lot of Westerners. went to the east to introduce the new western rules right so the deal mainly in 1919 was the easternists are allowed to join the western model Right. And they need to adapt to the Western model. So it's basically moving into the house of your rich cousin. But you get your room.
you're not allowed to talk about the rules with him right because like the house is owned by a rich western cousin and i think this is a problem we are struggling with until today so the east germans didn't really feel like they're apart of the whole process right there was no new constitution there was no um um i think in in major terms there when um no one tried to kind of
try to look at what could we learn also from the East. But the direction seems quite clear. East Germany needs to adapt to the Western standards set by the West Germans. And I think, just in brackets, this is also what happened later on with European... integration towards eastern europe right like the germans adapted a similar model for the eastern enlargement of the european union so that like poland and hungary and czech they needed to adapt to certain western rules but which is another topic
So pretty quickly after Europhoria of 1990, these things... became more and more messy and then easterners were grumbling around unemployment was on the rise privatization had a huge impact on the social landscape of the east um a lot of people left eastern germany to towards the west And there was a huge internal debate in the 90s about these East-West divides. There were also debates about how to come to terms with the history of the GDR.
And at Secret Service, there were talks about how to deal with right-wing extremism showing up in Eastern Germany as well. There were some kind of violent clashes in the early 1990s. in Rostock-Lichtenhagen against foreigners. So a lot of talks, a lot of conflicts already in the early 1990s. But then these things seem to slowly go away.
in the late 1990s so like the shake-up period of early transformation as we call it was basically over and then things need to seem to basically ease down for a moment and even after the turn of the century um angela merkel became chancellor and he's she's from me she's from eastern germany right so it looked like the relation between east and west
would normalize, and all these conflicts and disruptions would slowly wither away. But this didn't happen. And to come back to what you mentioned, Wolf Lepenis and his quote, there's another quote by Ralf Dahrendorf. this British-German intellectual. And I really like this quote because everybody was expecting, like most people in the public and in the political field, they were expecting a very quick reunification and without any...
long-term problems and issues. But Ralf Dahrendorf already stated in 1919, the Germans might be able to manage political unification in six months. So this is kind of true. So political reunification was negotiated within six months with the contract, the external and internal reunification contracts. And then he went on and said, economic unification, reunification might last six months.
years. And also this is kind of true because the privatization, which was heavily criticized with a lot of issues, was finished after even five years in the East by privatizing most of the state-owned companies. And then his last sentence was, but cultural, social reunification might take 60 years or three generations. And many people didn't believe this would be true. But in the end...
Now, after roughly 30 years, 35 years after reunification, this inner unification, this growing together you mentioned, seems to be further away than ever. Stefan Mao's contribution, which I really liked, was like, okay, he tries to describe how this emerging, like, fractions between East and West.
were stabilized but i think his major argument is maybe we need to live with this maybe we need to accept this and not try to like kind of homologize or like try trying to to achieve like a national culture And what should this national culture be? Because it's not just about East Germans and West Germans. It's also about like a huge migrant population in Germany, right? As you know, like 20% of the German population has a migrant.
migration background in 2023. So the picture gets even more messy. So this is basically maybe one of the main issues that people in 1990 didn't really expect these East-West divines. And now we are here 35 years later, and it seems like we haven't really come a long way. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I guess the question is, if it takes longer to reunify culturally. than it did to endure the existence of the German states that are now growing together.
whether that's not a quasi-permanent sort of divide i mean again thinking about the south and in the united states relative to the rest of the country it's hard to You know, yes, it's part of one country at one level, but it's culturally, you know, continues to be very different because it has a very different, you know, history and over a long period of time.
So you mentioned the issue of migration background, immigration, and I, you know, I'm interested in hearing you say more about how this, what kind of role this plays in. uh in these you know german inner german um yeah difficulties uh i mean western germany you know hardly uh you know absorbed tons and tons of immigrants without difficulty but it was a relatively smooth process at least in the early years in particular while there was this sort of economic
miracle going on that immigrant labor from from Yugoslavia, from Turkey, from Italy and elsewhere, you know, in many ways made happen. But now, you know, the immigration background is. different one, by and large. And particularly, you know, in 2015, it's come from Syria and from the Middle East and is culturally and religiously somewhat more different than those earlier.
largely European immigrants in the early days. I mean, Turks were obviously not culturally and religiously so similar, but nonetheless, there was some greater similarity. And now...
you know, that's not the case. And I mean, how do you see the different parts of Germany dealing with these immigration flows? I think it's a very interesting topic how all these... east west conflicts in germany are related to migration and um of course maybe one thing one issue of migration we should think of before we get into these
different cultures of migration is the migration, the inner German migration between East and West. Because if you realize that almost like three million East Germans... left the east after 1919 towards the west and usually the very highly educated young people leaving for university don't come back. to the rural east right this is like a huge issue of like um aging population brain drain a lot of young people left the east the rural east especially
And this is posing a massive problem at the ground level, right? Because there is no, these people usually are the main kind of the main pillars of civil society. And I think this is one, maybe one thing at the beginning, right? So there's a migration.
uh an inner german migration between east and west at the heart of the problem but i think you're right migration has been pretty normalized in the western part of germany since the 1950s and 1960s with labor migration the turkish german turkish community is the biggest community in germany
and why i lived for many years in the rural area in the west of germany i think these it's quite um i think it's quite settled um migration society especially in the bigger towns of the west of germany like the geographic west of germany um in the east There's not much migration going on, right? So you don't have high levels of migrants in smaller German towns, East German towns. I think the numbers are 1%, 2%. So it's not very diverse.
