In his first state of the nation address, the German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, yesterday acknowledged the disappointment felt by many former East Germans 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
He emphasised that he recognised that the dismantling of the Communist state (GDR) had not been without friction and said: "For many people it was accompanied by sharp losses and deep cuts."
But he hailed the peaceful revolution itself and the achievements made in the east of the country, describing them as "great successes" for the people there. "There is hardly a more important project at the end of the century than the establishment of internal unity," he added, and promised continued financial aid for the east. But Mr Schroder faced sharp criticism from opposition politicians during the five-hour debate. Mr Wolfgang Schauble, chairman of the Christian Democratic Union, said if it was not for the CDU push for unification under the former chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, "German history would have run differently and not so happily".
The CDU broke with tradition for such debates and rather than putting forward its most high-profile MPs to speak, allowed primarily those from the east to take the podium against the Chancellor.
Mr Arnold Vaatz of the CDU, a former civil rights campaigner in the GDR, said that Mr Schroder had not signed the treaty of German unification while governor of Lower Saxony. He said the Chancellor was now trying to disguise his poor record with what he called platitudes. Mr Schroder had called for western Germans to show more interest in and respect for people from the east. "More curiosity for East Germany, its history and its people would further understanding," he said during his 35-minute address. Mr Werner Schulz of the Greens, another former GDR civil rights campaigner, said that the continued division of the country could be clearly seen in the state of the job market. Unemployment in the former East Germany is markedly higher than in the former West.
There were further indications of fundamental differences within the country yesterday as statistics on German education were released.
These showed that East Germans have had so few children since unification that the numbers starting school have more than halved in the last three years. The German Statistics Office reported that for the school year 1999-2000 the number of new pupils was 82,000, compared with more than 170,000 in the year 1996-1997.