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alyazawelcome to 2025. i came down with a rather nasty sinus infection approximately a month ago, which derailed what had previously been plans to talk about a large number of subjects. instead, to start the year you'll get to hear me talk about being painfully ill in a way that precluded serious work on anything and which generally ruins your month. don't worry, we'll eventually get back to some of the stuff i intended to talk about last month on this blog.
don't get sick: or, how it feels to be sick for literally an entire month
i don't generally get sick in the way most people seem to—my pandemic sickness of "choice" was getting the flu randomly. i have never knowingly had COVID, and the closest thing to sickness i usually experience is seasonal allergies. unfortunately, i also seem to develop sinus infections rather easily—and after dodging serious illness for the duration of the year, being stricken by an infection finally happened to me at the beginning of this month.
if you've never had a sinus infection: i do not recommend getting one. after a day of stuffy nose and sleeping weirdly, i woke up one morning at approximately 4am to feelings of being unable to breathe; i had approximately ten seconds between this and standing over our bathroom sink, painfully coughing up what is best described as a mixture of brown-red bile with the consistency of non-fresh caramel. if this sounds deeply unpleasant: yes, it is. it does not get better from here.
the subsequent six or seven days were spent in what i can only call a stupor; approximately 23 hours of these days were spent in various states of lucidity and (hard to catch) sleep. to not choke in my sleep or drown in a frankly unimaginable amount of mucus, i was obliged to sit upright at basically all times (not so bad) and sleep upright (horrible). this completely ruined my sleep schedule, which i am still recovering from. eating was non-pleasurable, but more importantly something i barely did at all—i think on at least two of the days in question i just drank water and juice and the bulk of my calories were from cough drops. at one point i coughed in a way that hurt so badly i thought i might have broken a rib or damaged a lung. this did not happen, luckily, but it's not ideal to feel that way.
the weeks to follow have been better: a number of hot showers and copious coughing has cleared up the worst of it, and for the past while i've been coughing up white stuff. unfortunately, i have been unable to cough up the remainder. as a result i have what feels in essence like a throat infection (even though it's not one), and protracted bouts of coughing can still be quite painful and lead to a sort of vomiting. this is not ideal, and i would also not recommend this.
what i'm reading (1/50)
i started this year off by finishing the fascinating book Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 (Katja Hoyer); if you're looking for a good account of East Germany's existence and what life was like for many people there this is a book to pick up. the relationship between the country and the Soviet Union is a particularly curious facet: i came away from this one feeling like much of the "blame" for the country's demise can be given to the Soviets. despite Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker taking strongly after the Soviet line, the Soviets were frequently distant or outright cold to the East German state. even from the beginning, the Soviets seem to have been dubiously interested in a partitioned Germany and were eager to push for reunification; when this became impossible, the Soviets consistently held East Germany to the standards of a disposable client state. regardless of its own desires or needs, the expectation was that East Germany would consistently and unquestioningly follow Soviet policy. thus, even the reform-minded Gorbachev was apparently oppositional to Honecker's efforts to establish a less antagonistic relationship with West Germany—at least without the Soviets being in charge of it.
the distance in relations was perhaps exemplified most heavily by economics between the two countries; Hoyer notes a particular moment in 1981 where relations essentially broke down after the Soviet Union refused to guarantee oil supplies to East Germany, which had by then become extremely dependent on the Soviet supply:
[Erich] Honecker found [Leonid] Brezhnev’s inability to engage with his concerns extremely frustrating. Brezhnev mechanically recited his brief: the Soviet Union needed to look after its own economic affairs for the foreseeable future and the GDR would no longer be able to rely on Soviet credit. Worse still, he could not guarantee that the supply of oil would remain stable. This was a huge blow to Honecker. His country had banked on the annual delivery of 19 million tonnes of oil contractually agreed with the Soviet Union.
[...]Energy consumption in the GDR had also begun to lean on imports from Soviet Russia. In 1960, coal still accounted for 97 per cent of domestic energy use; by 1980, oil had taken over 17.3 per cent and gas 9.1 per cent.3 As oil is five times as effective as brown coal in terms of energy production, the economy was shifting towards the deliveries from the Soviet Union while investment in domestic brown coal had begun to slump. The oil crises of the 1970s had made this an increasingly expensive undertaking – by 1980, the GDR was paying the equivalent of $15 a barrel of crude oil compared to $2–$3 in 19724 – and as a result local brown coal once again had to be sourced in higher quantities. Nonetheless, crude oil from the Soviet Union could still be turned into hard cash in the GDR’s refineries. Their oil-based products were sold to many non-socialist countries on the world market, including West Germany. So successful was this that, among the non-producing nations, East Germany had become one of the biggest exporters of fossil fuels. By the time Honecker received the worrying news from Brezhnev under the palm trees of Crimea, oil-based products accounted for 28 per cent of its exports to non-socialist states.
despite these difficulties (and the 1981 situation bringing the state perilously close to immediate economic collapse, which was averted only through prompt new trade relations with Bavaria, of all places), East Germany was able to consistently deliver a high standard of living. Hoyer notes that by the end of the 1970s:
Rents were so heavily subsidized that GDR citizens did not have to worry about affordability once they had found a suitable flat. From 1971, the rates paid were means-tested, allowing working class families with children privileged access. A four-person household in West Germany spent around 21 per cent of their net income on rental costs while a similar household in the East only needed 4.4 per cent. While this focus on newly built housing meant that older buildings were left to decay in town centres up and down the country, which made for very unsightly impressions on foreign observers, the prefab blocks came with central heating, insulation, bathrooms and plenty of space. Honecker was also able to oversee rapid progress in supplying the population with consumer goods. By 1975, more than a quarter of households had a car, compared to only 15 per cent in 1970, and the figure would rise to 38 per cent by the end of the decade. By 1980, almost every household had a fridge, a TV and a washing machine.
East Germany also had a remarkable amount of gender parity; from 1981 onwards, more than 90% of women were employed and the country had the highest rate of female employment in the world. half of all university students were women, a remarkable accomplishment given the pre-Cold War state of higher education. for the most part—and although their representation lagged within the Socialist Unity Party itself relative to the rest of East German society—women were financially autonomous and politically independent, and their concerns were well represented in politics. women were even integrating into the military by the late 1980s—something that was constitutionally illegal in West Germany (and led to virtually all of these women becoming unemployed after reunification). in many respects it is remarkable the state was so stable given its inability to be self-sufficient and its troubled relationship with the Soviets. i'll definitely have more to say about this in subsequent blog posts, especially since i have other books about East Germany to eventually read.
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Date: 2025-01-01 09:17 pm (UTC)Oh god, I'm sorry about you being so sick, that sounds deeply unpleasant. Being sick is never fun, but for an entire month... I don't blame you for falling behind on your blogging plans in the slightest there.
I love your "what I'm reading" posts, by the way. I don't always know how to find time to read even the things already on my list, but you highlight out a lot of genuinely interesting nonfiction (especially in relation to history and politics) that I otherwise never would have heard of from my own social bubbles. (Certainly, Tumblr's own website culture is... uninterested in anything but luminously glowing takes on the Soviet Union, and its relationship to its member and client states. While mainstream offline American culture, of course, continues to rely almost entirely on Cold War propaganda for its understanding of life behind the iron curtain.) It's always been one of my favorite features of your Cohost blog, and I happily await more of your commentary when you have the energy and time.
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Date: 2025-01-02 06:56 pm (UTC)