Desired Reunification or Forced Annexation?

I. The Jubilation and Its Shadow

On 9 November 1989, the Wall opened. People fell into each other's arms, champagne corks popped on the Ku'damm, and the world watched as a people separated for 28 years by concrete and barbed wire found each other again. It was one of the happiest moments in German history. It was also one of the most fleeting.

For what happened in the eleven months between the opening of the Wall and reunification was neither the realization of a shared dream nor a cold act of subjugation. It was a third thing, more uncomfortable: a process in which the vast majority of East Germans wanted, voted for, and celebrated the union — only to discover that they had no say in the terms of that union. East Germans wanted unity. What they got was accession.

It is precisely this tension — between the desired outcome and the imposed procedure — that makes the subject so fraught to this day. Those who speak of annexation must answer the question of what colonized people ever summoned their colonizers by free election. Those who speak of free reunification must explain why, 35 years later, the median wealth of an East German household stands at 43,400 euros while a West German household holds 127,900 — and why not a single CEO of Germany's hundred largest companies is of East German origin.

II. Two Paths, One Constitution

The Basic Law had envisaged two paths for the event of reunification. Article 23 in its original version allowed other parts of Germany to accede to the territory governed by the Basic Law — an incorporation in which the existing constitutional system remained unchanged. Article 146, by contrast, provided that the Basic Law would lose its validity once a new constitution, freely decided upon by the entire German people, came into force.

The difference was fundamental. Article 23 meant: the GDR accedes, the Basic Law is extended, the Federal Republic remains what it was. Article 146 meant: both states dissolve and jointly create something new — a constitution, adopted by referendum, in which for the first time in German history all Germans would have voted on their foundational law.

At the Round Table in East Berlin, a working group had already drafted a constitution that built on the Basic Law but set its own accents — children's rights, social rights, parity in public offices, specifications of the social-state principle. In September 1990, weeks before reunification, nearly a thousand people gathered at the Weimar National Theatre to debate these questions. It was a moment when history might have been written differently.

It was not written differently. Helmut Kohl had declared on ZDF television on 11 February 1990 that a new constitution would need to be created and that he had no intention of pursuing a course that amounted to annexation. Within weeks, no more was said of this. The pressure of events — the mass exodus from the GDR, fears that Gorbachev might close the window of opportunity, the electoral triumph of the "Alliance for Germany" in the Volkskammer — made the fast track appear inevitable. Or made it appear so, which is not the same thing.

On 23 August 1990, the Volkskammer voted for accession under Article 23. On 3 October, the GDR acceded to the territory of the Basic Law. There was no new constitution. There was no referendum. There was not even a serious debate about whether the Basic Law — which Carlo Schmid had expressly designed as a provisional arrangement in 1949 — ought to be replaced in this historic moment by something shared.

Legally, the procedure was correct. Politically, it was legitimate — the Volkskammer had approved it with a two-thirds majority. Symbolically, however, it was devastating. The signal was unmistakable: the Basic Law is good enough for you. Your forty years have no substance worth incorporating into a common foundation. Come in, but bring nothing with you.

The political scientist Gerhard Lehmbruch later observed that the claim of a narrow window of opportunity exaggerated the role of the key actors. Whether the path through Article 146 would truly have taken too long will never be known. What is certain is that it was never tried.

III. The Curse of the Deutschmark

Before the GDR acceded politically on 3 October 1990, it had already been overrun economically on 1 July. On that day, the Monetary, Economic and Social Union took effect. Wages, salaries, pensions, and rents were converted from GDR marks to Deutschmarks at a ratio of 1:1. Savings up to certain thresholds were also converted at 1:1, with amounts above converted at 2:1.

The 1:1 exchange rate was a social policy decision. It was also an electoral promise. The "Alliance for Germany," which had pledged the fastest possible introduction of the Deutschmark, won the Volkskammer election in March 1990 with 48 percent — winning particularly among the industrial working class in Saxony and Thuringia, precisely those who would be hit hardest by the consequences of this decision. They had voted for the Deutschmark. They received deindustrialization.

