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The original was posted on /r/worldnews by /u/donutloop on 2023-10-03 14:43:17.
Russian textbook claims German unification was 'annexation'
Submitted 2 years ago by bot@lemmit.online [bot] to worldnews@lemmit.online
https://www.dw.com/en/reunification-russia-speaks-of-annexation-of-the-gdr/a-66986199
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 2 years ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
After the end of the World War II, the US, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France divided defeated Germany into four sectors.
The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, the first and last free elections in the GDR in 1990, the unification process and the signing of the “Two-Plus-Four Treaty” — these were events that ultimately paved the way for reunification on October 3, 1990.
“From the point of view of Putin and his ‘historical falsifiers’, unification was an act of colonization: The strong imperialist West subjugates the weak East,” says Ute Frevert, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, commenting on the Russian interpretation: "That corresponds in no way to the historical facts.
According to Zaur Gasimov, lecturer in Eastern European history at the University of Bonn, the new textbook "perceives reunification in the context of then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika policy, which, from the perspective of the Russian establishment, helped trigger the collapse of the Soviet empire.
It is viewed by Medinsky and the wider establishment as an important milestone in the “movement of the entire east central Europe and the Baltics towards NATO and is condemned as such,” says Gasimov, adding that this could possibly explain "the radical change in terms from “reunification” to “annexation.”
A decision that weakened the Soviet Union’s military presence in eastern European countries and led to a sharp rise in nationalist and anti-Soviet sentiment.
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