I was 15 when the Berlin Wall came down. Everything changed: the east adopted not just the West German currency, but all its laws and rules and values. Thousands of companies were privatised within four years of the wall falling – millions lost their jobs, and millions more migrated to the west in search of better paid work. In 1994, only 18% of East German employees still worked at the same place as they had in 1991, according to the historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk.

There were new and often completely disorientating experiences for many: unemployment had not existed in the GDR. No one even knew the meaning of betriebsbedingte kündigung – compulsory redundancy – or where unemployment benefits came from. In the GDR, work had been so much more than a source of income; life revolved around the workplace. Companies often had their own singing or sports clubs, and their own childcare and health services. My dad, a metal worker, lost his job after the unification. It was a shock – he felt guilty and ashamed. But it took him years to find the words to express his feelings. “I didn’t realise the gravity of the situation,” he said to me 20 years later.

The AfD's success in the east has spurred debate: they have freedom yet they're still so angry. What is wrong with them?

Everyday life was dramatically altered after 1989, from the price of rent to the way health insurance was organised. Most people struggled to find a sure footing in the new world. Many were overwhelmed by these events – but they were unlikely to speak openly about it.

My father worked again, but on and off; in the 90s and early 00s there remained a lot of economic problems in the east, despite the overall prosperity of Germany. Today, GDP per capita in the east is around 20% lower than in the west; wages and salaries are 15% lower. Not a single major corporation has its headquarters in the east.

I went to a boarding school in Eisenhüttenstadt, an industrial town near the Polish border. The town has lost more than half of its population since 1990 – several housing districts have been demolished altogether, and a whole generation is missing. Even today, if you are a young person in eastern Germany and want a traditional, well-paid career in a large corporation, you have to leave your hometown and go west.

In the 90s, most people in the east had quite different existential problems. The unification of Germany was not between equals but between a poor, community-orientated, working-class society and a wealthy, middle-class society that prized self-improvement.

In the 00s, the pace of change slowed, but that was also a time when nobody wanted to hear stories from the east. There was no room at all for criticism of the west in public debate. Major media outlets, headquartered in the west, often indulged in cliched portrayals of east Germans, mainly as Stasi officers, neo-Nazis or unemployed. If anyone criticised the hardships of the transformation, they were very quickly discredited as Jammerossi – the whining east German.

For a lot of west Germans, nothing changed with the fall of the wall – it seemed that the Bundesrepublic just got a bit bigger with unification. The hardest thing most of them had to stomach was the change of the postcodes – and, as the joke went, that the chocolate bar Raider was suddenly renamed Twix. It seemed that capitalism and democracy had won, that the world would only become more free, more open.

It is often stunning to see how little west Germans know about history and culture of the GDR. “I knew nothing about East Germany, I felt mentally and emotionally much closer to France or England,” said a woman who invited me to a talk in Cologne. On a book tour in west Germany a couple of years ago, I often felt that, to those who came along, the east seemed as far away as Beijing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Berliners walk among the ruins of the Wall. Photograph: Ullstein Bild

The official narrative over the past 30 years has been of unification as a great German success story. But in the last few years, the divisions between east and west have grown deeper than ever. The electoral successes of the far-right AfD in eastern federal states such as Saxony and Brandenburg has prompted much media debate about what the matter is with the east. They have freedom – and yet they are still so angry. What is wrong with them?

One government survey found 57% of east Germans feel like second-class citizens. But another study by the Pew Research Centre has found that, despite much hardship, life satisfaction has dramatically improved for east Germans since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1991, only 15% of east Germans felt happy about their personal life; in 2019, it was 59%.

These statistics are not as contradictory as they might first appear. For a long time, east Germans lacked the inner freedom, the time and simply the words to explain how the transformation of their world after 1989/90 affected them. Disappointment may have been brewing for a long time, but it was not openly discussed or heard. But since life satisfaction has improved for east Germans, people have become more capable of expressing what happened to them over the previous 30 years. People needed to find stability in their personal life in order to be able to express their anger and frustrations.

In 2019, the debate in Germany is finally changing: other voices and perspectives have taken the floor. Previously taboo topics are now being talked about, maybe for the first time since 1990: the trauma of the post-unification period; the controversial heritage of the Treuhand – the institution which oversaw the privatisation of thousands of state-owned companies; the lack of representation of east Germans in leading positions around the country (Angela Merkel’s years as chancellor continue to be the high-profile exception to this rule).

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Many west Germans might now begin to realise, for the first time since 1989, that the end of communism and the dismantling of a dictatorship wasn’t such a clearcut victory. Something was also lost. The end of the GDR opened up many opportunities for the east Germans, but it also made them more sensitive to change. There is a fear of suddenly losing the life satisfaction they have built up in the years since 1989.

A lot of the things that are a source of pain in east Germany – rural exodus, ageing populations, lack of infrastructure – are problems that permeate everywhere: throughout Germany and in many western societies with growing inequality. It’s about time that a proper debate about these issues takes place.

• Sabine Rennefanz is a writer for Berliner Zeitung