Five federal states and one reunited city: that is what East Germany brought into the Federal Republic when Germany was reunified at midnight on 3 October 1990. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) ceased to exist, its re-created states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia joined West Germany, and East and West Berlin merged into a single city-state that became the capital. The process began with the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and ran through the GDR’s first free election on 18 March 1990, a currency union on 1 July 1990 and the Unification Treaty of 31 August 1990. Legally it was an accession under Article 23 of West Germany’s Basic Law, not a merger of equals, so today’s Germany is an enlarged continuation of the 1949 Federal Republic. The Two Plus Four Treaty with the four wartime Allies restored full sovereignty, and the German–Polish Border Treaty fixed the eastern frontier on the Oder–Neisse line. 3 October is now German Unity Day, a national holiday.
Four Zones, Bonn, East Berlin and the Wall, 1945–1961
The division began with defeat. On 5 June 1945 the commanders of the four victorious powers, the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union, took over government of Germany, and the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945 split it into four occupation zones, with Berlin, deep inside the Soviet zone, divided into four sectors of its own. Germany also lost its lands east of the Oder–Neisse line, most of them to Poland. No peace treaty was ever signed.
As the Cold War set in, the three western zones became the Federal Republic of Germany on 23 May 1949, with Bonn as its provisional capital, and the Soviet zone became the GDR in October 1949, governed from East Berlin by the Socialist Unity Party (SED). West Germany joined NATO in 1955, and in 1952 the Western Allies and Bonn rejected a Soviet offer of reunification on the basis of neutrality. A small precedent for 1990 came on 1 January 1957, when the French-run Saar Protectorate joined the Federal Republic as a new state, an event called the “Little Reunification”.
The frontier between the two states hardened into the inner German border, an L-shaped line of fences, minefields and watchtowers running 1,381 km from Dassow on the Baltic Sea to Eichigt on the Czechoslovak border, patrolled by 50,000 GDR border troops. Berlin remained the gap. About 3.5 million East Germans, roughly 20% of the population, left before the SED began building the Berlin Wall around West Berlin on 13 August 1961. Between 136 and more than 200 people were killed by East German authorities in and around Berlin trying to cross it. The GDR’s population fell from 19 million in 1948 to 16 million by 1990. The Wall itself is covered in our history of the Berlin Wall.
Sopron, Prague and Leipzig’s Monday Marches, 1989
The first crack opened in Hungary. In May 1989 Hungary began removing its border fence with Austria, and on 19 August a border gate near Sopron was opened during a “Pan-European Picnic”, and East Germans holidaying in Hungary used it to cross into Austria, the largest escape from the GDR since 1961. By the end of September more than 30,000 East Germans had escaped through Hungary before the GDR stopped travel there, and thousands more crowded into the West German embassy in Prague until Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher negotiated their passage to the West by train.
At home, protest grew out of the peace prayers held in Leipzig’s St Nicholas Church since 1982. The first Monday demonstration set off from the church on 4 September 1989. On Monday 9 October, two days after the GDR’s 40th anniversary celebrations, the state massed 8,000 police and armed units in Leipzig, and about 70,000 people marched round the inner ring road anyway. No one fired. The crowds then grew week by week, Erich Honecker was forced out as SED leader two days after the 16 October march, and on 4 November half a million people demonstrated in East Berlin. The protesters’ chant was “Wir sind das Volk!” (“We are the people!”).
Schabowski’s Note and the Gates at Bornholmer Straße
The Wall fell by accident. The government had drafted new travel rules meant to take effect the following day, but nobody told the SED spokesman Günter Schabowski about the delay. At the end of a televised press conference on the evening of 9 November he read out the note he had been handed, and when a reporter in the front row, either the Italian Riccardo Ehrman or Bild’s Peter Brinkmann, asked when the rules applied, Schabowski replied that, as far as he knew, they took effect immediately, without delay. Thousands of East Berliners went to the crossings demanding to be let through “as Schabowski said we can”. At about 10:45 pm (some accounts say 11:30) Harald Jäger, the officer in charge at the Bornholmer Straße crossing, gave way and opened the gates with little or no checking of papers, and the other crossings soon followed.
