The legal status of Germany concerns the question of the extinction, or otherwise continuation, of the German nation state (i.e., the German Reich created in the 1871 unification) following the rise and downfall of Nazi Germany, and constitutional hiatus of the military occupation of Germany by the four Allied powers from 1945 to 1949. It became current once again when the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) joined the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in 1990.