When West Germany merged with East the impact upon GDP wasn't dramatic and it was a democratic choice.
Indeed it went so well, I dare say it was a motivator towards more integration within the EU and will say the EU went on a pokemon phase not long after in member growth. Which even the EU phrases as "Re-unification of Europe" https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/policy/from-6...
So the re-unification of Germany had many aspects too it that get overlooked.
I think actual Germans cared a bit more about things like suddenly being unemployed, in the millions, and actual economic opportunities, than the rather abstract value of GDP.
And on that end unification presented quite a dramatic change for the everyday reality of many Germans, a change that's lasting to this day and wasn't actually for the better for everybody [0]
[0] https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/wirtschaft/ost-we...
Many things are complicated but a regime that has to cage its own citizens in, and at times shoot them when they try to leave, is rotten to the very core.
Reunification was inevitable and a good thing. Sure, major historic change causes upheaval, but it's a trivial truth that this is the case every time things change.
I've crossed the allegedly "caged border" several times to visit family and vice versa.
People tend to forget that back then border regimes, with often complex visa regulations, existed everywhere. It's not like Europe was the EU and everybody had freedom of movement except for people from the GDR.
No, visas were still required over the place, borders were reinforced and heavily controlled from both sides, both sides treated you like a pseudo-criminal by completely and utterly taking your belongings apart to suppress any possible smuggling. Which was mostly down to the fact of the two Germany's also serving as a cold war border.
But adding any nuance like that to these discussions is simply not allowed, the only thing allowed is equating the GDR, and the people who lived in it, with Nazi Germany at worst, at best as a bunch of people that had to be "liberated" economically and socially from the Soviets by their glorious Western saviors.
A narrative that will continue to alienate a rather big part of the population, a problem that becomes slowly noticeable, but has yet to be acknowledged any more meaningful way than the usual Nazi-Keule of "Them East Germans are just neo-Nazis".
> but it's a trivial truth that this is the case every time things change.
The not so trivial truth is that not everything changes to the better for everybody, and in the case of "reunification" a whole lot of things changed for the worse for a whole lot of people, to this day.
You can't just hand-wave that away with "Oh it was inevitable!", when the rushed and one-sided way "reunification" actually happened was absolutely not "inevitable", it was the result of Kohl's ambition to have reunification as his legacy, damned be the actual people and consequences for them.
The economy was having enormous difficulties. Rather than support & help the population, it was GDP & GDP alone that was focused on.
My sources for what happened then are mostly the 4-part netflix drama The Perfect Crime, about the assassination of the Trust Agency head who paved over communism with capitalism. Not fancy, so I'm not super well versed. The movie doesn't go far into the aftermath, which, if you look at East Germany, has many of the scariest Trumpist vibes one might imagine to it. People got left the heck behind. It was a conquest not an integration.
Edit: People seem to really really hate that I cited my sources and it's not good enough. Perhaps a wikipedia quote to confirm some of my stance might make you modestly less skeptical? My words are radical but the situation itself was too:
> Despite these problems, the process of unification moved ahead, albeit slowly. The Treuhand, staffed almost entirely by Germans from the west, became the virtual government of eastern Germany. In the course of privatization, the agency decided which companies would live and which would die, which communities would thrive and which would shrivel, and which eastern Länder would be prosperous and which would not. It also decided who might or might not buy eastern firms or services.
I'd like to find a way to hand out more credit, to be fairer, and I lack that expertise. My apologies. This was an incredibly difficult situation. Yet, it feels very much, the German "reunification" was a one way integration, was one country taking over another, with few chances at all for the German Democratic Republic government & people to try to self-determine what path forward they wanted to take towards reunification.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_Germ...
Support peaked at 1/3rd of GDP. At the time, there were a lot of critics (domestic and foreign) of how expensive Kohl's vision of rebuilding the East was.
I'm not saying: the East has caught up, it was handled perfectly, there aren't still problems, there aren't ugly political problems.
I am saying you have a very weirdly biased view of what happened, and maybe should consider not single-sourcing your history to tee vee shows, or at least recognize the limits of doing so.
This cannot really be compensated by money, especially if that money flows back into Western corporations (such as construction companies that build infrastructure).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tnnjry_v-hY
> Despite these problems, the process of unification moved ahead, albeit slowly. The Treuhand, staffed almost entirely by Germans from the west, became the virtual government of eastern Germany.
I agree, I would like to have a better background on this. The West did face severe difficulties & extreme extreme burdens of it's own in trying to support & integrate. But it continually feels to me like the image of this being a take-over are not unfounded. Trying to figure out a way to sustain & support the economy, to allow space for a more graceful self-rule, under which terms transition could be better, more slowly explored would have been immensely interesting. Instead, we got a much fairer, nicer version of what was just starting to happen somewhat East of Germany, in the wake of the fall of the USSR ten months three weeks earlier: a sell off, a economic re-dividing up of spoils, a commercialization of a nation.
There were huge huge challenges, and it's not as simple at all as saying capitalism is at fault here. This wasn't even necessarily predatory. The world continues to have faith above all in the GDP, in macro-economics. The drive to push GDP up, by all means, quickly, or else (given the economic troubles faced) is a very real & valid survival reflex; quite understandable. It's hard to imagine what alternatives there were, especially given the already fairly dire economic state of East Germany/the German Democratic Republic at the time, but I don't think it is a "very weirdly biased view" at all that I nor wikipedia present: that the GDR was coerced into change, rapidly, by external forces, with little respect to self-determinism & little chance given for the people to figure out a way forward to try to support each other, in a less ambitiously bottom-line oriented manner.
I'm a little more aware of the contemporary situation, where there is an alarming rise of far-right angry-popularism. From the same sort of economically-left-behind folks who feel left out of modern society. And while I think their reaction is malformed, I can sympathize with their anger and recognize the common problems faced by "rural America" and much of East Germany.
Anyhow, you've rather told me I'm full of shit, and I'd like rather much if you could find something beyond criticism to offer to this conversation. Do you have any materials or suggestions for the readers here?
Seriously!?
The Treuhandgesellschaft and Kohl are topics you will come across extremely polarized opinions from "Best thing ever" to "Worst thing ever", but these kind of controversies rarely make it out of the German language sphere, as they require a fair bit of deeper understanding not just about German history, but also about German political culture.
In that context The Perfect Crime on Netflix is a pretty good piece of documentary shining a light on parts of German history that, particularly West Germans, just love to gloss over but have in East Germany lead to deep scars lasting to this day.
I don't think, that western Germany is solely to blame, though. If you look into the "Klassenfeind" in eastern Germany, that is entrepreneurs, bourgeoise, Christians, even just small-scale craftsman, they all did rather well after a short transition. But they did so in a very difficult environment: The masses of workers, educated to be lead by and taken care of, by the state were now completely on their own. Underqualified faced an especially dire situation: In eastern Germany even the most inept would have some payed position, even though they were completely useless there. It was basically an alternative to unemployment. Now these, say, 5% of the workforce never had been told that they should have some qualification to get some work. They simply expected some simple position to be created for them (I personally met some of these people, btw.). These people never faced a chance on the labor market.
Places like Hoyerswerda are the worst German-speaking communities I ever saw, the spirit of hopelessness permeates everything.
Even in cities like Görlitz that were restored to their original beauty, the loss of population has been so enormous that entire building blocks are empty, the windows blinded by years of dust. Ghost neighbourhoods, very untypical for Europe.
Zittau on the Czech border has lost like a third of population within thirty years. Many of the remaining residents are over 70.