MICHAEL EHRKE Germany: United, Rich, Unhappy T he timing of new centuries and millennia and the objective division of history into epochs rarely coincide. According to Eric Hobsbawm, the »short« 20 th century began in 1914 and ended in 1989 . 1 Here, Hobsbawm’s definition of 1989 as the threshold of a new epoch is more than just the judgment of a historian made after the event. Whilst only a few contemporaries probably experi­enced 1914 as the end of an epoch – as the end of the»long« 19 th century – 1989 was immediately seen by the whole world as a turning point which divided history into before and after. The follow­ing remarks, which are made on the occasion of a new millennium, refer more to the significance and the consequences of 1989 and aim less to assess the entire century, let alone the millennium. 1989 saw the end of the state in Germany known as the GDR and the beginning of German reunification. It is no coincidence that the whole world associates the end of the post-war order not with the electoral victory of Solidarnosc in Poland in the summer of 1989 , but with the fall of the Berlin Wall that autumn. The image of the people dancing on the Wall has become the icon of the end of the epoch. German reunification is a sort of miniature edition of that larger process of integra­tion which started to bring the former communist countries in central and eastern Europe into the global market system and the political community of the West. It is a piece of»globalization«, and has brought changes throughout Germany. However, whilst people in the western part of Germany have only experienced or will experience these changes as a very gradual process, the citizens of the former GDR have gone through this process in a very short period – even ahead of the western Germans. Ger­man reunification resulted in the normalization of the international status of Germany, a country which had enjoyed only limited sovereignty before 1989 . It also created the preconditions for a con­tinuation of European integration into an econo­mic and monetary community. At the same time – and this is the point at the core of the following remarks – it overrides, distorts and intensifies the country’s internal socio-economic development as it experiences a transition from a Golden Age of economic prosperity and social consensus into something which is at most vaguely defined, which due to a lack of precise definitions we might term post-industrial society, second modern age, or knowledge-driven service society. A German Century For the western part of Germany, the second half of the 20 th century( 1949–1989 ) was a period of good fortune. There was no war, no civil war, no manifest restriction of freedom, no significant inflation, no significant economic crisis. As a result of an extremely dynamic economic development, the western part of Germany had already become the third-largest economic power and the second­largest exporter in the world prior to reunification. People may complain about a lack of competi­tiveness in Germany, but German firms supply the world with high-grade machinery, telecommunica­tions equipment, cars and chemicals. It can be said with some justification that an average German worker enjoys a higher quality of life than his Japanese equivalent, even though he works 48 days less a year on average, and that an unemployed German has a better life than one of America’s working poor. Germany’s universities lag behind the top US institutions, but the skills level of its workforce is on average higher than that in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Germany’s cities and land­scapes are less damaged by industry than those of 1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes. A History of the World 1914–1991 , Vintage Books 1996 . IPG 1/2000 Ehrke, Germany: United, Rich, Unhappy 83