Why Germany Is Still Divided When It Comes to Russia
Many East Germans are more sympathetic toward Moscow than their western compatriots, reflecting decades of Soviet ties and disillusionment since reunification.
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When Judith Enders was a young girl in the dying days of the old East Germany, she would walk her dog in the forest, where she would often encounter young Soviet soldiers fishing at the local lake.
“We couldn’t really talk and mostly communicated by gesturing, but we clearly liked each other,” Ms. Enders said, recounting how the soldiers — who were occupying her country — shared their catch with her dog and gave her little chocolates, whose wrapper featured the iconic Russian bear Mishka.
Today she teaches political science at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin. “We saw them as our friend, our big brother,” she added, with a smile that indicated how naïve that was.
She told the story to help explain why many people in the former East Germany still hold a lingering affinity for Russia. It’s a sympathy that persists even as President Vladimir V. Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nears its fourth year.
It has survived the crimes and injustices that East Germans endured during decades of virtual colonization by Moscow, which hundreds of thousands of Germans took to the streets to throw off in the late 1980s.
Thirty-five years after German reunification, that nostalgia continues to be fueled by the failure to fully integrate the east, where even today citizens are still poorer and more likely to be unemployed than their compatriots in the west.
The Berlin Wall is gone and the heavily mined no man’s land that once divided the country has been turned into a nature preserve. But when it comes to attitudes toward Russia, the border between east and west remains remarkably clear.
While most West Germans have condemned Russia’s invasion and have been broadly supportive of helping arm Ukraine, many in East Germany have a more nuanced view of the conflict and are cautious about backing Ukraine or imposing sanctions on Russia.
Polls show East Germans are less likely to favor military aid or NATO membership for Ukraine and are more likely to believe that Kyiv should give up land for peace with Russia. More in the East also believe that the West and Ukraine carry some of the blame for the conflict.
This persistent divide has complicated the German government’s efforts to counter the Russian threat, and it has allowed the far-right Alternative for Germany party to win over voters in the east with what it bills as pro-peace, anti-armament campaigns.
The East German view is part of a varied landscape of opinion toward Moscow in the states that were once part of the Soviet empire. Poland and the Baltic States are, for instance, much more hostile to Moscow, especially since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, while Hungary has been sympathetic.
But if East Germany were still its own country, it would be among the most understanding of Russia of the former eastern bloc states in northern Europe.
Some experts say this has as much to do with developments after German reunification as it does with the ties that built up over decades of Soviet occupation.
Jörg Morré, a historian who has specialized on German-Soviet relations, calls the phenomenon a “post-Socialist community of shared destiny.”
Time has made hearts grow fonder, he said, especially as reunification and the ascent of a Western capitalist system failed to live up to its promise for many.
But what made the former East Germany unique is that its citizens could look to their wealthy compatriots in West Germany for immediate comparison — and overwhelmingly felt that they had lost out. When they started to feel like losers from reunification, a new kinship with Moscow was born.
Silke Satjukow, a German historian, says that the abrupt Soviet exit, which was completed by 1994, made matters worse by undoing the established local economy.
The fact that the withdrawal was peaceful, however, also helped prepare the ground for today’s nostalgia.
The general view has become rosier, Ms. Satjukow said, partly because people were now free to project their own values and hopes on their former occupiers. “We still have the idea that the Russians are our friends, and this idea was able to survive because we’ve not been able to verify,” she said.
Steffen Mau, a sociologist who has studied German reunification, said that East Germans today tend to have limited contact with Russians, so their views are based on an era just after the collapse of the Soviet Union when Moscow was aspiring toward an open and democratic society.
“I do believe that it is a form of Soviet nostalgia, and East Germans have not realized that the character of the Soviet Union, of old Russia, has changed dramatically since the 1990s,” he said.
Even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, sympathies in the east for Russia remained strong, recalled Dr. Morré, the historian, who is also the director of a museum in East Berlin on the site of Germany’s final World War II capitulation.
The museum has a permanent exhibition on Nazi war crimes committed during the German invasion of Russia and has long been a focal point for German-Russian comity.
When he decided to raise the Ukrainian flag in solidarity, he said, the reaction from neighbors and museum patrons was clear: “We want you to take that flag down.”
Christopher F. Schuetze is a reporter for The Times based in Berlin, covering politics, society and culture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.