East Germany's last leader: 'We had to hurry'

Maiziere: "If we didn't (unify) ... Europe's history would have been more complicated."

From Chris Burns
CNN Berlin bureau chief

BERLIN, Germany (CNN) -- It happened so quickly: The German Democratic Republic, long touted as a communist workers' paradise, suddenly fell. Its people had voted with their feet and headed west, and on November 9, 1989, the gates of the Berlin Wall opened wide.

Four months later, the country held its first -- and last -- free elections, catapulting Lothar de Maiziere, who had quit as deputy prime minister of the last communist cabinet, to the post of prime minister.

"If someone said in '87 Germany will reunite in three years, everyone would have thought he was crazy," says de Maiziere, who joined the conservative Christian Democrats and was elected on the promise to merge the two Germanys as quickly as possible.

The promise was in part the result of fear that the reformist Moscow government might not last.

"We had every reason to hurry," says de Maiziere. "I remember a conversation I had in May 1990 in Moscow with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardmadze. He told me, 'Hurry, bistro, bistro. I don't know how long Soviet domestic politics will let us carry out the foreign policy we want.'"

De Maiziere says a failure to unify Germany could have had wider repercussions: "If we didn't do it, I don't know what Europe's history would have been, but it would have been more complicated."

Chasing the deutschmarks

De Maiziere promised to eliminate the job he took as East Germany's only non-communist prime minister, and he made good. East and West Germany merged on October 3, 1990, less than a year after the Berlin Wall fell.

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl then became leader of the new Germany. He promised a blooming post-communist landscape. But that didn't happen for millions of East Germans thrown out of work in the new market economy -- even though the promise helped fuel a euphoria that accelerated unification.

"This blooming landscape had another reason," says de Maiziere. "Helmut Kohl, and we, wanted to tell people, 'You have a future here in the east.' At that time, after the Wall fell, every day 4,000 people went west. They went there because they thought, 'I have no luck here, no future anymore. …' It was the time when people said, 'Either the deutschmark comes to us, or we go to the deutschmark.'"

Kohl's promise of a blooming landscape was designed to give former East Germans hope, Maiziere says

'Second class citizens'

De Maiziere acknowledges the hype turned out to be counterproductive.

"This goal was too grand, so that people realised we won't achieve it as quickly as we thought, and that led to a breakdown in motivation."

With the demise of his government, de Maiziere joined Kohn's cabinet. But he soon resigned amid allegations of ties to East Germany's feared Stasi secret police -- something he declines to discuss.

Sidelined from power, de Maiziere looks back over the past 10 years with some bitterness, suggesting the West Germans treated the East like a colony.

"If we East Germans had had a little more time to bring ourselves into order, we would have had more self-respect," he says. "We had the feeling that many problems we should have taken care of ourselves were taken care of for us. … That's why there developed a feeling of being second-class citizens."

That's a perception the German government struggles with to this day, trying to win hearts and minds as it spends hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild a long-neglected land.