Bundesbank president Karl Otto Pöhl considered a currency union premature. Economists such as Otmar Issing, later chief economist of the ECB, warned of the consequences. The Council of Economic Experts proposed phased approaches. Kohl offered the GDR the currency union without informing his own Bundesbank president in advance. Pöhl learned about it from television and called it "unusual and rather annoying."

The figures underlying the decision were wrong. The productivity of the GDR economy was lower than assumed; wages were already rising rapidly. The currency conversion amounted to an overnight revaluation of approximately 300 percent for GDR enterprises. Production costs exploded; export markets in Eastern Europe collapsed definitively with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Enterprises that had still been functioning on 30 June were technically insolvent on 1 July — not because they were worthless, but because the exchange rate had been set in a way that rendered them worthless.

In his television address on the occasion of the currency union, Helmut Kohl promised that the new federal states would "soon be transformed into blooming landscapes." No one would be worse off than before, he pledged, and many would be better off. A year later, he declared himself "more convinced than ever" that blooming landscapes would materialize within three to four years. It became the promise for which he would be remembered longest — as a lie or a miscalculation, depending on whom you ask.

IV. The Treuhand and the People's Property

The Treuhandanstalt — the Trust Agency — was originally conceived differently. At the Round Table, civil rights activists had envisaged a custodial institution that would preserve the people's property and distribute it to GDR citizens through share certificates. Every resident would have received a stake in the national assets. It would have been a form of citizens' dividend, a model similar to Czechoslovakia's voucher privatization programme.

It turned out differently. The Treuhand Law of 17 June 1990, passed by the democratically elected Volkskammer, transformed the custodial institution into a privatization agency. Some 8,500 enterprises with over four million employees at more than 32,000 locations were put up for sale. It was the largest liquidation of a national economy the post-war world had ever seen.

The motto was: "Privatize rapidly, restructure decisively, wind down carefully." In practice, privatization was rapid and winding-down was anything but careful. The first Treuhand president, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, favoured restructuring before sale. He was assassinated by the Red Army Faction on 1 April 1991. His successor, Birgit Breuel, accelerated the pace. By the end of 1992, over 80 percent of the enterprise portfolio had been "disposed of."

The balance sheet when the Treuhand concluded operations at the end of 1994: approximately 12,500 enterprise units — created through the break-up of the original 8,500 — had been processed. Fifty-three percent were privatized, 13 percent returned to owners expropriated under the GDR, 2.5 percent transferred to municipalities. Roughly 30 percent — over 3,700 enterprises — were shut down. Of the original four million jobs, one and a half million remained by the end of 1994. Revenue: barely 70 billion Deutschmarks. Expenditure: over 300 billion. Instead of the projected 600 billion DM surplus, a loss of approximately 270 billion.

What mattered most, however, was the distribution. Eighty percent of the privatized enterprises went to West German buyers. Fourteen percent to foreign investors. Six percent to East Germans. Six percent — in their own country, with their own people's property. Birgit Breuel phrased the Treuhand's logic thus: they were not selling enterprises but purchasing investors. East Germans were largely not investors. Banks refused them credit unless a West German sat in the management alongside them.

The criminal statistics convey the scale. A Bundestag investigative committee estimated the damage from embezzlement, fraud, and other criminal acts in connection with privatization at three to ten billion Deutschmarks. Numerous enterprises were sold for a symbolic single mark — with employment and investment pledges that were later not honoured. Others were acquired by dubious operators who stripped the remaining assets and let the shells go bankrupt.

The counter-argument deserves a hearing. The GDR economy was finished. Productivity stood at 24 percent of the Western level in 1991. Enterprises were technologically outdated, heavily indebted, and environmentally contaminated. Eastern European markets were collapsing. There was no blueprint, no historical precedent for transforming an entire planned economy into a market economy. The Treuhand operated under extreme time pressure, with too little staff, in an environment where every day of delay cost billions. That mistakes would occur under such conditions was inevitable.

