Less than a year after its people had forced open the Berlin Wall, it had been achieved with the blessing of a flagging Soviet Union and threw a bridge across the narrowing east-west chasm still dividing Europe. The main official festivities took place in Dresden, in the eastern German state of Saxony. It is expecting more than 100,000 visitors. Chirac, speaking later to an audience including the prime ministers of several neighbouring east European countries, was expected to stress a need to keep expanding the European Union eastward to definitively end the schism across the continent. Many differences still exist between Eastern and Western Germany.
Easterners are twice as likely to be unemployed than their Western counterparts.
But there is also a new generation growing up which never knew a Germany divided, rather a Germany united.