From the Fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 and the National Anthem at the Bundestag in Bonn the following day, to German Reunification in Berlinlike today, October 3, 1990. Thrill for the old, lesson and discovery of a pivotal chapter in modern German and world history for the younger.

Her night Fall of the Wallwhen the Iron Curtain had now collapsed on that cold November night, it heralded a new era of unbridled hope and joy. But also the beginning of a historical process until October 1990 for Germany itself, which more than forty years after its division into West and East, would be reunited in one country, peacefully and bloodlessly.

On this day, the German Reunification Treaty officially entered into force, marking Germany’s restart into a single state, based on West Germany’s post-war commitments to a strong social rule of law, which would guarantee the longevity of democratic institutions , the freedom and well-being of its citizens. Within the European family and with commitments towards the international community as well as the guarantor, victorious powers after the end of the Second World War.

October 3, 1990 was also a day of euphoria and a day of victory for liberal parliamentary democracy, which today, 34 years later, is again receiving serious blows, this time from the Far Right, which despises the hard-won democratic acquis, after Nazism, the Holocaust and the post-war division into two like-minded enemy states.

The “surprise” of Interior Minister Schäuble

The process of the unification of the two Germanys was not self-evident, nor was it a foregone conclusion that it would succeed, in an era of cosmogenic changes with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And yet he succeeded, to the surprise of many. And his Wolfgang Schäublewho in 1990 was Minister of the Interior in the Helmut Kohl government and is considered the architect of the Reunification Treaty.

As he himself had said in the Plenary Session of the Bonn Parliament shortly before the Agreement entered into force, he himself did not believe it. “Dear ladies and gentlemen. Some of us have been surprised in recent months. And indeed in the past year it has caused astonishment that the unity of Germany was brought about in peace and freedom, as it is here with the convening of parliament and the government. It has surprised me too,” said Wolfgang Schäuble in August 1990.

Until the end of his life, B. Schäuble considered his contribution to that historic year as a political award and his most important contribution to German democracy.

From Gorbachev to Putin

However, the role of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader of “Glasnost” and “Perestroika”, with which the liberalization of the Soviet Union began Union and the beginning of its end. And in Germany he has gone down in history as the politician who launched not only the end of the Cold War but also the German Reunification.

And the Christian Democrat “chancellor of reunification”, Helmut Kohl, may not have trusted him at first, even comparing him to Goebbels, the head of the Nazi propaganda machine, but he later recognized his contribution to the peaceful transition to a unified Germany, removing obstacles that could have been set by Moscow. Helmut Kohl had said in this regard, as recorded in a DW documentary, that Gorbachev “had told him that he would respect the process of German unification. And that it was up to the Germans to decide for themselves the time and the way to it.”

34 years later, this historic moment of rapprochement between Kohl and Gorbachev, which paved the way for peaceful German reunification, seems as foreign as ever and rings as a reminder that there is room for dialogue even where Walls once stood.

34 years on, German-Russian relations, Scholz and Putin, following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, are at an absolute nadir and the phone, which once rang frequently between the Chancellery and the Kremlin, and both sides sometimes comfortably answered in German and sometimes in Russian, it is due to hit from the winter of 2022.