The Logistics of German Reunification | Wendover Productions

0:00A fumbled press conference intended to announce a forthcoming protocol to allow for expanded yet still restricted travel between East and West Germany was all it took to topple the Berlin Wall. Armed with a misinformed belief that all controls were being dropped immediately, citizens from the East rushed west and from the west to the east overwhelming the checkpoints, compelling the guards to open the gates, and in a moment, two Berlin's separated four decades became one. But then everything went back to normal, or at least close to it. In the hours and days that followed, controls over the flow people were reestablished, and life in East and West Germany returned more or less to what it was, but what's now referred to as the fall of the Berlin Wall kicked off a slow march towards West and East German reunification. The intended protocols for relaxed restrictions were just one step in a years-long process of taking two countries separated for four decades and weaving them back together. And still today, three and a half decades from that fateful day, the integration process

1:03continues as these scars of separation remain. But in those first few days, the challenge was how to accommodate the overwhelming surge in demand for cross-border travel now permitted with the relaxed restrictions while still maintaining the functional international border that persisted. Most of the wall blocking previously open streets were quickly torn down to allow for herd construction of new immigration checkpoints, but there was also potential for capacity both below and above ground level. After all, like the road network, the Berlin subway was originally one single system that had been painstakingly separated in those early years of division. In the post-war era, after a fleeting attempt at unified leadership of the entire system, BVG, the city's public transport company, was split into two legal entities, BVG West and BVG OST. Some of the lines, like you too, were simply split into and no longer traveled across the new border. But others were trickier. U6 and U8 for example, traveled primarily through West Berlin, but briefly passed below

2:06the eastern sector in the city center. So to allow for continuous operation of the entire line, an agreement was met between the two governments in which the few stations on the lines in East Berlin were sealed off and removed from service and trains just simply wouldn't stop at them. Rather they ran through the entirety of East Berlin at full speed, watched in the closed stations by East German guards to assure adherence to the rules, and to catch anyone trying to get on or off, and in exchange the West German side paid its counterpart usage fees each year. But this awkward situation, West Germans traveling from one part of West Berlin to another via East Germany, a foreign country, fortuitously maintained physical connectivity between the two sides. The very thing so desperately needed when the restrictions suddenly ended. The tracks were in good condition, the stations still stood, so a mere two days after the fall of the wall, authorities reopened Yanowitz book station with temporary immigration facilities, providing the first subway link between the two sides in decades. In the days, weeks and months that followed, additional stations on the U6 and U8 lines

3:09opened in succession, each representing another step in making the two Berlin's one again. But other lines had strayed far further from their original forms. The U2 line for example was split in half here, meaning these were the last few stations on the western side of the wall. Yet this area was already served by other subway lines, meaning passenger flows on the U2 line in this area were quite low compared to when it continued eastward for many miles more. The UG West therefore decided to shut this section down and terminate service at Vittenberg Platt station instead. In its place, the company transformed Nolandorf Platt station into a flea market and Bula Strasse into a Turkish bazaar, then ran old heritage trams between the two as a shuttle service to boost business. But ultimately the truncation left this dense neighborhood bordering the wall underserved by transit, as unlike most of the area previously served by the U2 line, there were no additional subway lines operating in this area. But rather than restarting U2 service, BVG West opted to use this area as a test case

4:10for the hot new transit technology of the time. Maglev As one of the first operational Maglev systems in the world, the Berlin embond spent years upon years in testing and trials, and it technically didn't even open for full passenger service until 1991, two years after the fall of the wall. But that service was extremely short-lived as it tracks to the top of those of the former U2 line, and it would lose its purpose as soon as full U2 service was reinstated. So a mere two months later, dismantling work began, and after two years of reconstruction work, the two halves of the line were reconnected, and full U2 service began once again. But Berlin was also a tiny portion of the two countries in the process of reunifying. Therefore essentially every issue that existed with the truncated Berlin subway and more were present on the national level, particularly in the east. That's because the Soviet Union, the power initially directly, then later indirectly overseeing East Germany, had dismantled huge amounts of rail infrastructure than shipped it to the

5:11Motherland as a form of war reparations. They took essentially every bit of rail electrification infrastructure, meaning while West Germany was building maglevs and testing its first high speed lines, East Germany was still running steam trains. In addition, essentially any section of railroad that had more than one set of tracks was stripped of its extras, meaning the entire country's railroads were operating using highly inefficient, capacity constrained, delay-prone single tracking methods. And even with the tracks that remained, the catastrophically poor East German economy devoted little to track maintenance, meaning the lines slid further and further into disrepair. Travel between Berlin and Hamburg, now Germany's two largest cities, took over four hours, despite a transit time of less than two and a half all the way back in 1933. And this was common. With the exception of those used to get West Berliners to the rest of West Germany, any rail line that crossed the inter-German border was in the poorest of poor condition, since for so long there had been so little demand for travel between the two countries.

