Yes. This is correct. The liberal ideological conditioning has not had as much time to become firmly rooted in the minds of East Germans as it did in the West.

Unfortunately, since the ideological rug was pulled out from under the East Germans with the annexation (really a hostile takeover) of the GDR, this left them floundering and groping in the dark for ideological alternatives. And though the aggressive “de-communization” campaign waged in the East, not only economic through sweeping privatization but also with an aggressive rewriting of the educational curriculum and a blacklisting of socialists in academia, government and media, tried very hard to reprogram the people to buy into the dominant liberal ideology, it did not fully succeed, especially where the ideology clashed with the lived reality.

On the one hand this means that they are more open to anti-hegemonic, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist alternatives, but on the other hand the profound shock and economic trauma of the “re-unification” has also opened up the door to resurgent far right ideology, ironically imported from the West of Germany where Nazism was kept alive throughout the Cold War.

It also definitely doesn’t help that economic conditions are still much worse in the East after the GDR’s industries, many of which were acquired by West German capital, were looted and dismantled after the annexation, at the same time as the previously existing robust social safety nets and social guarantees were replaced with much more meagre alternatives. For all the high-minded rhetoric about “cheerful re-unification of a divided family” the reality was more akin to one country losing a war and being conquered and plundered by another. The meagre attempts at pretending to help the East with the so-called “Solidaritätszuschlag” fell far short of what was needed to compensate for this devastation.