Reunification

Chapter 6 closed with the Wall opened by genuine accident — no government had planned that specific night. What followed it was the opposite: a deliberate, negotiated, and remarkably fast legal process, turning two separate states back into one within eleven months.

March 1990: A Mandate for Speed

East Germany's first genuinely free elections, held for the Volkskammer, delivered a clear verdict: the former ruling communist party was heavily defeated, and a CDU-led coalition formed under Lothar de Maizière on an explicit platform of rapid reunification. The result gave East Germany's own new government a real, direct mandate to move quickly rather than negotiate a slower, more open-ended process.

Article 23 vs. Article 146: Two Paths, One Chosen for Speed

The Basic Law itself had always contained two real, different routes to reunification. Article 146 pointed toward drafting an entirely new, jointly negotiated constitution for a reunified Germany — the genuinely deliberate route, matching Chapter 2's own real finding that the Basic Law had been named provisionally, with reunification already in mind from 1949. Article 23, by contrast, allowed any new territory to simply accede to the existing Federal Republic and adopt its existing Basic Law directly.

Monetary Union and a Costly Act of Political Generosity

The Treaty on the Creation of a Monetary, Economic and Social Union took effect 1 July 1990, replacing the East German mark with the West German Deutsche Mark. The real exchange rate the East German mark had actually traded at on the black market before this — roughly 5 to 10 East marks per West German mark — was nowhere close to the rate ultimately chosen for ordinary citizens' wages and savings: 1:1, up to a real cap of 4,000 marks per adult (2,000 for children, 6,000 for those over 60); larger savings and debts converted at 2:1, and money judged "speculative" — acquired shortly before unification — converted at a real, harsher 3:1.

The Treuhandanstalt: The Real Price of Reunification

The Treuhandanstalt, East Germany's own privatization agency, inherited roughly 8,500 state-owned enterprises employing over four million people — real assets ranging from steel works and the Babelsberg film studios to 2.4 million hectares of former agricultural and forest land. Of those four million employees, an estimated 2.5 million were laid off in the early 1990s as the agency worked through privatizing, restructuring, or closing enterprises that could no longer compete once the currency shock made their own costs uncompetitive. By the time it wound down in 1994, the Treuhandanstalt had accumulated roughly DM 260–270 billion in debt rather than the profit its own privatization mandate had originally been expected to generate.

Two Plus Four: Clearing the Real International Obstacle

Domestic reunification still needed the consent of the same four Allied powers that had occupied Germany since 1945. The "Two Plus Four" talks — both German states plus the US, UK, France, and the Soviet Union — produced a real treaty signed 12 September 1990, resolving the international side of reunification directly: full German sovereignty was granted on 15 March 1991, and Soviet troops stationed on former East German territory were not fully withdrawn until 31 August 1994.

The Unification Treaty and 3 October 1990

The Unification Treaty (Einigungsvertrag) itself was signed 31 August 1990, approved by large majorities in both the Volkskammer and the Bundestag on 20 September, and took effect 29 September. At midnight on 3 October 1990, East Germany's five reconstituted states plus East Berlin formally acceded to the Federal Republic under Article 23 — just under eleven months after the Wall's own accidental opening.

Hands-On Exercises