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East Germany (German: Ostdeutschland, [ˈɔstˌdɔʏtʃlant] ⓘ), officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR; Deutsche Demokratische Republik, [ˈdɔʏtʃə demoˈkʁaːtɪʃə ʁepuˈbliːk] ⓘ, DDR), was a country in Central Europe from its formation on 7 October 1949 until its reunification with West Germany on 3 October 1990.
In 1952, East Germany began policing its Western border to stop the flight of engineers, scientists and doctors to West Germany. Interestingly, the border within Berlin wasn’t as tightly...
East Berlin, the capital of East Germany, reunited with West Berlin, a de facto part of West Germany, in order to form the city of Berlin, which joined the Federal Republic as its third city-state alongside Bremen and Hamburg.
West Germany commenced this Ostpolitik, initially under fierce opposition from the conservatives, by negotiating nonaggression treaties with the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Hungary. West Germany's relations with East Germany posed particularly difficult questions.
German reunification, the reuniting of East Germany and West Germany into the country of Germany in 1990. The process put a formal end to World War II, guaranteed the western borders of Poland, inspired a drive to greater European integration, and ensured the election of Helmut Kohl as the first.
The existence of West Berlin, a conspicuously capitalist city deep within communist East Germany, “stuck like a bone in the Soviet throat,” as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev put it. The...
It was on 9 November 1989, five days after half a million people gathered in East Berlin in a mass protest, that the Berlin Wall dividing communist East Germany from West Germany crumbled.
For purposes of occupation, the Americans, British, French, and Soviets divided Germany into four zones. The American, British, and French zones together made up the western two-thirds of Germany, while the Soviet zone comprised the eastern third.
The unexpected opening of the frontier between East and West Germany and the breaching of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, were a heavy blow to the East German economy, as the relatively small numbers of migrants, who in previous years had left the country by way of Hungary or Czechoslovakia, rose dramatically.
The German government attempted to counter this east-west divide in two main ways but both also reinforced underlying differences. One was the construction of the east as a low-wage territory...