German reunification

• 1. Introduction

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  German reunification began not with a handshake or a signing ceremony, but with a picnic. On the 19th of August 1989, the Austrian branch of the Paneuropean Union distributed thousands of brochures across Hungary, inviting East German holidaymakers to gather near the border town of Sopron. When those East Germans arrived, they crossed into Austria and did not come back. It was the largest single escape movement from East Germany since the Berlin Wall had been built in 1961.

  That picnic set off a chain of events that nobody had predicted. Even as tens of thousands of East Germans streamed westward, many people inside and outside Germany still believed that real reunification would not happen in the foreseeable future. Within fourteen months, it had. On the 3rd of October 1990, the black-red-gold flag of West Germany was raised above the Brandenburg Gate at the stroke of midnight, and the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist.

  What drove that transformation? Who tried to stop it? And what did unity actually mean for the Germans who lived through it? Those are the questions this documentary will explore.

• 2. The Divided Nation

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  After Adolf Hitler died on the 30th of April 1945, Karl Donitz assumed the title of Reichsprasident and authorised the unconditional surrender of all German armed forces, which took effect on the 8th of May 1945. Five days later, the four Allied powers signed the Berlin Declaration, which formally confirmed Germany's defeat and, crucially, the complete legal extinction of the German Reich.

  What followed was division by design. The Allied Control Council carved Germany into four occupation zones. On the 23rd of May 1949, the American, British, and French zones fused to form the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany. East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, emerged from the Soviet zone that October. The two countries that resulted were not just politically separate; they were ideologically opposed, and they quickly calcified into permanence.

  The border became a physical scar. From 1952 onward, most of the dividing line between the two Germanies was physically fortified and tightly controlled by East Germany. The Berlin Wall followed in 1961. In 1957, the territory of Saarland reunited with West Germany as its tenth state, in what was sometimes called the "Little Reunification" though it involved only one disputed territory. The larger question of Germany as a whole became, as one West German politician put it, a goal that could take generations beyond his own to achieve.

• 3. The Picnic That Broke the Iron Curtain

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  The idea for the Pan-European Picnic had roots in a geopolitical calculation. Otto von Habsburg conceived of it partly to test how the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev would react to an opening of the border. His son Karl von Habsburg, who headed the Austrian branch of the Paneuropean Union, organised the distribution of thousands of brochures and flyers among East German tourists in Hungary.

  When the border gate at Sopron was opened on the 19th of August 1989, around three hours passed before Hungarian guards stopped the flow. Erich Honecker's public reaction, printed in the Daily Mirror that same day, revealed the Eastern Bloc's helplessness: he accused Habsburg of distributing leaflets that lured East Germans with gifts, food, and Deutsche Marks. The reaction only confirmed, to those watching in East and West alike, that the communist rulers had lost control of events.

  Hungary was no longer willing to keep its borders sealed or to order its border troops to use force of arms. By the end of September 1989, more than 30,000 East German citizens had escaped to the West before the GDR cut off travel to Hungary. Czechoslovakia became the only remaining escape route. The Austrian-Hungarian border opening had shattered the eastern end of the Iron Curtain, and no amount of diplomatic repositioning could close that breach.

  Gorbachev's decision not to intervene with Soviet troops stationed in Hungary proved decisive. Habsburg and Hungarian Minister of State Imre Pozsgay had privately wondered whether Moscow would give that order. It did not.

• 4. The Fall and What Followed

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  The Peaceful Revolution, a series of citizen protests in East Germany, brought the Wall down on the night of the 9th of November 1989. Two weeks later, on the 28th of November, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced a ten-point program calling for the two Germanies to expand their cooperation toward eventual reunification. He proposed no timetable.

  Events moved far faster than the program's cautious language suggested. In March 1990, the Party of Democratic Socialism, the renamed successor to the Socialist Unity Party, was heavily defeated in East Germany's first free elections. A grand coalition formed under Lothar de Maiziere, the leader of the East German wing of Kohl's Christian Democratic Union, committed explicitly to speedy reunification. At the same time, East Germany's economy was in near-total collapse. Long regarded as the most robust economy in the Soviet bloc, it had been propped up by Communist structures that dissolved almost overnight.

  On the 18th of May 1990, the two states signed a treaty on monetary, economic, and social union. The West German Deutsche Mark replaced the East German mark as East Germany's official currency on the 1st of July 1990. The Deutsche Mark carried enormous prestige among East Germans, who had long regarded it as a symbol of stability and prosperity.

  The Volkskammer, East Germany's parliament, passed a resolution on the 23rd of August 1990 declaring the accession of the GDR to the Federal Republic, effective the 3rd of October 1990. The Unification Treaty, negotiated between the two states since the 2nd of July 1990, was signed on the 31st of August 1990. It passed the West German Bundestag by a vote of 440 to 47, and the Volkskammer by 299 to 80. Formally, East Germany had voted to dissolve itself.