um um society in this terms but um even if these migrants are not present um on the ground level i think this even fuels the problem that the people are feel threatened by migration, right? So a couple of weeks ago, with my best friend, we did a hike in Saxony-Anhalt, like the south, where Nietzsche is from and Bach and all these guys. And they're like pretty hills. It's amazing.
for hiking and there are even some wine yards. And so we hiked through the countryside and we saw all these new family homes. with nice cars everything is very very nice really like picture picture book germany very picturesque very well off but if you zoom in you will realize that many like of these like emerging east german middle class Most of the time, this is their first family home. So they try to build new wealth and property after 1990.
and it's not like like settled like in the west right like proper like if you if you look at uh property at wealth The West is way stronger than the East, right? So because in West Germany, people usually inherit huge sums of money. There's nothing like this happening in the East. So the wealth established in the East after the 1990s.
is so to say way thinner and i think this is why the afd is so successful playing on the fears and the threats of now berlin is sending in migrants and they will take away your nice new little home your cars and they will threaten you there will be crime there will be poverty right and i think this is this is really like this like emerging middle class
in the east is basically one of the main like especially in the rural east is basically one of the main kind of it's the main audience for the afd right and it's not like about poverty um it's it's about like um a kind of a middle class that feels threatened to to be kind of challenged by um migrants that are coming in effectively then they're not coming in right this and so because they're
There's also like a low and like another high number of social contacts and interactions. I think this even enhances the problem even more. And even like in my hometown, I still remember there was there were not there was a there were maybe two Asian families. families running two Asian restaurants and a shop or Vietnamese.
uh families German East German Vietnamese and there was a German Turkish family running a kebab store and basically these families were accepted because they were like providing the main infrastructure for the town right like food and and also you see a lot of migration in terms of elderly care.
doctors from eastern europe so it's changing also on the ground level but i think in general terms the east doesn't also like going back to the gdr like to eastern germany before 1919 so there was not a lot of exposure to international people of color people from other groups and this is of course where you can see the roots of racism and violence especially that we saw in the early 1990s
But also, if you remember this right-wing terrorist group that emerged in the 1990s that killed like over more than 11 people, assassinated them, like the so-called Nationalsozialistische... like National Socialist Terrorist Group. And so, yeah, it's a complicated situation. So migration is, I think, at the heart of this rise of the AfD.
And there are some specific things to Eastern Germany, but as you already mentioned, in general, this is the pattern we see all over the Western world, right? We see it in France, we see it in Poland, we see it in the UK, also in the US. So there seems to be something that migration is triggering a lot of fears and threats, perception of threats, especially in the rural parts of the countries, but also especially in the lower middle classes.
Interesting. I mean, that's fascinating. And I think exactly on the money. uh but we're running out of time and so i have one last question to ask you and that is what should we expect on uh this weekend uh in brandenburg yeah it's a very good question i think we won't see it's very because i'm an historian i always need to be careful with like giving giving a huge uh outlook into the future usually this is not really something we are very good at but uh just for all
little talk here. I checked a recent polling in Brandenburg and I think it looks like the AFD will be in first. and the social democrats will are traditionally strong in brandenburg so they have been the strongest party since 1990 and the prime ministers has always been a social democrat and this could pose a major
issue for the federal government, which is headed by the Social Democrats. Chancellor Olaf Scholz is a Social Democrat. So if the Social Democrats lose their pole position in Brandenburg to the IFD, we might see major um consequences on the federal level as well because like the federal government the coalition government coalition is already struggling a lot with internal debates and fighting so i don't want to be um
and paint a too dark picture but the brand book election might be uh even the most consequential of all of them right because like this is where um because like the parties of the ruling government in berlin they already wrote off
Saxony and Thuringia, right? Because all the parties in the federal government, like the Social Democrats, the Greens, the Liberals, haven't been very strong in these two states but now in brandenburg the social democrats are really under pressure and they have really something to lose there so i we will see how it turns out but um It looks like this election will end up almost like on the lines of the other elections. Like the AfD will be in strong and also the BSW, like the left-wing party.
is expected to win 50% of the share of the votes. So it will be another blow to the democratic parties. And I don't know how the German party system will be able to manage. this pressure. Because for the first time since 1945, we are facing a probable majority of anti-system populist parties that can basically blockade the whole process of coalition building and decision making. So I don't want to end on two grim tones here because maybe this will go away in a couple of years.
But at the moment, Germany is really, I would say, in the middle of this huge trend of populist parties challenging the so-called established parties. And something we can see in France. And also another country. So the picture is quite, it's not desperate, but it's very messy and complicated, I would say. And I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I didn't want to be, I wouldn't try to.
be a politician in these states myself, to be honest, because it's a lot of things to figure out. Right. Interesting. I mean. As you say, and I guess as I've said, you know, this is a pretty widespread phenomenon. So it's not obviously just Germany, but everybody worries about Germany because of its historical past. And that's just hard to escape.
uh thanks so much uh that's it for today's episode i want to thank marcus buric for his uh for sharing his insights about recent developments in german politics and the history of the post-unification period Look for International Horizons on the New Books Network and remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. I want to thank Claire Centafanti for her tech. for the next episode. of International Horizons.