25 Years of German Unity

A stylised double Brandenburg Gate, mirrored and interlocked; the semicircular inscription "25o ANNIVERSARIO DELLA RIUNIFICAZIONE DELLA GERMANIA 1990-2015"; the country name "SAN MARINO", the year 2015 in Roman numerals "MMXV", the designer Erik Spiekermann's initials and the "R" mintmark.

The reunification of Germany on 3 October 1990 was one of the most significant political events in postwar European history. After more than four decades of division, which had emerged from the collapse of the Third Reich and the subsequent occupation by the four Allied powers, the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany merged into a single state. The division had split Germany, but it also stood for the wider East-West conflict in Europe, with the Berlin Wall as its most visible symbol. Its fall on 9 November 1989 set in motion a dynamic that led to state unity less than a year later, embedded in the "Two Plus Four Treaty", which secured the full sovereignty of a united Germany under international law.

San Marino, the oldest microstate in Europe and a close neighbour of Italy, has repeatedly drawn on German history in its commemorative coinage, documenting its own view of the European continent. The commemoration of unity looks back on a process that redrew the political map of Central Europe in a remarkably short time: the economic, legal and social integration of two state systems that had developed along fundamentally different lines for decades. Twenty-five years after 1990 - the occasion marked by this 2015 issue - a united Germany had become the most populous democracy in the European Union and its economic core, even as the challenges of internal convergence between West and East remained a defining theme of German society.