Jobs.
Both selfworth and usefullness, where enourmously undermined after the wall fell and the hordes from the West, Besserwessied the East. I experienced this it myself. Even though I was from the West, but I moved to East Germany / Leipzig in 1991 and people did treat me differently when they realised I was from the West. Which sometimes took them a while. But for the colonial Wessis I encountered, I only have contempt and I was one of them.
It is the small things that give one the realisation of selfworth and very often it is still being connected to your work place and as you all know - everybody in the GDR had the security of life-time employment. The responsibility was with the state and the state took good care of you - for the cost of your liberties. But now, since the liberties are achieved, the responsibilities rest with the individuals, social structures don't work the same way and different working styles were seem to be needed to be learned. But the way it was being enforced, was out of the control of the individual. The carpet they stood on was pulled under their feet - laying on the floor there were being lied to by the politicans.
"I can see blossoming landscapes" Helmut Kohl promised this but he made damn sure, that it was on West German terms.
I still have difficulties to understand why my friends vote for the PDS, but in the end, I would have to vote for them as well, if I trusted Wahl-o-mat I just cannot. I have seen their politicians promise as much as the CDU, but the Realos in the Greens are still my choice.
In general the critique should include the disastrous decision to convert the E. German mark on a 1-1 basis and to raise wages to an almost W. German level. If you take an already struggling enterprise and choose to massively hike its costs overnight, it will die. That's what happened on a large scale in E. Germany. Not that it would have been easy to do anything else - people might have voted with their feet, but still that's a major reason why in many ways the E. German economy has done so much worse than those of the new member states.
