To commemorate the 25th anniversary of German reunification, the Institute of Contemporary History Munich-Berlin—the leading research institute on contemporary German history—has published an 800-page edition comprising 170 documents related to the reunification process. The sources transcribed here originate from the Foreign Ministries of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and the vast majority of them were only recently declassified specially for this commemorative volume.
The editors date the start of the reunification process to May 1989 when the GDR's fate was largely sealed by the Hungarians dismantling the Iron Curtain at the Austrian border. Even though this act did not mean the border had ceased to be impassable, the pictures in the media suggested otherwise. Officials in the West German Foreign Ministry even saw themselves compelled to warn the media against “encouraging GDR Germans to entertain false hopes by spreading ultimately one-sided reports about...