The Off-Key Bard
History

This Day in History — Germany Is Reunified

On this day in 1990

On October 3, 1990, East Germany dissolved and acceded to West Germany, formally ending four decades of Cold War division less than a year after the Wall fell.

The Off-Key Bard stands in Berlin as midnight approaches. For more than four decades, Germany has been divided by the aftermath of war, competing political systems, and the front line of the Cold War.

"For twenty-eight years, a wall cut through this city. Tonight there will still be scars where it stood. But there will no longer be two Germanys."

On October 3, 1990, the German Democratic Republic — East Germany — ceased to exist as a separate state and joined the Federal Republic of Germany, formally completing German reunification. At midnight, the five reestablished eastern states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia, along with the reunited city of Berlin, entered the constitutional order of the Federal Republic. October 3 has since been celebrated as Germany's national holiday, the Day of German Unity.

It was the culmination of a division that had lasted more than four decades.

A Nation Split by the Cold War

After Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945, the victorious Allied powers divided Germany into occupation zones controlled by the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Berlin, although located deep inside the Soviet occupation zone, was itself divided among the four powers. As relations between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies deteriorated, those occupation zones hardened into political boundaries.

In 1949, two German states emerged. The American, British, and French zones became the Federal Republic of Germany, commonly called West Germany. The Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. Germany had become one of the clearest geographical expressions of the Cold War: a capitalist parliamentary democracy aligned with the West on one side and a Soviet-aligned socialist state on the other.

Berlin became the most visible fault line. Millions of East Germans left for the West during the years following the division, many traveling through Berlin. On August 13, 1961, East German authorities began sealing the border through the city. Barbed wire was followed by concrete walls, guard towers, patrol roads, barriers, and heavily controlled crossing points.

The Berlin Wall became one of the defining symbols of the Cold War. It did not simply divide two political systems. It divided streets, neighborhoods, workplaces, friendships, and families. People attempting to escape across the border risked imprisonment or death.

The Night the Wall Opened

Yet by the late 1980s, the political order supporting that wall was beginning to weaken. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced reforms and became less willing to use Soviet military power to preserve communist governments throughout Eastern Europe. Hungary began dismantling its border barriers with Austria. Growing numbers of East Germans escaped westward, while demonstrations inside East Germany demanded political reform and freedom of movement.

The pressure became impossible for the East German government to contain.

Then, on November 9, 1989, an extraordinary bureaucratic mistake accelerated history. During a televised press conference, East German official Günter Schabowski announced new travel regulations intended to loosen restrictions on citizens traveling abroad. Asked when the rules would take effect, Schabowski — apparently working from incomplete information — responded that, as far as he knew, they applied immediately.

East Germans heard the announcement and began gathering at border crossings. The guards had not received clear instructions about what to do. Eventually, overwhelmed border officials began allowing people through. The Berlin Wall had effectively opened.

Images of Germans climbing onto the wall, embracing one another, pouring through checkpoints, and attacking the concrete with hammers became some of the most recognizable scenes of the end of the Cold War.

From Open Border to Formal Union

But the fall of the Wall on November 9, 1989 was not German reunification itself. What followed was an extraordinarily fast and complicated political process. East Germany held its first — and ultimately only — free parliamentary election in March 1990. The newly elected Volkskammer then became central to negotiations over how and when the two German states would unite.

On July 1, 1990, a monetary, economic, and social union took effect between the two countries, with East Germany adopting the Deutsche Mark used in the West. Then, during a dramatic overnight session on August 22–23, the East German Volkskammer voted for the GDR to accede to the Federal Republic under the then-existing Article 23 of West Germany's Basic Law, effective October 3.

That constitutional mechanism is an important detail. Germany did not technically create an entirely new state on October 3. Instead, the territory of the German Democratic Republic entered the existing constitutional framework of the Federal Republic of Germany. The five eastern Länder were reestablished, and the Basic Law was extended to them.

The Diplomacy Behind the Scenes

Meanwhile, reunification couldn't be decided by the two German governments alone. The United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and France still possessed rights and responsibilities stemming from Germany's defeat in World War II. The two German states therefore negotiated with those four powers in what became known as the "Two Plus Four" talks.

Those negotiations addressed enormously consequential questions: Germany's borders, military forces, alliance membership, and sovereignty. The resulting Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, signed in Moscow on September 12, 1990, established the international framework that allowed reunification to proceed. Germany reconfirmed its existing border with Poland along the Oder-Neisse line, formally renouncing any claim to former German territories further east, and agreed to cap its combined armed forces at 370,000 personnel. The four former occupying powers suspended their remaining rights and responsibilities over Germany and Berlin, with full sovereignty formally taking effect the following March.

The two German governments also negotiated the enormous practical problem of combining two countries that had spent more than forty years developing under fundamentally different systems. The Unification Treaty, signed August 31 and approved by both German parliaments in September, addressed everything from government administration and law to education, property, public finances, and the reestablishment of the eastern states. It entered into force on October 3.

Midnight in Berlin

Then midnight arrived. Crowds gathered throughout Germany, with enormous celebrations centered in Berlin. The black-red-gold German flag was raised as the German Democratic Republic formally disappeared and the Federal Republic expanded eastward.

Less than eleven months had passed since the Berlin Wall opened.

Reunification did not mean the differences created by forty years of separation disappeared overnight. East Germany's state-run economy underwent a rapid and disruptive transition to a market system. Industries closed or were restructured, unemployment increased sharply in many eastern communities, and disputes emerged over property, pensions, wages, and the treatment of former East German institutions and officials. Economic, demographic, and social differences between eastern and western Germany would persist long after the border itself disappeared.

Nor was reunification simply the work of presidents, chancellors, diplomats, and treaties. The political transformation of 1989 had been driven in significant part by ordinary East Germans demonstrating, organizing, leaving the country, demanding free elections, and challenging a government that had once appeared immovable. The peaceful revolution inside East Germany created possibilities that diplomacy then transformed into a political settlement.

"A wall once cut a land in two,
With guards and wire between the view.
Then stone gave way, the borders fell —
And midnight rang reunification's bell."

October 3 therefore represents something different from November 9. November 9, 1989 was the extraordinary night the Berlin Wall opened. October 3, 1990 was the legal and political completion of German reunification.

The following day, an expanded all-German Bundestag assembled in Berlin. Germany's first nationwide federal election after reunification followed on December 2.

On October 3, 1990, a division created from the ruins of World War II and hardened during four decades of Cold War confrontation formally came to an end. East Germany ceased to exist as a separate state, Germany was reunited, and one of Europe's most powerful symbols of the Cold War passed into history.

Sources

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