A sentence like a fist punch: "In the societies dug up by neoliberalism, there is anger on a massive scale." When Wolfgang Engler wrote it down in 2021, this anger had already found expression: in the Pegida marches and the electoral successes of the Saxon AfD.

The East Germans had gone from being a problem child to a problem child, from whom one could not distinguish oneself far enough, although, as Engler believed, a general feeling of homelessness was expressed particularly clearly there, with which the West had only been able to adapt better.

Thomas Thiel

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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For Engler, the drama of the East Germans was that, after the end of the GDR, they had gotten straight into the nervous 90s, when the safeguards of Rhenish capitalism were being dismantled and left-wing emancipation values ​​were being absorbed by the world market.

Instead of the promised open society, East Germans ended up in a cold, abstract one;

and the new freedoms they found there did not make up for the lack of sympathy.

When a satirical party was founded in 2004 with the pointless slogan of rebuilding the wall, it was clear that its credit had run out.

Engler described the experience of not being able to connect to the front and reaching into the void behind as double homelessness.

Like no other, he went in search of the lost legacy of that time.

In his widely acclaimed book Die Ostdeutsche.

Tale of a Lost Land” (1999) he found them in notebooks, diary entries, poetic words.

Some people blamed him for ignoring the power side of the unjust state, but it wasn't ignorance.

It simply did not belong to a methodical approach that should not hide how much the subject touches on the life experience of the author.

Engler did not hide the dark side of the GDR, but it annoys him that everything that is going wrong in the East today is interpreted as a late consequence of the authoritarian state.

It may come as a surprise that Wolfgang Engler has found his feet so much better than most of his former compatriots in this society, which he cannot particularly like from what he writes about it.

Unlike many of his sociologist colleagues, he did not fall victim to the exchange of elites and is still able to make his voice heard in books, newspaper articles and countless interviews.

He himself attributes it to the fact that he spent the period of reunification in the slipstream of history at an art school.

Born in Dresden in 1952, after studying philosophy at Humboldt University he came to the GDR Academy of Sciences, later became a professor and from 2006 to 2017 rector at the Ernst Busch Drama School in Berlin, which, like himself, survived the reunification years well .

But his success also has to do with his rhetorical qualities.

There is something playful about his performance without losing any of its analytical sharpness.

On Sunday he will be seventy years old.