Status Updates From Kraj za murem. Życie codzie...

It's hard to overstate how ridiculously militarized all facets of life in this country were. Probably it was more so than either the US or the USSR. In schools, "even music and art were often directed towards military subject matters. Children learned how to play military marches or were asked to draw tanks and battle scenes." To get access to higher education, one first had to fulfill extended military service.

"Bonn and Berlin were far more obsessed with one another at this point than they were with their superpower allies and enemies. Willy Brandt's Chief of Staff, Horst Ehmke, had aptly summarized the top three priorities of the West German intelligence service as 'GDR, GDR, GDR'. This was reciprocated in the East as the Stasi saw espionage of and by West Germany as the main concern at all levels of the organization."

"by the end of the 1980s, every East German teenager owned two pairs of jeans on average". Now that's what I call a post-scarcity society

🤓 "Access to university for working class students was not only made possible through financial and structural support but also encouraged. This was so effective that by 1967 around a third of university students in the GDR came from working class backgrounds while it was only 3 per cent in West Germany (and would never rise above 5 per cent until reunification)."