Can Pyongyang become the next Berlin?

By Lee Jun-youb

I've wandered over a hundred cities, but nowhere under the sun beats Berlin. A smorgasbord of humanity from beatniks to seniors fueled by kebabs to chemicals shimmy day and night in village-sized techno clubs, while the whole city reverberates to the beat. During my month-long zigzagging across Europe this summer, I made three pilgrimages to Berlin.

I've heard today's Berlin compared to New York of the 1980s. Although I hadn't popped out then, it seemed true as every Berliner seemed an artist of sorts. What could degenerate into effete aestheticism seemed tempered by startups and multinationals including the German headquarters of Universal Music and Coca Cola. Their offices, along with mythic nightclubs such as Berghain that rejected me twice regardless of how much black I draped, dot East Berlin formerly occupied by communists.

I wondered if the city's libido stems from the ecstasy of reunification. All across Berlin, the scars of division were palpable in the remnants of the wall and public art memorials. After the wall fell in 1989, Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Moon Jae-in unveiled in Berlin their blueprints for Korean unification. More than 300 Koreans have also devoted their dissertations to the parallels between German reunification and Korea. Their conclusion? Not much, but I disagree.

Liberation came like a thief for Koreans, and so did reunification for Germans. Tocqueville's dictum that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform may apply to the Kim dynasty just as it did to the Soviet satellite. Kim Jong-un is a Swiss-educated millennial after all, and the terminus of his royal reform could be a confederation of two Koreas similar to the cantons of Switzerland.

Echoing young West Germans' apathy about reunification, today's young South Koreans are also blase about our other half. In contrast, young East Germans gave their blood for freedom, as most of the escapees and protesters during the 28 years of the Berlin Wall were twenty-somethings. My East Berlin-born hostel owner hid in a car trunk to cross the border when she was 18. Ironically, she returned to East Berlin to open a hostel after reunification.

As young North Koreans are shackled by totalitarianism crueler than communism, young people in the south must generate the momentum to traverse the arc of history. Our grandparents and parents' historical imperatives were industrialization and democratization. Ours is unification. As the colloquialism “hell Chosun” and the macabre rates of depression and suicide in South Korea illustrate, we are not happy alone.

North Korea presents not only an untapped market and labor, but also the proud histories of Goguryeo and Goryeo when Korea reached its military and artistic apogees. Once a rabbit-shaped peninsula at the terminus of the Silk Road, the sacrificial lamb of the Cold War is now two islands at the nexus of imperial crossfire. If young Koreans demand unity in duality, then Pyongyang can metamorphose into East Berlin.

Lee Jun-youb (lee@hds.harvard.edu) is a freelance journalist and literary translator based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.