Memories of winning peace
By Michael Bergmann
German reunification was achieved, from my viewpoint now as a middle-aged hobby strategist, by West-German policies of partially joining the American "pressure" campaign while pursuing parallel engagement of both the East-German regime and people. Chancellor Helmut Kohl's crucial decision was to continue his pre-predecessor Willy Brandt's "Ostpolitik," the set of foreign and inter-German policies which Kohl's conservative party had fiercely opposed, not unlike the South Korean conservatives of today. With this and another irony, Kohl could become the hero of the East-German revolution of 1989-90.
But when you ask the teenager in me who witnessed the miracle, I will tell you a somewhat different story, not a story of winners and losers, heroes and enemies, but a story of humanity undefeated by "forces."
I had grown up in a small town on the western side of the border. Correctly speaking, the border was north of my hometown at a distance very similar to the one I have now from Seoul to the North. I had often seen the enormous fences, the watchtowers and landmine warnings, as well as the mysterious villages across the border. And until the summer of 1989, I had been told that we would more likely experience a Third World War, with Germany as the first battlefield, than the opening of the border in our lifetime.
Spring 1990, around my 17th birthday: Three teenagers on bicycles, two boys and one girl, demanded their right to unrestricted movement, now guaranteed in both directions by both governments, and expressed their will to pedal to the "village over there." I remember us being guided by police through a fenced area. The new fence had been built to guarantee pedestrians' safe passage through the “Death Strip.” I remember this landmine-free zone within the Death Zone as narrow for our bicycles, but we made it, friendly assisted, and returned one or two hours later. The half-deserted village was the most boring place on earth, but our journey there left a memory of freedom that had won over fear.
A related memory I recall from this time is the question in my head: Whom had we been afraid of? No one can, of course, deny the dangers of landmines, nuclear bombs and missiles. But those representatives of the fallen regime, stripped of the impressive titles we had heard echoing through walls and fences, directly exposed then to the cameras and microphones of the free media, stuttered gibberish and looked like clumsy granddads lucky enough to have reached retirement.
This thought came back to me when I read Choi Sung-jin's Feb. 27 column "Don't overestimate your enemy" in The Korea Times. Yes, a "demonized enemy" is much more dangerous than the bankrupts, control freaks, criminals or spoiled heirs they really are. Should we risk a war to fight the demon in our mind? Or should we deal with real human opponents, as strong and as weak as they are?
Michael Bergmann (bergmann2473@yahoo.de) is a teacher in Seoul.