This chapter takes German history all the way up to the early years of the twenty-first century. It tells the tale of the all-German youth revolt of 1968 and of the later students’ revolt in Frankfurt am Main. Moving on to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, it then concentrates on the issue of remembering the National Socialist past and commemorating the Holocaust in the new Germany, beginning with the Historians’ Debate in the 1980s and ending with the later, more public and more political controversies, till the scandal around the festive speech by Martin Walser in the Paulskirche and the various responses to it. Most important among these was surely that of Ignaz Bubis, and this man’s biography, a rather tragic tale again, is concisely told in this chapter. Finally, a discussion of the controversies around the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered European Jews closes the chapter – and the book, bringing the story all the way to the new millennium.

This epilogue reexamines select themes – return migration and transnational lives, estrangement from “home,” racism, and the inclusion of Turks in European society – applying the arguments put forth in the previous chapters to more recent developments. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990, there was an explosion of racist violence that recalled the racism of the 1980s and reverberated throughout Germany and Turkey. The 1983 remigration law had its own echoes in a 1990 GDR law that incentivized the departure of unemployed foreign contract workers. In the new millennium, paying unwanted foreigners to leave became standard practice for dealing with asylum seekers – in Germany and a united Europe. Over time, Germans transposed the call “Turks out!” onto a new Muslim enemy: Syrian asylum seekers. For its part, Turkey’s turn to authoritarianism under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has strained Turkey’s relations with Germany and the diaspora. These developments come with profound implications – regarding citizenship, political participation, and national identity – for the approximately 3 million Turks who live in Germany today, and for the hundreds of thousands who have returned.

This chapter accounts for the twists and turns of Soviet–American and Sino-Soviet relations in 1960–61. Khrushchev's primary concern was resolving the Berlin issue, and he hoped that the new US president, John F. Kennedy, would be more amenable to finding a solution than Eisenhower had been. China continued to be a problem for Khrushchev. During the November 1960 Moscow conference of Communist parties, he faced Chinese resistance and criticism but ultimately prevailed in having the conference adopt a declaration that largely ignored Beijing's objections. After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Soviet leader became increasingly concerned with the prospect of Cuba's survival. Berlin, Cuba, and other global issues were at the center of his discussions with Kennedy in Vienna in June 1961. The summit ended on a sour note, but despite Khrushchev's bluster and his optimistic evaluation that the chances of a war with the United States stood at merely 5 percent, he proved unwilling to push his luck over Berlin and ultimately authorized the building of the Berlin Wall to stem the flow of refugees and stabilize a highly volatile situation in East Germany.

Wartime leaders need to carry their armies and sometimes their nations through trying ordeals. Accordingly, there are occasions that call for effective rhetoric. This section consists of fourteen speeches during wartime or in the face of impending war. The speakers include Shakespeares Henry V, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Neville Chamberlain, Duff Cooper, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and George W. Bush.

A new era of universalism and constitutional systems sets in after the fall of the Berlin Wall. With a worldwide demise of most traditional communist systems, liberal democracies seem to be the last system standing: The End of history, as Francis Fukuyama dubbed it. A lot of nations change in their old constitutional system for a new one: a liberal democracy, set in stone by a constitution that lays down individual fundamental freedom protection, division of government power, popular sovereignty and democracy. The bulk of nations has or adopts a liberal democratic constitution by the end of the twentieth century (at least they do so on paper). Communist and theocratic (Islamic) constitutions still exist but they represent a minority part of the constitutions in existence. The first part of the twenty-first century shows slide backs in the form of illiberal democracies, democratic downfalls and an increase of autocratic systems. None state (or supra state) constitutions spring up.

A few brief reflections on the timeliness and importance of rediscovering moderation in our age of extremes following the fall of the Berlin Wall. It also comments on the fragility of civilization and makes a strong case for moderation conceived of as a fighting faith.

This snapshot is a tapestry of voices from the major groups who came after the second great caesura, 1989, the end of Cold War and the opening toward the East: the ethnic Germans (2.3 million after 1987 and Gorbachev’s Perestroika) and 230,000 Jewish “quota refugees” (from 1990 onwards), both from the former Soviet Union and subjects of subsequent chapters; and many others, such as the ethnic Germans from Poland or Polish labor migrants who work in Germany but continue to live in Poland. It also touches on the 400,000 Soviet soldiers who left the former GDR until 1994 and the Eastern German “interior” migrants who began commuting to jobs in Western Germany.

Bolaño’s work in the nineties shows him conscious of the harm that has been done to an entire generation and to the psyche of Chile. His preoccupation with the Chilean situation connects with his interest in writing fiction that recounts that loss, along with the establishment of the central pieces of the new economic world order. For him, the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) unleashes energies associated with a new world map in which the American continent is key to the necropolitics of the end of the century. Bolaño will become the main Latin American author of this period marked by multilateralism, though he is certainly not alone (a central characteristic of Latin American literature of the end of the century is a desire to become global.) Much of what he wrote in the second half of the nineties is an inquiry into Chile’s Pinochet which shows the pervasiveness of evil and the bitter conclusion the neoliberal trend has consolidated. Bolaño’s fame explodes with the publication of The Savage Detectives, which can be read as an instruction manual for contending with the market without making concessions.

This chapter is a review of the early debates on how best to do the transformation from socialist central planning to a market economy with private capitalist owners sets the stage. It is noted that the popular euphoria generated by the fall of the Berlin Wall permeated the world academic community with numerous papers and conferences on the subject, and a broad consensus on the main changes was reached; however, a wide rift occurred on two key points: should this be done rapidly or gradually, and what should come first: market liberalization or development of new institutions? An important clarification is made that criticisms of the Washington Consensus for ignoring social costs of liberalization and institutional development were unfounded straw-man depictions. All relevant documents or statements of international institutions clearly include both of these elements; at most, such criticisms could justifiably note IMF and others paid insufficient attention to these elements.

