War and the destruction that comes with it always leaves traces in a country and on its people. The Second World War was the cruelest war the world has ever seen. Millions of people died and families were shattered. After World War II, Germany was occupied by the US, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. Consequently, Berlin, which was neither considered to belong to the West nor to the East of the country, was divided into four sections and split between the four nations mentioned above. The world was ripped into “the Western World” and the East communism. The symbol of the Cold War was the Berlin Wall, which was constructed in order to stop the people from fleeing to the western part of the country. Furthermore, any attempt was punished by death. As a result of the so-called “Monday Demonstrations” the Wall was finally demolished in 1989. On Oct. 3, 1990, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) joined the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the country was officially reunited. This most important turning point of German history had huge effects on the country’s population, and on my family as well.
When the borders were completely open and people were finally able to legally migrate to the West, masses of people moved from the Eastern to the Western part of the country. Between 1990 and 1991, approximately two million people migrated to West Germany. Due to the fact that people used to be surrounded by rules all the time, were monitored by the government and were only allowed to listen to certain radio stations, watch certain TV channels or read certain books and newspaper, they didn’t feel free under the socialistic leadership of the East. My family originally comes from the GDR, but when the borders opened, my grandfather also took advantage of this situation and migrated to the West. For a very long time, my grandfather and grandmother had been separated from one another, for my grandfather worked for the military and was stationated in the East of the country. They were only able to see each other when my grandmother received a visa to travel from West to East, but still she was not allowed to stay for a very long time. Everyone was very relieved and excited about my grandfather being able to join the whole family again. However, the reunification of Germany also affected families in terms of financial crisis caused by massive unemployment.
The post war effects on East Germany were particularly felt in the economy. The unity of Germany turned out to be a huge financial challenge for the new Western country. Because of missing investments, old technology in East German companies and too much competition around the world, many corporations had to shut down their business. Accordingly, many people lost their employment. My mother’s father was only one of them. He used to work in a car factory, but when Germany was reunited and the eastern economy was changed from being a “Plan Economy” to a free market economy, he lost his job. The company wasn’t able to compete with the big companies from West Germany. As a consequence of that, he and his wife suffered from a financial crisis for a long period of time. Since my grandmother depended on my grandfather and didn’t maintain a job herself, they went through a rough time, but were finally able to set an end to their agony when my grandfather found work in West Germany, where people were overwhelmed by job offers. The social inequality that occurred from the economic difficulties that East Germany was afflicted with, was also visible in the way people were educated differently depending on whether they went to school in West or East Germany.
Education in West Germany is considered to be more valuable than in East Germany since schools and universities don’t attach the same importance on the way students are taught. For instance, schools in the East consider student's participation in class to be more important than written work, whereas schools in the West emphasize the importance of a good written expression. One of my cousins attended a university in The East. When he graduated after the reunification of Germany, he found it hard to apply for a job. Employers were skeptical about his abilities since he went to school in East Germany. A similar thing happened to one of my aunts. She was a trained secretary and worked for many years in this field, but she was declined a job offer when she applied for a position as a secretary in an office in a city in West Germany. My family has never really believed in the differences between the two parts of our country until we were proven wrong and directly faced with them.
Despite the fact that the population in West Germany constantly remains more dense than in East Germany and that there are still visible and invisible differences in economy and education between “the West” and “the East”, no one knows if that is ever going to change or if the differences will ever disappear. Yet the situation in Germany has certainly improved, I might take more decades until people are finally able to speak of Germany as one country and not as a country of two diverse parts.
This essay was impressed to me. As Korea is seperated with South and North, I have a seperated family in North Korea. However, we can not see each other without permission from the goverment. Koreans really want to reuite. However, like German, there are a lot of differnces between South and North Korea. I could imagine about Korea after the reunification.
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