East Germany vanished into an enlarged West on 3 October 1990
German reunification—Deutsche Wiedervereinigung—rebuilt Germany as one sovereign state from nine November nineteen eighty-nine to three October nineteen ninety, when the German Democratic Republic dissolved and its restored Länder joined the Federal Republic. That date was chosen as Unity Day.
The SED-run East German state wobble began on two May nineteen eighty-nine when Hungary cut its fence with Austria, punching a hole in the Iron Curtain. The Pan-European Picnic and hesitant Eastern Bloc reactions unleashed an exodus of East Germans through Hungary into the West, feeding the Peaceful Revolution. After World War II the old Reich had ceased under Allied occupation; West Germany (FRG) formed on twenty-three May nineteen forty-nine from US, British, and French zones, while the Soviet zone became the GDR.
The reunited polity is legally an enlarged continuation of nineteen forty-nine–ninety West Germany, not a successor state. It kept West German seats in the EEC/EU, NATO, and UN while quitting the Warsaw Pact and other Eastern organizations. Activists often prefer die Wende—“the turning point”—for the wider Eastern European cascade; many rejected SED leader Egon Krenz’s branding of the same word.
Naming matters: “reunification” distinguishes nineteen ninety from the eighteen sixty-six to eighteen seventy-one Prussian-led unification into the German Empire. On three October nineteen ninety Germany again became a single nation-state—this time by absorbing a socialist republic into a liberal federal democracy rather than forging an empire from kingdoms.
The split had hardened over four decades. The Soviets walked out of the Allied Control Council on 20 March 1948 and blockaded West Berlin from June 1948 to May 1949, and in 1952 the Western powers and Bonn turned down a Soviet idea of a neutral united Germany. East Germany fortified most of the inner border from 1952 and sealed Berlin in 1961; the two states even flew identical flags until the East changed its design in 1959. Bonn eventually accepted the Polish border in 1972 and the GDR itself in 1973. Once the Wall fell, East Germans held their first free elections on 18 March 1990. Whether the outcome was a merger or an annexation is still argued; Mikhail Gorbachev dismissed a 2015 Russian proposal using the latter label as nonsense.
Source: German reunification
