The Unification of Germany by L. Goldstein

By now the outlook was hopeless, and when Hungary, which was in fact bankrupt, bought its survival by opening its borders, the GDR was finished.

One must be clear on a number of points. The first is that as long as socialist productivity was low, no open borders were possible. The so-called brain drain, that is, the emigration of intellectuals to the USA and Western Europe, affected the whole third world. The poorer socialist countries could not continue to train skilled workers, engineers, and doctors who then went to the West. And then went to the West not because there was no democracy in the East which is not say that there were no problems in this regard, but because the living standard in the West was higher, and the West made every effort to lure the intellectuals away. It is also important to see that the GDR citizen did not compare his standard of living with that of the Soviet Union Hungary, not even with that of England, France or Austria; but almost exclusively with that of the FRG. The standards for necessities grew not out of life in the GDR but out of advertisements from the West.

I have so far concentrated primarily on the economics of the collapse of socialism in the GDR. Let me now turn to the less narrowly economic and weave into it other, more political events. Fear of the Slavs generated by the Nazis, frightened many able people to flee to the West right after the war, taking valuable know-how with them. The GDR faced an economically, financially, and militarily powerful enemy in the West. The Eastern part of Germany had always been the poorest and least industrialized. In addition, the agricultural potential of the GDR was not great. The West German economic miracle and the felt need for participation in decision making in economics and politics served as powerful magnets to the Germans in the East to go West. As one writer put [Minnerup, 10]: "The attractions of West Germany's imperialist prosperity and bourgeois-parliamentary democracy lured hundreds of thousands into the Federal Republic every year: between 1949 and August 1969 over 2.6 million left the GDR for West Germany, the majority of them young people under 25."