DILEMMAS RESULTING FROMGERMAN REUNIFICATION

1. Financial: How to pay for the stupendous cost of rebuilding East Germany?

2. Economic: What to do with the “People’s Own Factories,” and how to promote investment in the “new German states”?

3. Professional: Were East German teachers, professors, police, military officers, and civil servants qualified to retain their functions?

4. Legal: What to do with SED bosses, Stasi agents, and border guards who obeyed their “shoot-to-kill” orders? What to do with property claims by the expropriated?

5. Constitutional: Should the Basic Law be modified to accommodate the legal rights of East Germans, e.g., to free abortion on demand?

Germans before the Reichstag celebrate their national reunification on October 3, 1990

Good-bye Lenin! (Berlin, November 13, 1991)

HELMUT KOHL’S TV ADDRESS, JULY 1, 1990(the day the Currency Union took effect)

“To Germans in the GDR I can say: No one will be worse off then before, and many will be better off. Only the monetary, economic, and social union offers the chance, yes, even the guarantee, of improving living conditions rapidly and thoroughly.

“Through our joint efforts, we will soon succeed in transforming Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia into blooming landscapes where it is worthwhile to live and work…

“I ask our compatriots in the GDR: Seize the opportunity; do not let yourselves be put off by the difficulties of the transition. If you look confidently to the future, and if everyone lends a hand, you and we will make it together.”

Bitterfeld, Saxony-Anhalt, March 1990, as the East German chemical industry ground to a halt.

Chemical plants and power plants among the first to be shut

down, as a danger to public health

The Halle Branch of the Trusteeship

Agency [Treuhand], which signed

contracts to privatize 15,000 East German

enterprises from 1990 to 1994

“Blooming” industrial

landscape in Saxony-Anhalt,

2004:This cement plant

had been shut down for years,

slated for demolition

“Steelworks City” in 1991 (built in 1950). This plant was modernized by an international

combine, but only after laying off 9,700 of its 12,000 workers.

The Metalworkers’ Union demands the 35-hour week (North Rhine-Westphalia, January 1993): It

rejected lower wage rates for the East in the name of “solidarity”.

UNEMPLOYMENT RATES IN WEST AND EAST GERMANY

YEAR Old FRG Old GDR National

1969 0.9% “0”

1979 3.8% “0”

1985 9.3% “0”

1989 7.9% “0”

1991 6.2% 10.2% 7.3%

1995 9.1% 14.8% 10.4%

1998 10.3% 19.2% 12.3%

2002 8.5% 19.2% 10.8%

2005 11.0% 20.6% 13.0%

In April 1991 the German Constitutional Court rules against the heirs of those whose land was confiscated

in 1945-49

After an emotional debate, a small Bundestag majority voted on June 23, 1991, to make Berlin

the capital again

THE FIRST CONTINGENT OF EAST GERMAN SOLDIERS IS SWORN INTO THE BUNDESWEHR,

OCTOBER 1990 (but only 11,000 of 89,000 made the cut)

The last Russian tanks are shipped out of Germany in 1994

Academics protest against unemployment in Berlin, Feb. 1991:

“Yesterday: You had no chance if you were not in the Party”

“Today: You have no chance if you’re unemployed”

Construction in the government district of Berlin, 2000

From a feminist perspective, East Germany could be viewed as more advanced than the West, but West German restrictions on abortion & day care were

imposed.

A new “Solidarity Pact” is signed in Bonn, March 1993, to finance state and local government in

the East.It required a painful income tax surcharge…

The “Gauck Authority”

controls 115 shelf-miles of Stasi files and

35 million index cards

The Wall Inside the Head(Hans-Jürgen Starke, 1994)

V. Dubosarkij & A. Vinogradov,

“The Eternal Chancellor”

(1995):Bismarck,

Adenauer, and Willy Brandt

gaze down from heaven

Demonstrators seek to prevent the expansionof Frankfurt Airport in 1981

“The Greens into the Bundestag!”

(campaign poster, 1983)

The “Official Bicycle” for Green

Bundestag delegates(ca. 1983)

Greens in the Bundestag (1983): Petra Kelly, Marie-Luise Beck-Oberndorf, Joschka Fischer, & Otto Schily

“The New Middle”Gerhard Schröder (SPD) celebrates victory,

September 1998

Chancellor Schröder with Oskar Lafontaine, Joschka Fischer, & Otto Schily; five ministers were women

Lafontaine resigned in 1999 to protest against Schröder’s “neo-liberalism”

Schröder prepares for a guest role on the soap opera, Good Times, Bad Times

Josef Prykiewicz, “At History’s Train Station” (1998)

In November 1999, former CDU treasurer Walter Kiep was arrested for tax evasion; in December

Helmut Kohl admitted that the CDU had gathered at least DM 2 million in illegal campaign

contributions.

The CDU suffered a fine of DM 40 million, and Kohl

resigned as party chairman

Schröder appointed Volkswagen Personnel Director Peter Hartz in 2002 to develop plans to reform the

labor market

Hartz I & II (2003) created agencies to facilitate temporary and part-time jobs and help those on welfare find a job.Hartz IV (2004) created pressure on the unemployed by merging the welfare and unemployment insurance systems, with lower benefits.(See THE GERMAN POLITY, pp. 62-66.)

HARTZ IV= “Poverty

Decreed by Law” (PDS,

2004)

HARTZ IV= “Hunger wages and compulsory

labor! We’ve had enough!”

“Hartz IV is Anti-Social because only capital gets the money”

(unemployment has plummeted since 2009, but income inequality has grown)

Gregor Gysi of the PDS (shown here in 2001) forged “The Left” with Lafontaine & SPD dissidents in 2005

Both major parties (black & red lines) have been on a downward trend since the 1970s but rebounded in

2013.