overview
East Germany :
Part of Germany Since 1990
Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk Historian
In 1989 and 1990 , two historical events took place that have been much discussed , debated , and argued over . The 1989 Peaceful Revolution brought down the SED dictatorship in East Germany and the two Germanies were united in a new democratic state the following year . While these events brought an end to the post-war period in Germany and ushered in the New Europe , their overall importance in world history is a matter of conjecture . We do not yet know for certain whether future historians will treat any events as decisive caesuras of global , or perhaps just European importance , whether we are talking about the 1973 oil crisis , the 1989 / 91 anti-communist revolutions and the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union , the 2001 terrorist attacks against the twin towers , or the 2020 / 2021 Coronavirus pandemic . Caesuras help to map , order , clarify , and arrange history in order to be able to relate past events , freeze-framed as history , in a structured way . Large-scale caesuras , such as those above , provide a framework , which internal caesuras , depending on the issue under scrutiny and the methodological approach , help to justify . These “ major ” caesuras follow political-historical considerations , but they are “ porous ” because political-historical caesurae almost never have an immediate impact on economic , cultural , mental , and social structures , processes , and phenomena . Societies are often far more sluggish and often don ’ t change in lockstep with these epoch-changing events . This happens only in exceptional cases and cannot even be shown conclusively to have happened in Germany in 1945 , 1918 , or 1933 . In the case of 1989 / 90 , research has so far not even problematized the caesura , but it seems obvious that the fall of the Berlin wall on November 9 , 1989 , and monetary union on July 1 , 1990 , when the West German Mark was introduced in the GDR , had such a profound impact on the lives of every single East German — monetary union even more so than the fall of the wall — that these two events do indeed represent a major caesura . Most East Germans were not directly involved in the
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Observing Memories Issue 5