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Polexit? Almost half of the Poles believe that Poland would be better off outside of the EU [548]
moving to a dramatically different place is going to instill trauma,
Maybe to people who have been forced to people who left their home due to violence and poverty. But this is not the group I was refering to. If you are a highly skilled engineer, or a famous scientist, you might consider it very different if only because you can choose freely where to go. Sadly, it also looks like East Germany has also squandered the chance to benefit from the refugees. There are many stories of dying villages in the West, who applied for refugees to be distributed to them, and evidence suggest that their integration goes overall pretty good (because there are more jobs available to them and they get to interact more with the local population). In the end, it is simple math. Shrinking villages will see a decrease in tax revenue, thus public spending decreases and calculations are made according to which fewer people need fewer infrastructure, which causes more people to leave. A vicious cycle. Be it as it may, I only brought that up to explain why the former GDR is still lagging behind economically.
the total amount of money
The usual cited figure is 2tn € until now.
In hindsight, maybe the best solution would have been to evaluate
As BB already said, the people forced the hand. They threatened to leave for the West, and who was going to stop them? The wall was already gone.
Additionally, it is also important to remember that we have a lot more information than the people back then. There was little expertise on how the economic harmonization between East and West could be achieved, and those that now exist were yet to be written. Furthermore everybody in and outside of Germany was mislead by the SED propaganda over the true state of their economy (or as the SED liked to boost, the "9th largest" of the world). Kohl and Co. initially believed that only a stimulus and some investments were needed to bring the East German economy up to date, not knowing that many companies operated under working conditions that were untenable by Western standards. This is significant, because if e.g. the Kohl government had allowed exceptions for those companies who e.g. did not meet Western safety standards -moral issues aside - it still would have left Western managers open to lawsuits and personal legal consequences if something happened to the workers because of it, because basic safety is not something the government can tell the courts to ignore. This also goes a long way to explain why rebuilding East Germany became so expensive. The government had to often sell companies for next to no money to private investors, because the money needed to make the company both competetive and safe often exceeded the worth of the company itself.
