Who is the absurd Bruni de la Motte?
Oliver Kamm: "I have no idea where to start with a writer so lacking in intellect, imagination, style and decency that she can produce a sentence like this..." And what is the dreadful sentence? "Since the demise of the GDR, many have come to recognise and regret that the genuine 'social achievements' they enjoyed were dismantled: social and gender equality, full employment and lack of existential fears, as well as subsidised rents, public transport, culture and sports facilities."
In "Fall of the Wall", Kamm points out that the Guardian "was on the right side in the Cold War" and he gives praise where praise is due. But as we've seen too often of late, something disturbing has happened to that once-principled paper and now, along with printing apologetics for Islamist terror, it is reduced to publishing what Oliver Kamm calls an "absurd and disgraceful article" by Bruni de la Motte (whoever she may be) on the occasion of the liberation of millions from tyranny. One imagines that, like some spoiled child, the Guardian does this kind of thing to attract attention, but it also attracts scorn and contempt.
Comments
I've no idea why you pick a single sentence from an article, but if you look at the book she co-authored (http://www.arterypublications.co.uk/books/stasi_hell_or_workers_paradise.html), particularly the last paragraph of the description there, you can see she's not defending the police state / "tyranny" aspects etc we all know about. She's talking instead about the *other* aspects which get no hearing at all in the media. The West German attitude to Easterners is "you spent 40 years in a police state, that's all I need to know", and she's saying, "well, actually, life wasn't quite that one-dimensional, and the transition was handled really badly, and not everything now is perfect and there are actually some things that might be learned by a comparison". That's a far cry from saying "let's go back there, it was flawless".
Posted by: Anonymous | November 17, 2009 8:16 PM