Walter Hinteler wrote:(In the fifties and sixties, West-Germans used to send parcels at christmas to [unknown] "brothers ans sisters" in East Germany: organitzed besides others by the SPD.)
The SPD being the Socialdemocrats, or those lefties who, even when they lost elections, were always said (by conservatives) to have the intellectuals and journalists behind them. They were sending parcels to their oppressed East-German brothers. Little romanticisation there.
I hate it when people try to reduce the entire left to those New Lefties of the mid-seventies only.
Even in the mass demonstrations against the nukes, in the early eighties - even when the original plan may have been hatched by some group of fellow-travellers, there ended up 800,000 people on the streets here, and few Soviet flags to be seen, I tell you. But a lot of demonstrators making sure that, even though
the issue was NATO Pershings, their banners condemned the Soviets, too ("against both").
Now that "against both" kinda line may have been misguided - as if there was any kind of equivalence there - but an idealisation of the Eastern Bloc it was not.
In fact, many of the same people who demonstrated helped with the collections that were held for the Poles at the time, too, in solidarity with Solidarnosc, when the communists clamped down there.