ABSTRACT
Germany's reunification or unification—as the Germans prefer to call it—took place at a time when, following eight years of sound economic growth, the Federal Republic of Germany seemed able to bear the anticipated financial burden. The West German identity could be described as markedly democratic and open, an intertwining of identities: local, German, European, predemocratic, democratic, and postmodern. The East German revolution, as the founding element of German unity and of a single German identity, appears today a highly ambiguous event. The Federal Republic in claiming to embody the Reich from a legal point of view sought to recover the territories lost to the communist regimes; politically and constitutionally to break with the Nazi past. In order to ease Germany's integration of all Germans into a single society and the integration of the country in the post-Yalta world, some say that a new patriotism is needed. In any case, patriotism cannot be thrust upon a people if it is not to remain a dead letter or become antidemocratic, denying popular sovereignty.
