There’s another side to eastern Germany though.
In the communist housing projects where Lehmann grew up, people stuck together and they helped each other out, she says. And that spirit continued even after the regime collapsed.
After her parents lost their jobs at the high-grade lens maker Carl Zeiss, Lehmann was often left on her own. Her father tried his luck as a sound engineer touring Europe but wound up pushing trolleys at the local supermarket.
“We were just as hard-working as people in the West, and we also had smart people,” says her mother, Angelika Spirk, who eventually landed a stable job managing operating-room supplies in a hospital.
“I’m happy with how things turned out,” she says, “but I don’t want anyone to cut off my past.”
Lehmann would bring herself back from school, make her food, do her homework, with neighbors watching out for her. That, she says, shaped her politics.
As a student, she volunteered at a food bank, but wanted to do more to address the social problems she encountered. She joined the SPD in 2006, became the head of the party’s youth organization in the state in 2009 and entered Thuringia’s parliament in 2014.
“I want it so people stay here and raise a family,” she said, in her office in the state capital, Erfurt, where there’s a crib for her two-year-old daughter and a Playmobil fairy hanging from a light fixture.
“People here live under extreme uncertainty,” she adds.
The state election campaign took its own toll on family life, with Lehmann often getting home long after her daughter had been tucked up in bed. And at the end, voters chose the anger and the slogans of the AfD over her vision for bringing Germans together, rooted in the turbulent years that followed communism.