Neal Ascherson and fables of the reconstruction of Germany

This blog's hero Neal Ascherson writes on the former East Germany in the current London Review of Books:

Travelling around Mecklenburg in 1991, in what had been the GDR six months before, was a disorienting experience. Again and again, I was reminded of Reconstruction in America, the traumatic aftermath of the Civil War. Here again was a sullen, defeated society. 

There had been no gunfire, but West Germany felt as victorious as the American North must have done in 1865. Here once more came the carpetbaggers, smart operators from Frankfurt or Düsseldorf pouring into East Germany to loot its collapsing industrial and service economy. While silent locals stood with their bicycles in the rain, gleaming black BMWs swept past carrying Treuhand officials on their way to privatise or close more state factories. 

As in the old South, a whole ideology justifying the power structure had been switched off, and its guardians – in this case, the SED, the National People’s Army and the immense web of the Stasi and its informers – found themselves out on the street.

Since then the gap between living standards in the former East and West, though still 26 per cent in 2020, has narrowed. And yet, just as sophisticated Manhattanites despair at the South’s refusal to forget a past that would be better forgotten, West German ‘Wessis’ are unnerved to find how many ‘Ossis’ insist on remembering a disconcertingly ‘other’ life in that phantom Germany.

Ascherson writes beautifully and is endlessly interesting. Another point he brings up is that the East German Communists saw themselves as the true heirs and interpreters of Karl Marx's thought, and thus morally and intellectually superior to the ruling party in the Soviet Union.