ABSTRACT
In West Germany, what had been an unending chain of success throughout the 1950s began to display a few weak links. By 1969, to East Germans, the socialists’ two favorite words—“militaristic” and “imperialistic”— seemed fitting enough to describe a Kafkaesque “Amerika.” Taking socialism as a faith, there are true believers, agnostics, and every perspective in between in eastern Germany. On 28 November 1989 Chancellor Kohl announced his “Ten-point Plan” to the West German Bundestag. As in April 1865, when Lee handed over his sword to Grant at Appomattox, so in May 1990 the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and West Germany signed the contract that would regulate their economic, and social union. By 1989, from the multiple complex of identities a number of characteristics had taken deep root in the GDR. In the late 1860s, the economy of the US South was also in a state of collapse, and all control had been ceded, at least on paper, to the North.
