ABSTRACT
The unification of the two Germanys is now an historical inevitability. Most East German factories are less like Zeiss and more like the sad example of the steel-mills at Eisenhuttenstadt, which use imported Polish coal and Soviet ore, and exist only for the ideological reason that a workers' state cannot be without a heavy industrial sector. Offering more generous credits to the East, which for most of the 1980s was how West Germany propped up the German Democratic Republic (GDR), will no longer be sufficient. And without the Wall, the economic self-destruction of any political entity in East Germany is an inevitability. At present the West German parties are not being realistic about the catastrophe that is hitting East Germany. Although some West Germans may wish otherwise, their country cannot legally deny citizenship to the mass of East Germans who will continue to move west as long as Germany remains divided.
