Much of the open-minded youth left, heading west, the elderly remained and nowadays, to nobody's surprise on the actual left, former east Germany is mostly fascist territory.
It was easy enough for them. The one thing that stuck was blind anticommunism and the right delivers just that, presenting scapegoats for all the evil that happened afterwards when factories closed down one after the other, leaving people without jobs, stuck in denial. Can't be the praised capitalism, can it.