Submission Statement: Martina Mielke, a former crane driver at Rostock’s old Neptun shipyard, recalls partying with the Russian crew of a newly delivered ship during East Germany’s heyday.
“It was just like in a movie! ‘Sto gramm!’” said Mielke, invoking the Russian expression for a 100ml serving of vodka. “You weren’t allowed to chicken out. There was bread, bacon, black tea. They were so friendly.”
Her experience, and that of many others in the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, points to a view of Russia that has helped the far-right Alternative for Germany top opinion polls in this part of the country.
The party, founded in western Germany in 2013, recently secured a historic victory in Saxony-Anhalt, another former state in the German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was known, and is on track to come first in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern’s regional election on Sunday, polling at about 37 per cent.
Even as Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government warns of Moscow’s escalating “hybrid war”, after an explosives-laden drone was found at Leipzig airportlast month, nearly two-thirds of voters in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern see Vladimir Putin’s nation as posing “little or no threat”, according to a poll published last week by local newspaper Ostsee-Zeitung.
“There are differences between east and west, on arms deliveries to Ukraine, on the perception of Putin and Russia, and that’s to do with history,” said Steffen Mau, sociologist at Humboldt University in Berlin.
People in the communist GDR were more accepting of Soviet soldiers than those in other occupied European countries, given the crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime, including against the Red Army. After reunification, eastern Germans became citizens of a Nato member state, but scepticism towards the US-led alliance endured.
“East Germans were very cautious about the expansion of Nato towards central and eastern Europe,” Mau said.
That enduring affinity for Russia has been reinforced by the economic pain of Germany’s break from cheap Russian energy and lingering resentment over the upheavals that followed reunification.
Together, those forces have created fertile ground for the Russia-friendly, Eurosceptic AfD, just as Germany has become Ukraine’s biggest military donor under Merz.
Posted by DifficultBarber6969
3 Comments
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Yeah they were really friendly when they raped a couple of million German women.
This is still within living memory for some, and certainly within one or two generations for anyone who claims to remember any interactions with Russians.
This is soooo incredibly dumb it’s nauseating.
Proves that people are people, though.
We got Alabama folks voting for a NYC billionaire believing he is gonna make their lives better when he promised to take away their healthcare.
Then we got Brazilian folks voting to a former army captain because the military junta was apparently “not that bad”.
And now this with Germans.
You read the Old Testament where the Israelites insist on seeing their God, get a glimpse of His glory which terrifies them and then go back to worshipping a cow anyway and then you compare it to what’s going on in the world today and it really seems like ain’t shit changed over the last 6000 years.