German Reunification in Historical Perspective

With his roots in the German-speaking world, for much of his distinguished career, Professor Richard Buxbaum has been a student of Germany in the context of international law. His scholarship has been recognized and honored by his colleagues in German Universities. As Dean of Berkeley's Department of Area and International Studies from 1993 to 1999, he consistently encouraged and supported the Center for German Studies at the University. This paper, dedicated to him, is a reflection of conversations he and I have had over the past few years concerning the future of Germany. Throughout the history of both the German states that comprised Germany after 1949, it was taken as an article of faith that Germany would one day be reunified. Because its founders considered the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to be a temporary state, the preamble to their constitution, the Basic Law of May 23, 1949, declared that it was a transitional document. It guaranteed citizenship to Germans living outside the FRG upon their arrival there, thus intending to serve those Germans in the East who could not participate in its creation. In his inaugural address in 1960, the Federal Republic's second President, Heinrich Liibke, declared that German reunification "remains the question of our national life ... on which we are all united, irrespective of party and religious affiliation. In the long run, Germany will not remain separated, whether by absurd boundaries or by brutal disruption of personal ties."1 He considered the reunification of the two Germanys to be a "natural right."2 For conservative politicians in the West, maintaining the vision of a reunified Germany served to cultivate support from the thousands of voters who had been expelled from the eastern territories lost to Germany at the end of World War II; while it was politically expedient, it also helped to forestall any further growth of right-wing nationalist sentiment.3 As late as the 1960s, placards with a map of pre-war Germany divided into three parts-West Germany, East Germany, and the lands east of the Oder-Neisse line-were