It helps that we live in a world of interconnected mass media and capitalism seems dead set on showing it's whole ass to the world. There's treats, sure, but it's really not that hard to show how the West is gleefully devouring it's working class like it's Attack on Titan.

Western propaganda worked. East Germans watched West German TV and saw all the treats in the commercials. They believed that they too would be driving BMW’s and eating bananas in their big-ass houses. Never did it occur to them that all of the treats of the West came with a price.

There is an interview with a person who escaped from North to South Korea and she basically tells the same, she said: I watched the shows I thought most (could become) millionaires and there was no poverty. Then I got here and saw poverty, lived precarious etc. she said her life only got better once the media picked her up to do Anti North Korean propaganda on TV basically.

All of this raises the question of what socialist countries can do in the future to prevent reactionary propaganda from taking hold.

Have bananas. Seriously the more productive system will win in the end. The ecological question makes a steady rise in consumerism unfeasable and undisirable. A more productive society might give more spare time instead of treats and save the enviroment. However people in the east had less treats just as much work and were horrible to the enviroment as well. Stuff like inequality don't mean anything. A west German worker might have a Volkswagen, his boss a BMW and his boss a Porsche, all of those are much better than a Trabant so people accepted it. Unemployment existed in the west for a few, the average worker would never assume to be one of the unemployed. The West saw massive immigation to help with worker shortages even. Capitalism is full of contradictions. If your socialism isn't more productive than that, there is something wrong with it.

I think it is very human not to consider the possibility that you might lose what you’ve already got. East Germans didn’t realise that the BMW’s were part of a system with unemployment, lack of community and disgusting inequality. East German media tried to tell the whole picture about the west but were ultimately not believed.

I think this systematizes the entire situation of the Eastern bloc very well. There were some major issues with the system, for a number of reasons, and people of course didnt like that, and its normal for people to desire things that will improve their material conditions. However, the 90s and 00s really took away the good things that were there during socialism. The entire period of the 90s was basically a dissolution of society. In many ways, it feels like the same level of neoliberalism is only now reaching the West, and the situation in the US and UK really rhymes a lot with that of 90s Eastern Europe, with the absolute dissolution of social institutions, absolute mistrust in society as a concept, rampant individualism and everyone having conspiray theory brainworms.

w/r/t consumer goods... I have no data that backs this up, but I wonder about the divide between the "labor aristocracy" and the working class in the GDR (for purposes here, I'll define labor aristocracy as those whose material conditions would be better under capitalism versus socialism - so a lot of doctors, lawyers, middle managers, etc). In the GDR I imagine you would have a sizeable "labor aristocracy" - a group of people that saw the capitalist West and thought correctly that their material position would be better with capitalism. However, I believe the working class would still be larger. What we know about capitalism is that the labor aristocracy is given a MUCH larger say in society. For example, consider TV and movies. How often are protagonists portrayed as struggling working class folks? And how often are they portrayed as professionals making good money and no real material concerns - if not outright petite boug or capitalists? When watching the news, how often are crimes that affect the labor aristocracy shown versus crimes against the working class? So I admittedly have no hard evidence, but I wonder if there was a significant divide in GDR society: enough people who could benefit from capitalism (but still the minority) versus a larger working class that wanted socialism and liked the system they had (but certainly wanted some changes). The working class being larger but having significantly less say over how history was written post-unification. So the story now is "we didn't like how little consumer goods we had", which is certainly true, but not the whole story as working class of the former GDR is forced to be mostly silent.

Yeah the GDR had a brain drain problem is what I've been told. Lots of doctors leaving.

Also I believe the USSR and allies weren't in favor of the Berlin wall at its construction.

I don’t know how much truth there was to that

I mean, for all intents and purposes, the modern day equivalent might be that people have to sneak the fact that they pirate music because it's illegal. Something that doesn't impact the average pirate's life at all because it isn't policed at all. Probably very much the same in the GDR, if such a ban did exist.

Haha I'm only aware of the banana thing because a German exchange student friend told me about it in school. Personally I would much rather have bananas than shelling out $1,500 per month for my kids' daycare.

Right, I'm in the USA so I have to couch everything I say with I'm speaking at a distance and I can only rely on what I read about or watch. That said, I find all sorts of conflicting information of how "good" things were back then, why the communist governments collapsed, etc. I have not seen anyone yet provide a good synthesis of all these perspectives. Certainly not the capitalist "see capitalism is so much better than communism, that's why capitalism won". And the other extreme - that the Eastern Bloc made few mistakes in implementing socialism and it was all the fault of western sabotage". Trying to figure out as much as I can myself.

Wasn't summarily executed though. Of course I am against borders, but the narrative that it is worse to lock people in the country (where they can move freely) than to keep others out is bullshit. The tens of thousands of people who drowned in the subterranean sea is objectively more evil than what the GDR wall was. Similar: The support and the teaching of the people who tortured and killed tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and in total millions of labeled leftist sympathisants in Southern America, in South East Asia and Africa by the US is worse.

While we don't calculate life against life the military industrial prison complex of the US gets away with a clean west in comparison if you ask the media.

I don't applaud summary executions, but have trouble with hyping up moral judgement against a state and thus institutions which don't hold power anymore while women are murdered in the FRG sometimes without recurse, when the chancellor of Germany is responsible that a person in Hamburg got tortured to death as direct consequence of him being Mayor there.

That's fair, yes I was probably giving them a bit too much credit. I like how you mentioned the nature of siege socialism, I think that provides helpful context (I didn't really want to get into the Stasi but I felt if I didn't mention it folks would bring up that they hear about the Stasi a lot too in addition to the wall).

And its changed back now that America is going after Chinese academics and fomenting racism against Chinese people in general, many Chinese students are choosing to study locally instead of going to the US, and many Chinese researchers in America (including naturalized citizens) are considering returning to China. The first cold war led to Qian Xuesen leaving the US and helping the PRC develop their first nuke. I wonder what other advancements China will make owing to this round of reverse brain drain.

IDK the numbers for East Germany, bu I do know that the richest Soviets were only something like six times wealthier than the average citizen. The perks for high level officials of having a nice housing bloc and a private store are so minor compared to what the rich in America can expect - nevermind the fact that nobody in that system was born into a high level Party position. Though some western propagandists will argue that Stalin "owned" the entire Soviet state when he was in charge of it, and therefore calculate that he was the richest man in history.