It’s been more than a third of a century since the German unification of 1990. Between Hamburg and Munich and Cologne and Frankfurt-on-Oder, you’ll easily find adults who have no personal memory of the country’s Cold War division, and even quite a few who were born after it. Germany divided, in other words, is history.

And yet, it isn’t. That’s what this year’s Day of German Unity – a public holiday on October 3 – has, once again, made clear. For one thing, differences and even tensions between the former West and East Germanies have persisted.

Bodo Ramelow, vice president of the German parliament and himself from the former East Germany, has scandalized many of his colleagues by pointing out that the two kinds of Germans remain estranged. Indeed, Ramelow believes Germany needs a new hymn and flag because too many East Germans still cannot identify with the current ones, which were simply taken over from the former West Germany. A German cabinet minister, who also grew up in the East, feels that talk about East and West is intensifying again. Even one of Germany’s politically conformist main news shows, Tagesschau, admits that the “process of re-unification remains incomplete.”

In one regard, often deplored, this persisting disunity in not-so-united Germany is a matter of very basic and thus powerful things, such as income: On average, for instance, Germans in full employment in the East still earn almost a thousand euros or 17 percent less than in the West. This may have something to do with the fact that almost everywhere in the East, Germans feel that life is better elsewhere and specifically elsewhere in Germany. The young feel (and are) particularly affected: Youth unemployment is generally worse in the East, and it is there that you’ll find regions that set a sad national record at about 13 percent.

But these economic and........

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