"A persuasive way of understanding the collapse of Communism in Europe and the Soviet Union is to think of nineteenth- or twentieth-century slum clearance. For in many respects the Soviet Empire was a slum of continental proportions. Beyond the grotesque architectural assertions of an alien ideology, public housing – almost all housing – consisted of anomic and primitive concrete barracks where the smells of cabbage, damp and low-grade tobacco combined. Rivers and lakes were polluted by chemicals, with the Pleisse river in East Germany alternately turning first red then yellow."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Michael Burleigh Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, New York: NY, HarperCollins Publishers (2007) p. 415
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/East_Germany
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
East Germany
East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was a statelet that existed from 1949 to 1990 in middle Germany as part of the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.
15 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by East Germany →
Related Quotes
"East Germany, apparently the most successful Communist regime, although with its economy wrecked by ideological misma…"
"An attempt is being made by the Russians in Berlin to build up a quasi-Communist party in their zone of Occupied Germ…"
"The creation of two German states, an event unforeseen at Tehran, Yalta, or even at Potsdam, was a signal Cold War ph…"
"It seems to me that certain definite patterns are emerging from the situation in East Germany and the Eastern Europea…"
"I find it difficult to say whether the leadership's 'second echelon' could have preserved the German Democratic Repub…"
"During the Cold War, while West Germans were confronting their Nazi past, East Germans were avoiding it. The Communis…"
"The example of East Germany exerts a far greater cautionary effect on the North Koreans than Qaddafi’s fate does. The…"
"East Germany ranked higher among the world’s economies than South Korea does today, and was able to make some claim t…"
"The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us. Wherever the comparisons have been made between …"
"The authorities in the German Democratic Republic kept an even more rigid control over their people than was achieved…"