German reunification

The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, put the question of German reunification back on the agenda. In certain European states, the idea of a reunified Germany reawakened old fears. Just four weeks after the fall of the Wall, however, the members states of the European Community voiced their official support for German unity coupled with integration in the community. A few days earlier, Chancellor Kohl had presented his 10-point plan for German unity to Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag. In parliamentary elections in March 1990, Kohl’s party the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which favoured rapid reunification, won a majority. With their votes, the East Germans expressed their implicit approval.

On July 1, 1990, the economic and monetary union introduced the deutschmark as the official currency in East Germany, and all salaries, pensions and savings accounts were switched to the new currency, leading finally to a complete takeover of economic and financial policy by West Germany. In this way, Chancellor Kohl wanted to offer the East Germans an economic perspective in the run up to the first free elections to the East German parliament, the Volkskammer, in March 1990.

Under the West German constitution, still provisionally known as the Grundgesetz, or Basic Law, there were two options for the officially desired reunification: the implementation of the existing constitution “in other parts of Germany ...after their accession” or the abolition of the Basic Law as soon as “a constitution comes into force that has been approved by the German people of its own free will.” The choice went in favour of the faster option of accession, without conducting a fundamental discussion on a new constitution, and on October 3, 1990, East Germany was essentially incorporated into the Federal Republic. The international ramifications of reunification were regulated in the Two-plus-Four Treaty (the four Allies and the two German states). This ended the special status of Berlin, confirmed the final character of Germany's borders, reaffirmed the commitment not to obtain a nuclear arsenal, and announced the withdrawal of Soviet troops stationed in Germany by 1994.

Berlin is considered, especially outside Germany, as a symbol of the regained unity of the European continent. In the Berlin Wall, the mutual misunderstanding of two competing systems was materialized for all to see. The fall of the Wall therefore not only meant the end of the division of a country, but it also opened the door to the establishment of free societies across the entire continent. After German reunification, the question of the future role of Berlin posed itself: with the smallest of majorities, the Bundestag voted in 1991 for Berlin as the German capital and as the seat of parliament and government.

The reunification was experienced differently in East and West Germany: while in the west of Germany, especially the most geographically distant regions in the south and west, there were initially few noticeable changes, in the East, it altered life completely. Although East Germany was the most economically successful state in the eastern bloc, almost none of the large-scale state-owned companies survived the sudden transition to a market economy. The East will remain dependent on state subsidies for a long time. There are several reasons for this economic collapse, a development which the western politicians had not foreseen as they negotiated the reunification: on average, productivity reached just one third of that in the west; promised investments from western industry failed to materialize; and East German statistics presented a picture that did not match the reality in the factories. The sale of all state-owned companies and properties by the “Treuhand” privatization agency remains only a partial success when one considers that for every deutschmark generated in revenues, roughly three deutschmarks were spent in state investments.

It is impossible to say exactly how many people were killed at the border between East and West Germany. The Berlin public prosecutor’s office has recorded all deaths that can be proved to have been caused by acts of violence on the part of border guards, and they put the figure at 270. Among the 169 deaths since August 13, 1961, the cause of death in 136 cases is listed as shooting or other acts of violence on the part of the border guards, with 33 deaths said to have been caused by mines. In the trials of soldiers who shot at people trying to escape over the Wall, this chapter of history was examined in legal terms. According to the terms of the Reunification Contract, crimes committed by East German citizens were to be tried under East German law: but when convicting two border soldiers who at the age of 20 and 23 years had fired sustained salvos of 25 and 27 shots respectively at a 20-year-old man trying to flee, who subsequently died of his wounds because he was not taken to hospital until two hours later, the Federal Supreme Court explained its decision as follows: “The killing of an unarmed refugee [was] such a cruel act, so devoid of any rational justification [.. ], that the offence against the ban on killing was entirely obvious and comprehensible even to an indoctrinated person.” The culprits were sentenced to 18 and 21 months on probation. The verdict set a precedent for subsequent cases, as it put the right to live above the actual order to shoot that had been given.

On account of its detested ubiquity, the Wall was almost totally torn down in 1990, the year of German reunification. Today, many tourists buy “original” pieces of the wall from the stocks held by a Berlin entrepreneur who in the mid-1990s purchased the remains of the front and hinterland walls and had them commercially spray-painted and broken up into fragments to make them look like the small chunks that people chiselled out of the Wall by hand at the time when the borders were being opened.