(*This opinion / analytical article was written by Ivan Dikov for The European Views website.)

The main difference between East and West Germans 30 years after the Reunification seems to be that the former are less constained by the paradigms of political correctness.

Bashing the former East Germany is in fashion in Germany and beyond these days.

Especially now that Europe is about to celebrate, or at least mark the 30^th anniversary since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in Eastern Europe.

And especially since the five German provinces, which used to be the communist “German Democratic Republic”, i.e. the ones that were occupied by the Red Army and then used by Stalin to craft a Germany of his own, have kept lagging economically behind the former West Germany despite the latter having poured more than 1 trillion euros (and deutsche marks) in the former.

And especially now that modern-day East Germans have demonstrated a willingness to vote far-right: with the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) recently becoming the second largest political party in the East German provinces of Brandenburg and Saxony.

Truth be told, the population of the former communist East Germany – which became part of the European Union, NATO, and the West immediately after the end of the communist regime by virtue of re-unifying with West Germany – has been spared the worst bashing and insults that the rest of the Eastern Europeans from the former Soviet Bloc have been subjected to in Western media for the past three decades despite the fact that they have also returned to the West (a return formalized by the EU and NATO accessions over a decade ago).

Yet, with the strong popularity of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party in the former East Germany, the former East Germans are increasingly being targeted by the mainstream media in the old West, with ultraliberals, pseudo-liberals, leftists, cultural Marxists, and political correctness crusaders now unleashing hell upon the ex-communist part of Germany.

In that narrative, the East Germans are portrayed as ungrateful, vicious ex-commies deliberately not wishing to integrate and not succumbing to the dominant Old West ideology of political correctness, identity politics, and “multiculturalism” (which is an insipid kind of uniculturalism and uniformity if you dare take an honest, closer look at it), all garnished and reinforced by the temptations of unbridled consumerism.

Read the rest of this article on The European Views website here

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