Shaping Network Society

Guest-Blog by Ralf Leiteritz (now an international relations professor at the Universidad de los Andes).

…on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall I’ve come to think about my old country again. Seeing a short compilation of songs about the wall or more precisely its fall in 89, I thought about compiling my personal top 10/11 list of songs from/about East Germany. Not that my generation really listened a lot to East German bands – we were much more in tune with Western (West German, US and UK) music during the late 1980s. However, a few songs still stuck in my mind, mostly from around the time of the Wende (1989/90).

So here goes: 11 songs that bring me back to the GDR (actually Nr. 7 was from a West German artist), accompanied by some comments, plus a bonus track from….New York of all places. Hope you enjoy it!

1. Sandow: Born in the GDR (1990)
(makes – not so friendly – references to the sport star Nr. 1 in East Germany – ice skater Katarina Witt and the concert that Bruce Spingsteen gave 1988 in East Berlin in front of ….160,000 people)

2. City: Am Fenster (1978)
(with an awesome violin solo at the beginning)

3. Karat: Ueber sieben Bruecken musst Du geh’n (?),
(the song was made somewhat more famous in West Germany in a cover version by Peter Maffay)

4. Feeling B: Wir wollen immer artig sein (1990),

(half of today’s Rammstein come from this Nr.1 punk band in East Germany)

5. Electric Beat Crew: Here we come (1989),
(Hip Hop from East Germany!!! Only song from an East German band I know in English)

6. Karusell: Als ich fortging (1988),
(wonderful melody and lyrics written by a local poet – Gisela Steineckert)

7. Udo Lindenberg: Sonderzug nach Pankow (1983),
(in fact, Udo Lindenberg finally did manage to sing in the “Palace of the Republic” in East Berlin in 1987)

8. Nina Hagen: Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen (1978),
(who would have had thought that – Nina Hagen grew up in East Berlin; she must have been 18 years old or so when she recorded this song…)

9. Herbst in Peking: Bakschischrepublik (1990),
(the hymn of alternative East German rock during the Wende)

10. Die Skeptiker: Strahlende Zukunft (1990),
(a band labelled the East German “Dead Kennedys” – I think for the (political) quality of their lyrics they’d probably better be described as the equivalent of “The Clash”)

Bonus track:
11. Grandmaster Melle Mel: Beat Street Theme (1986),
(the movie “Beat Street” about life, rap and hip hop music in New York was shown in GDR film theaters in 1986 or 87 and revolutionized the local, unofficial music scene – lots of breakdance groups imitating the moves from the movie sprung up like mushrooms)

As we are watching the global stimulus packages being implemented, it makes sense to step back and reflect on comparable interventions. Germany has invested around 4% of its GDP every year since 1990 into the reconstruction of former East Germany. This amounts to around $ 2 trillion a number comparable to the $ 5 trillion that countries worldwide pledged in their stimulus packages. Peter Gumbel develops the analogy in Time Magazine,

In the past year, as the world economy has plunged into recession, governments have pledged to spend as much as $5 trillion of taxpayers’ money to ward off a prolonged slump. For the most part, these massive programs are based on little more than theory: nobody advocating them has experienced a downturn as dramatic as this one. But Dagmar Szabados has seen such spending before — she knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a gigantic fiscal infusion. Szabados, a chemist by training, is the mayor of Halle, a mid-sized town in the middle of what used to be the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the formerly communist eastern part of Germany. Since the Berlin Wall fell, the old GDR has been showered with money. Overall, some $2 trillion has been pumped in — the equivalent of about 4% of Germany’s economic output every year.

What do you think of it? Was it a success? I live in Erfurt, a stunningly beautiful medieval city in the East that clearly profited from the process, but what does that mean? What answer would satisfy such a question?