ABSTRACT
The collapse of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 signified the end of forty years of inner-German division and indicated that the East/West frontier of Cold War politics, which had been gradually eroded throughout the 1980s, would finally be washed completely from the landscape. The next years were to be witness to massive social and political upheaval in the lands of the former Eastern Bloc, marked by the fragmentation of nation states as a consequence of regional and ethnic conflicts. Events in East Germany did not, however, follow this pattern of segmentation and, on 3 October 1990, less than one year after the jubilant scenes of 9 November, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) were politically united: The voices of those who had hoped not for unification, but for a reformed GDR, were drowned by the wave of enthusiasm with which ordinary citizens of the five new federal states initially embraced amalgamation with their more affluent sister state. The GDR had ceased to be, and in the following years the question of how to confront its legacy would become the subject of bitter controversy between and within the two former Germanys.
