Introduction

Abstract

The idea of a smiling German chancellor a decade and half after German unification seems like a contradiction in terms. Yet there is a photo of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder from his second term which is particularly telling. The photo shows Schröder smiling with his arms around two delighted, if somewhat dazed middle-aged East German women. The women, Heidelinde Munkewitz and her sister Inge Siegel, are his newly discovered cousins from the eastern state of Thuringia. Having just learned of their existence a few weeks before, Schröder remarks after their first meeting: “Considering that we have been reunited after nearly 60 years, this has gone better than any of us had thought.”¹ Such a comment befits a meeting of citizens from the two former Germanys. No one anticipated the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or the surprisingly swift German unification of 1990, and certainly many international observers did not expect things to go well. In a country that has wrestled with its national self-understanding for the better part of two centuries, unification of the former Federal Republic and German Democratic Republic has confounded, rather than solved, Germany’s status both domestically and internationally. Questions concerning the quality of life in the former eastern states, Germany’s contemporary economic woes, its changing cultural makeup, its now “doubled” Stasi and Nazi past, its future in international politics, all remain largely unresolved.