It is particularly sordid, writes Dirk Oschmann, “to blame the East for xenophobia alone, and paradoxically on top of that, it is a prime example of hypocrisy, double standards and double standards, because the West continuously makes the East itself foreign.” His book “The East: A West German Invention” is the sharpest polemic on the German-German hierarchy since 1990.
His book is expressly not an identity-political pamphlet, he explains in an interview, but, on the contrary, a plea for “dis-identification”. In an interview at his publishing house in Berlin, Dirk Oschmann also speaks soft Thuringian, which many West Germans would mistake for Saxon.
WORLD: If the East is an invention of the West, how did the West do it?
