East Germany became a part of a united Germany in 1990. There is one lesson that the world has drawn from this reunification and another lesson that I have drawn from it.
The lesson the world learned was that reunification of a successful commercial society with a communist society is an expensive proposition. It is such an expensive proposition that no country would embark on the same course again. From looking at the East German unification there is no chance that a Korean unification will be possible. South Korea could never afford the burden of integrating with the poverty and horror of North Korea.
The lesson I learned is that once people have become inured to a society in which merit is not rewarded and freedom is marginal that comfort with a stagnant life becomes ingrained and can be passed on to at least two additional generations.
It is now nearly a quarter of a century since Germany re-unified to include it's totally disabled population of East Germans.
East Germans, in the most recent election, supported one of their own prodigies, Angela Merkel, by a sizable ratio. 37% supported one of their own. An estimated 27% were voting for Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union Party. Former communists now are also voting in the Left Party which gets 20% of their vote. The two Leftist parties together are roughly 37%.
To me the ‘East German Syndrome’ means that creating a lazy, grubbing population in a communist or socialist milieu means decades and decades of despair and malaise. East Germans vote turnout is noticeably 10% lower than Germany as a whole.
Socialism is a nearly hereditary debilitating disease.