OVER TO YOU Shadow of the wall still divides a nation by jobs and prosperity

‘‘The fact is,’’ Gunter Grass, one of West Germany’s most celebrated writers, told an audience in 1990, ‘‘I fear a Germany simplified from two states into one. I . . . would be much relieved if it did not come about.’’

Amid the general euphoria of the months that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, Grass was not alone in his reservations about what might come to pass in a unified Germany.

There were some foreign leaders, Margaret Thatcher foremost among them, who felt that the resulting economic superpower would inexorably become the dominant force in Europe and slip back into its old habits of arrogance. But Grass had other concerns. He worried that Western values, and particularly capitalism, would smother the new state in its infancy. Nearly 30 years later, it seems that Grass was more on the money than Thatcher.

Today Germany is united in theory but painfully divided in practice.

The fortified border between the two Germanys has long been torn down but its shadow remains starkly visible in almost every statistical map: disposable income, unemployment, voting patterns. East Germans are not necessarily wrong to feel like second-class citizens. In Angela Merkel’s cabinet there are only two ministers – the chancellor herself and Franziska Giffey, her social affairs minister – who grew up in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

More broadly, east Germans make up 16 per cent of Germany’s population but hold less than 2 per cent of its top jobs. Even in the east, the children of the GDR occupy only 23 per cent of senior positions in politics, business, science, the media, the military and the justice system.

‘‘Someone told me recently that there is not a single German university led by an east German,’’ Merkel, 65, told Der Spiegel this week. ‘‘That’s not just odd: it’s really a shortcoming.’’

In 1990 Helmut Kohl, the chancellor who unified Germany, promised that ‘‘flowering landscapes’’ would spring up in the east thanks to the magic of the free market – and over the past three decades average incomes in east Germany have risen from 50 per cent of those in the West to 82 per cent today. But the disparity is still keenly felt.

One in five Wessis (west Germans, as opposed to Ossis from the east) has never visited the former GDR. In one survey, only 18 per cent of Germans said they saw more similarities than differences between the halves of their country. Some on both sides felt things would be better if the Wall were rebuilt.

The absolute triumph of western liberalism over eastern socialism has brought a sense of alienation. A large minority feel unable to speak their minds. Last month 41 per cent of east Germans told an opinion poll for Die Zeit magazine that speech was no freer today than it had been in the GDR.

Joachim Gauck, 79, a prominent pro-democracy activist in the GDR who served as the president of unified Germany from 2012 to 2017, compares Ossis and Wessis to children brought up with drastically different styles of parenting.

‘‘In a society that is not used to existing as a composite of autonomous individuals, you always want another way of doing things, you expect more orders from above,’’ he said. ‘‘You love to have clear leadership and you’re afraid of debates in which you have to take sides.’’

West Germany was impeccably generous with its resources, bundling as much as euros 2.5 trillion into reviving the east’s shattered economy. But there was no sum of money in the world that could quickly repair the damage done over four decades of inept central planning and socialist dogmatism.

In the two years after the Wall came down, 2.5 million Ossis lost their jobs. The unemployment rate has since shrunk markedly, but is still a third higher in the east than in the west.

Equally difficult to bear was the sudden loss of identity. The old lodestars of the GDR’s society – its youth organisations, pop culture, justice system, political apparatus – dissolved into irrelevance.

Yet Gauck regards the jarring difficulties of bringing the two societies together as a sign that the process is working. Polls suggest that a clear majority on both sides believe that unification was a good thing. Approval is highest among young adults, who have known only a single Germany.

‘‘The whole purpose of revolutions is to bring down those who ruled illegitimately. If they feel sore about it, that is precisely the point of this historic upheaval,’’ Gauck said.

In one survey, only 18 per cent of Germans said they saw more similarities than differences between the halves of their country.

AP People line up to see an escape tunnel underneath the Berlin Wall, which divided the city for 28 years during the Cold War. The tunnel was built by a group of people who had escaped earlier from communist East Germany to West Berlin. They wanted to help friends and family to flee to the West, too, but days before it was finished, East German officials discovered the tunnel and destroyed it.