love my Oma, she’s turning 90 next week (born 1934!) and was the first person I came out as bi to. Defo hanging one or two of these up in my dorm
Whenever people imply communism = lack of incentive for human greatness, I think about how my grandparents had lower class parents and were extremely poor (even starving) in their post-war childhood, but ended up leading pretty impressive lives, despite knowing they wouldn’t live much above the material reality of their neighbors for it.
My grandma was an interior architect and my grandpa an astrophysics professor and professional photographer. Both were gymnasts in their 20’s (my grandpa has a couple medals below). They didn’t do any of that shit for luxury, they figured they’d lead a modest life in the standard plattenblau housing block as the other working people of their town (small but cute and cozy apartment, I was there not too long ago), and that’s what they wanted.
They never needed to drive a car in their lives, and often visited countries across the Eastern Bloc by bike/public transit. My grandma always had a thing for making fruit preserves and cool pottery (still killing it), and my grandpa for art from wood carving (he was also a mountain climber). They had a nice community garden they always tended to too. It’s a beautiful town with a lot to see, honestly can’t wait to visit again
My mom was 19 when the Berlin Wall fell. She studied english abroad when everything went to shit under capitalism. Ended up moving to the US just because she met my dad. Usually when she tells an American she grew up in the DDR, they look all shocked and ask some insane shit like if she was starving to death, or if she knew anyone who was shot and killed trying to climb the wall (💀⁉️). Certainly no one was starving by the 70s/80s. My mom and all her friends and acquaintances had great childhoods. She had a small town, middle of nowhere school system that pushed sports, music, art, multilingualism, sciences, etc. on her heavily (when I did track and field in high school she always told me how her school’s facility was 10x better lmao). The DDR fostered genuine human greatness. But ig they didn’t have bananas at grocery stores and a hundred car brands like the west 🤷♂️
Ngl, you seem dishonest with that calculation of political prisoners
First of all, that’s from your WEST German parliament over there, using the number for political propaganda purposes
If you checked your first study, it’d be around 28,705 prisoners on average per year…
Unless you decided to stack the figures high, I don’t think you’d get that amount…
That being said, other than that, I won’t argue for or much for you, who has an ax to grind against the DDR.
Go back to your techbro stuff and play devil’s advocate for another western country in lemmy.ml…
Okay techbro is doing a quick calculation: 28.000 per year. DDR existed for roughly 40 years 1949-1990. If you just multiply that, you would get 1.120.000 prisoners. Of course some of them had longer sentences than just a year. So 200.000 seems an okay-ish assumption.
Just to clarify, could you take a look back at the data and see if its labeled population inflow or input, or just simply the overall prison population of that year…
The source you are criticising just states the 200.000-250.000, unfortunately I do not have access to the original source but have to rely on this citation here.
My assumption is, that 200.000 was meant over the course of the DDR’s existence.
The sci-hub source even states the ~28.000 per year. So without in- or output. Just total persons imprisoned. And as I already stated, this could fit the overall 200.000-250.000 over the existence of DDR if you assume that some of them stayed longer than a year or were imprisoned for a second or third time.
If you found a section, paragraph or other source with in- or output of prisoners this would certainly be interesting.