I love the smell of burning paradigms in the morning…

After awhile, you learn that tidying things up and making everything squared away is just in the German DNA, and must have been there for hundreds of years. What’s their beloved catchphrase? ” Alles in Ordnung”?

Then you see how communism broke that in East Germany in fewer than 5 years. Money wasn’t the issue: the Germans would have been itching to haul away the rubble and patch the bullet holes, and repaint……and then – for what can only be 1 reason – they just didn’t do it. Any political system that can turn *Germans* into passive, lazy ne’er-do-wells is by definition a toxic system. So I’d say those pictures of fixed-up buildings make a fine case, wrapped neatly into a tidy little package. They sat there untouched and unrepaired for 45 years…and then something changed, and they suddenly got fixed up. Seems only fair to ask, “what changed?”

While it would be tempting to make this an allegory about the Reagan and Obama administrations, I won’t go there because it’s not fair. DC had a long-running real estate boom. When real estate soars, buildings that had been not worth repairing become valuable.

I won’t say that the East German government wasn’t evil, or trivialize the change that the former East Germany has seen in the two decades since reunification by calling it merely a real estate boom. But some pictures of fixed up buildings doesn’t make much of a case.

The track record of Communism is that it is nearly ALWAYS a dictatorship. Give the State unlimited authority, and you make it that much more worthwhile for psychos and thugs to take it over. “True Communism” has “never been tried” because “Communism” was the fig-leaf of choice for 20th century monsters like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. All three claimed to be Communists, and all three were given appalling latitude by large numbers of people who should have known better.

BTW, two photos of my house over the last decade would show a similar (but less dramatic) transformation

“Van” isn’t spelled “house”.

Let me go talk to my liberated East German relatives OH WAIT I CAN’T because they were killed.

I was in the USSR just before the coup. Leningrad (large parts of it) looked a lot like that photo above. A beautiful city, with wide boulevards. But very few automobiles (some may like that but that is a different issue…) and the ground floors of buildings mostly abandoned and boarded up (because there was no retail purpose for them). The Russians had spent some time rebuilding the old buildings destroyed by the war (to their credit) but beyond that there did not seem to be a lot of maintenance and there were lots of broken and boarded windows. The “new” architecture was hideous. Reinforced concrete monstrosities by half wit architects.

St. Petersburg is a completely transformed city economically now. Mostly in a good way (although I suppose there is always a danger of new development taking out some of the old historic buildings). Communism tended to save the past due to the lack of any dynamic economic growth. And that is true across the whole former Communist block.

It is similar in Asia. Singapore is a dynamic city, but the old colonial city is left only in remnants. Old Shanghai and Bangkok are also in many ways no more. You can get a hint of what they may have looked like by going to Saigon or Hanoi. But growth there is changing those cities, in good and bad ways. It is interesting to watch it happen.

I never saw such a thing in any of the West German towns I visited. Even in the smallest small towns I visited in WGer, stucco on the buildings was fresh and clean and the towns were tidy and well cared for. There was a felling of decay and abandon in those small towns in EGer that was apparent (and so aberrant that I immediately took note of it), even from the passing of a car on a highway.

Radley, thanks for this post. I really enjoyed the photos and my fellow Berlin vets, whom I pointed towards the photo gallery, have enjoyed them as well.

http://molivam42.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/koreabynight.jpg

Our German instructors and informants absolutely did not want to go back to a repressive socialist government – but they were also pretty firm on the point that the benefits of the market economy have been uneven. The photographer who did this series left out the very visible evidence of that unevenness.

Those pictures don’t paint the picture you think they paint.

Not that I’m defending communism, it has never worked at the state level because it has a flawed view of human psychology and behaviour.