The Reunification of Germany (1989-1990)

Hungary began dismantling its border fence with Austria. Though the border was still guarded, the opening — symbolized by the Pan-European Picnic of August 19, 1989, organized with support from Otto von Habsburg — set off a mass exodus of East Germans who crossed via Hungary to West Germany rather than waiting for reform at home. The loss of thousands of its citizens destabilized the East German state.

Location: Hungarian-Austrian border

Weekly demonstrations after Monday peace prayers at Leipzig's Nikolaikirche grew from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands by October, despite police beatings and threats of a "Chinese solution" hinted at by party officials after the Tiananmen Square crackdown. On October 9, some 70,000 marched; by the end of the month, over 300,000 did. The protest movement's chant — "Wir sind das Volk" ("We are the people") — became the revolution's signature.

Location: Leipzig, East Germany

After East German spokesman Gunter Schabowski, poorly briefed, told a press conference that new travel regulations took effect "immediately, without delay," crowds massed at the border crossings and the guards, receiving no orders to shoot, opened them. Within hours, Berliners from both sides were dancing on the wall. East German leader Erich Honecker had been forced out weeks earlier; his successor Egon Krenz's government never recovered control of the sequence of events.

Location: Berlin

Chancellor Helmut Kohl surprised allies and his own foreign ministry by presenting a ten-point program to the Bundestag envisioning confederation and eventual unity between the two German states, through free elections in the East and treaty arrangements with the wartime allies. Britain's Margaret Thatcher and France's Francois Mitterrand reacted with caution — both had privately expressed unease about a reunified Germany — while U.S. President George H. W. Bush backed Kohl. The plan set the diplomatic framework for the year that followed.

Location: Bonn, West Germany

The GDR's first free parliamentary election gave the Alliance for Germany — a coalition favoring rapid unification — a decisive victory over the reformed Communist party and the citizens' movement groups. The new government under Lothar de Maiziere moved immediately toward accession to West Germany, ending any prospect of a prolonged confederation.

Location: East Germany

The treaty on economic, monetary and social union took effect July 1, replacing the East German mark with the Deutsche Mark at a 1:1 rate for wages and small savings (2:1 for larger amounts), inside a West German legal and welfare system. The conversion made eastern industry instantly uncompetitive — a consequence economists had warned about — but it was politically untouchable, and queues at the currency exchanges became the emblem of unification's promise.

Location: East Germany

At a meeting with Kohl, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed that a reunified Germany could remain a member of NATO — the concession that removed the last great-power obstacle to unity. In exchange, Germany committed that no NATO troops would be stationed on the territory of the former East Germany during the Soviet withdrawal, and that substantial German payments would fund the housing of returning Soviet troops.

Location: Arkhyz, North Caucasus, Soviet Union

The two German states and the four wartime occupying powers (United States, Soviet Union, Britain, France) signed the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, restoring full sovereignty to a united Germany and clearing the way for unification. Germany renounced nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, accepted troop ceilings, and confirmed the Oder-Neisse border with Poland in a separate treaty that November. The treaty came into force on March 15, 1991.

Location: Moscow

At midnight, the five re-established eastern states (Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia) joined the Federal Republic under the Unification Treaty of August 31, and East and West Berlin merged into a single city. The date, chosen over November 9 — the anniversary of both the wall's fall and the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch and 1938 Kristallnacht — became Germany's national holiday, celebrated as Unity Day.

Location: Berlin

The Treuhand agency, charged with privatizing some 8,500 state-owned eastern enterprises, sold or closed nearly all of them by 1994; most of the roughly 4 million eastern industrial jobs at unification did not survive the decade, and mass migration west followed. Treuhand chief Detlev Rohwedder was assassinated by the Red Army Faction in April 1991. Western taxpayers financed transfer payments exceeding 100 billion dollars a year through the Solidarity Surcharge; the east-west economic gap narrowed but remained a generation later, sustaining a distinct post-communist politics in the eastern states.

Location: East Germany