By Beatrice Jeschek

© Gilles Leimdorfer/AFP/Getty Images

Today, the 3rd of October, Germany celebrates its Unification Day. The fall of the infamous wall dividing East and West Germany has been one of the most divine moments in German history and led to the unification in the first place. Still, the scars between the two parts have not healed completely.

Never in its history has German been so democratic, so down to the rule of law and so social. Germany has never lived so at peace with all its neighbors as it has been doing since the 3rd of October 1990.

Most people who were wildly celebrating the unification that night around the German Reichstag in Berlin, could not possibly have foreseen that with the end of the division, an era also came to an end.

An era which had lasted for a hundred years and had seen Germany trigger military fights again and again, or at least perceived the nation as a latent source of danger.

The former German federal president Richard von Weizsäcker already mentioned the necessity of a peaceful Germany within a unified Europe in his speech twenty years ago:

“We want a united Europe to serve the peace of the world [...] For the first time we as Germans will not be a dangerous point of contention on the European agenda [...] For the first time in history Germany will find its permanent place among the Western democracies [...] We should excel in strengthening the community like no one else.”

The official Germany was one aspect. The everyday life was another. In the light of the overwhelming happiness over the ended division, one could already grasp enormous problems, piling up on the way to the realization of a truly unified Germany.

Mutual prejudices between East and West Germany were growing dramatically. This unfortunate growth was just interrupted by a recent harmonization initiated by the Football World Cup in 2006.

These prejudices might have gone too deep to be solved just within twenty years, although the politicians had hoped that this skepticism would not move into the minds of the next generation. The number of people who want to see the wall going up again remains, and has done so for many years, between ten and twenty percent.

It is the young people who believe that the differences between East and West would be too big, and would possibly be even more severe 50 years from now.

However, put in positive words, those who worship the past (DDR/BRD) are in a minority – a strong one, but still a minority compared to those who believe in a Germany not divided by East and West, but as a whole.

These people are celebrating today, together.

This article was first published 03/10/2010 on maltastar.com.