rck. A byproduct was the Franco Prussian War and the humiliation of France; another byproduct was the creation of a new Great Power united Germany for which no part could easily be made in the nineteenth century Concert of Europe.
These consequences of the first German unification blew up in 1914 with the First World War. It ended with Germany beaten, humbled, bitter, but still united. The question of a united Germany's place in Europe continued to fester. In 1945, the victorious Allies physically occupied Germany, as they had not done in 1918 19. Large parts of eastern Germany territory were permanently annexed by Poland. The remainder was divided into four occupation zones.
With the coming of the Cold War, former allies were at odds, and the fourfold occupation and division of Germany became effectively twofold: the Soviet zone of occupation became the German Democratic Republic, "East Germany;" the American, British, and French zones combined to form the German Federal Republic, "West Germany." Legalistically speaking, all of these arrangements were and remained temporary. The 1945 settlement was based on a cease fire and military occupation agreement. No formal peace treaty was signed to end World War II. No such treaty would be signed until 1990.
In the decades after the war, however, the "temporary" division of Germany seemed as permanent as anything could be in the contemporary political world. An Iron Curtain was imposed across Europe, and it split Germany in two. In 1961, the division of Germany was further hardened and symbolized by the construction of the Berlin Wall.
Germans continued to believe that they should be unified, and that "one day" they would be. Former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, speaking with Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko in 1969, began by saying that "the Germans wuld never give up hope of living in one house" [author's emphasis].2