SLet’s imagine that public television went to the trouble of producing a report followed by a talk show on the subject of “China, Olaf Scholz and us North Germans” or “America, climate change, the automotive industry and we West Germans”. A majority of viewers would find that strange, ridiculous, or even derogatory. In this case, however, ARD cannot abandon the topic “Russia, Putin and we East Germans”.
The coupling of the report by Jessy Wellmer with an edition of “Hart aber fair” follows the practiced pattern of presenting and explaining “the East Germans” to the West German majority society as deviations from the norm. Even if the claim to “explain” is embellished here behind the attempt at “listening” and “understanding”, even if the now embarrassing “the East Germans” in the title has been noticeably softened by “we East Germans”: The topic is set because a mental dissonance must somehow be resolved; if it stopped, it would be worrying for “non-East Germans”. In this case, public service television again remains western television. Anyone who says “ARD” must also say “FRG”, and that means Trizonesia.
Frank Plasberg, who takes the discussions about the underrepresentation of East German topics in the media and the quasi-colonial way of dealing with them seriously, is also not entirely comfortable with the subject and the group in the studio. Self-critically, he asks: “Have we done something wrong? Were there too many ant researchers here, bending over the people in the East?” He doesn’t have to answer the question, so the courage to ask it is free. But everyone in the group – the political advisor Antje Hermenau, the former world boxing champion Henry Maske, the journalist Jessy Wellmer, the publicist Ralf Fücks and the sociologist Stefan Creuzberger – hastens to say that “the East Germans” don’t even exist, that the different generations in one and the same family have very different opinions and that the mental imprints of the Cold War with the current generation of students – according to Creuzberger – have long since disappeared.
anger is inherited
It speaks for Jessy Wellmer that she does not allow these quick evasions in the consensus. There are enough young people in the new federal states who take on the pain, the wounds, the hurt and the anger of their parents. This honest observation gives a different weight to the end of her own report, in which she describes herself as a child of a reunited Germany who does not want to inherit the bitterness of her parents’ generation. Because Wellmer – who comes from Güstrow in Mecklenburg – knows this anger, this bitterness, this hurt from people who are close to her.
But what is the subject of the report and the talk show? Supposedly that “East Germans” judge Russia’s war against Ukraine differently than “West Germans” and are more inclined to seek explanations for Putin’s aggression in political provocations “of the West” and advocate a relaxation or even removal of economic sanctions. However, neither the report itself nor the surveys conducted in connection with it confirm this thesis. Henry Maske carefully points this out. Only 35 percent of the East Germans surveyed – however representative this group may be – do the current sanctions against Russia go too far. That’s a good third, says Maske, so by no means the majority, where Wellmer has to agree with him immediately. And the assumed greater mental proximity of the East Germans to Russia due to the Soviet quasi-occupation, which the report tries to substantiate with media images of GDR state propaganda, collapses in the discussion.
