Review of the book The Shock of Freedom by Ilko Sasha Kowalchuk

Ilko historian Sasha Kowalchuk, who published the second volume of his comprehensive biography of Walter Ulbricht this year, is an incredibly productive author: The Shock of Freedom. Various histories of East Germany have been published from 1989 to today. Of course, this is neither a quick fix – the author, who was born in East Berlin in 1967, has been researching and publishing for decades on the German Democratic Republic – nor is it the product of a steep thesis.

Although Kowalchuk makes a strong personal contribution in this book and makes no secret of his dislike of the bestsellers by Dirk Ochmann (“The East: A West German Invention”) and Katja Hauer (“This Side of the Wall”).

Because what does it say about the mood of society when two books are so successful that they blame the West alone for all the disappointments that arose after 1990/89 or water down the dictatorship of the GDR in such a way as to throw them, so to speak, into disarray? A floating void, without any real contact with “ordinary people”?

This “normalization” of the system of repression in the GDR is precisely what Ilko Sascha Kovalchuk writes against in his book, angrily and eloquently, and through reliable sources – and not only for reasons of historical accuracy, but also from a point of view that is deeply concerned about today.

Isn't the enormous success of the AfD and the Wagenknecht coalition in the East, the author asks, also due to a melancholy nostalgia for the ethnically homogeneous, statist, and authoritarian German Democratic Republic, the psychological consequences of which were never discussed? Quite the opposite: paternalistic talk of “revolutionary people” created a German nationalist narrative behind which millions of GDR followers (who by no means took to the streets to demonstrate in 1989) could easily hide.

But Kowalchuk is not interested in moralizing. It is not the co-operation of many at that time – forced, voluntary or paradoxically flamboyant – that becomes the target of his criticism, but rather the inability to mentally break free from such entanglements and lies of life.

Without downplaying the importance of the economic turmoil as a result of the reunification process (these turmoil are discussed in detail in his book “The Takeover”), his new work revolves around the question of how now prosperous regions, the majority of whose inhabitants also maintain their personal lives, can be described as a situation that ranges between good It polls very well as good, but resentment and even hatred can spread across the board: “freedom shock” leading to aggression, not least xenophobic rage.

In three parts, intertwined thematically – in the spirit of a fluid but dialectically coherent essay – Kovalchuk traces the influences before 1989, then the expectations associated with reunification, and finally the attitudes of many East Germans in that year 2024. A tradition that has remained virtually unbroken since the Wilhelmine Empire , the Nazi era, and the decades of the German Democratic Republic, are considered “heavy baggage” because they have never been viewed as such, let alone examined critically. Subordination to the state (including the resistance simulation of complaining “against those above”) was not only cultivated in the GDR but also survived its moment of freedom in 1989.

“Helmut Kohl, take our hand and lead us to the economic miracle,” Elko quoted Sasha Kovalchuk as one of the famous slogans from the demonstrations that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall – by the way, without cheap irony, albeit with horror. Psychologically implausible, he explains today's Putin sympathies, which hundreds of thousands of AfD and BSW voters do not hide, as an after-effect of the GDR's previous propaganda, especially the notorious reappraisal of the word “peace” – As a kind of twisted protest. Against the German federal (welfare) state, which supposedly “doesn't care about us.”

In the end, the author once again demonstrates in radical terms that this sort of thing is more than just an annoying, if regionally limited, whim. What if some trends in the East were not an anachronism, but were rather a manifestation of a mood that might soon spread to the old federal states? Aside from the German-German scrutiny, you can also read this in this uncomfortable book: “In Ukraine, the result of 1989 is currently being decided.”