A period of political stability : Germany

The overwhelming majority of Germans are actively in favor of national unification. Understandably, many Germans in east and west have different opinions on the contribution which the people in the old states are making to help those in the new. The alienation that had developed over a period of more than 40 years of isolation is now becoming less and less pronounced, especially since the general initial euphoria has given way to a sober assessment of what is feasible. People have realized that while it is comfortable to expect the standard of living in eastern and western Germany to be quickly brought into balance, this is in fact unrealistic. Today people look at the progress which has actually been made. On this basis one can see a steady increase in the number of people who express their satisfaction with the process of recovery in the new federal states; they presently represent over 60 percent of the overall population - and nearly 90 percent of young Germans in the east between the ages of 16 and 29.

A difficult aspect of coming to terms with the period of rule by the SED has been and continues to be the handling of so-called government crime by the courts. How, for instance, should the guilt of those be assessed who bore political responsibility for giving the order for the shootings along the Wall and the barbed-wire fences? In this case, the basis for criminal pros-ecution is the law in force in the GDR at the time the crime was committed. Another painful issue is the scrutiny of the vast quantities of files maintained by the GDR State Security Service (Stasi). Many people in eastern Germany want to know what kind of information the Stasi held on them, and many of them discover upon reading their files that they were spied on by individuals they had trusted.