AFTER 20 years of painful sacrifice, a journey down the former cold war border suggests that Germany can finally claim its unification reward. There were wrong turns along the way, like in the euphoric days of 1989 when Helmut Kohl made his prosperity-for-all promise of “blossoming landscapes” in the former east. That was corrected in 2004 when German president Horst Köhler said it was unfair to promise and unrealistic to expect the same standard of living everywhere in a country, east and west, north and south.
That emboldened politicians to stop pouring subsidies over the entire former East German territory in the hope that the cash would trickle down. Scaling back to target limited resources on population centres with potential has proven more successful but has created real problems too. Entire generations of easterners over 50 have failed to make the connection in the new Germany; many of their children have had to move west in search of work. Unemployment in some eastern regions can top twice the national average, breeding discontent and its racist relation, xenophobia.
Unification stirred discontent in the west too. The prosperity to which westerners were accustomed vanished with the Berlin Wall and two decades of infrastructural investment in the east has left many of their own roads and train stations crumbling. This bad news is all true but it is not the whole story.
As Derek Scally found in his The Other Wall series in The Irish Times over the past week, visitors to the regions once in the shadow of the inner-German border will meet people who, far from complaining about their lot, have worked hard to get these areas up and running. Tourism, too, will play a huge role in the future of these regions, thanks to stunning landscapes and historical towns untouched by the western blight of 1960s car-friendly town planning.
Despite Margaret Thatcher’s dire predictions, Europe has benefited from a united, stable Germany. In Chancellor Angela Merkel – born in the west, raised in the east – European leaders have found a reliable, honest broker who has maintained Germany’s post-war policy of putting European interest above national interest.
The expensive transformation process will stand to Germany in the long term. The east has a new, multi- billion euro modern infrastructure. Unification has been a constructive political catalyst, forcing former chancellor Gerhard Schröder to make drastic cuts to a social welfare system that was no longer affordable. It was a painful step that ultimately cost him his job, but a step Germany now has behind it.
Though the former border still can divide opinion, Germany has held together and its people are increasingly at ease with their differences. After all, unification was never meant to be homogenisation: if that were the case, no one would have accepted it. Decades of cash-transfers lie ahead before Germany’s east can stand unassisted but, after just two short decades, Willy Brandt’s remark from November 1989 is ringing true: in Germany, what belongs together is truly growing together.