Postscript: unity

Summary

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.

Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, published in 1852

Historical accident and the end of division

As is the case with so much History, the events that plunged Germans into their frenetic rush toward unification – a premature, short-sighted, and cynically pursued unity – all began with a misunderstanding. At a press conference on November 9, 1989, East German politburo member Gunter Schabowski was directed to read new visa regulations for travel of GDR citizens to Western countries. For several months, tens of thousands of young East Germans had been fleeing their republic – sneaking into Hungary over the newly opened Hungarian border and climbing West German embassy walls in Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw.