A journalist named Carolin Würfel tries to explain, using the example of the writer Jenny Erpenbeck, why West Germany is to blame when East Germany votes for the right-wing AfD or is intending to do so. As she writes in the “Guardian:”
One newspaper article described her work as offering “a benevolent, sometimes even loving view of socialism”. Another pointed out that Erpenbeck “grew up in a communist parallel world with all kinds of privileges” and would therefore portray the GDR as a “place of longing and hope”. None of it was meant as a compliment, but as proof of her delusional perspective.
Würfel withholds from her readers the crucial information that can be found in one of the articles she links to:
Jenny Erpenbeck’s father John studied physics in the GDR and became a Leninist philosopher “for whom there were no travel restrictions despite the Wall.” Therefore, she “not only grew up in this communist parallel world with all kinds of privileges. She even had the privilege of being able to live in Italy with her mother for about a year before the Wall fell.”
Privilege means that the other GDR citizens did not have these freedoms. The author of the linked article, Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, therefore judges: “The GDR prison appears more comfortable, more acceptable from this perspective.”
Do not trust those who try to whitewash the GDR and blame the West when extreme parties gain support there.