On August 31, 1990, at 1:15 p.m., Minister of the interior Wolfgang Schäuble for the Federal Republic of Germany and State Secretary Günther Krause for the GDR signed the Unification Treaty in the Crown Prince’s Palace. Also present were the catering and printing staff who had accompanied the negotiations. With this unusual invitation, the politicians thanked the supporting staff for often working around the clock over the past eight weeks. The negotiators had put 42 drafts on paper. "Several times the printing presses failed due to overuse, but the people never did", Schäuble recalls.
The delegations had agreed on the final wording only eleven hours before the signing. The last point of dispute was the regulation of abortions. However, it was not the delegations of the two German states that were arguing about this, but the parties in Bonn. The SPD and FDP wanted to prevent women from the West from being penalized if they terminated a pregnancy in the East. There, the less restrictive GDR law would have continued to be in force for the time being.
The fact that there were temporarily different laws on abortion in East and West was an exception. In principle, federal German law was to take effect throughout the entire national territory upon reunification. GDR laws only continued to exist if the Unification Treaty explicitly specifies it. The freely elected GDR government had set out with the promise of achieving rapid unification. The quickest way to get there was for the GDR to join the Federal Republic, as provided for in the West German Basic Law. A country, however, that aimed at joining but was smaller and shaken by serious crises, had a hard time negotiating at eye level. Schäuble remembers the words he spoke at the beginning of the negotiations: "We do not want to coldly ignore your wishes and interests. But this is not the unification of two equal states."
A rapid unification made the thorough solving of disputed issues more difficult. And of those there were several. What would happen to the Stasi files on millions of East Germans who had been spied on? Should Berlin or Bonn become the capital of a reunited Germany? These questions would only be answered by the members of the all-German Bundestag after the GDR joined the Federal Republic on October 3, 1990.