Few yet expected the two states to merge quickly. On 28 November 1989 Chancellor Helmut Kohl set out a “Ten Point Program for Overcoming the Division of Germany and Europe”, popular at home but unsettling to other European governments, with whom he had not discussed it.
De Maizière’s Volkskammer and the Arrival of the Deutsche Mark
The timetable was set by East German voters. In the Volkskammer election of 18 March 1990, the GDR’s first free election, the Alliance for Germany led by the eastern Christian Democrats won 192 of the 400 seats on a promise of swift unity. The re-founded Social Democrats took 88 and the former ruling party, renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism, 66. Lothar de Maizière formed a grand coalition with a mandate to negotiate the GDR out of existence.
The economy forced the pace. The East German mark had long been almost worthless outside the GDR, and the East German economy was in near-total collapse. On 18 May 1990 the two states signed a treaty on monetary, economic and social union, and on 1 July 1990 the Deutsche Mark became East Germany’s currency, with wages converted at a generous rate of 1:1, so East Germans were suddenly paid in West German currency.
Article 23, the Unification Treaty and the Moscow Signing
The Basic Law of 1949 offered two routes to unity. Article 146 envisaged a new constitution approved by the whole German people, which would have meant negotiating a formal union of two states and writing a new constitution. Article 23 allowed new states simply to join the Federal Republic, the route the Saarland had taken in 1957, and could be completed in months. On 23 August 1990 the Volkskammer voted for accession under Article 23 with effect from 3 October, and the five eastern states, abolished by the GDR in 1952, were re-created.
The Unification Treaty was signed in Berlin on 31 August 1990 and approved on 20 September by 440 votes to 47 in the Bundestag and 299 to 80 in the Volkskammer. The outside world’s consent came from the Two Plus Four talks between the two German states and the four wartime powers, whose treaty was signed in Moscow on 12 September 1990. The Allies gave up their remaining rights over Germany and Berlin, and the two German states accepted that their combined territory was all Germany could ever claim. President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker gave Kohl decisive support.
At 00:00 on 3 October 1990 the GDR ceased to exist. The enlarged Federal Republic kept West Germany’s seats in NATO, the European Community and the United Nations and left the Warsaw Pact behind. The five new states held their first elections on 14 October 1990. The full list of today’s 16 states and their capitals is in our guide to Germany’s state capitals.
The Oder–Neisse Line and the Last Russian Troops, 1990–1994
Two pieces of unfinished business were frontiers and soldiers. On 14 November 1990 Germany and Poland signed the German–Polish Border Treaty, making the Oder–Neisse line permanent and renouncing claims to most of Silesia, Farther Pomerania, East Brandenburg and the southern part of former East Prussia. It entered into force on 16 January 1992. The Two Plus Four Treaty took effect on 15 March 1991, giving the united state full sovereignty. Soviet, then Russian, forces stayed on in the east for several more years; the bulk of the ground troops paraded out of Berlin on 25 June 1994, and the last left on 31 August 1994.
Bonn Votes for Berlin as the Five New States Catch Up
Berlin was the capital from the day of unity, but the seat of government was still in Bonn. On 20 June 1991, after more than ten hours of debate, the Bundestag voted 338 to 320 to move. The vote split by region and generation, with members from the south and west mostly backing Bonn and the votes of eastern deputies tipping the balance to Berlin. The Berlin/Bonn Act of 26 April 1994 organised the move, left several ministries in Bonn and gave it the title of Federal City. Norman Foster rebuilt the Reichstag between 1995 and 1999 as the home of the Bundestag.
Economic union proved slower than political union. The 1:1 currency conversion and the collapse of eastern industry were costly, and western Germans paid a Solidarity Surcharge on income tax to rebuild the east; estimates of the total cost to the federal government run from 1.5 to 2 trillion euros. In April 1993 only 22% of West Germans and 11% of East Germans told the Allensbach Institute they felt they were one nation, but in a 2019 Pew Research Center survey 89% of Germans said reunification had been good for the country. Set beside the division of the Korean Peninsula, where the 1953 armistice line still stands, the German outcome looks all the more unusual.