THE EAST WEST DIVIDE
When I was ten years old, I remember watching the news of reunification of Germany on TV in the living room of my childhood apartment in Seoul. On the TV screen, I saw the Germans chipping away pieces of the now fallen Berlin Wall and leaping all over them with tears of joy streaming down on their faces. The news imbued South Koreans with hope that the Koreas could also be reunified one day.
What I hand’t realized before moving to Germany in 2015 was how much division there still was between the formal East and West Germany. On paper, Germany was reunified in 1989, but in reality, Germany, more than 30 years later, still remained very much divided.
The division became evident in the hierarchy between the West germans & the East Germans that still existed to this day. As it turned out, the West practically had taken over the East. This meant not only capitalism took over communism as an economic system and a way of life, but also who governed, who took up the position of power, who got to own the property: Top leadership positions in Germany were still occupied by former West Germans. Most property owners in Germany were still West Germans. Wealthier regions in Germany were still the formal West, while poorer ‘left behind’ regions were the formal East. It was no coincidence that the recent rise of right wing movement was largely concentrated in the former East regions. East Germans, upon reunification, had become ‘second-class citizens’ in Germany.
Moreover, West German culture had taken over East German culture as the way of life. I could at least go back to South Korea and slip right back into the culture that I knew growing up, but for East Germans, there was no East German culture to go back to nor slip back into, because it no longer existed. There was a sense of loss and nostalgia among East Germans for the culture and the way of life that no longer existed.
A German friend of mine who grew up in the former East and was 13 years old when the wall came down told me that her parents couldn’t give her any guidance after the reunification, because they didn’t go through the West German system themselves. Like immigrant children whose parents couldn’t give them any guidance, East German children were left on their own to blindly navigate through the unknown — the system that was as unfamiliar to them as to their parents. East Germans had become immigrants in their own land — strangers to the new culture, system and way of life that they found themselves in, even though they spoke the same language and hadn’t moved anywhere. And that lack of guidance for the younger generations, I could see from my own experience of immigration, would contribute towards widening the hierarchy between West Germans and East Germans even more.
What’s more, the hierarchy between the West and East Germans wasn’t even being acknowledged as a ‘problem’: East Germans saw it, but West Germans didn’t. It was the sense of entitlement and self-centeredness of the West — which had never questioned itself — that the East Germans resented.
I could not help but wonder: ‘How can you extend equality to minorities, if you can’t even achieve equality among your own people?’
The most troubling division I observed was an ideological difference between the former West and former East Germans: East Germans didn’t think that the new system was necessarily a better system than what they had before. This sentiment, I noticed, was shared not only among East Germans but by the Eastern Europe in general — the former communist countries. The recent resurgence of communism seemed to have grown on this seed of doubt, which had been percolating under the surface all along. There was no question that living under liberal democracy where there is freedom would be better than living in a totalitarian state where there is no freedom. But rather than a blind embrace and defense of liberal democracy and its unquestionable coupling with capitalism as the way of life, they had a critical distance to be able to SEE its contradictions, dysfunctions and shortfalls.
I tried to imagine if South Korea and North Korea ever became reunited, what would happen. The division had been much longer than Germany — 75 years compared to 30 years years — and the two would have diverged much more than between West and East Germany. After the reunification, it was not hard to imagine South Koreans would take up the dominant status, and North Koreans the second class status. It was already happening in South Korea, where North Korean defectors were treated as second class citizens. It was not hard to imagine that wealthy South Koreans would buy up the most scenic and iconic locations in North Korea. It was not hard to imagine that South Korean culture, system & way of life would take over North Korean culture, system & way of life.
But then with the recent resurgence of totalitarian regimes and crisis of liberal democracy, was it presumptuous to assume that South Korea would necessarily take over North Korea?
It made me wonder what a ‘true reunification’ would mean. What would it mean to reunify and not let one culture, system & way of life take over another? How can it be ensured that there is no hierarchy between two groups when they were reunited? What could Germany have done differently and can still do — so that there was no hierarchy between East and West Germans, no disparity between the former East & former West regions, and East & West German ‘cultures’ seamlessly ‘reunited’ into a ‘German’ culture, not at the expense of one or the other? And more importantly, what would it mean for a society to critically question its own system, rather than blindly embracing and defending one ideology over another and see its shortfalls, dysfunctions and contradictions as they are, so that they can work on improving them?