Culture
East Germany's culture was strongly influenced by communism and particularly Stalinism and was described by East German psychoanalyst Hans-Joachim Maaz in 1990 as having produced a "Congested Feeling" among East Germans as a result of the East German state's goal to protect people from dangers of deviant cultural influence and dangers of popular expression deviating from the state's ideals through enforcing official ideals through physical and psychological repression of these tendencies via its institutions, particularly the Stasi. Critics of the East German state have claimed that the state's commitment to communism was a hollow and cynical tool Machiavellian in nature, but this assertion has been challenged by studies that have found that the East German leadership was genuinely committed to the advance of scientific knowledge, economic development, and social progress. However, Pence and Betts argue, the majority of East Germans over time increasingly regarded the state's ideals to be hollow, though there was also a substantial number of East Germans who regarded their culture as having a healthier, more authentic mentality than that of West Germany.
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