On Oct. 3, 1990, German youth light flares in front of Berlin's Reichstag to celebrate German unification. | AP Photo West and East Germany vote to unify, Sept. 20, 1990

On this day in 1990, the legislative chambers of both West and East Germany voted overwhelmingly in favor of unification. The vote in the West German Bundestag was 442 to 47. In the East German Volkskammer, it was 299 to 80.

With the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, the country was divided into two separate areas, with the east becoming part of the communist Soviet bloc and the west aligned to capitalist Europe. Separate military alliances were formed: NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Berlin was divided into four occupied sectors of control. Germans lived under these externally imposed divisions throughout the ensuing Cold War.


The East German regime had begun to falter in May 1989, when the removal of Hungary’s border fence with Austria punched a hole in the once formidable Iron Curtain. It enabled an exodus of tens of thousands of East Germans who fled to West Germany and Austria via Hungary.

A so-called Peaceful Revolution, actually, a series of protest marches by East Germans, led to the first semifree elections on March 18, 1990. They in turn triggered negotiations between West and East Germany that culminated in a unification treaty. (Its official name was Treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic on the Establishment of German Unity.)

These negotiations ran in parallel with another treaty between the two about-to-unify Germanys and the four original occupying powers: The United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. They resulted in a grant of full sovereignty to a newly unified German state, whose two parts had heretofore still been bound by some postwar curbs.

In return for a huge aid package, the West Germans drove a hard bargain: United Germany was folded into the prior Federal Republic (West Germany) and did not become in any sense a successor state. As such, it retained all of West Germany’s memberships in international organizations, including the European Community (later the European Union) and NATO, while relinquishing membership in the Warsaw Pact and other international organizations to which only the former East Germany belonged.

In the wake of reunification, Berlin was once again designated as the capital of a newly united Germany.

In an emotional ceremony, at the stroke of midnight on Oct. 3, 1990, the black, red and gold flag of West Germany — henceforth the flag of a reunited Germany — was raised above Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate marking the symbolic moment of German reunification.

German Unity Day is celebrated each year on Oct. 3.

SOURCE: “GERMANY UNIFIED AND EUROPE TRANSFORMED: A STUDY IN STATECRAFT” BY PHILIP ZELIKOW AND CONDOLEEZZA RICE (1997)

