“Forty years are 40 years,” she said. “And I think the transition was difficult. You just need to look at the numbers: Only 2% of the management positions in companies, in universities, in the media are in eastern German hands. Let me put it this way: I think that easterners are also quite capable of being able to run a western newspaper.
“I think that there is simply a feeling people have that they are not really represented, that they are not heard. The east German-born theatre director, Frank Castorf, coined this beautiful expression: ‘the AfD is the revenge of the East’, and I believe that it really is like that.
“There was such a long wait to really be noticed, and not just to be welcomed, but actually to be recognised as capable of taking on positions of responsibility.”
It remained a particularly sore point, she said, that the pensions of eastern Germans still remained below the level of those western Germans receive, “which I think is hugely absurd. There has been a lot of injustice like this.” These experiences had not been properly dealt with, or discussed, she said.
#TheGuardian quotes #JennyErpenbeck on her views why #AfD is so popular in East Germany. It is very short, worth reading it, this is just an excerpt.
www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/sep/22/g...