1541 A Cajun East Germany

Last week during our Danube River Cruise we enjoyed many outstanding lectures. Tour guide Robert who is British and has lived and studied both in the USSR and the GDR, lectured about post WWII Germany and reunification. He said (according to my notes) that USSR had hoped it could build a model country from the ashes, and in 1949 the GDR (East Germany) was formed. While the USA poured money into Germany building housing, businesses, and currency reform, the GDR stagnated. 100,000 people a year were leaving the East for better opportunities in the West. The Berlin Wall was built and the Iron Curtain fell cutting off what had been Prussia. On the 40th anniversary, 1989, the people knocked down the wall, and no one in the West had a plan B, because no one believed the Soviets would so totally fail. After 1990, things went sour. 16 million East Germans and 4,000,000 Volga Germans had to be absorbed into the rather generous German social system and economy. It was a disaster--"Too risky to invest in a work force that had been under Communism for 45 years."

Two days later Dr. Hans Hillerbrand picked up the theme with "What is a German?" He said Germany had had one of the most generous social systems in the west, with no unemployment and few pensioners in the 1980s. But as the work forced aged, and the East Germans came into the system not having contributed anything, 1.4 trillion Euros were transferred west to east to get the former GDR's economy going again. But it is a black hole. In the GDR, 8 workers were employed where 2 were needed, but easterners wanted the same salaries as westerns, who were far more capable and productive.

In today's WSJ George Melloan writes in the "Global View" column about how government handouts and subsidies to the East Germans to bring them "up" to West German standards has failed, causing high unemployment, anger and a growing Communist party, which made a small showing in the election that took place while we were there. Unemployment in east Germany is at 19%. He notes that the ambitious 4 milllion left, resulting in a Darwinian downward spiral in the population, leaving the elderly, the lazy and the indigent.

As I was reading it I kept thinking how much it sounded like Louisiana politics and government props (before Katrina) and how much worse the federal infusion of "aid" could make life there. And then in his last sentence I see we were really "on the same page," when he mentioned the hurricane aid was going to turn Louisiana into a "Cajan East Germany."