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German reunification: Thirty years on, is the job done?

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Less than a year after the Berlin Wall came down, Germany was a united country again.

Added on the 03/10/2020 09:30:31 - Copyright : Euronews EN

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  • 30 years of German reunification, a path of joy and disappointment

    Berlin (Germany), Oct 2 (EFE), (Camera: Rodrigo Zuleta).- In the 30 years since German reunification, which is being commemorated this Saturday, have been a path of joy, but also of disappointment for the promoters of a peaceful revolution in the former German Democratic Republic (DDR). The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, the high point of that revolution, remain forever in the collective memory.FOOTAGE OF STATEMENTS BY HISTORIAN HANNO HOCHMUTH, FROM THE LEIPZIG CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY HISTORYTRANSLATIONS:It is not easy as a historian to assess these things without falling into the trap of trying to determine as if they could have done things better. As a historian, you have to analyze why things happened the way they did, and I think that German unity was a completely special challenge for the two states and that in many respects it worked out very well, especially in terms of the social security of the people in the GDR. But in terms of cultural participation, social representation, especially among the elites, there were things that went wrong. And the result is that many East Germans do not feel represented in the united Germany.For many people, the disappointment began as early as 1990. When the monetary union was introduced in June 1990, products produced in the GDR lost interest overnight. They were no longer in demand, they could no longer be produced cheaply in the GDR. This led to the first waves of layoffs and rising unemployment even before reunification in the summer of 1990. That was the first thing that led to disappointments. The people who had taken to the streets in March 1989 and who had asked for German unity could not foresee these consequences.These disappointments grew in the 1990s and were articulated first and foremost by the PDS, the successor party to the SED, and were also brought into the parliamentary system in the Federal Republic of Germany. Today this unease about the process of transformation is expressed in a variety of ways. In the extra-parliamentary sphere with Pegida and Coronaprotesten, but also in the parliamentary sphere with the success of Afd, which in the new Länder achieved particularly high voting rates. But also through The Left, which managed to integrate the interests of the Germans in the East into the parliamentary system, in contrast to what the right-wing populists do.

    02/10/2020 - EFE Inglés
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  • Ingo Schulze talks novels and the German reunification

    Berlin (Germany), Oct 3 (EFE), (Camera: Rodrigo Zuleta).- The German writer Ingo Schulze, author of three novels about German reunification, whose 30th anniversary was commemorated this Saturday, has proposed in one of his recent novels to take the two systems, capitalism and socialism, "to the letter" and through it reduce both to the absurd. The novel largely reflects Schulze's vision of reunification, a process he has always wanted to address without falling into idealization and without renouncing a critique of the present.FOOTAGE OF INTERVIEW WITH GERMAN WRITER INGO SCHULZE Translations:1.Q: What is the path from "New Lives" to Peter Holtz?A: "In the beginning it was very difficult for me to write about the time before 1989 because there is a great danger of falling into a kind of pseudo-dissidence. The question was, how do you write about the past without losing sight of the present?"New lives" was an attempt to show a paradigm shift, from how a writer, as a result of reunification, becomes a businessman. I found that very interesting"Adam an Evelyn" was something like the sonata in front of the symphony. To show again, in a minor tone, that change between two worlds. A provincial tailor ends up with his wife in Ballaton when people are escaping across the Hungarian border and the question is how they decide.Peter Holtz was the attempt to tell about that time with distance both from what was accepted as obvious then and from what is accepted today without discussion. It is to take both systems at face value, affirmatively, and through that to lead both to the absurd2.Q: One key to the novel is the naivety of the character...A: It is the naivety of the rogue. The rogue can mean many things. For me it was important that he evolved, that he believed first one thing and then another, and that he went through two systems and grew up. That was not easy.He's a madman, a naive madman who finds it impossible to separate words from actions.3.Q: When reading the novel, one cannot help but think of Voltaire's "Candide"...A: "Candide" was naturally a model, it's a great model but with him you never know if you are really naive or not. For me a great model was "The Idiot" by Dostoieski, someone who tries to be a good person.4Q: There are two allusions to Theodor Fontane and Günter Grass when they talk about Peter Holtz's "Confessions and Entanglements" and when they explain to Holtz that capitalism "is a long story. Are they deliberate?A: "Confessions, Entanglements" is for me one of Fontane's most beautiful books and it has become a catch-phrase in Germany. "It's a long story" is something that has also become a catch-phrase but of course you can't use it without thinking of Günter Grass.For me it was beautiful that when I had the first chapters of Peter Holtz ready I read them before him in a small round of writers in Lübeck - in February 2015, two months before his death - and he laughed a lot, he had fun which was important to me because Grass is key in Germany to the tradition of the rogue which is not very widespread.

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