The history of Germany since 1990 can be consistently described as that of a political short-circuit between two diametrically opposed social systems and value systems, the result of which has been a fully-fledged process of internal colonization and marginalization of the smaller part since the 1990s. This process — which is comparable in some respects, particularly with regard to the agonistic interdependence of stigmatization and self-exclusion, to the emergence of Southern identity in the United States after the Civil War — cannot be separated from the long historical duration of the failure of German nation-statehood in 1848/49 and from 1933 to 1945, nor from the history of the two Germanies from 1949 to 1989/90. For the Republic of October 3, 1990 — which had by then completely failed in terms of political integration — decidedly saw itself as a new, definitive German nation-state in selective political response to this historical continuity. This failure is no accident; rather, it impressively confirms the long lines of Central European history marked by division.

The emerging Berlin Republic was intended, according to, for example, the Berlin-based modern historian Hagen Schulze in his 1996 work *A Brief History of Germany*, to draw, among other things, on the national-democratic traditions of 1848, the bourgeois-liberal, social democratic, and Catholic party forces of the German Empire that were instrumental in the later founding of the Weimar Republic, as well as the constitutional ideas of the Weimar Constitution incorporated into the Basic Law, combined with the memory of certain facets of the resistance against National Socialism and the fundamental anti-totalitarian motivation of “Never Again!” in the Basic Law.

This highly selective invention of a German nation-state centered on Berlin was the continuation — indeed, an intensification — of the deliberate disregard of the GDR and its society, particularly its social order and the corresponding political values of a society that, in principle, lacked private ownership of the means of production. The results of the only free People’s Chamber election in March 1990 were used to legitimize the political short-circuiting of two social and economic systems, only one of which possessed functioning safeguards for an established property order. As a result, the annexed territory became a blank slate for colonialism, similar to the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century. Colonial societies, such as that of the young United States, are highly dynamic, politically volatile, and characterized by a sharp divide between winners and losers. This is also clearly evident in the Republic of the Others.