Trust Law in the Process of Reunifying East and West GermanyHow a legal concept foreign to German law was the solution to merge a socialist and a capitalist economy between 1989 and the present

In the run-up to the Re-Unification of the East and West Germany in the 1990's the governments faced a problem, how do we integrate two political systems without causing a collapse of the economy and livelihoods. In order to counter the aforementioned the East-German government initiated the Treuhandanstalt, a piece of legislation that would govern over State Owned Enterprises in order to ready them for either investors to take over or for liquidation. In so doing the similarities between the Anglo-Saxon Trust and the Germanic Treuhand is of extreme interest, namely; in what manner did the German government design the Treuhandanstalt? Was it focussed on the Germanic tradition, of does it draw heavily from the common law trust? This paper focusses on the similarities and differences between the two concepts of ownership.