Well....the Bundestag has put up around 200-million Euro to construct a building which will be for the purpose of serving as some 'catalyst' for talking about unification.
This week....the competition finished up on where the site would be located, and Halle will be the location. There's some disgruntlement going on with the other cities that tried to get into the competition.
The other four cities in the competition? Jena, Eisenach, Leipzig, and Frankfurt (the other one, on the eastern side).
Trying to get an understanding of the purpose of the structure (worth 200-million Euro)? Well....the political folks want a building to explain how East and West Germany unified so successfully. This would be a place where you could visit and learn all the effective tools of unification.
The fact that 30 years later....probably one-third of East Germans consider the unification a problem or unsuccessful. The NY Times published a piece three years ago....after talking to East Germans....that eight out of ten felt that unification was still incomplete.
The Economist published a piece in 2019....saying from West Germans they talked to....only about half of them consider unification a success story to talk about.
I hate to suggest it, but I think the main purpose of the Center (once standing and operational) is to bring people through and propagandize them enough....that they believe unification has been mostly a long and tough success story.
This unification discussion is a epic saga in some ways. You take a section of the country, and push them through a marginal crappy existence from 1945 to 1989. Those who were teens in the war....sat through the entire period....with their kids getting the full bitter taste.
Those born after 1990? On one side, they get the unification-fixed-all-problems chatter, but see dozens of problems which still linger over a thirty year period.
Maybe in thirty years....the center will have changed the perception of people.
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