German reunification: resilience

Edward Hadas For a while, it looked like the fall of the Berlin Wall – 20 years ago on Monday – would undermine the German style of capitalism. But the Rhenish way – high wages, high technology, industrial cooperation and long term bank financing – seems to have passed the test. The end of the old East German regime first caused political jubilation, and then economic fear. The productivity of this 20% of the unified nation’s population was only 35% of western German levels. By the mid 1990s,...