Who speaks for East Germany?

Img: Costamiri, CC BY-SA 4.0

Germany is set to get its ‘first East German economics minister’, news outlets reported this week. There are still ministerial positions to be announced, but so far, Katherina Reiche from Luckenwalde in the state of Brandenburg will be the only GDR-born minister in the new cabinet. But does that matter?

There is no doubt that the former East Germany is a distinct political, economic and cultural landscape. The widely distributed maps of the election results have shown that once again. It would therefore be helpful if politicians took that on board and found a way of representing these differences in cabinet. But how to include a range of voices that speak for the various perspectives of people in East Germany is a difficult question that goes beyond geography.

The debate about to what extent East Germans should be represented in the next government in proportion to their size within the German population had gathered momentum in recent weeks. Depending on how you measure, around a fifth of Germans are classed as ‘Easterners’ – a proportion that leadership positions in politics and the private sector don’t tend to reflect. A recent study suggested that just 12 per cent of top jobs across all areas go to people from the East.

Unsurprisingly, polls have suggested that East German representation in the cabinet is important to the vast majority of East German voters. Politicians from the former GDR have also called for more parity. Guido Heuer, who leads the conservative group in the parliament of Saxony-Anhalt, for instance, said he ‘would be happy if East Germany was represented in cabinet proportionally. I believe I’m not the only one with this idea in the five [East German] states.’

I suspect I might be in the minority with my view, but I really don’t think this is the right debate. Of course it’s important that there are voices in and around the government that understand the specific social and economic challenges that the East faces, but being from there in and of itself doesn’t achieve that.

Katherina Reiche may be the first East German economics minister, but need I remind people that another woman who grew up in Brandenburg was chancellor for 16 years? Angela Merkel consciously decided not to promote East German interests, partially because she felt (not without justification) that it would harm her politically and partially because her unusual background as the daughter of a left-leaning pastor who had moved to the GDR from Hamburg didn’t really make her a representative of mainstream society in the East. In the end, people judged her on her politics, and she ended up less popular in the East than in the West.

Germany has also had many East Germans in prominent positions who were outright disparaging about their fellow East Germans. There was Joachim Gauck from Rostock, who became president and therefore head of state. He explained the inner-German economic disparity by claiming that ‘East Germans lack determination’. To him, the rise of the AfD (which is now pushing for the top spot in the polls Germany-wide) in the East is due to people’s ‘very strong connection to authoritarian leadership’ from the GDR years. Neither of those are constructive views that lead fellow politicians to address the real problems in the East. Instead, they promote the view of the region as inherently damaged.

Gauck is not the only prominent East German politician who harbours residual resentment for others born in the GDR. There is also Angela Merkel’s former minister for East German affairs, Marco Wanderwitz from Chemnitz (then called Karl-Marx-Stadt), who claimed that large parts of the population in the former East were ‘lost to democracy’. He has recently led efforts to ban the AfD — now the most popular party in the East and pushing for the same position Germany-wide.

Or there is Katrin Göring-Eckardt from Thuringia, who served as vice president of parliament — another prominent East German who thinks fellow East Germans ‘haven’t arrived in democracy’.

What these politically successful East Germans have in common is that they don’t belong to the mainstream in the East – if indeed there is such a thing. It’s notable how many of them have strong religious backgrounds, for instance, when the former GDR is a majority atheist region. Politically, too, many are outsiders. Göring-Eckardt’s Green Party, for instance, got 3 per cent in Thuringia in the last state election and was knocked out of the state parliament.

When I was recently in Thuringia for a political conference, which involved mostly West German participants, the person around the table who was most critical of the East German public was a local SPD politician. I had a chat with her over dinner and began to understand the dynamics behind this a bit better.

Also coming from a religious family, she said she had a happy enough childhood in the GDR but one that was shielded and withdrawn from the mainstream. Her parents told her to be careful about what she said outside her own house. She led two lives, a public and a private one. Merkel describes similar dynamics in her autobiography. Out of that comes an inherent suspicion of mainstream society in the East. Seen from the perspective of an inner-Eastern minority, they were the ones who lived in and with the GDR, who allowed the state to function and, at the very least, tacitly accepted the conditions as they were.

Another thing that many of these Eastern politicians have in common is that they come from middle-class backgrounds, while the GDR aggressively promoted working-class people and culture. This again made them social islanders both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Yet, social class underpins the AfD vote. In the February election, 38% of working-class voters opted for the AfD. Due to the East’s historical legacy and the socialist policies of the GDR, working-class structures are still more prominent in the region, which, in my opinion, is a significant driver behind the higher AfD vote there.

But how is a Merkel or a Göring-Eckardt in a position to understand these social dynamics any better than a West German politician from a similar background of personal economic stability? It’s not really surprising that someone like former chancellor Gerhard Schröder was popular with East Germans at the time. He was from the West but grew up in humble circumstances, which made him appear more relatable to many in the former GDR.

I should add that there are notable examples of popular Eastern politicians, particularly the state leaders in the East. Dietmar Woidke (SPD, Brandenburg), Michael Kretschmer (CDU, Sachsen) and Reiner Haseloff (CDU, Saxony-Anhalt), for instance, all managed to win elections in states where the AfD is the most popular party. Notably, all three have a reputation as grounded, pragmatic ‘doers’ who seem to have an ear on the ground. Woidke even asked his party not to get involved in his local campaign in Brandenburg, which was entirely tailored around him. Kretschmer also has significant leeway to do his own thing in Saxony, and has proved a powerful ‘Eastern’ voice in his party at the national level as one of four deputy chairs of the CDU.

So where does that leave the likely new Economics Minister, Katherina Reiche? I think whether she will do a good job for East Germans will be judged based on her work rather than where she was born. On paper, she appears to resemble Merkel: an ambitious Brandenburger with a background in science and a worldview grounded in Protestantism.

Indeed, she became a Merkel protege in the conservative party and is said to use the informal ‘Du’ with the former chancellor. But in contrast to Merkel, Reiche has got experience in the private sector, specifically in the all-important energy industry, where she has led the E.ON subsidiary Westenergie in recent years. She’s also very well-connected, including in her private life. It was revealed earlier this week that she’s in a relationship with former Economics and Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.

None of that qualifies Reiche as a representative of specifically East German interests. But that won’t be her job. As Economics Minister, it will be her task to help Germany emerge from its economic malaise. If she can manage that and people begin to get the sense that things are on the up, she’ll be appreciated for that, regardless of where she was born.

The remaining economic disparities between East and West, such those regarding wages and pensions, wealth and property ownership, won’t get tackled automatically by appointing people from the former East to cabinet positions. Besides, there are plenty of regions in the former West with similar issues. These are serious and complex questions that require more than tokenism for answers. Of course, it matters that a government contains voices from a wide range of backgrounds, but diversity in perspective should trump diversity in geography.