Their own country spent decades divided by opposing regimes until geopolitical winds shifted and allowed East and West Germany to reunite peacefully in 1991. Just two years later, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl visited the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on the Korean Peninsula and expressed hope that South and North Korea would also be reunited by the end of the decade. Some 35 years since Germany achieved its dream of reunification, Seoul and Pyongyang are still bitterly divided by political systems, economy, and their geopolitical alliances.
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Overlooking the DMZ, which separates the two Koreas, on Friday Chancellor Friedrich Merz could only repeat the hopes stated by Kohl in 1993. "We Germans know how painful the division of a country is," Merz stated in a message shared on social media. "We also know that whoever stands firm in their values and has the courage for dialogue can tear down walls." "We wish the people in Korea unity in freedom," Merz said.
To analysts following the day-to-day inter-Korean politics, this sounds like a distant dream. As the Koreas continue to eye each other warily across the DMZ, their dramatic differences in wealth and political freedom are clearly on display. But the biggest single issue might be that neither side appears to want reunification.
"The feeling has changed in the last couple of decades," Choo Jae-woo, a professor of foreign policy at Kyung Hee University, told DW. "Younger South Koreans just see the North as another country that happens to be next to us, is poor and threatening, and they have no sentimental attachment to it, like older generations do." "More and more people are asking why they should bother about reunification," he said. A study by Seoul National University's Institute for Peace and Unification Studies in September indicated that 39.1% of South Koreans believed reunification was impossible, the highest proportion since the survey was started some two decades ago.
Many were concerned about the vast amounts of money that it would take to build the North's infrastructure, including roads, hospitals, schools and all other requirements for a modern functioning society. Officially, South Korea's government has not abandoned reunification as a national objective. Its constitution still calls for peaceful union based on freedom and democracy, but Choo points out recent governments are promoting the idea far less frequently than in the past.
North Korea has not been nearly so reticent about where it stands on the matter. "In December 2023, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un announced that the constitution was being changed and that peaceful reunification was no longer possible," Choo said. "Instead, South Korea would be seen as a hostile rival and that he no longer had any intention of bringing the two together." The revised North Korean constitution was approved in March 2026 and Kim's regime has moved aggressively to scrub all references to reconciliation and national unity.
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