One of the most difficult chapters in German Unity includes the question of the political approach to coming to terms with the SED regime in the GDR between 1949 and 1989/1990. Apart from the fact that with regard to remembering and coming to terms with the past more and more party political positions are expressed, differences still surface. However, primarily commemorative means are being used here to address those disputes which, given the swift transfer of the disintegrating GDR in the fall and winter of 1989/1990 into the process of reunification, were broken off. Even if many of those affected do not see it this way, as a result the elite of the GDR enjoyed the protection of the federal German legal system (and the care of the welfare state), which was a deciding factor in this revolutionary-like overthrow remaining peaceful. 

With the Peaceful Revolution, which formed part of the major central and eastern European freedom and civil rights movement, the Germans, who, unlike their French neighbors, had been unable to claim to have played a revolutionary role in the history of the world, did after all make a forceful mark on European revolutionary history, exactly two hundred years after the French. One can safely say that this was a decisive step along what Heinrich August Winkler called the “path to the west”, with which a reunited Germany has also relinquished its claim to a special path.