National Unification Posed Many Challenges for Germany. The “blooming landscapes” that Chancellor Kohl predicted for the former GDR in the summer of 1990 proved slow in coming, as severe economic difficulties and accompanying social and political problems enveloped the region instead. The initial result was an overall sense of discomfort and continuing division in East and West alike, as graphically described by an East German pastor in 1991:

Some twenty years on, the picture looks much more complex and nuanced. The most acute symptoms of unification-related illnesses have been healed in the intervening years, thanks primarily to slow but steady economic and social improvements in the new Bundesländer. Many former East Germans, particularly members of younger generational cohorts who have thrived personally and professionally since unification, are by now well integrated into the new Germany. But opinion polls and other evidence indicate that significant East-West differences persist in the cultural identities of present-day Germans; a significant proportion of other ex-East Germans, especially older and socioeconomically marginalized people, remain disillusioned with their present circumstances and hanker after life under Communism, or at least after certain aspects of that life. The stubborn refusal of the post-Communist Linke party to join the SPD and the Greens in backing the former GDR dissident Joachim Gauck as the center-left candidate in the German presidential election of June 2010 highlighted, yet again, the persistence of important East-West rifts in German public life, more than two decades after unification. As Peter Schneider predicted well before the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, the “Wall in the heads” between former East and West Germans has indeed taken much “longer to tear down” than the concrete structure that served as the most visible symbol of Germany’s national partition.

Most of Germany’s persistent East-West rifts have derived from the legacies of the GDR and the controversies that they — and the varied attempts to address them — provoked in unified Germany, particularly in the first post-unification decade. During that time, conflicts arose in various public arenas.