This essay examines the impact of the mass arrival of forced migrants in three post-World War II European polities: West Germany, East Germany, and Finland. All three states faced similar challenges in dealing with the legacies of defeat, territorial loss, and large-scale forced migration while forging new postwar social structures and adapting to the developing Cold War international order. The first was to become a key member of the Western alliance; the second an integral part of the Eastern bloc; and the third a neutral entity. It offers a comparative analysis of refugee reception and integration process in the three states between ca. 1945 and 1970. It placesparticular emphasis on identity-building processes, detailing how the postwar forced migrants, many of whom were initially seen as unwelcome intruders, came to be portrayed in the national narratives of all three states as co-nationals and members of an ethnically homogeneous national community.

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.

GERMAN UNIFICATION IN 1990 ARRIVED with high expectations and big promises. Chancellor Helmut Kohl predicted “blooming landscapes” for the former GDR, and in the early euphoria of unity the path forward seemed clear to many: the victorious liberal democracy of the Federal Republic would extend itself over its defeated Socialist rival, and a nation arbitrarily divided by the legacies of the Nazi era and the vicissitudes of the Cold War would grow together again.

In reality unification turned out to be a much more conflictual affair. Economic crisis rather than blossoming affluence promptly enveloped the former GDR, bringing with it a variety of accompanying social and political problems. The government’s attempts to address these and other pitfalls linked to the GDR’s legacies fueled disputes and divisions, particularly between former East and West Germans, Ossis and Wessis. The sources of controversy were many: subsidies and transfer payments aimed at resuscitating eastern Germany’s moribund economy, attempts to return private property nationalized under Communist rule to its previous owners, efforts to grapple with the Stasi’s toxic legacy and to prosecute East German officeholders and functionaries for various actions defined as criminal. Yet ultimately unified Germany’s east-west divisions were rooted in something deeper and more fundamental: clashing self-perceptions, memories, and mentalities. Although the militarized boundary that had divided the two Germanys had been dismantled, Peter Schneider’s prediction about its most visible and symbolic section proved prescient: the “Wall in [the] heads” between former Ossis and Wessis was to take much “longer to tear down” than the concrete structure of the Berlin Wall itself. The wall continued to haunt and divide unified Germany in general and Berlin in particular long after its physical disappearance.

This chapter will examine the public commemoration of the wall in postunification Berlin. These efforts and the accompanying controversies are important in themselves as a key factor in the evolution of the public remembrance of the GDR at a crucial site of recent German memory. But they also illustrate the broader trajectory through which the commemoration of the GDR evolved in the two decades following German unification. The initial rush to unity yielded a wave of Western triumphalism that translated into a sustained prioritization of the western perspective on the wall, reflected in part in a tendency to sweep the barrier aside as quickly and comprehensively as possible.