The already vast amount of literature on the unification of Germany reveals an often amorphous use of terminology, and disagreement as to periodization. The term Wende has been applied to the events of October and November 1989, but also to the whole period between January 1989 inside the GDR, when there were the first real signs of public dissidence, and March 1990, the month of the first free elec­ tions. The term is sometimes used by east Germans, moreover, as a point of temporal and spiritual orientation in a present in which they feel increasingly alienated, and there have been calls for a second Wende in which the hopes of the autumn 1989 revolution for a truly free and democratic society might be realized. The phase following the Wende is known as the accession phase (Beitritt), but while some date its beginning back to Kohl's November 1989 ten-point plan, others date this beginning to the March GDR elections, or to the coalition formed subsequently. Historically unique, the new parliament and government had as their objective their own dissolution and the dis­ solution of the state they represented. The term unification is usually used to refer to the official merging of the two states on 3 October 1990, but it has been pointed out that the various stages by which the GDR acceded to the Federal Republic July 1990 currency union, ratification of the Unification Treaty, to name two examples are themselves aspects of economic and fiscal unification, so that accession and unification can in a sense be seen as synonymous. Others have argued that unification started on 3 October 1990, but did not end there. If one conceives of unification as referring not just to the process of fiscal and political union, but also to issues of social, psychological and economic union, or issues of national identity, then it has certainly not come to end (hence the distinction between external and internal

unification). The expression reunification, often used as a synonym, is certainly a misnomer. It implies that, in October 1990, two areas which had at one time in the past been made one through an act of union were now being united again, an historically inappropriate implication given that East and West Germany as they emerged after 1945 were, topographically and politically, quite new creations.