All of this is true. It explains a great deal. It justifies nothing about the foundational decision to expropriate an entire people rather than giving them a stake in their own property.

V. The Elite Exchange

What applied to the economy applied even more to institutions. The entire public life of the GDR was reorganized — administration, judiciary, universities, media. Since the structures of the West were being transplanted, people were needed who knew those structures. They came from the West.

The logic was compelling and merciless in equal measure. East German elites were either politically discredited by their roles in the GDR system or insufficiently familiar with the West German system to manage the reconstruction. So the judges came from the West, the professors, the departmental heads, the managing directors, the chief physicians. Some were top professionals accepting a challenge. Others were mediocrities who would never have been promoted in the West and used the East to make up for the career denied them at home.

The subtext, as the historian Kowalczuk writes, was unmistakable: the Western system was superior in every respect — not merely economically and politically, but culturally and humanly. The conclusion followed inexorably: adapt. What had been learned, achieved, and experienced in forty years of the GDR was without value. Professional qualifications, lifetime accomplishments, vocational identity — all devalued, overnight.

The figures from 2024 show how deep this rift runs. The Elite Monitor, a longitudinal study by the universities of Leipzig and Jena, tracks approximately 3,000 top positions across twelve sectors. The share held by people born in East Germany: 12.1 percent. Against a population share of roughly 20 percent. In business: 4 percent, declining. On the boards of Germany's hundred largest companies: zero percent. In the hundred largest East German companies, the share of East German executives has fallen from a one-time 70 to 27 percent — in their own federal states, in their own cities.

The executive recruiter Constanze Buchheim names the mechanism: self-reinforcing networks that recruit on the principle of social similarity. Those who studied in the West have better career prospects than those with an East German educational path — not because the training was worse, but because the networks carry a Western imprint. Professor Astrid Lorenz warns that the under-representation reinforces the feeling of being second-class citizens.

VI. The Wealth Wall

The physical Wall fell on 9 November 1989. The wealth wall still stands.

The median household wealth in the West, according to the Bundesbank, is 127,900 euros. In the East: 43,400 euros — one third. The homeownership rate in the West is 50 percent; in the East, below 40. The average inheritance in Bavaria: 176,000 euros. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania: 52,000 euros. Saxony-Anhalt brings up the rear. East Germans make up (excluding Berlin) 15 percent of the population but 20 percent of the poorer half — and 6 percent of all millionaires. In East Germany, nearly one in four people between 60 and 79 is at risk of poverty in old age.

The cause is historical and structural. In the GDR, private wealth accumulation was barely possible. There was no homeownership to speak of, no stock portfolios, no family businesses accumulating value. When the Wall fell, two societies collided: one that had spent forty years building wealth and one that had spent forty years being prevented from doing so. Reunification — as it was carried out — did not mitigate this inequality. It cemented it.

The decisive policy was the principle of "restitution before compensation." Property expropriated during the GDR era was to be returned to its former owners rather than remaining, with compensation, in the hands of its current occupants. In practice, this meant that West German families whose ancestors had been expropriated in the 1950s or had fled the GDR reclaimed their property — while the GDR citizens who had lived in those houses for forty years, maintained them, and not infrequently made them habitable in the first place, were left with nothing. It was legally correct. It was humanly devastating.

The inheritance system does the rest. Since wealth in the West has accumulated over generations and the inheritance tax effectively captures only 2.8 percent of total inheritance volume, the advantage is not being closed but passed from generation to generation. Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research, calls inheritance the single most important driver of wealth inequality in Germany. The East-West gap may even widen further, because the massive rise in property prices in the West has inflated the asset base there, from which East Germans — lacking property — have scarcely benefited.

VII. What East Germans Wanted

The other side must be heard, or the essay becomes an indictment, and indictments explain nothing.

