Paul Scraton looks at Germany’s rocky road to reunification…

On the 3rd October 1990, Germany was reunified after forty-five years of division that began with the post-war occupation of the country, and which was formalised in concrete and barbed wire with the closing of the inner-German border in 1952, and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

Looking back at the winter of 1989-90 from the vantage point of three decades later, it seems as if reunification was inevitable from the moment the Wall came down. But as many Germans from both sides of the divide would tell you, the road to reunification was not a simple one—and indeed the process did not end on that October date.

Two weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced a ten-point plan that was aimed at bringing ever closer cooperation between the two Germanys in the direction of an eventual reunification. Hence the intention, at least from Kohl’s perspective, was clear. But there was no timetable included in his plan and there were plenty of people on both sides—not to mention outside of Germany—for whom a united Germany was certainly not an inevitable or even desirable outcome.

In the GDR, many of the dissidents who had taken to the streets of Leipzig, Dresden and beyond calling for reform were not necessarily convinced that incorporation into the existing Federal Republic of Germany was what they were protesting for. In the FRG, as the extent of the economic collapse of East Germany—accelerated by events on the ground—became apparent, the first questions were asked about how much any likely reunification was going to cost. And in the corridors of power in London and Paris there was a certain trepidation, if not outright hostility, to the notion of a unified Germany once again at the heart of Europe.

Once the euphoria of the 9th November had dissipated, the reality of the situation began to hit home. Yes, all these people were German, but there were forty years of living apart and with different social, educational, political and economic systems to contend with. It meant that unity would be as much a question of psychology as it was logistics. In a 2010 interview, Social Democrat Governor of Brandenburg Matthias Platzeck outlined how he and others like him had felt as the reunification process gathered momentum in those early months of 1990:

“We didn’t want an accession; we wanted a cooperation of equals with a new constitution and a new anthem. We wanted symbols of a real, collective new beginning. But others got their way.” [1]