The former East Germany got a raw deal out of reunification

Between 1978 and 2006 I spent a total of about six years living, working and travelling in Germany, so was well acquainted with it both with and without the Wall. As is the way of walls, it seemed pretty permanent while it was there, and as if it had never been when it wasn’t. In 1993, with a friend, I spent an afternoon walking the length of its former course before it all got built over. (While all the East Germans were streaming into the West to look for jobs, my friend and thousands of his fellow Bohemians had hopped the other way to find cheap and deliciously retro flats.) Later on the Wall came up in a conversation with one of my sons. It didn’t ring a bell. Come on, I wanted to say, you were sitting with me when we saw it happening on TV. And then I remembered that he’d been nine months old at the time.

The speed at which it happened caught everyone cold, particularly in the West. Suddenly they had got what they’d always wanted, and how on earth were they going to cope with it? Firstly, the question of unification – yes or no? The Chancellor at the time was Helmut Kohl, for whom reunification was the ruling passion of his life. Nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of his dream (and Margaret Thatcher’s nightmare). Pleas for caution were disregarded in a tidal wave of national sentiment. When the first free elections were held in the East, they brought the Eastern version of Kohl’s party to power, which included Angela Merkel. Unification was now unstoppable.

Economic integration presented more intractable problems, but these were simply steamrollered by Kohl; though he must have known that setting the exchange rate for eastern and western marks at 1:1 would be disastrous, it was simply something that had to be done.

The result of this rush to unity was that the former East Germany, once one of the more successful of the Warsaw Pact states, is now the only one that has been unable to recover under capitalism. The economically active sector of the population high-tailed it to the West to find work. The East has been done up a treat, it’s true: beautifully renovated historic towns are ten a penny, but virtually nothing is going on in them. German unemployment is much higher than ours, and that is almost entirely down to the East; this is partly due to the fact that both men and women expected to be employed in the East, whereas in the West millions of housewives are happy to stay out of the statistics. It is virtually certain that an East Germany allowed to preserve its statehood, cheap labour and attractive exchange rates for a bit longer would have been in a better condition now; but there was no saying that in 1990.

The Social Democrat opposing Kohl in the unification election of 1990 was Oskar Lafontaine: he said exactly that, got thrashed, and is now a leader of the Left Party, ironically the only real “unification” party, with its main power base in the East. Another group with its main power base in the East is, sadly, the many-headed neo-Nazi movement, which feeds on unemployment, economic malaise, and lack of sense of purpose.

Yes, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a great and unforgettable moment; but it is a pity that those who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries got so little out of it.