Despite high hopes for reunification, Germany remains a culturally divided country. Part of the German cultural divide stems from the asymmetrical nature of German reunification.
History of German Reunification
East German frustration over the backlog of emigration applications increased in the 1980s. In the summer of 1989, Hungary opened its borders to Austria, and thousands of East Germans escaped through Hungary to Austria.
In early October, the SED regime restricted travel, requiring permission from authorities to leave the country, but this only increased protests and dissent. 70,000 East Germans marched in Leipzig on October 9th, and the SED did not forcefully repress the protest.
Exactly one month later, November 9th, an official’s ambiguous comment on a new travel law caused thousands of citizens to storm the checkpoints, which the guards opened.
Initial Reactions to German Reunification
East and West Germans jubilantly celebrated the opening of the wall; 4.3 million people visited Western Germany in the first four days after it fell. People chanted “Wir sind ein Volk” (“We are one people”), and East Germans were increasingly in favor of reunification.
The GDR’s economic difficulties further catalyzed the process of reunification. Reunification officially took place on October 3, 1990.
Anxiety and Uncertainty about Reunification
However, the euphoria caused by the “rush to unity” soon turned to anxiety, uncertainty, indifference, and irritation. And even if reunification hopes had not been so high, deeply held beliefs could not have changed so quickly. Values and ideologies that have been held for decades and are connected to personal experience “involve strong feelings that resist rational appeals at reorientation”.
This process of reorientation has been especially difficult for East Germans, however, because of the asymmetry of adjustment after reunification.
Asymmetry of German Adjustment: Mirrored Images
Four decades of discord between the GDR and FRG “created two virtual mirror self-images, locked in mutual antagonism”.
The FRG and GDR “constructed themselves in a symbiotic relationship involving complicitous reciprocity,” which included the shipping of FRG garbage to the GDR, the exploitive GDR production of cheap goods for FRG consumption, and the exchange of GDR citizens for FRG money.
Dominic C. Boyer calls this mirrored national identity “bipolar,” noting that “the good traits were cultivated carefully at home, while the nightmarish survivals of Nazi culture were imagined to be perversely exploited on the hither side of the wall”.
The Mauer im Kopf allows this escape from guilt to continue; as Borneman writes, “So long as the phantasmatic figures of the Jammerossi and the Besserwessi stalk German culture, the ‘bad Germans’ will always be indexically elsewhere”.
Creating a Unified German National Identity After Reunification
These two mirror images needed to be reconciled and integrated to create a unified national identity. Germany must also confront the blame and responsibility for the atrocities of World War II.
So far, however, reunification has involved “an attempt to simply replace the Eastern version with its Western mirror image”. There is an “almost exclusively west-to-east transfer of money, ideas, institutions, and elites”.
Other examples cited as evidence of asymmetrical reunification include controversies over monuments of the GDR, the renaming of streets, and the interpretation of German history presented in German museums.
Although Western Germans have made great financial sacrifices, East Germans have given up their entire political, social, and economic models.
Related Articles
Sources
Borneman, John. “Uniting the German Nation: Law, Narrative, and Historicity.” American Ethnologist 20.2(1993): 288-311.
Boyer, Dominic C. “On the Sedimentation and Accreditation of Social Knowledges of Differences: Mass Media, Journalism, and the Reproduction of East/West Alterities in Unified Germany.” Cultural Anthropology 15.4(2001): 459-482.
Thomaneck, J.K.A. and Bill Niven. Dividing and Uniting Germany. London: Routledge, 2001.
Turner, Jr., Henry Ashby. Germany from Partition to Reunification. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Verheyen, Dirk. The German Question. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999.
Welsh, Helga A., Andreas Pickel, and Dorothy Rosenberg. “East and West German Identities.” In After Unity: Reconfiguring German Identities, ed. Konrad Jarausch, 103-136. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997.
Rebekah Richards - Rebekah Richards has published fiction and nonfiction in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Brandeis Law Journal, Where the Children Play, ...
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