Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday that German reunification had “not yet been achieved in all areas,” 20 years after the East German regime adopted the west’s Deutschmark currency as a prelude to political unification.
“Today, we have a booming medium—sized business sector and many new enterprises, but in the new (former East German) states we also have far greater structural unemployment than is the case in the old federal republic,” Ms. Merkel said in her weekly video address.
On July 1, 1990, West Germany extended the Deutschmark to East Germany, offering a 1—to—1 exchange for its communist currency. The move came eight months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and ahead of political reunification later that year.
The currency union, orchestrated by then—chancellor Helmut Kohl, was politically significant but economically fatal for many East German businesses, which had significant competitive disadvantages in a reunified market.
Ms. Merkel nevertheless called reunification a “political and economic success for the people in all parts of Germany,” adding that the currency union had been a “risky, but brave and finally successful move.” But Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the process of economic reunification was decided too hastily. He was a state secretary for West Germany, while his cousin Lothar de Maiziere was East Germany’s only freely elected premier.
“We objectively had too little time, we were driven people,” Thomas de Maiziere told the Spiegel news magazine.
He said West Germans had taken a “paternalistic stance towards the East — along the lines of ‘we know what’s right for our sisters and brothers in the East’” “In truth, we did not know,” the minister added.
