The GDRization of Germany

Socialist technocracy is here

May it be true that, 35 years after the death of the German Democratic Republic, the
Bundesrepublik Deutschland is revealing itself as the GDRs second coming?

Someone on Twitter aptly remarked that in 1989, the German Federal Republic did not annex the German Democratic Republic, but vice versa. And here we are: a new State Socialism seems to have gripped the entire political class, with its “correctness” in speech, its Red-Green Party state Central Committee directives ordering us what to eat, in what houses to dwell, what cars to drive, and how to travel, its ordering of the consumption of the designated political view by the threat of designation, the ecstatic lust of denunciation and the setting up of denunciation platforms precisely for its satisfaction, and its whole collectivist spiel. As though that wasn’t enough to prove anyone right who suspects the return of the GDR, in the last few weeks, the Social Democratic and Green government technocrats have called on the population in mass protest marches against the opposition party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – and consequently for the government. This was common praxis in the GDR who called on Germany’s Socialist Unity Party’s (SEDs) cadres, the production managers of their Publicly Owned Enterprises (VEB), state school teachers, higher employees of the bureaucracy, and other State Planning Commission nobility to lead marches against the civil opposition. People who did not join were denounced. Bye bye to Bautzen!, would be the last call. The name of Bautzen still evokes disturbing images, as it was the GDR’s well-known state prison for dissidents and not exactly a holiday resort on a pony farm.

Pro-government protest in the GDR then…

…and pro-government protest in the GDR Federal Republic of Germany today

The current protests against the opposition were incited by a construct of lies not unlike the lies used to justified aggression in wars, from the German Nazi propaganda’s “since 5.45h we are firing back” on September 1^st, 1939, to the Tonkin Incident of August 1964, or the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia that justified NATO intervention that led to increasing acceptance for further intervention in Yugoslavia. Needless to say, the war of the German political elite against its citizens is not fought with F-117As (yet), but a no less extensive net of lies. A government-sponsored news platform in the “fact-checker” business called “Correctiv” purported to have exclusive information on a “secret meeting” of AfD and conservative politicians at a villa by a lake near Potsdam, immediately dubbed “Wannsee-Konferenz 2.0”, in which plans of “deportation” of millions of non-ethnic Germans, regardless of their German citizenship, emerged and were openly discussed. It is true that a meeting took place in the villa, but it was in the spirit of a crowd funding for a new radio project (though I could not determine whether this was about sponsoring my former employee Kontrafunk, a dissident radio station), a private meeting of businessmen and women, albeit in the presence of Martin Sellner, a right-wing Austrian writer. That any plans for “deportation” were made at this meeting turned out to be made up, and Correctiv had to withdraw that statement from its “fact-checking” site. What is obvious is that the sympathizers of the AfD and the newly found Werteunion, a liberal-conservative liberal split from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) are critical of mass immigration, and have publicly and repeatedly demanded that migrants without recognized migration or asylum status are to be sent back to their home country, in line with the German federal constitution. No need for a “secret meeting” to make this known via a government-funded denunciation website.

The ”Correctiv” investigations, however – conducted like a 1940s black and white spy movie set in foggy Nazi Germany and suitably presented in the form of a screenplay – were blown out of all proportion and accordingly disseminated in left-wing state media, so that, as we hear, “millions” of people marched in solidarity with the government “against right-wing extremism” on the streets of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and smaller towns. A welcome side effect of course being that everyone stopped reporting on the farmers’ protests, while tractors still occupied main roads of the German capital.

None of that came as a surprise for Hans-Georg Maassen, former president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution who lost his position under Merkel for questioning the reality of “Neo-Nazi mobs hunting down migrants” in an incident happening in Chemnitz in 2018, in which one person lost his life. While an independent commission confirmed that indeed no such thing as a “Neo-Nazi hunt” happened in Chemnitz, Maassen, who was a member of the CDU until recently, was already gone and made up his mind about the Merkel fraction. And with good reasons. Unlike some politicians in the AfD, Maassen was adamant about the protection of the German constitution, which also includes knowing where to set its limits and knowing that it should not become instrumentalized for political purposes. It is too late for all of that now, as we not only know since the Covid emergency’s suspension of civil rights – starting under Merkel – but since the new president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Mr. Thomas Haldenwang, has called for the “decent parts of society” to march in protest against “right-wing extremism”. And, unsurprisingly, Maassen himself, who has finally formed his own political party, and expressed concern about the anti-democratic tendencies of the current Bundesregierung, is now monitored by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the irony of which is palpable.

Maassen came to my attention a while ago as a very intelligent analyst and critic of Germany’s current transition to technocratic totalitarianism, which he sees in the spirit of a GDRization of Germany. As he convincingly claims, Germany – but probably the West more generally –  has undergone a shift in the perception of the term “democracy”. No longer does democracy mean belief in freedom and equality between people in a system of government based on this belief, in which power is either held by elected representatives or directly by the people themselves. Democracy has undergone a stealthy shift towards what the German Democratic Republic originally meant by it, namely “socialism”. In an interview with the Swiss Weltwoche, Maassen said:

“The left has managed to achieve hegemony in the media by introducing a concept creep regarding the term democracy. It is now fair to say we have a concept of democracy that was used in really existing socialism. This means that only those who stand by socialist ideas are democrats. In the GDR, democracy was also a matter of course. That is not cynicism. People simply saw themselves as democrats under socialism. Those who stood outside of this socialism were the fascists, the imperialists, reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries.  And we are currently seeing this change in the concept of democracy in Germany, too, when people talk about left-wing parties as the "progressive forces" or use devisive language like “we, the democrats". By this, [the politicians] mean that only socialists are democrats, and I, who am an avowed anti-socialist, am a fascist, a counter-revolutionary, a reactionary from their point of view. The CDU has not yet understood that this is a different concept of democracy that is now being used. And of course they want to be on the good side. The result is that the CDU has turned into a cartel party of the socialist bloc and does not want to be on the outside, because otherwise it will also be one of the fascists and counter-revolutionaries.”

Elsewhere, Maassen saw the transformation towards totalitarian rule “under the pretense of the social question” as another indicator for the GDRization of Germany. This can be confirmed by anyone looking closer at the NGOization (on which there will soon be an important piece by George Hoare in Café Américain) of Germany in particular, and the West in general, and the emergence of tax-payer funded denunciation hubs, such as the “Meldestelle Anti-Feminismus”, which not so much tackles anti-feminism as “transphobia” and other fantastic fabrications that are not in line with government ideology.

One thing is clear: while the pro-government mass protest of the last weeks, however, may push down the AfD’s poll ratings from 21% to 19%, it does not solve any of the problems Germany faces right now, predominantly deindustrialization and precarization. The problem will return with a vengeance to those in power. One can only keep one’s fingers crossed that, like the GDR before it, the current Ampel coalition government faces a similar downfall – if not today, then in the 2025 elections.