Chapter 3 examines how the SED leadership used “socialist human rights” in international relations. Seeking to break its diplomatic isolation outside of the socialist bloc, the SED decided to use the UN International Year for Human Rights in 1968 to launch a propaganda campaign aimed at the Third World to demonstrate East German solidarity against Western imperialism. Although this effort failed, the bureaucratic machinations surrounding the campaign cemented for SED officials that socialism and human rights were one and the same and that the GDR was on the right side of this global struggle. This paved the way for a series of treaties and agreements, including recognition from West Germany and entry into the United Nations, that included public commitments to international rights treaties and culminated in the GDR’s signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, which finally led to universal diplomatic recognition of East German sovereignty.

In 1989, those demanding human rights to reform the system versus those who fought to leave it combined to create an explosive crisis for the SED. Human rights served not just to rally a heterogeneous coalition of dissidents, but also provided an ideological justification for SED officials to dismantle their own power structure and abolish the party’s monopoly on power in the face of mass demonstrations and mass emigration. In planning for a new East Germany, former SED officials worked with dissidents to draft a constitution that would secure liberal democratic rights and freedoms alongside rights that would preserve the ideals of the socialist project. In 1990, however, the joint hopes of dissident activists and reform communists were dashed as the realities of East German economic collapse turned the population away from new utopian ideas towards realising human rights through reunification with the Federal Republic. The idealistic anti-capitalism of the dissident elite alienated a population that wanted both democracy and prosperity through human rights. While the dissidents were successful in ending state-socialist dictatorship through their campaign for human rights, they ultimately failed to expand upon the narrow and unsatisfactory human rights system of the capitalist West.

Although East Germany and its state security agency, the Stasi, have become synonymous with human rights violations, the ruling SED considered itself a champion of human rights. The introduction outlines the implications of socialist human rights theory and politics and how it requires us to reconsider the history of GDR foreign policy, the rise of the dissent movement and the collapse of state socialism in 1989/1990.

Chapter 1 examines the beginning of the ideological conflict over the meaning of human rights from the founding of the SED in Soviet-occupied Germany to the June 1953 Uprising. In 1946, elections in occupied Berlin forced the SED to face off against their Social Democratic (SPD) rivals. Aiming to mitigate hostility to the party’s Soviet patrons by presenting a moderate image to the German people, the SED ran on a platform of constitutionalism and democratic rights that recalled the rhetoric of nineteenth-century liberalism rather than Marxist revolution. The SPD was triumphant in the elections, however, denouncing the SED as seeking a return to dictatorship under the slogan “No Socialism without Human Rights!” In response, the SED ceased its efforts to find a democratic path to power and instead turned to coercion and authoritarianism. At the same time, it also adopted the language of human rights to legitimise its rule and the establishment of a socialist dictatorship, calling for “No Human Rights without Socialism!”

The end of the GDR in 1990 also resulted in the erasure of human rights alternatives to capitalist West German norms developed before reunification. The idea of “socialist human rights” collapsed in tandem with SED rule, and many of its own proponents evolved into democrats who renounced their earlier work on the subject. East German dissidents and feminists – who advocated for conceptions of democratic rights and rights to bodily self-determination in conflict with those established in West Germany – were deemed to be deviant and marginalised. While some dissidents saw reunification as the ultimate triumph of the mass demonstrations of 1989, others saw it as a lost opportunity to create a better form of democracy and human rights.

In the 1980s, many disillusioned East Germans dropped out of the official social system and created a parallel civil society within the Protestant Church, striving towards disarmament, demilitarisation and environmentalism. While these activists sought to eschew politics, the SED’s repression of a social sphere outside of party-approved organisations demonstrated to many that political reform was imperative to achieving even purely moral goals such as peace. In 1986, a small group of activists created the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights, sparking a rallying cry for disparate groups of disaffected East Germans, who invoked human rights not as the antithesis of socialism but as a core value forgotten and abused by the SED. Simultaneously, the SED’s ideological bulwark against such a movement began to crumble as it sought to create a socialist version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Despite initial enthusiasm from allies who saw it as a means to unify the socialist world against Western pressure, one country after another pulled out, scared off by various human rights guarantees contained within. Simultaneously, reformers began to see human rights as a rhetorical tool to liberalise sclerotic political institutions to save the socialist project as a whole.

By the 1950s, the SED had to compete with an independent West Germany for international recognition, while also contending with the global politics of human rights emerging out of the Third World. On the one hand, the SED created the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights to campaign against abuses in West Germany, including the imprisonment of Communist Party members who had been deemed a threat to the constitutional order. On the other hand, legal scholar Hermann Klenner developed a philosophy of “socialist human rights” in response to the Third World’s struggle to place self-determination at the centre of the UN agenda. Klenner integrated the idea of self-determination into a Marxist interpretation of rights, claiming that state socialism, human rights and the realisation of state sovereignty in opposition to the imperialist West were, in fact, a singular unified political goal. By the mid-1960s, the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights – using Klenner's new ideological formulations – shifted its focus from West German prisoners to international human rights campaigning.

In 1963, the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities published a study that found that more people were ‘effectively confined behind their national boundaries today than in previous periods of history’.The study, written by Filipino Judge José D. Inglés in his capacity as Special Rapporteur, represented the first attempt within UN institutions to examine the emerging right under international law of individuals to leave any country including their own, and to systematically document how various states were recognising – or failing to recognise – this right in their domestic laws and regulations.