Merkel urges greater respect for sacrifices of eastern Germans

Caretaker chancellor Angela Merkel has urged western Germans to show greater respect for their eastern neighbours’ lives and achievements before and after the end of cold war division.

In an unusually personal speech on Sunday, marking 31 years of German unification, Dr Merkel reminded her audience that it was East Germans – not West Germans – who toppled the Berlin Wall.

Just how great a leap of faith it was –with help from its eastern neighbours in Hungary and Poland – was often forgotten by westerners.

“The country we celebrate today as unified became this way because people in East Germany risked everything for their rights, their freedom and another society,” she said in the eastern city of Halle. “We must never forget that it could have ended differently . . . that the revolution would succeed and that it would not end in terrible punishment.”

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As a former East German herself, she cited examples that betrayed occasionally unreflected attitudes of western Germans. While their lives continued largely unchanged after 1989, their eastern neighbours had to reinvent themselves entirely – and not all succeeded.

She cited an essay from last year which described her East German biography as political “ballast”.

“Ballast that at best is good for balance but can be tossed overboard as a useless burden,” she said, regardless of the good or bad experiences it included.

She wondered aloud if former East Germans of her generation still had to “prove that their East German past was some kind of imposition”?

Three decades after German unification, she said it was time to accept how easterners’ readiness to adapt and westerners’ solidarity had created a new feeling of belonging in a new, united Germany.

“A country in which everyone has to learn anew together,” she said, suggesting the embrace of change for unification could be applied to looming challenges on climate change and digital transformation.