The European economic downturn meant the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was celebrated in Germany this week without any "triumphalism", political scientist Dr John Leslie said.
"The celebrations are more reflective and contemplative than they might otherwise have been," he said in an interview yesterday.
Given recent economic difficulties, there had been little suggestion of "triumphalism" and of the Western system triumphing over the East, he said.
Now based at Victoria University, Wellington, Dr Leslie was in the former East Germany on November 9, 1989, as a news producer for NBC Nightly News when the Berlin Wall came down.
He gave a talk on "The Reconfiguration of German Politics in the 21st Century" yesterday during a University of Otago conference commemorating the 20th anniversary of the wall's demise.
He commented recently that the fall of the wall was enormously significant, marking the beginning of the end of the Cold War and the end of an international power structure divided between the US and the Soviet Union.
Germans were continuing to take a critical view of their past and working out for themselves "what was good and what was bad", including in the outcomes after the end of the wall and the advent of German unification.
East German residents who had been in their 40s when the wall fell and when Germany was later unified in 1990 had in many cases lost their jobs and been unable to find other work.
Nevertheless, despite the many challenges still being faced, German policymakers had handled unification well.
Although unemployment remained higher in the east than in the west of Germany, major disorder had been avoided, and extreme nationalist approaches, which could have sought to remove Germany from the EU and Nato, had been avoided.
It was important for New Zealand trading that European democracies such as Germany and other European Union nations continued to succeed, he said.
