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I wish I knew more about east Germany because someone recently dropped the "if it was so good why'd they have to stop people from leaving?" line and I had no reply. I have failed the cause and I will take my place against the wall
A lot of the reason why many east Germans dreamt of life in the west was the belief that they could have a higher standard of living there. While the idea that everyone in the west was driving BMW's and wearing Levi's jeans was naive and rosy it is true that the west was richer than the east.
Liberals will mystify this difference with lazy idealist notions of capitalism being more dynamic or whatnot. A more materialist explanation can be found by comparing the conditions for economic development of the east and the west.
For centuries before WWII eastern Europe has a history of being less developed than western Europe. The fighting on the eastern front was much more intense and vicious than on the western front, leaving eastern Europe more destroyed after the war than western Europe.
After the war, western Europe was placed in the orbit of the United States, the only major industrial economy left unharmed by the war, whereas eastern Europe was aligned with the USSR who had seen significant destruction during the war. The Americans realised that the best way to preserve their foothold in Europe was to make western Europe economically comfortable so communism would not look like an attractive alternative and gave capitalist states in Europe aid and access to trade. The USSR was facing a gargantuan reconstruction effort at home and was unable to provide the same kind of aid.
On top of all that western Europe was and is part of the metropol of an imperialist system, enabling the western European bourgeoisie to extract superprofits from the global south, further deepening the wealth gap between east and west.
This isn't to say that the AES countries in eastern Europe didn't make mistakes and had problems of their own making. They did, but even with the best management imaginable they wouldn't have been able to become as wealthy as the west.
Whenever this conversation pops up, it's usually in relation to Berlin, to which i have to say
Berlin was not this split point in the middle of the country, it was firmly in Eastern Germany. People attempted to scale the wall to either rejoin family, or escape persecution for crimes. While one side is understandable, the other is because these people would have been under police custody, and likely would not have once if they escaped. Information would leak, and understandbly the East German government would rather that not be the case.
I remember what almost nothing I've been told about the Berlin Wall, pretty much nothing aside from "communism bad", and this image looks like the narrative I've been told has some plotholes that really need to be explained.
Think about it....
Put yourself in the POV of one of those ultranationalistic German clowns in that period:
spoiler
You've lost the war against the "untermensch", and you believe economic opportunity is just one of your worries
(maybe your brother was deployed to Belarus for some "soldier work" prbly got sentenced to hang or go to gulag and you might meet a similar penal result, if not the country itself),
Either way, with most of your Eastern Germany being underdeveloped as fuck and already ravaged by war, not to mention the reparations of Soviet Union demanded from you and the radical change of your society from a Hitlerite one to a Brotherly Socialist one, you probably had a bit of mindbreak....
Just remember that Germany as a whole nation was only united recently years ago in 1871, so to see this all, as an of course, a very ultranationalistic German, would probably break your brain....
Compared this to the more-untouched and modernized West Germany, which still is in good shape in the Allied hands... and hasn't been forced to change much of its ranks from the Nazi era, you'd probably want to flee there too...
Tl;dr: it could be the fact that the sweeping societal whiplash transforming from to Hitlerite to a brotherly Socialist country and its ramifications could prbly do something with it...
But I mean, not all Germans in the Eastern part prbly share the same idea of fleeing the country, but yk, a new German people wasn't born without birthmarks of the old horrible Nazi Germany, whose anti-communist ideas had probably been imprinted long on some of them heavily....
This is kinda what I said, good to know my instincts were reaching in the right direction at least. I still hate how insipid and simplistic an idea it is to say "the wall was to keep people IN" that these people treat like sage wisdom
I mean, use their logic against them...
You know, if these same ppl say "oh Palestine should given wholly to the Israelis, because their ancestors got killed by the German Nazis"
Say "The German people deserved to get their government purged and replaced with a whole new Socialist German Republic, for what they've done in the Holocaust, et so forth..."