By Rafaela Prifti/ DIELLI
Today marks the historical event of German Reunification. Twenty nine years ago, the former German Democratic Republic officially joined the Federal Republic of Germany. It is commemorated with a three-day festival around Platz der Republik at the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. In 1990, the East and West Germany were reunited amid the collapse of communism and the end of Cold War era. “The fall of the Berlin Wall on the 9th of November in 1989, which marked the end of the Cold War, had paved the way for German reunification barely a year later. The Unification Treaty that was signed on the 20th of September in 1990 and declares the 3rd of October the national holiday, sealed the end of the division of Germany.” (Official Website of Berlin) The upheaval of the late 1980s and early 1990s were so profound that Yoshiro Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist and political economist, argued in his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), that the Western system of liberal democracies and the free market model of capitalism would ascend as “the final form of human government.”
Looking back, the collapse of Soviet Union in 1991 did not put an end to communism. One example is China. Although the ideology of the Communist Party of China has undergone dramatic changes throughout the years, the Communist Party of China is committed to communism. In the decades following Germany’s Reunification, the world has witnessed the rise of dictatorships, ultra-nationalism and state-sponsored terrorism.
In a bit of irony, at the Rinia Park, the central public park of Tirana, Albania, that was built in 1950 during the communist era, there stands a fragment of the Berlin Wall. The 2.6 ton graffiti-covered slab piece was donated by the city of Berlin. Installed in 2013 to commemorate the victims of Albania’s communist regime, the fragment of the wall is part of a Memorial, that is the work of writer and former political dissident Fatos Lubonja and artist Ardian Isufi. The installation includes a concrete bunker and some pillars from the notorious camp of Spac.