The East of the West

This chapter investigates the history of “zonal borderland aid,” a program devised to support the West German border regions. It analyzes the strategies that borderland advocates deployed to entrench this government program for good. By depicting their regions as victimized by the Iron Curtain, they inadvertently generated the perception that the borderlands were backward. Pushing beyond 1990, the chapter addresses the economic consequences of the fall of the border and the widespread hope that the erstwhile periphery would turn into the new center of Germany and Europe. The borderlands became the places where the postunification “cotransformation” was instantly felt. The toolkit of economic aid that had been employed to prop up the borderlands now moved a few miles across the former border: “zonal borderland aid” turned into Reconstruction East, the program charged with rebuilding the economic capacity of former East Germany along capitalist lines.