6:11In short, for four decades, West Germans had overwhelmingly traveled West, East Germans traveled East, and now that predominant flow was suddenly reversing 180 degrees. To rectify this, enormous amounts of public spending were greenlit, summing to $20 billion for the reconstruction of East West rail lines, then an additional $16 billion for highways, which faced a similar set of issues. And these reunification infrastructure projects were so colossal that they're not even done yet. For example, the VDE number nine project, encompassing upgrades to the East West rail line between Leipzig and Dresden, was started in 1993, and is not expected to be complete until 2030 with level crossings and other older technologies necessitating slower speeds remaining around Risa. But merging West and East Germany into one was not as easy as rectifying the physical scars of the borders, because, after all, they were two entirely different countries. The meant there was a rather simple question of whose rules to follow, and which institutions

7:12were in charge. Just four months after the fall of the Berlin Wall came another momentous occasion, but one far more structural than symbolic. While 30,000 East Germans had decided to vote with their feet as the Soviet Union's border softened, a staggering 11,604,000 of 12,426,000 registered East German voters came out to vote in the region's first free and fair election since the 1930s. While no single party won a majority in the legislative election, voter sentiment was clear. Winning 192 seats in the 400 seat folks' cummer, the Alliance for Germany comprising the Christian Democratic Union, the German Social Union, and the Democratic Beginning parties ran on a platform centered on immediate German readification, rights to private property, and a tagline of never again socialism. Eastern voters wanted Western policy, and quickly, Eastern politicians made it happen. In the wake of the election, the Alliance for Germany entered a grand coalition with the election runner-up and owner of 88 parliamentary seats, the Social Democratic Party.

8:15With a two-third supermajority that gave the coalition the ability to alter the Constitution, change came in revolutionary proportions. In May, the parliament ratified a law to harmonize the monetary, economic, and social union between East and West. Soon, the East would use the Deutschmark. In June, the body amended the Constitution to protect private property rights and began the process of dismantling the Stasi, the notorious state security force. Even just months, East was beginning to mirror West. Then with a 299-80 house vote accepting terms of readification, the nation signed the treaty on the final settlement with respect to Germany, along with West Germany, the US, the UK, the Soviet Union, and France, East became West, effectively folding the East into the West. On the strike of midnight October 3rd, 1990, a German flag rose in front of the Reichstag with a horizontal tri-color and without the East German national emblem as the Federal Republic of Germany was officially a single sovereign entity the German Democratic Republic

9:16ceased to exist. But now, the hard part. Turning East to West required restructuring from the ground up. Take for instance the very demarcation of administrative boundaries. Prior to reunification, West Germany was broken into 10 federated states where, in a system not so different from the US, governing was mostly local and power flowed from voters through locally elected officials who then represented their interest at a state then federal level. East Germany meanwhile, while smaller in population and area, was slintered into 14 districts or Bessierkes within which the country was further split into 191 counties and 27 county-free cities. Rather than leaning on stronger self-governing states, this system relied on top-down management from a powerful central government and weak districts and counties. The first phase of reframing eastern administration was straightforward enough.

10:18They just got rid of the Bessierkes borders, returned the former states and upsized counties so they were less numerous and more manageable. This much was doable within just a year. Where the real challenge arose however was in figuring out how to turn these new administrative units into fairly independent self-governing institutions, something that both structurally and culturally countered for decades of East German history. To provide even the simplest functions of government, the newly unified German states had to move fast to set up courts in Prime Minister and Ministerial offices. Strap for time in cash, German administrators retrofits as best they could. The state legislator of Mecklenburg, Western Pomerania, took up residence in a castle which had previously served as a teachers' college in the museum. In Thuringia, the legislation began meeting in a host of office buildings built between the 30s and 50s, with a legislation of Saxony and Holt set up in an available space along the Magdeburg Cathedral Square. Only the Saxony state legislation actually moved into a building constructed for its specific purposes.

11:18Rapid and gritty administrative restructuring extended to Staffing II. In positions where possible, government employees before 1990 would remain government employees afterward, so long as their responsibilities weren't too altered, their skills were deemed sufficient, and their past affiliations weren't considered too problematic. In such a fundamental restructuring, however, these all proved to be rather large barriers to entry. For one, like the Soviet Union, the GDR was a cadre administration. An administration stabbed with those appointed by the party directly, leaving to party loyalty and messaging being rewarded overability, in turn creating an ecosystem of what one political scientist called politicized incompetence. Effectively, many lack skill, and more had too close of ties to the Stasi, which had for decades prior leveraged a network of informants to root out socialist party descent. As part of reunification, it had been agreed upon that those who had collaborated with Stasi officials or violated basic human rights could be dismissed from public jobs, which ultimately led to some 1.3 million employees being scrutinized for their ties.

