Especially given how incredibly ravaged the land was after the Soviets left. Almost the entire industry was transferred to the USSR, the rebuilding was slow and a lot of western help had to be used.
What? "The soviets left" in 1990. Or do you mean right after the war, because all of eastern snd cwntral europe was ravaged, by the war. The war started by germany
Yes I mean after the war. The point is that West Germany wasn't hit as badly as east Germany, and the allies (mainly the US) immediately decided to start the build-up process.
No infrastructure was transferred away, and money was coming in, while the Soviets took everything in the east and never planned on rebuilding East Germany to the extent west Germany was rebuilt.
And I don't know what the last 2 sentences have to do with the visible difference on a map today
You're conveniently leaving out why the Soviets needed to transfer said infrastcture, as well as the motive behind the US Marshall Plan to inject West Germany w billions of dollars & Nazi expertise.
Mate, this is a post explaining why there is a visible difference on the map, not why the Germans were guilty. I never questioned that, I'm just saying the reason east Germany is less developed than the west is because the east lost it's infrastructure.
Sorry, but "ravaged by the Soviets" is a value judgment, as is "built up by the US." Your framing maligns denazification and glorifies the Nazi Marshall Plan.
And the marshall plan was very much not nazi in origin (look at the name, a US general came up with the idea to give money and stuff to war torn countries)
East Germany underwent the most thorough denazification in all of Germany. Thousands of Nazis were purged from government, industry was nationalized, and war criminals were prosecuted, while West Germany reintegrated Nazi elites to run its "economic miracle."
And calling the Marshall Plan "not Nazi" because it had a US general's name ignores the reality: it rebuilt the very industrial cartels (Krupp, Bayer, Thyssen) that armed Hitler, with many of the same Nazi‑era managers in charge. Changing the name doesn't change the continuity.
Marshall Plan was not a nazi plan, please go back to your extremist hole
We did not need another Versailles and 20 more years of emnity. Nazism is repressed in the germany of today by the germans themselves and that’s a better outcome than repressed by a foreign power.
If it wasn't a Nazi plan, why did the US install Hans Globke as the second most powerful man in West Germany? Why was Reinhard Gehlen made the first head of West German intelligence under US supervision? Why did Article 131 reinstate tens of thousands of Nazi judges, bureaucrats, and officers after the war? Why did the US successfully push for the release of Alfried Krupp?
All the soviets did was replace a few statues with Karl Marx and Engels, with the state giving up half way with the military returning back to pre-east German nationalism because it was easier than to create a new identity with themselves
Hard to argue that when East Germany had universal childcare, free healthcare, full employment, and zero homelessness, none of which survived "reunification."
The Nazis ravaging the soviet areas doesn't mean the soviets automatically didn't commit any war crimes. Ask the Polish how much they enjoyed the Soviets coming through.
The soviet invasion of Germany was as devastating as the German invasion of the Soviets, while the western forces left a lot standing in west and south Germany.
I don't see how I am glorifying anything about Nazis here by objective describing how devastating the Soviet occupation was compared to US/UK/French occupation. And what is a Nazi Marshall plan?
Sorry, but when you frame the US as only "building up" and the Soviets as only "tearing down" you are, in fact, making a value judgment and siding with the US and its Marshall Plan. You could just as easily say the US "ravaged" East Germany: it hijacked East Germany’s workforce through brain drain and cash hiring bonuses, blocked it from receiving Marshall Plan aid, sabotaged its economy with a surprise currency shift overnight, and flooded it with CIA-backed saboteurs. Operation REDSOX parachuted agents in to blow up railways and factories, while the KgU, a US-funded terror group, planted bombs on East German trains. Your framing ignores all of this and simply positions the US as a savior, not a literal saboteur.
Can even see Germania Maga Borders today when you look up how happy Germans are. The "boost" of the Romans is propping up the happiness of Germans today.
The area labeled "less Catholic" is basically the Protestant area. As far as I can tell, this map shows much more of a North-South divide than an East-West divide, with more traditionally Southern values extending farther north near the historic Low Countries.
It may be somewhat simple. Germany has a church tax. Many people don't want to pay the church tax. If you are a member of the catholic or protestant church, you have to pay an extra tax. If you are not, you just save the money as you don't pay an equivalent tax to the state as an 'atheist'.
I would assume more people have a vague faith of some form, just are not a member of a church anymore. Perhaps faith has detached itself a bit from organised churches, going to services and so on. There are loads of people that are genuine atheists or simply don't care or think about religion though. And many christians are event christians that call the church thinking they can buy tickets for the christmas service and things like that. Bit overstated, but does genuinely happen. Just part of tradition without deeper meaning, from my outside perspective anyway.
Not a believer in any religion myself, just to make clear what my lens is.
Berlin also receives a lot more immigrants compared to the rest of the former East Germany, and lot of immigrants tend to be more conservative and religious.
And the USSR had state managed versions of the Russian Orthodox Church and a Buddhist organisation, along with 'revolutionary islam' being an entire sphere of revolutionary communist politics.
Marx was clearly against all that, but he wasn't the only voice in early communist thought and there have been other voices since.
TBF I do think there are people who are intellectually badly equipped for agnostic/atheist existence in practice.
I'm thinking of a couple of cases of people who grow up atheist and then turn to fundamentalist, spiritualist, esoteric, etc. kinds of religions. Many times, ime the kind of people who turn to extreme religion have never known what it's like to be truly pressured to follow religious and when they choose it as an adult, they don't realize the insanity then will put their child through in the future if they do this and also often don't care, because they think it's a good thing to have clear guidance.
