German reunification

German reunification, the reuniting of East Germany and West Germany into the country of Germany in 1990. The process put a formal end to World War II, guaranteed the western borders of Poland, inspired a drive to greater European integration, and ensured the election of Helmut Kohl as the first democratically chosen chancellor of a united Germany since 1932. The process was rushed, largely to stem the hemorrhage of young people and skilled workers from East Germany who poured westward at the rate of about 2,000 per day after the Berlin Wall was opened on November 9, 1989.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and economic unification

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The swift and unexpected downfall of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) was triggered by the decay of the other communist regimes in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The liberalizing reforms of Pres. Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union appalled East Germany’s hard-line communist leader Erich Honecker. By 1988 Honecker’s administration began forbidding the circulation within East Germany of Soviet publications that it viewed as dangerously subversive.

The Berlin Wall was in effect breached in the summer of 1989 when a reformist Hungarian government began allowing East Germans to escape to the West through Hungary’s newly opened border with Austria. By the fall, thousands of East Germans had followed this route, while thousands of others sought asylum in the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw, demanding that they be allowed to emigrate to West Germany. At the end of September, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher arranged for their passage to West Germany, but another wave of refugees from East Germany soon took their place. Mass demonstrations in the streets of Leipzig and other East German cities defied the authorities and demanded reforms.

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Germany: The reunification of Germany

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In an effort to halt the deterioration of its position, East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) deposed Honecker in mid-October and replaced him with another hard-line communist, Egon Krenz. Under Krenz the Politburo sought to eliminate the embarrassment occasioned by the flow of refugees to the West through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. On the evening of November 9, Günter Schabowski, a communist functionary, mistakenly announced at a televised news conference that the government would allow East Germans unlimited passage to West Germany, effective “immediately.” While the government had in fact meant to require East Germans to apply for exit visas during normal working hours, this was widely interpreted as a decision to open the Berlin Wall that evening, so crowds gathered and demanded to pass into West Berlin. Unprepared, the border guards let them go. In a night of revelry, tens of thousands of East Germans poured through the crossing points in the wall and celebrated their new freedom with rejoicing West Berliners.

The opening of the Berlin Wall proved fatal for the German Democratic Republic. Ever-larger demonstrations demanded a voice in government for the people, and in mid-November Krenz was replaced by a reform-minded communist, Hans Modrow, who promised free, multiparty elections. When the balloting took place in March 1990 the SED, now renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), suffered a crushing defeat. The eastern counterpart of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which had pledged a speedy reunification of Germany, emerged as the largest political party in East Germany’s first democratically elected People’s Chamber. A new East German government headed by Lothar de Maizière, a longtime member of the eastern Christian Democratic Union, and backed initially by a broad coalition, including the eastern counterparts of the Social Democrats and Free Democrats, began negotiations for a treaty of unification. A surging tide of refugees from East to West Germany that threatened to cripple East Germany added urgency to those negotiations. In July that tide was somewhat stemmed by a monetary union of the two Germanys that gave East Germans the hard currency of the Federal Republic.

Helmut Kohl and the details of reunification

Kohl flew to Moscow on February 10, 1990, seeking Gorbachev’s approval to press on for unity. He was told that the Soviet Union was ready to respect the right of Germans to decide if they wanted to live in a single state. The Moscow visit also underlined the fact that the two Germanys would not be able to unite without the approval of the four main World War II Allies—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union—who were still ultimately responsible under the terms of the 1945 Potsdam Agreement. Therefore, on February 13 the foreign ministers of the two Germanys and the four Allies met in Ottawa and agreed to open negotiations on the external security aspects of unification. This “two plus four” group would essentially settle the question of whether the united country should be neutral or remain a member of NATO.

Negotiations in the “two plus four” forum got underway in Bonn, the provisional capital of West Germany, on May 5. The Soviet Union agreed that internal unification should be allowed to proceed but said that the question of a united Germany’s eventual military alliances had to be deferred for two or three years. This would mean that the four Allies retained their rights and responsibilities over the united country for the immediate future. Genscher was ready to accept this, but Kohl flatly ruled out any suggestion that the country would be anything but a full sovereign state and member of NATO from the moment it was united. This firm position was strengthened by the support of the three Western Allies. Understanding it would be dangerous to try to hold up German unity, the Soviet Union decided to make the most of the situation by asking Kohl to bear a large portion of the cost of pulling its 360,000 troops out of GDR territory.