In the Volkskammer election of 18 March 1990, the "Alliance for Germany" — the coalition for the fastest possible reunification — received 48 percent. The similarly unity-minded Liberals won 5.3 percent. The SPD, which favoured a slower process, received 22 percent. The SED/PDS, opposed to reunification: 16.4 percent. Three-quarters of voters chose unity. The municipal elections in May confirmed this. The state elections in October confirmed it again. And the first all-German Bundestag election in December 1990 once more. Four elections, four clear majorities. Representative surveys consistently showed 80 to 90 percent support for unification.

It is difficult to speak of annexation when the annexed say yes four times in a row. The historian Kowalczuk, who gave the process the title "The Takeover," himself poses the question: what colonized people ever summoned their colonizers by free election?

Yet the surveys also showed that 55 percent of GDR citizens considered the pace too fast. They wanted unity — but not like this, not this fast, not on these terms. They had thrown off dictatorship and now faced a transformation for which they were unprepared and over which they had no say. The tragedy of the process is not that unity was imposed against the will of East Germans. The tragedy is that they got what they asked for — and something different was delivered.

What they had ordered was freedom and prosperity. What was delivered was a system that promised both and initially provided neither. Freedom to travel is of little use when you have no money. Freedom of occupational choice is abstract when your occupation is being wound down. The freedom to own your house sounds fine — until the former owner appears at the door.

VIII. What the West Failed to Understand

After 1990, the West committed an error that weighs more heavily than all the economic miscalculations: it understood reunification as a victory. As vindication of its own system in every respect. The GDR had collapsed — therefore everything about it was wrong. The West had endured — therefore everything about it was right.

From this attitude followed the complete transplantation of the West German system onto the East. Not as the result of negotiations between equal partners, but as a modality of accession. The Basic Law stayed. The court structure stayed. The administrative structure stayed. Collective bargaining law stayed. Pension law stayed. Training regulations stayed. Everything stayed — only the people had to change.

What did not stay was recognition. Lifetime achievements accomplished under adverse circumstances. Professional qualifications no less valuable than Western ones, yet unrecognized. Kindergartens and polyclinics that had worked. Gender equality in professional life, which the GDR had advanced further than the West. None of this found its way into the Unification Treaty, because there was no unification treaty in the true sense — only an accession treaty, in which one side set the rules and the other accepted them.

Arnulf Baring, one of the most prominent conservative historians of the old Federal Republic, stated in 1991 what many thought and some said: the GDR regime had spent nearly half a century "dwarfing" its people, "ruining" their education and training. It was a sentence that revealed much about the speaker and little about those he described. For the GDR citizens had just accomplished a peaceful revolution — the only successful one in German history — and found themselves objects of a West German civilizing mission they had never requested.

IX. History's Irony

No other group suffered under the transformation process as severely as those workers in Saxony and Thuringia who had voted with the greatest enthusiasm for the fastest possible unity in 1990. They lost their jobs, their enterprises, their professional identities. The Treuhand wound down their industrial combines. West German corporations took over their markets. Banks denied them credit. The state offered job-creation schemes and early retirement — dignified words for an undignified outcome.

Two-thirds of all East German industrial workers lost their employment during the early 1990s. In 1989, GDR industry had still employed 3.2 to 3.4 million people. By 1994, industrial enterprises with more than 20 employees retained just 638,000. The collapse of the working society was total. And since in the GDR the workplace collective had simultaneously served as social safety net, cultural institution, and life's purpose, people lost not merely their jobs but their entire social infrastructure.

What followed was the largest internal migration in post-war German history. Between 1990 and 2019, approximately 3.7 million people moved from East to West Germany. Above all, young, well-educated women left. Entire regions emptied. Schools closed, hospitals closed, bus routes were discontinued. The Federal Government's Commissioner for Eastern Germany, Carsten Schneider, summed it up in essence: the East had lost an entire generation.

It is the bitterest irony: those who shouted "We are the people" and "We are one people" loudest found themselves the losers of the very unity they had fought for.

X. The Counter-Argument

The brief for the prosecution has been written. Now the defence must be heard, for without it the findings harden into resentment.

