BERLIN — Nov. 9 marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. There will be no lack of commemoration — but there will also be very little celebration. Today the country is once again divided along East-West lines, and growing more so. As it does, the historical narrative of what really happened in the years after 1989 is shifting as well.

Only a few years ago, when my country consecutively celebrated the 25th anniversary of the wall’s demise and of German reunification in 1990, the official mood was one of victory and hope.

President Joachim Gauck, a former East German pastor who had played a role in the Communist regime’s demise, then later oversaw the declassification of the archives of the Stasi secret police, praised the East German masses who, in their “desire for freedom,” stood up to “overwhelm” the “oppressor” — an uprising, he said, in the tradition of the French Revolution. A year later, he spoke optimistically about German reunification, stressing the dwindling differences between eastern and western Germans.

He wasn’t entirely wrong: After the mass unemployment and deprivation following the breakdown of the socialist state economy during the transition years of the 1990s, the economy in eastern Germany has been on a slow, steady recovery. Regional identities, once solidly split between East and West, were softening — the Allensbach Institute, a polling organization, found that since 2000, more people on both sides of the old border were identifying as simply “Germans.”