Today is a national holiday in Germany, commemorating twenty-five years of reunification. A “Festival of Unity” has been organized — in Frankfurt-am-Main and nationwide — under the motto “Overcoming Borders.”

The standard narrative of German unification begins with the New Cold War and Ronald Reagan’s call to Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down the wall”; next, East German (GDR) refugees broke through Hungary’s border fence to escape to the West (a celebrated moment that echoes awkwardly given today’s fences and walls); then the masses protested in Leipzig and elsewhere, before finally breaching the Berlin Wall. There followed the “2+4” negotiations (two Germanys, four occupying powers) and the process of institutional merger that on October 3, 1990 yielded the “new Germany,” a blessedly unified state, at last able to bask guilt-free in banal nationalism.

A critical moment shaping this narrative occurred in December 1989, when the demand for unification was raised on East German streets and the visiting West German (FRG) chancellor Helmut Kohl was greeted by a sea of black-red-gold. “Blossoming landscapes” lay ahead, he promised. With unification, “nobody will face undue hardship”; “none will be worse off than before — and many will be better off.” Kohl pulled off a masterstroke: he aligned himself — and by association the West German elite as a whole — with the East German revolutionary crowd.