12:21Finally, while West Germany imported experts and instructors to work in East German offices and with East German administrators, there were simply too many state employees to justify, a remnant of a bloated socialist bureaucracy. In June of 1991, East Germany had 634,000 state employees, a ratio of 39 state employees per 1000 residents, a number that far outpaced the 29.5 in the West. Through focused but painful cuts to such positions, that number dropped to 30 by 1999. At every turn conceivable, the East German government had to be remodeled at best and rebuilt and worst. Courts needed to be modernized while judges and lawyers needed thorough retraining or direct replacement to follow laws rather than dominant party stances. And then there was the matter of the entire economy. The most fundamental difference between East and West Germany was their economic systems, socialism or capitalism. Therefore, successful economic reunification was a far greater challenge than simply stitching

13:24the infrastructure or bureaucracy back together, especially considering the two economies as vastly different fortunes. In the post-war era, West Germany experienced an economic bounce back of miraculous proportions. In fact, this era is now referred to as the German Economic Miracle. The standard of living just didn't stop rising and more or less matched that of France, the UK and other Western post-war economies. East Germany, however, mirror the economic fates of the rest of the Eastern bloc, that's to say shortages abounded, productivity stayed low, and growth stagnated. Therefore, with each year of division, the two sides grew further and further apart, and by the fall of the Berlin Wall, GDP per capita in East Germany was just a third of what it was in the West. So upon reunification, it was only natural that huge numbers of East Germans immediately uprooted their lives to move West to the area decades ahead in standard of living, and multiples higher in average income. It was also only natural that when mixed into one larger free market economy, East German

14:26companies previously run by the state unprepared for competition were simply beaten. Their products were not as good, their costs were high, consumers simply just didn't want to buy from them. Therefore, in spite of mass immigration, unemployment and former East Germany shot up to over 20% and industrial production crashed nearly half of its previous rate. Meanwhile, former West Germany was experiencing the gains from the East's pain as a surge in low-cost labor and quick expansion in demand strengthened an already strong economy, and GDP grew at an annualized rate of over 5% in 1990 and 1991. To stop an all-out gutting of the East German economy, the newly unified government approved a colossal spending program that essentially acted as a wealth transfer from West to East. The goal was to pour money into create opportunities for employment and industry, which it did, but not necessarily efficiently. For example, $7 billion was awarded to Dow Chemicals to rebuild this plant in your lives' egg, but a few years after opening the facility only employed 2,200 people, making

15:28for an effective per-job cost of $3.2 million. And then one of the largest blunders was the new tax policy that allowed for about half of any investment in East Germany real estate to be written off. Trying with lofty expectations, this led private West Germany to pour into Eastern real estate, but the demand just wasn't there. Lipsick and other major cities were now filled with shiny new hotels, office buildings and malls that simply lacked customers and tenants. But then there's the aspect of reunification that's less tangible than infrastructure, governance, and even economics. Culture Just as in governance and economics, reunification was a massive task for East German identity. They get from one particularly influential East German, Angela Merkel, who was spoken on the difficulties of the transition. Living with so much freedom, as she's expressed, was something that had to be learned as there was a certain comfort in having so much of life already figured out in essentially planned state. Simple everyday aspects of life changed overnight.

16:30Healthcare, education, childcare all began to operate differently when they moved from strictly state control to at least partially free market. And the free market hasn't exactly borne the fruit that was hoped. GDP per capita in what was East Germany is still just 75% of what it is in former West Germany. That's as large a difference as between the UK and Slovakia. And former East Germany's unemployment rate has always been higher with an even more pronounced difference during times of economic turmoil. Western cities still dominate the German economy, while the West also just so happens to be far more resource rich than the East. Already years after unification, with their looking at immigrant populations, mosques, incomes, education level, there's a stark divide between Germany's 10 Western states and its 5 Eastern, almost as if the wall never fell. The result has been dissatisfaction at best and disillusionment at worst. The 30 year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification proved a popular time to reflect just how far or not this single German state has congealed.

17:35Some have called it a promise unfulfilled, some have called it a failure, and some 57% of East Germans pulled when so far as to identify their standing within Germany as second-class citizens. Rightly or wrongly, they felt rejected and left behind. This has come with consequences. Academics often trace this sentiment to the propagation of far-right politics in former East Germany. In the Soviet era, East Germany was notably homogeneous, with essentially zero immigration, especially from anything but Soviet states. But now reunified, the area has become far more diverse in the past three decades, while its economic prospects have improved little, and academics suggest that many have conflated these two situations into one. Leading a disproportionate number of people to believe that the surge in immigration is the cause of their poor economic status. Therefore, anti-immigrant views and xenophobia abound in the East. Although voting patterns for alternative for Germany, the country's far-right political party often described as extremist are so stark that one can clearly see where the inner

18:38German border once stood. And this is indicative of the broader phenomenon. Perhaps the longest-scarved vision will be culture and politics. That's because infrastructure and government slowly affect the economy and then the economy slowly affects politics, so each step moves slower than the last. With economic inequality remaining, one can only expect that this political and cultural divide will too remain for years to come. Nations are powerful forces. They are far more than near lines on a map. They are determinants of culture, politics, economics, and more, and this history of division demonstrates just how much that simple line can represent. The more and more our world digitizes, the more relevant the internet becomes to our daily life. When you go out into the real world, you have certain tools. You have an umbrella to stay dry, a water bottle to stay hydrated, sometimes even pepper spray to stay safe. A VPN is like one of these tools, but for the digital world. And just like you can use an umbrella to stay dry or stay cool in the sun, a VPN also

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