• 5. Thatcher's Map and Mitterrand's Warning

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  British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher reportedly carried in her handbag a map of Germany's 1937 borders to illustrate what she called the "German problem." At a European Community summit in Strasbourg in December 1989, attended by Kohl, she reportedly warned fellow leaders: "We defeated the Germans twice! And now they're back!"

  As late as March 1990, Thatcher summoned historians and diplomats to Chequers to ask the question: "How dangerous are the Germans?" She favoured a five-year transition period during which the two Germanies would remain separate. She had told Gorbachev before the Wall fell that neither Britain nor, in her view, Western Europe, wanted German reunification.

  French President Francois Mitterrand was no less alarmed, though he adapted more quickly. On the 20th of January 1990, he reportedly told Thatcher that a unified Germany could make more gains than even Adolf Hitler had, and predicted that revisionist Germans would dominate Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Yet Mitterrand recognised before Thatcher that reunification was inevitable and calculated that France's best defence was to bind Germany deeper into European institutions and a common currency.

  A January 1990 poll across four countries found that 69 percent of Poles and 50 percent of French and British respondents worried about a reunified Germany becoming the dominant power in Europe. The United States stood apart from these concerns. Secretary of State James Baker and President George H. W. Bush gave Kohl strong and decisive support. As Condoleezza Rice later recalled, the Americans saw Germany's democratic transition as complete and viewed any remaining concerns as belonging to 1945, not 1990.

  Kohl agreed to a US requirement that the reunified Germany remain within NATO, even though fewer than 20 percent of West Germans at the time supported that commitment. Germany also agreed to pay roughly 55 billion deutschmarks to the Soviet Union in gifts and loans, which Kohl's foreign policy advisor Horst Teltschik later described as equivalent to about eight days of West German GDP.

• 6. Voices Against Unity

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  Gunter Grass, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, wrote that "historical responsibility dictates opposition to reunification, no matter how inevitable it may seem." He argued that the Holocaust had deprived Germany of its right to exist as a unified nation-state and condemned the process as driven by what he called "the monetary fetish, by now devoid of all joy."

  On the 28th of November 1989, writers Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym, together with a union of GDR writers, issued the appeal "For Our Country," urging East Germans to build an independent democratic socialist state rather than accept what they called "capitalist annexation." By January 1990, the appeal had gathered over a million approvals, an unprecedented response in the history of the GDR.

  The Anti-Germans, a movement emerging from the student Left, held protests against reunification in 1990 attended by several thousand people. Hermann Gremliza, who had left the Social Democrats in 1989 over the party's support for reunification, compared the mainstream consensus to Social Democrats joining the National Socialists in singing the national anthem in 1933.

  Opposition also ran along lines of identity and rights. Feminist groups pointed to abortion laws that were less restrictive in East Germany than in the West. The Sorbs, an ethnic minority who had received legal protection under the GDR, feared that those rights would not survive in a united Germany. Their concern proved well founded: no provision protecting ethnic minorities was included in the post-unification reform of the Basic Law in 1994.

  Polls reflected deep ambivalence. A December 1989 survey by Der Spiegel showed strong support for preserving East Germany as a separate state. A poll in July 1990 found that the primary motivation for those who did support reunification was economic concern rather than nationalism. In February 1990, two-thirds of West Germans considered the pace of unification "too fast."

• 7. The Wall in the Head

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  Formal reunification on the 3rd of October 1990 solved the legal question but left something harder intact. A survey by the Allensbach Institute in April 1993 found that only 22 percent of West Germans and 11 percent of East Germans felt they were one nation. The phrase Mauer im Kopf, "wall in the head," entered common usage to describe the psychological distance that the physical wall had once expressed.

  The economic gap was severe. Between 1990 and 1995, gross wages in eastern Germany rose from 35 percent to 74 percent of western levels; pensions rose from 40 to 79 percent. Yet unemployment in the East reached double the western level. Roughly 2 trillion dollars in public spending was transferred from west to east, which produced a stagnation in the West even as it turned some eastern areas into boom regions.

  The Treuhandanstalt, the agency created to manage privatisation of East German enterprises, attracted fierce criticism. Many East Germans believed the shock-therapy style of privatisation had not given their industries time to adapt, and blamed the agency directly for mass unemployment and poverty. The former East German economic zone has since been compared to the underdeveloped southern regions of Italy and the American South during Reconstruction after the Civil War.

  Culturally, the successor to the Socialist Unity Party was renamed the PDS and later merged with the western leftist party WASG to form Die Linke, the Left Party, which became a significant force in German politics after 1990. The Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records, known informally as the Birthler-Behorde, was established to collect and maintain the files of the East German security apparatus, representing the country's public reckoning with its divided past.

  In 2009, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had grown up in East Germany, said plainly that "the process of German unity has not ended yet." The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany entered into force on the 15th of March 1991 after the Soviet Union, the last party, deposited its instrument of ratification on that date, closing the international legal chapter. But the ceremony that marked the withdrawal of the last Allied forces from Germany took place on the 8th of September 1994, at the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, attended by the leaders of Britain, France, the United States, and Germany, more than four years after the flag went up at the Brandenburg Gate.