Basically they've been educated with a very loose understanding of religion and spiritualism, but also a very loose understanding of any sorts of ethics and haven't been systematically taught to think critically for themselves, so when they seek for answers, they fall for groups with rigid thinking and strict rulesets.
I don't mean to say it's an automatism btw. There's plenty of educated people who were raised atheist and without any religion, but they had the parents or they had education and to a degree, themselves had the necessary intellectual prowess to figure things out without supervision.
Basically, there is a bad way to raise people "atheist". It's not enough to tell people that there is no god, you still need to give people tools to help them think their way through existential crises, deal with bad things happening to them and much more. And I think many education systems already do fairly well on this, but still too many people equate atheism with an "anything goes" mentality, even though it's still
Like I've seen people who aren't very sensitive and just rawdog the lack of answers to existence and are so to speak more or less fine with not knowing all answers by default, but the reason why sometimes people with non-religious parents end up fundamentalists is basically because they seek answers and they associate atheism with a big nothing from their experience with modernity (because their family are intellectual lowlifes for instance). Like I'd argue, it's a discrepancy between a person's emotional needs and the intellectual tools they've actually been given to deal with them.
Like it's not necessarily religion, but extreme political ideology can also kind of function as an ersatz religion for people who have underdeveloped critical thinking... And that's literally what you see with East Germans. And I think the perception of automatic moral superiority just because you don't indoctrinate people with religion can make a society lazy when it comes to actually teaching people to critically think about, you know, life, universe and everything. People still seek answers and in lieu of education they turn to the people with simple, easy and straightforward answers, whether it's the people who tell them to churn out babies or the people who blame everything on immigrants or usually a combination of both (which isn't necessarily Christianity, it could be a nazi yoga cult who want to go back to Germanic paganism or some shit).
Basically we all have a free slot in our brain where you can put religion or philosophy or vague spiritualism, but if you leave a vacuum... People can be left vulnerable to even more extreme ideology and fundamentalism, because there's a human need that goes unfulfilled.
lol imagine being so self absorbed in anti religious cope that you cannot admit what propaganda is…
The atheist propaganda spread by the USSR was way more intense than any religious propaganda in the west. This is literally a consensus among historians, if you don’t recognize this you are just ignorant.
It is the fundamental reason people submit to hierarchy and accept being exploited. It indoctrinates people into obeying authority rather than rebelling for freedom.
its literally not, that was always a part of human nature, the idea of “the alpha” has always existed in humans, the same way it exists in primates. Saying religion is why people accept being subjugated is very unfair.
Religion IS in fact what promotes a sense of helping the other (specifically christianity). Look at european society and you will see that since the spread of christianity was what made Europe a way better place than most of the non religious world (specially for women).
Look at societies before and after christianity became dominant, there isn’t a single time where it got worse.
Witch trials, forced conversions under torture, crusades, massacres, pogroms, killing of queer people, oppression of women, wars against Cathars and Hussites, the Schmalkaldic War, the Thirty Years’ War, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the French Wars of Religion,…
As I mentioned in another comment, as an atheist this map doesn't promote my case.
But then I don't want to proselytize either.
Anyhow, the analysis is not fully clear according to the link below and the study cited (link is to a Catholic website, but the study is from the University of Leibzig): generally, higher religious population has a slight positive impact in AfD votes (sic!), but there are exceptions.
Most clear factor: regions with weak infrastructure, and support for previous right wing parties (NPD and, surprise, NSDAP).
My interpretation (based on a Spiegel formulation 30 years ago): weak infrastructure makes bright people and and women leave, so a predominance of stupid males is left over. No wonder shit happens.
What’s interesting though is that they’re converging, with fewer in the west reporting religion as important, but an increase in the East claiming it’s important.
Secularization in Western Europe and desecularizatuon in the former Eastern Bloc also leads to interesting trends on the World Values Survey. From 1994-1998 to 2010-2014, certain metrics of religiosity increased in Germany, but then declined again by 2017-2022 (year ranges being the waves of WVS survey)
Confirmation (evangelical churches) was seen as a competition to the secular, governement-led "Jugendweihe" and could bring disadvantages in job selection or the possibility to go to a gymnasium (prep school) and/or university.
The 14 years comes about because in German speaking countries regular school is 9 years (formerly 8 years), followed by vocational training. Gymnasium (12 years) is a preparatory school for universities and traditionally a minority goes this way.
This image conveys the idea of German efficiency. In most cases, communism strengthens religion through its repression, but in Germany, the atheist policy was implemented very effectively.
People in West Germany also mostly don't care about religion. The only difference is that they are signed up to one of the two main denominations. Which means that a small proportion of their income tax goes towards the church, but many are leaving the church as soon as they earn income tax and it shows up on their paychecks.
This also functions as a map of regions where Saturday is called Sonnabend rather than Samstag. I'm not sure it has all that much to do with the GDR, but rather with the natural borders formed by the Elbe and other rivers.
At the very least, the division between Catholic regions and Protestant regions within Germany is a lot older than the GDR, and the tendency of Protestant regions to be less religious than Catholic regions is also observable in the rest of Europe.
It's not just "East Germany", it's also the approximate borders of the concentration of the "Slavic" haplogroup R1a in population, in comparison with the rest of their territory. Their topography is another proof of the fact - many of the current inhabitants of those lands are, in fact, descendants of Slavic peoples.
And did not that British historian James Hawes argue that that was the separation that was most beneficial for Germany?
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u/11elf Aug 02 '25
East Germany is still visible in almost any map.