The GDR economy was beyond reform. It was bankrupt. The Schürer memorandum of October 1989, prepared by Politburo member Gerhard Schürer, catalogued the situation soberly: the GDR was insolvent, its debts crushing, its productivity catastrophic. Nine days after the memorandum was submitted, the Wall fell. A "gradual transformation" would have cost billions per month that no one had — and it would not have stopped the exodus that was the true engine of events. Every day, a thousand people left. Not because they were politically persecuted, but because they wanted the Deutschmark.

Moreover, living standards have converged. Life expectancy, which in 1990 was two to three years lower in the East than in the West, has almost fully converged for women and to within just over a year for men. Pensions have been equal since 2023. Unemployment rates have narrowed. Per-capita income has reached 90 percent of the Western level. Cities like Dresden, Leipzig, Erfurt, and Potsdam are not merely restored but thriving. Anyone who travels through the East with open eyes will see — alongside the empty villages — the blooming landscapes Kohl had promised. They arrived. Only thirty years later than announced.

And the transfer payments were immense. An estimated two trillion euros flowed from West to East — through infrastructure, social transfers, the solidarity surcharge, the Aufbau Ost programme. It was the largest wealth transfer in German history. West Germans financed it, often reluctantly, but they financed it. That is no small matter.

All of this is true. And none of it changes the fact that the process by which it happened was remembered by East Germans not as participation but as external control. The problem is not the what. It is the how.

XI. Neither Annexation nor Reunification

So: what was it? Neither annexation nor reunification in the full sense of the word. It was an accession in which the acceding party gave its consent but did not negotiate the terms. A takeover, as Kowalczuk calls it — accurate, but not exhaustive.

Perhaps the most fitting image is that of an adoption. The GDR citizens were taken into the family of the Federal Republic. They received the family name, the house rules, the credit card. But they were given no seat at the table where the rules were made. And they were expected to be grateful — for the roof over their heads that they had never asked for, and the rules they had never been allowed to help shape.

The long-term consequences of this experience are political. Through the accession and the social upheavals of the early 1990s, many East Germans, as the legal historian at the University of Leipzig writes, were discouraged and came to see themselves as objects of history rather than acting subjects. In the Basic Law, as it stands, the transformation experiences of East Germans are not reflected. And what is not reflected in the Basic Law does not exist in the Federal Republic's official self-understanding.

The resonance of the AfD in Eastern Germany is not solely, but also, a late consequence of this process. Not because the voters are stupid or authoritarian or unteachable — as the West German reflex likes to suggest — but because a substantial portion of the East German population has experienced that their voice counts only on election day and no longer thereafter. Kowalczuk also points out that older traditions of illiberalism and nationalism, which continued to operate within the GDR, must not be ignored. The explanation is multi-layered. That changes nothing about the fact that the experience of non-participation is real — and that it began in 1990.

XII. What Might Have Been Different

A constitution could have been written. Not in five weeks, but in a year. It could have taken the Basic Law as its basis and supplemented it — with social rights, children's rights, direct democracy at the federal level, all that had been debated at the Round Table and in the Weimar National Theatre. It could have been adopted by referendum — the first in German history. It would have given unified Germany not merely a constitution but a founding narrative: we decided this together.

The people's property could have been distributed differently. Share certificates, citizens' funds, cooperative models. Slower privatization, more restructuring, preference for East Germans. No panacea, but a signal: this country belongs to you. Not to the West German investors, not to the buyers for a single mark.

Wages could have been adjusted more gradually, rather than ruining enterprises overnight through the 1:1 exchange rate. Banks could have been required not to treat East German borrowers automatically as second-class risks. West German officials posted to the East could have been stripped of their bush-bonus and replaced by a programme for East German leaders.

All of this would have taken more time. Possibly more money, too. But it would have given unity what it still lacks: legitimacy, not merely in the legal sense but in the human one. The sense that one half did not impose its system on the other, but that two halves of a people jointly created something new.

It is too late for that. But it is not too late to state the finding: German reunification was desired, voted for, and historically inevitable. And it was — in its concrete execution — a process in which one of the two sides determined everything and the other received everything except a voice.

Germany will be working on that for a long time yet.