"fuck west germany "

"Much like my understanding of British Rail prior to reading Wolmar, my knowledge of the DDR was surface level and based mostly on anecdotes. I’d heard good things about this book from comrades and it didn’t disappoint. It is really informative and its vital for any socialist to read. Furthermore, anyone who wishes to wax lyrical about “misery beyond the Wall� etc should be forced to sit down and read this."

"As is to be expected, what you've been taught about the Berlin Wall, the GDR, and the FRG is a lie. I suppose the West (the US and its allies) had no choice but to launch a brutal propaganda campaign to demonize the GDR, considering that its deflection was from having fully integrated Nazis back into positions of power throughout west Germany whereas in the east a fully-fledged denazification program, among other things, successfully restored Jewish communists into social, political, and cultural life. In essence, west Germany was truly a "third Reich" that, through programs like the Marshall Plan, was resuscitated by Western capital in the resurgent war against communism. There's no doubt when you line up the metrics - employment, womens' rights, housing, medicine, arts, education - that the GDR was a success, and de la Motte does a great job placing the entirety of the state into its historical/material context. The looting of the state and the robbing of its people in the aftermath of unification runs in parallel to Yeltsin and co. looting Russia in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR, and again, the documentation of the proceedings is damning.

It will never not be remarkable to me how disinterested in (or perhaps more accurately, opposed to) denazification the Western imperialist countries were (and are). There's a reason the Berlin Wall was originally called the "anti-fascist protection rampart" - it was a dividing line between two states who had diametrically opposed visions for restructuring society on the ashes of Hitler's Nazi state."

"This scratched the annoying itch I have with left-wing class commentary in the UK that often doesn't acknowledge what our modern class system actually is now (or is aware but chooses to focus on two extreme ends of the class system anyway).

Maybe I'm asking too much of the book but I think it would've been a good idea to bring in some firsthand accounts to add some tangibility to a theoretically dense book.

Because of this there were times I thought I wouldn't make it. But it's very much worth the read. The intermediary classes don't get nearly enough attention even though they make up the majority of the population."