The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989 was the most dramatic in an extraordinary sequence of events that led to the collapse of communism in central and eastern Europe, the unification of Germany and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The Wall had been a monument to the brutality of the communist system and to the failure of diplomacy to resolve the crisis over Berlin in the early 1960s. The peaceful revolution that led to its collapse was a testament to the remarkable courage of a few and to the thirst for freedom of millions of people behind the Iron Curtain.
But it was the leadership of Helmut Kohl that ensured that the fall of the Wall would lead to the reunification of Germany, while the diplomatic efforts of other leaders, notably George HW Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, that ensured that the new Germany would be embedded in a stable international structure.
It was Kohl's commitment to rooting the new Germany in a politically integrated European Union that helped to assuage fears about a resurgent Germany. The leaders of France and Britain were, like Kohl, from a generation that remembered the second World War and both François Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher were initially hostile to German unity.
Decaying industrial landscape
As it turned out, the early years of the reunited Germany were preoccupied with the Herculean challenge of transforming the decaying industrial landscape of East Germany into the
blühende Landschaften
or “blossoming landscapes” promised by Kohl.
As the euphoria of the fall of the Berlin Wall receded into memory, many easterners felt devalued in the new Germany, where their entire biographies were dismissed as irrelevant, while westerners began to resent the financial cost of unification.
Football had long played an important role in German identity and as Ken Early notes in these pages, the performance of the national team after unification helped to forge a new common identity among easterners and westerners.
Berlin itself, after decades as a cold war frontier city, became Europe’s hippest city and a magnet for the young, not just from western Germany but from all over Europe and beyond.
The new Germany showed none of the authoritarian, militaristic or nationalistic characteristics that Thatcher and Mitterrand had feared but its growing wealth and power raised new anxieties. By the start of the global economic crisis in 2008, Germany was the most economically and politically powerful, as well as the most populous member state of the European Union.
Chancellor Angela Merkel threw her country's weight behind an EU-wide policy of fiscal orthodoxy that imposed great economic hardship on peripheral, debt-laden countries such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland and prompted a whole new resentment about Germany's role in Europe.
Some of Berlin’s allies would like Germany to take on a greater leadership role, notably in the area of security and defence policy. Others, along with many of Merkel’s critics at home, want Berlin to show leadership in Europe by showing greater generosity towards its poorer neighbours.
There is much to criticise in Merkel’s Germany, but there is no doubt that the united country that emerged from the rubble of the Berlin Wall is the best Germany there has ever been.
