History

...and they usually can't name anything after that. Some people might mention the Stasi but that's pretty rare. I guess you'd have a number of people like me that were raised evangelical who were told even owning a Bible in East Germany was illegal (it wasn't) and churches were banned (they weren't); but that's such obvious bullshit I won't even address it here.

So when you ask US Americans about East Germany, the wall is the first thing that they will say, every time. It's the hallmark of why they (and communism in general) were "bad". East Germany doesn't have a leader they know about like Stalin or Mao. It doesn't have a scary name for "prisons" like "gulag". And it doesn't have a famine that anticommunists can exaggerate and blame on communism. But they do have a wall.

OK, in the ~30 years of the Berlin Wall's existence, do you know how many people were killed trying to cross it?

Not millions. Not tens of thousands. 140. Over a 30 year period. US Americans have no idea this is the actual number. Instead, we have movies like Bridge of Spies. In that movie, Tom Hanks is in a train going over to the eastern side of Berlin. And in the four seconds the train is above the zone behind the wall, of course they show someone crossing the wall getting shot. Despite the fact that there would have been only say 4-5 people that would have happened to in a given year across the length of the whole wall, not just the spot Hanks' character was at. The odds of that happening at that exact spot at that exact time were a million to one. But that doesn't stop Hollywood from including it.

But yeah, the GDR is evil and terrible for killing 140 people. I'm sure there were individual months where Obama droned more innocent civilians than that. But the US is the good guys, right? That's the worst the US can come up with about the GDR. 140 people. The US can slaughter innocents by the millions but that's not evil because reasons. Wall bad, agent orange good.

And of course, US Americans never learn about the reasons for building the wall in the first place. The US and FRG used West Berlin as a major base of operations for spying and sabotage into the Eastern Bloc. Something had to be done, or the CIA et al would continue to use West Berlin as an easy access point. I'm pretty sure the wall's main purpose was keeping folks out more than in. And yes, brain drain out of the GDR was a problem. The west absolutely pumped people in the GDR with (not necessarily incorrect for labor aristocrats) notions that they could be pretty well off in the west. Was the wall the right solution for that? Probably not, but I'm not in their shoes and I can see why they did it.

Now, about the Stasi. It's a great word, like "gulag". It sounds scary, right? Most US Americans aren't familiar with it, but the dedicated anti-communists will always bring it up. Do you know what the secret police in the FRG were called? Probably not, but don't feel bad. It's not like we were ever taught about them. But the FRG did have their own secret police, and they acted with as much impunity as the Stasi, just against leftists. Meanwhile, in the GDR... as long as you weren't a CIA asset, a Nazi, or advocated against the working class (i.e. for capitalism)... the Stasi had no interest in you. Yes, they collected a lot of info on folks. But I'm sure the data profile that Facebook or Google have on most Americans would put the Stasi to shame. And those corporations have zero problems handing that info off to law enforcement in order to put you in the slammer. But Americans think this is perfectly ok because Facebook and Google are pRiVaTE coRpOrAtiOnS, and corporations aren't able to limit our freedoms. Not to mention, I remember seeing some post-unification polls of East Germans about the things they didn't like about life there, and the Stasi was waaaay down on the list.

Basically, US Americans are the most deeply propagandized people on the planet. The capitalists built up these scary communist boogeymen that were apparently so evil. But when you learn the truth, you see that on their worst days, East Germany was still a far better country than the US could hope to be on it's best day.