GERMANY MARKS 30 YEARS SINCE EAST, WEST REUNIFIED

Germany marked the 30th anniversary of its reunification on Saturday, drawing a generally positive picture of the progress made in knitting together east and west. The country’s president declared that today’s is “the best Germany there has ever been” and proposed a new memorial to the “peaceful revolutionaries” who helped end communist rule.

Germany was reunited on Oct. 3, 1990, after four decades of Cold War division. East Germany joined the western federal republic less than a year after the east’s communist rulers — under pressure from growing protests — opened the Berlin Wall and the rest of the highly fortified border between the two states on Nov. 9, 1989.

While much progress has been made since then, economic and other differences between the west and the less-prosperous east still persist. A long-lasting trend of more people leaving the east than moving there has finally halted in recent years. Pensions in the east are nearing the level of those in the west, though wages are lower. And Germany’s biggest companies are still headquartered in the west, while political polarization has been most noticeable over recent years in the east, where the far-right Alternative for Germany party is particularly strong.

The coronavirus pandemic meant that celebrations were relatively low-key — as Chancellor Angela Merkel put it this week, “quieter than the occasion would actually deserve.” President Frank-walter Steinmeier led the main ceremony at a hall in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, with 230 guests — about onefifth of the audience originally planned.

Germany is “rightly proud” on the anniversary of reunification, “and no pandemic can get in the way of that,” Steinmeier said.