@luatic you conveniently skipped over basically every advantage of the socialist system and picked only a single aspect. that was the entire point of my post. I’ve posted all of this before, but let’s see how people who have lived in the GDR evaluate the pros and cons of the “SED dictatorship”:
In a survey carried out in 1998, ex-GDR citizens were asked the question: ‘From your own personal standpoint, to what extent do you associate life in the GDR with the following aspects?’ The answers were very clear. On the positive side were full employment (89 per cent), social security (85 per cent), career opportunities for women (84 per cent), satisfaction in the workplace (65 per cent) and anti-fascism (54 per cent). Negative associations were restriction on travel (62 per cent), scarcity of consumer goods (42 per cent), domination of the SED (38 per cent), censorship (30 per cent) and being spied on (5 per cent).
Source: SFZ-Beiträge zur sozialen Transformation, Band 13, Berlin 1998. (SFZ= Sozialwissenschaftliches Forschungszentrum)
Der Spiegel found in 2009 that 57 per cent of eastern Germans believed the GDR had “more good sides than bad sides”, and even younger people rejected the idea that the state had been a dictatorship. Similar public disenchantment with the post-1989 experience can be found in polling results across eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
In 2009, according to a survey by the Emnid Institute, more than half of East Germans saw the GDR ‘in a positive light, that it had more good than bad sides and one could live well’. In contrast, 78 per cent of West Germans saw the GDR as ‘overwhelmingly bad’.
Source: „Studie: Ostdeutsche sehen DDR positive“, Merkur Online 26 June 2009.
The more positive attitudes to their state held by many ex-GDR citizens has been underlined in a series of post-unification surveys and studies carried out by respected organisations. In a report on a survey of East Germans made in 1997, Professor Noelle-Neumann from the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy wrote: ’Two thirds think that in essence it was a good time, and that the principles on which the GDR was based were also good’.
Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10 December 1997.
Women were better off in the GDR:
After only 20 years of the GDR’s existence, 34 per cent of judges in the GDR were women (in the FRG 6 per cent) and in 1988, this figure had increased to more than 50 per cent, and one third of women worked in technical professions. At the same time, women in the GDR held the post of mayor in 1,172 towns and villages (out of 9,021); in contrast, in the FRG, there were only 12 women mayors (out of a total of 14,869 towns and villages).
Source: Claudia Wangerin, Die DDR und ihre Toechter; Der Spiegel „20 Jahre DDR“ No 41/1969
On the wages front, the wage differential between men and women in the GDR was around 5 per cent, but in the West it was 25 per cent. The German Government Office for Statistics bears this out when, in November 2009, it noted that women from the East are more often in possession of technical qualifications through their careers and that such jobs are better paid than ‘typically female’ ones.
Source: Claudia Wangerin, Die DDR und ihre Toechter, p.171
By 1973, the percentage of women employed in the GDR had reached 82.6%, while in the FRG it was 53.8, see this graph: https://snac.pinkro.se/rose/s/post-44c85abcb413bb68a572ec9bb04e2a62.webp
Source: “Zahlenspiegel Ein vergleich Bundesrepublik Deutschland / Deutsche Demokratische Republik” from the west german institute for intragerman relations
Even after 25 years of unification women in the East still have a very different self-perception of their role. They do not accept the traditional role model still prevalent in the West of a man as chief breadwinner and the married woman only working to complement his income. Women in the East want to work and have a family – as they had known it. Work for women means independence as the most important basis for equality. Work is seen as significant not only for the individual but also because it provides a sense of belonging and of contributing to a larger social entity.
Queer people had better rights:
As early as 1956, the GDR had abolished paragraph 175 of the German penal code which outlawed homosexuality, but even beforehand the law had been largely ignored. This was undoubtedly facilitated by the fact that the GDR was an overwhelmingly atheistic state. In the Federal Republic, between 1945 and 1969, around 50,000 men were convicted of homosexual practice. It was not until 1969 that the FRG eventually abolished the persecution of homosexuals.
Source: Oda Lambrecht, Christian Decker, ‘Verurteilte Schwuhle: ‘Eine Schande bis heute’. NDR.de. Panorama. 7.4.2015.
The Supreme Court affirmed that “homosexuality, just like heterosexuality, represents a variant of sexual behavior. Homosexual people do therefore not stand outside socialist society, and the civil rights are warranted to them exactly as to all other citizens”.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20180717130434/https://www.gaystarnews.com/article/burgeois-decadence-how-the-iron-curtain-divided-gay-rights-in-germany/
The GDR allowed for both men and women over the age of 18 to receive government-sponsored sex reassignment surgery as its healthcare system was free and fully nationalized. Transgender individuals were also allowed to marry other people and adopt children.
Reunification caused east german trans parents to lose custody over their children.
The FRG banned trans people from being married until it was overturned in 2008. https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2008/bvg08-077.html. The law was only properly replaced in 2024 despite many of its aspects having been ruled unconstitutional for decades.
I could go on honestly, but I also want to address unification.
I am not arguing the GDR was literally annexed as per international law. The majority of GDR citizens voted for unification with the FRG. Yet the implementation of unification was extremely one sided and left many east germans frustrated in hindsight.
east german territories were absorbed into the FRG, under the constitution of the FRG. none of the positive aspects of the east german system were adopted.
In areas such as legal rights and justice, perhaps surprisingly to some, the GDR had much to offer in terms of looking at social alternatives to current structures of the justice system. In the 1970s, the GDR undertook a complete re-writing of the country’s Civil Code. The previous Civil Code of justice had been in place for over a hundred years and indeed some laws went back a lot further. Apart from hardly being appropriate for a modern state, the laws were couched in such archaic language that few ordinary people could understand them. It was decided to rewrite the Code and make it ‘citizen friendly’, i.e. comprehensible without the requirement of a degree in jurisprudence or recourse to a lawyer. Even today this Civil Code retains validity and relevance in terms of its innovative approach and the effective removal of layers of dusty, archaic jurisprudence: it re-empowered citizens to be in a position in which they could undertake much of their own legal administration. Yet, like all other GDR legislation, this Civil Code was rejected after unification and the old, complex and archaic (West) German one was re-imposed
What happened to the east german economy is described here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treuhandanstalt
After unification, when the whole economy was privatised at break- neck speed, the co-operatives came under enormous pressure. However, the main reason they could challenge the threatened expropriation was that the farm workers and not the state owned the land. This meant it could not legally be taken away from them and they could make their own decisions as to what to do with it. Because of their positive experience working in the co- operatives, the vast majority of farmers did not want a return to individual farming. However, the co-ops had to battle against discrimination anchored in Federal German law that favoured individual over collective ownership. In addition, they suddenly faced imposed fictitious debts that were near impossible to pay in the changed economic circumstances. As a result, many co-operatives were forced to give up. Today only a few survive and about 80 per cent of the jobs in agriculture have been lost.
Source: Luft, p.216.
During unification, east german citizens were hoping to get rid of political repression and restrictions, not to get rid of their entire way of life and the way their economy functioned.
I recommend reading https://ia801700.us.archive.org/33/items/StasiStateOrSocialistParadise/StasiStateOrSocialistParadi-JohnGreen.pdf
lizzy مثلية الله ☭ 
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