Jena (dpa/th) - The Jena historian Jörg Ganzenmüller considers the closeness to Russia of many East Germans to be an expression of their turning away from democracy. From his point of view, there are several reasons why people, especially in East Germany, parade through the streets with Russian flags, for example, said Ganzenmüller of the newspaper "Freies Wort" (Saturday). For many, it's "not about Russia at all when they demonstrate with Russian flags or reproduce Russian propaganda on social media." Rather, they wanted to express their support for an authoritarian model of society.
"That means that when they parade through the streets with the Reichskriegsflagge or the Russian flag, they actually mean the same thing, which is basically interchangeable," said Ganzenmüller of the newspaper. He holds a professorship for comparing European dictatorships at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena and is also the chairman of the Ettersberg Foundation in Weimar.
According to the historian, there had been a section of the population in eastern Germany for decades that viewed the Soviet Union or Russia with sympathy and interest. "These people are still there and sometimes find it difficult to blame Russia alone for the war in Ukraine."
In addition, many East Germans themselves had had negative experiences with the West in the years after reunification. "Putin is spreading the narrative that Russia has been constantly cheated by the "collective West" since 1990 and cheated with the eastward expansion of NATO," said Ganzenmüller. In fact, that's not true. "In East Germany, however, this narrative is now leading many people to show solidarity with Russia, since they too have experienced being cheated by the West in the course of the German unification process."
