FORMER WEST GERMANS AND THEIR PAST
545
many others hold the legacy of the GDR responsible for almost every
problem Germany is confronted with. They locate the country's con–
temporary problems, particularly its supposed lack of international com–
petitiveness, the neo-Nazis, and the problems of coping with its new in–
ternational position, in the now defunct totalitarian system of the GDR.
Both Communism and Nazism are the common legacies of the reunited
German people. However, East Germans have to come to terms with
the peculiarities of two totalitarian dictatorships in sequence, the Nazi
and the Communist one.
In 1990, when the Western democracies agreed on German unifica–
tion, they were convinced - and assured by the Germans - that the new
Federal Republic would remain the same stable democracy the old West
Germany was, encouraging the transition to democracy in the former
Eastern bloc. After violent anti-foreigner riots - not only in eastern
Germany - and a disturbing debate about the reunified country's na–
tional identity as well as confused discussions about its European and in–
ternational role, uncertainty has replaced the once-euphoric assumptions.
Conventional wisdom assumes that the East German
Lander
are ei–
ther populated by passive, obedient East Germans, unwilling and unable
to work hard, or by the essentially better Germans, who are victims of
West German carpetbaggers. In both perceptions, East Germany looks
like a crumbling, unpredictable society that would distort West Ger–
many's democracy and reintroduce the intolerance, the mutual hatred,
and the authoritarian behavior that once ruined the Weimar Republic.
The stability of German democracy seems to be endangered. The dicta–
torships left their marks. I will concentrate on the structural legacies
which the new
Lander
impose on German society.
In 1989, the GDR had 16.43 million inhabitants. Although that is
only about one-fifth of the German population, its political and psycho–
logical impact, I believe, will be considerably greater than statistics sug–
gest. Unified Germany still faces the question of whether the unavoidable
conflicts between two different societies may be mastered, or whether
they will lead to instability and a loss of democratic achievements. A fail–
ure in integrating East German society into the West German one - that
will be more than a West Germany plus sixteen million new citizens -
could well lead to serious political trouble, domestically and even inter–
nationally.
The legacy of totalitarianism has been often underestimated among
the political elites in the West. Like many other Western assumptions
about the heritage of the totalitarian dictatorship in East Germany, the
belief that institutions could return to normal once the Communist, So-
