The system was far from perfect, but along with the “tears and anger”, “oppression and brutality”, there was “laughter and pride”, “opportunity and belonging”. Like her, millions of Germans alive today “neither can nor want to deny that they had once lived in the GDR”.
Yet the process of dismissing the GDR as a footnote in German history is, for Hoyer, “ahistorical”. Proud of West Germany’s prosperity and political stability, they saw it as the continuity state and East Germany as the anomaly. West Germans were too wedded to the idea of 1945 as their “zero hour”, the point at which the tender shoots of democracy grew from the ashes of the Second World War. It was sink or swim.”ĭrawing a line under both German states in 1990 was never going to happen. But while West German lives “continued as before,” writes Katja Hoyer, for East Germans reunification “triggered a wave of change whose force, direction and pace were uncontrollable. The reunification of Germany on Octoended 41 years of division between the democratic West (FRG) and the communist East (GDR).
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