Germany Has Learned The WRONG Lessons Of History | Prof. Dan Bednarz

Originally published on 8 May 2024.
[Part 2 of 2] Today I’ve got Dan Bednarz with me who wrote a very interesting book titled, “East German Intellectuals and the Unification of Germany”: An Ethnographic View.

This book is quite cool for four reasons: First, usually it’s the Europeans who go out into the world and then do ethnographic and anthropological studies of the non-whites to understand how they function and what they do. And here we haven an American who does this to the Germans, so it is an outsider view of East and West German society, trying to understand these groups.

Secondly, the book does something you don’t read or see often in German publishing landscape; it takes the East German experience serious. Especially that of intellectuals, who witnessed what was happening to “their” Germany during the re-unification process in the 1990s very ambivalently.

Third, it is also a very interesting long term study, because Dan first observed Germany right before the wall fell, then talked to these East German intellectuals, and then came back in 2014 to follow up with them 24 years later.

And finally, the book links-up with today where we clearly see different electoral preferences in Germany where the AfD is most strong in East Germany, and East-Germans seem to me also to be way, more critical of media narratives.