What, at first glance, seems little more than a partial aspect of converting the economy to capitalistic, competitive structures in reality gets to the heart of a political culture which came out of the Nazi period with a completely different profile. In this ‘takeover’ of a sensitive communicational interweave which, even at its best, was thoughtless, the naivety of the assumption which generally guided the federal government in the triumphal confirmation of its anti-communism came to light. This naivety was given legal expression in the choice of the constitutional path of a ‘reunification’ with the (as yet non-existent) eastern Länder via article 23 of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law). This article was originally customised for the entry to West Germany of the Saarland which in 1949 had only been separated for four years—so that then, as was swiftly confirmed, one was allowed to infer an ‘accumulated’ national connection between the two sides. That, decades later, in the case of reunification, one started from the same premise reflected a perhaps understandable but deceptive wave of national feeling—quite apart from the fact that this entry route took away the possibility for citizens east and west to create a common tradition, by preparing in catch-up a shared constitution and thereby building the sustained political consciousness of an intended merger.

It was the concurrence of Kohl’s 12-point plan with the will of a majority of the GDR populace that, with the result of the elections to the Volkskammer (the East-German parliament) of March 1990, rendered irreversible the decision to pursue the earliest possible reunification—a decision that was logical on foreign-policy grounds as well. The Round Table (a forum for SED bodies and civil-rights movements), with its initiative for another type of unification, was not brushed aside by the west alone.

Meanwhile, there is substantial literature on the mistakes made in the rough manner with which elite western functionaries took control in all areas of GDR life.¹ The well-known fact that, even after three decades, there is still a lack of east-German experts on the economy, politics and civil service is symptomatic of this. But, one way or the other, with the decision to opt for the ‘fast route’, a ‘robust’ transition to functioning in line with west-German social systems became unstoppable. With that, the GDR intellectuals and that part of the citizens’ rights movement that would have liked to overthrow the communist SED regime with the vague goal of creating another, ‘better’ GDR² simply became marginalised. Of course, there could have been a greater amount of thoughtful reticence on the part of the west, even in the conditions for a democratically chosen Anschluss. In any case, the GDR populace would have merited greater space for acting autonomously—if only because that way it might have been able to make its own mistakes. And, above all, there was no available public space for any process of coming to terms with a doubly burdening past.

But these are counter-factual reflections that merely concern the missed opportunities of the last few decades and no longer serve a political purpose today. However, today’s exceptional situation, in a German perspective, offers a new opportunity for reaching a twin unity, at the German as well as the European level. There are now, as we have seen, two complementary developments happening in the federal republic. On one hand, reciprocal sensitivity to and understanding of historical differences—and thus differences not of one’s own making in the character of political mentalities—have increased in east and west. On the other hand and at the same time, the political significance of a conflict now taken seriously and even accepted by the political establishment has become clear.

The AfD is fomenting a conflict which may well have arisen out of the asymmetric costs of German unification but is now newly orchestrated as a mirror-image rejection of European integration in nationalistic and racist language. This conflict gains its special relevance in our context, because it has today taken on a pan-German character: it no longer runs along the divisive geographical borders of different historical fates but along those of party preference instead. The clearer the nationwide shared contours of this conflict become, the greater the prospect that the confrontation with far-right populism now going on across Germany as a whole will hasten the already recognised historical distancing from the failings of the unification process—and, what’s more, the awareness that increasingly other problems are coming to the fore which we can solve only by acting together in both Germany and Europe, in a world turned more authoritarian and strife-torn.

This shuffling of the political cards can be seen as an opportunity to complete the process of German unification, by gathering together our national forces for the decisive step in integrating Europe. Let’s face it: without European unification we will not overcome the unforeseeable economic consequences so far of the pandemic nor the right-wing populism at home and in the other member states of the EU.