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The Reunification of Germany
The opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, was one of the most
dramatic events of the post-World War II period. In the ensuing months,
much more than just the graffiti-covered concrete panels of that infamous
structure came crashing down during carnival-like celebrations. After
four decades, the division of an entire continent, a nation, and a society
came to an abrupt end.
A powerful force setting the revolutionary change in motion was a substantial
movement of people from the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany)
westward. Throughout its forty-year history, the GDR had resorted to extreme
measures to control its borders and halt the exodus of productive workers.
The most extreme of these measures was the erection in 1961 of the Berlin
Wall to check the sustained movement of East Germans to the Federal Republic
of Germany (FRG, or West Germany), whose booming economy had created millions
of new jobs. Nearly three decades later, for a period of several years
beginning in the summer of 1989, the appeal of West Germany, even with
its economy mired in recession, prompted another wave of migration of
more than 700,000 East Germans, most between the ages of eighteen and
thirty.
The FRG's absorption of the GDR in 1990 enlarged its area by about 30
percent and increased its population about 20 percent. Integrating this
new territory has proven to be a Herculean task. Prior to unification,
West Germans enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world
and a per capita income exceeding that of the United States. East Germans
were prosperous by the standards of the communist world but had a living
standard considerably below that of Western Europe. As the costs of unification
have accumulated, the time when easterners will attain the standard of
living of westerners has receded further into the future.
In the early 1990s, the five new eastern states experienced substantial
depopulation as a result of a plummeting birth rate and the internal migration
of eastern Germans to the west. All social groups in the east were affected
by the hasty merger, but the position of women was even more negatively
affected. In particular, the rapid privatization of the socialist command
economy led to much unemployment among women and the dismantling of an
extensive child-care system. The east's elderly, who generally had incomes
and savings much below their counterparts in the western Laender,
also suffered hardship.
Unification inevitably revealed a series of unpleasant surprises about
the closed economy and society of what had been East Germany. One of the
most distressing was the deplorable state of the environment. Among the
world's most environmentally conscious peoples, West Germans were shocked
by the levels of ecological damage in the east. Environmental degradation,
most noticeably badly polluted air and water, was perhaps a more important
cause of the inequalities in living standards between east and west than
smaller living quarters and lower wages. Surveying the dilapidated infrastructure
and housing stock, observers dubbed the newly incorporated territory "Germany's
Appalachia."
By mid-1995 it appeared that the physical and administrative mergers
of the two German states would be far easier to accomplish than the social
aspect of the union. In the postwar period, the two Germanys had assiduously
developed two mutually exclusive models of society. Thus, the major challenge
lay in harmonizing and integrating these societies, which were only gradually
emerging from the long shadows cast by four decades of separate development
in antagonistic systems.
- Geography (lands and
capitals, climate)
- Society (population, religion,
marriage, urbanization, social structure, immigration)
- Education (elementary,
junior, senior, vocational, higher)
- Economy (the Economic
Miracle, financial system, Bundesbank, business culture)
- Politics (government,
the Chancellor, the President, parties, Bundestag)
- Mass Media (newspapers,
radio and TV)
- Armed Forces (army,
navy, air forces, police)
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