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The (re) united Germany turns thirty on Saturday; The central events of the national holiday on October 3 will take place in Potsdam, the capital of Brandenburg, once part of the Communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), with the participation of German public dignitaries and of course the obligation wearing masks due to the coronavirus epidemic.
German unity may have formed at the end of the Cold War as early as 1945, almost a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the fall of 1989.
Alive and dead
Among the protagonists of current German politics
- Chancellor Angela Merkel was not a politician until regime change, she worked as a physicist (at the age of 36), joined the opposition Democratic Awakening movement in December 1989 and took a seat in the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament. German, a year later.
- The current federal president Frank-Walter Steinmeier did not participate in public life either; At that time, at the age of 34, he was still a researcher at the Faculty of Law of the Justus Liebig University in Giessen.
- Wolfgang Schäuble, the current president of the Bundestag, has been a politician in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) for decades (at the age of 48) and a member of Parliament since 1972. Just thirty years ago, during the 1990 election campaign, Schäuble suffered an injury as a result of a murder that still affects him in a wheelchair.
- Among the co-chairs of the Greens, the largest opposition party today, Robert Habeck was in his civil service at the age of twenty, and Annalena Baerbock was a nine-year-old schoolgirl near Hannover.
The legendary Chancellor of the Reunification, Helmut Kohl, died in 2017 at the age of 87.
Among former East German leaders
- Erich Honecker, a politician who has ruled the GDR for decades, also died in the 1990s.
- His successor, Egon Krenz, lives to the age of 83 as a widow. She spent several years in prison after being convicted of shooting East German refugees.
- Lothar de Maizière, the last prime minister of the GDR, and already democratically elected, is now an eight-year retiree and co-president of the civic association Deutsche Gesellschaft.
Inequalities that have existed for a long time
But while thirty years of age means a lot in human life, and many of those born in 1989-90 are already raising children, the relationship between the former West Germany, whose name, the FRG is also known as United Germany, and the disintegrated RDA. differences in development did not disappear.
However, Helmut Kohl promised in 1990:
With a joint effort, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia will soon become prosperous landscapes where living and working are worth living.
By comparison, according to a Berlin Institute survey and statistics, the
- the population of the western provinces has grown by 5.4 million in the last 30 years, the eastern provinces have lost 2.2 million
- Eastern incomes are, on average, 14 percent lower today
- an eastern household is only capable of half of the savings and investments of a western family
- While both West German and East German women can expect to live to be 83, East German men can only estimate at 72 years, two years younger than the expected age of their Western counterparts.
- in the east, the unemployment rate was two percentage points higher before the coronavirus epidemic
- Of the young people born after reunification, 23% of Westerners and only 12% of Easterners fully agree with the statement: today it does not matter who comes from which part of the country.
There are also historical reasons for the differences between the Ossik, the Orientals, and the Wessik, the Westerners.
For centuries, there has been a mental and social-structural contrast between jolly Rhineland and rugged Prussia. This was only reinforced by the fact that the western part benefited from the help of Marshall and later from the social market economy, and the eastern part that received the GDR moaned the weight of communism. The effects of this have persisted to this day.
Gergely Prőhle, a former Hungarian ambassador to Berlin and an expert on Germany, told Index.
Prőhle emphasized that although the most developed of the five new eastern federal states, Saxony also lags behind the least developed western one, behind Bremen, Saxony and Thuringia were able to join the new knowledge economy characterized by technology, science and technology. the innovation. This is not typical for areas in East Germany, such as the north-eastern province of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
It is also Angela Merkel’s responsibility that the differences persist after thirty years. As a naturalist, the Chancellor has always prioritized practicality, but has neglected social policy considerations.
– said Prőhle, noting that there has been a recent flow of population from west to east, which is partly due to the fact that the eastern provinces are less affected by the challenges posed by the negative effects of German immigration policy. On the other hand, while property prices and rents have skyrocketed in the west, housing is affordable in many places in the eastern provinces.
According to the latest statistics, the 11 million non-residents living in Germany out of 83 million represent 12.5 percent of the population in the entire country, but the western provinces have this privilege in terms of population and proportion. Almost three million people live in North Rhine-Westphalia, almost two million in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, while the presence of foreigners in none of the eastern provinces reaches 5 percent or 250,000 people.
Top image: A section of the Berlin Wall called the East Side Gallery in the German capital on September 30, 2020, three days before the 30th anniversary of German reunification. The day of German unity, October 3, marks the reunification of divided Germany in 1990. The German Democratic Republic, a member of the former socialist bloc, joined the Federal Republic of Germany on the other side of the Iron Curtain. day. Photo: MTI / EPA / Filip Singer
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