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At a second “two plus four” meeting in Berlin on June 22, the Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, conceded that a compromise was possible. Kohl visited Gorbachev on July 14–17, when it was agreed that the united German army would be reduced in size to 370,000 men and that the Soviet army would leave GDR territory by 1994, with the help of 13 billion deutsche marks in German aid. Kohl also undertook that, while Soviet troops remained, NATO troops would not be deployed on GDR territory, which would remain nuclear free. At the third “two plus four” meeting, held in Paris on July 17, the parties agreed that, instead of a peace treaty to end World War II, there would be a document governing all the issues leading to the restoration of full sovereignty to Germany. The Paris meeting was also attended by Poland, and assurances were given that the Oder–Neisse border would be guaranteed. The final “two plus four” session took place in Moscow on September 12; the six countries initialed a concluding document, the “four” agreeing to suspend their rights and responsibilities for the country, including the divided city of Berlin, from the day of unification.

A unification treaty was ratified by the Bundestag and the People’s Chamber in September and went into effect on October 3, 1990, immediately after the “two plus four” ministers were to sign their final treaty. In moving ceremonies all over the country, unification was marked from midnight on the day by the raising of flags and the ringing of bells. The date was also marked by small right-wing groups, particularly in Leipzig and Berlin, demonstrating violently in support of nationalist policies and attacking left-wing anarchists protesting against the emergence of a “Greater Germany.” These were only small minorities, however, and the vast majority celebrated unification with great joy. The German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic as five additional Länder, and the two parts of divided Berlin became one Land. (The five new Länder were Brandenburg, Mecklenburg–West Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia.)

In December 1990 the first all-German free election since the Nazi period conferred an expanded majority on Kohl’s coalition. After 45 years of division, Germany was once again united, and the following year Kohl helped negotiate the Treaty on European Union, which established the European Union (EU) and paved the way for the introduction of the euro, the EU’s single currency, by the end of the decade.

The struggles of reunification

The achievement of national unification was soon shadowed by a series of difficulties, some due to structural problems in the European economy, others to the costs and consequences of unification itself. Like most of the rest of Europe, Germany in the 1990s confronted increased global competition, the increasing costs of its elaborate social welfare system, and stubborn unemployment, especially in its traditional industrial sector. However, it also faced the staggering added expenses of unifying the east and west. These expenses were all the more unsettling because they were apparently unexpected. Kohl and his advisers had done little to prepare German taxpayers for the costs of unification, in part because they feared the potential political consequences but also because they were themselves surprised by the magnitude of the task.

The core of the problem was the state of the eastern German economy, which was far worse than anyone had realized or admitted. Only a handful of eastern firms could compete on the world market; most were woefully inefficient and environmentally destructive. As a consequence, the former East German economy collapsed, hundreds of thousands of easterners faced unemployment, and the east became heavily dependent on federal subsidies. At the same time, the infrastructure—roads, rail lines, telephones, and the like—required massive capital investment in order to provide the basis for future economic growth. In short, the promise of immediate prosperity and economic equality, on which the swift and relatively painless process of unification had rested, turned out to be impossible to fulfill. Unemployment, social dislocation, and disappointment continued to haunt the new Länder more than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The lingering economic gap between the east and west was just one of several difficulties attending unification. Not surprisingly, many easterners resented what they took to be western arrogance and insensitivity. The terms Wessi (“westerner”) and Ossi (“easterner”) came to imply different approaches to the world: the former competitive and aggressive, the product of what Germans call the west’s “elbow society”; the latter passive and indolent, the product of the stifling security of the communist regime. The PDS became the political voice of eastern discontents, with strong if localized support in some of the new Länder. Moreover, the neofascist German People’s Union (Deutsche Volksunion), led by millionaire publisher Gerhard Frey, garnered significant support among eastern Germany’s mass of unemployed workers.

In addition to the resentment and disillusionment over unification that many easterners and some westerners felt, there was also the problem of coming to terms with the legacies left by 40 years of dictatorship. East Germany had developed a large and effective security apparatus (the Stasi), which employed a wide network of professional and amateur informants. As the files of this organization began to be made public, eastern Germans discovered that many of their most prominent citizens as well as some of their friends, neighbours, and even family members had been on the Stasi payroll. Coming to terms with these revelations—legally, politically, and personally—added to the tension of the postunification decade.