Comments on: A Glimpse at Life in East Germany 20 Years After the Wall Fell

By: Paul McHeimat

Paul McHeimat — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 04:26:53 +0000

Best Movies (unmentioned so far) to portray life in the DDR:

1)”The Legends of Rita” – pay attention to the East Germans other than Stasi characters. They live, work, get frustrated and go on vacation just like normal folks. The DDR wasn’t all stasi and spying.

2) “Coming Out” by Heiner Carow shows Berlin in 1989.

3) “Traces of Stones” by Frank Beyer is another good piece and is critical of party ideology

4) “The Architects” 1989 by Peter Kahane is another film to come out right around the fall of the Wall and portrays the nuances of trying to live and succeed without sleeping with the SED. Very good.

5) “The Murders are Among Us” 1946 shows some of the emotional forces that led to a formation of a socialist, anti-fascist state.

By: Tony Goodman

Tony Goodman — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:38:19 +0000

Actually the East German party bigshots lived in Wandlitz, not Wannsee…somehow Mr. Radosh confused the site on Lake Wannsee in Western Berlin where a notorious conference by top Nazis was held and it was decided to murder millions of Jews. Wandlitz was known to ordinary East Germans as “Volvograd”, because Honecker and his colleagues preferred the Swedish car to Soviet limousines. I’ve been to Wandlitz and although the houses were much grander than the prefabricated apartment buildings where most East Germans lived, they were scarcely mansions at all…more like modest suburban houses in Princeton NJ, for example. The nudist theory of Marxism holds no water whatsoever though – the Soviets and most of the other communists were just as prudish as most neo-cons and rightwingers are today. Only in East Germany was nudism tolerated. The state also published soft-core porn for the masses as well…

By: Funs blog

Funs blog — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 07:36:38 +0000

They won the debate. A metaphor is here somewhere. The government as the 600lb woman and the thong as the people?”

By: About twenty, berlin wall, east, fall | Find me About

About twenty, berlin wall, east, fall | Find me About — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:04:51 +0000

[...] Perhaps because this was the very week of the fall of the Berlin Walltwenty years ago, attendance at the one year old Museum of the DDR (German Democratic Republic- the official name of the East German Communist government) was way above average. …Read Original Story: A Glimpse at Life in East Germany 20 Years After the Wall Fell – Pajamas … [...]

By: About east, berlin wall, anniversary, fall | Find me About

About east, berlin wall, anniversary, fall | Find me About — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:05:20 +0000

[...] Perhaps because this was the very week of the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, attendance at the one year old Museum of the DDR (German Democratic Republic- the official name of the East German Communist government) was way above average. …Read Original Story: A Glimpse at Life in East Germany 20 Years After the Wall Fell – Pajamas … [...]

By: Delia

Delia — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:47:53 +0000

13. Mr Lucky:

“They won the debate. A metaphor is here somewhere. The government as the 600lb woman and the thong as the people?”

EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!

By: Delia

Delia — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:43:28 +0000

13. Mr Lucky:

“Not even Obama? Mmm, mmm, mmm? In a bathing suit, that is.”

LOL! ACK! Especially not glistening man-boobs himself!

By: Marie Claude

Marie Claude — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:34:50 +0000

well, if you want to get a good idea how the life was in eastern Germany, wtch the movie “good bye Lenin”, a very clever and poetical trip !

Now about “nudism”, this wasn’t a specific eastern Germans rebellion, but, globally, Germans like to exhibit themselves in nudism camps, lots are in France and built on germans customers habits !

Remember, Nazis promoted the boies cult too ! This is quite of the german Psyché

By: PAthena

PAthena — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 03:46:20 +0000

I visited East Berlin with a German friend of mine who had grown up in the DDR and escaped before the wall was built. It was a truly Marxist experience in a Marxist place – the Marxism of Groucho, Harpo, and the other Marx brothers. We could laugh at the absurdity of it all, the secret police everywhere, people avoiding us when we showed them an old map of Berlin to get directions, poor food in a cafeteria where the cashier tried to shortchange us, trying to meet with friends who still lived in the DDR. This generous Marxist regime also kindly let the mother of my friend leave the DDR when she retired – she could only travel with what she could carry and she lost all retirement benefits. (The mean free West Germany gave her a pension.)
Yes, we saw the wall – and memorials on the side of West Berlin to those who had died trying to escape the prison of the DDR, lovers of liberty.

By: James DeMeo

James DeMeo — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:09:12 +0000

The communist states were never bastions of sexual liberty or license, except perhaps behind closed doors in brothels and such which are found globally. While the early periods of both the Wiemar Republlic and Kerensky Russian state removed a lot of laws which kept women in a subservient condition, those conditions did not last. The communists were exceedingly sex-repressive, as were the Nazis. In Russia up through Gorbachev, parental controls over the marriage choices of children remained strong, and young unmarried couples had to “sneak” about, risking having their names posted to workplace public bulletin boards as “immoral counter-revolutionaries” by some comrade babushka. Heterosexual kissing and hand-holding in communist China is taboo, and can lead to arrest in some areas — heterosexual expression is “counter-revolutionary” as per the state oppression of “decadent” Western rock music. Homoeroticism was OK, however, and this is something one sees in multiple expressions in fascist nations of either left or right-wing.

The confusion of nudism with promiscuity is just that, a confusion. Nazi germany and the Soviet communist state and satellite vassal states were prudish heterosexually, but promiscuous in a homoerotic manner. The SA under Rohm is the well-known example, but it would be an error to think this license also extended into the heterosexual realm. Girls were still supposed to be chaste and boys could experiment sexually, as per the Nazi motto for women: “Kinder, Kircher, Kucher” (children, church, kitchen).

As to Wilhelm Reich, his influence was aimed at eliminating neuroses due to the social conditions that led to such things as high levels of unwanted pregnancies and the abandoned women with children, the many homeless children and crushing economic situations, the depression and suicides, etc. That led him to become a champion for legalization of abortion and contraceptives, legalization of divorce, erasing of the stigma of “illegitimate children” which had legal consequences for such children. He also argued to decriminalize homosexuality, even while he considered it a neurosis, and his later exposure of the sexual psychopathology of both the Black Fascists of Nazism and the Red Fascists of communism earned him the enmity of both, who happily burned his books. His net influence upon European events and the later Kinsey-inspired “sexual revolution” in the USA was negligible. Free nations grant freedom to women also, and out of that comes a generally more fluid condition sexually, where people marry for love rather than out of parental dictates or financial motives, and the priests are confined to the church. Under totalitarian conditions, sexuality is crushed down and like all else, is made subservient to the goals of the State.