Many tankies will point to the "perfect equality" of communist governments, but to them I ask: how equal were those gay disco rations?

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.

Think about it....

Put yourself in the POV of one of those ultranationalistic German clowns in that period:

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....