Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of German reunification — a decisive event in the end of state socialism in Eastern Europe. On October 3, 1990, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), formerly one of the most enthusiastic members of the Warsaw Pact, was annexed by the Federal Republic following an election victory for the Christian Democrats. Only eleven short months after the Berlin Wall fell, what had long been considered an unalterable and impermeable border ceased to exist, and an entire sociopolitical system disintegrated around it.

Rather than bringing the democratization, let alone the rejuvenation of socialism some initially hoped for, the uprisings of 1989–1990 across Eastern Europe saw the consolidation of a neoliberal order as the supposed price to pay for basic civil liberties and nominal freedom of movement. Communist parties that had ruled for decades fell into disarray, hastily rebranding themselves as social democrats or dissolving entirely. The fall of the Soviet bloc also demoralized large sections of the Left on the other side of the Iron Curtain, prompting the collapse of the international communist movement and helping to set the stage for social democracy’s pivot to neoliberalism.

If East Germany wasn’t all good, nor was what followed. In the early 1990s, unemployment skyrocketed across the former Eastern Bloc, the public sector collapsed, and millions were forced to emigrate in order to find work. Mortality rates went up, and life expectancy declined by several years. In a study conducted for the World Bank, economist Branko Milanović estimated that poverty levels in the former socialist countries rose from 4 percent in 1989 to a staggering 45 percent by the middle of the following decade.