The telephone call that gave the all-clear came late one night in June 1989. It meant that Daniel Sanghoon Lee, a student just turned 19, was free to set off with his father and a family friend from Frankfurt, then in West Germany, onwards to Berlin. Travelling the 600km (370 miles) or so by car, they arrived in West Berlin in the morning, met up with a couple of other German-born Korean students for lunch and then all boarded a bus to the East Berlin airport. The hot June temperature was matched only by the political tensions in the split city as it inched towards that fateful November, when the Berlin Wall – the 28-year division of East and West Germany, communism and democracy – would be torn down . For Lee, crossing into East Germany that day, there was another divided nation on his mind, on the other side of the world. The two Koreas had also been divided along ideological lines, following a three-year war in the 1950s that killed an estimated five million people, most of whom were civilians, on both sides. Today, North and South Korea are still separated by a fortified border – the demilitarised zone (DMZ) – that doubles as a tourist attraction, albeit one that is decidedly more tense than Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie. That summer day in 1989, Lee was among a small group of young travellers that included South Korean student activist Lim Su-kyung, who had travelled all the way from Seoul to East Berlin to board the flight to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, for the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students, held from July 1 to 8. Escape from North Korea: how a defector made it to Seoul Costing an estimated US$1 billion, it was to be North Korea’s largest international event, bringing together a reported 25,000 to 40,000 people from more than 170 countries for a week-long programme of political discussions, as well as sporting and cultural activities. Recalling that day over coffee in Berlin, the now 51-year-old Lee says it was his parents, South Korean pro-democracy activists, who had suggested the idea of the trip to him. “Many South Korean adults in West Germany were too scared about being spied on by the secret service if they travelled to North Korea,” Lee says. “But since I was a lot younger and didn’t speak Korean, my parents felt I wouldn’t face such a threat. So I decided to go. “When we arrived at the East Berlin airport, the North Korean ambassador came out to greet us. It was an exceptional event for someone from South Korea to officially meet North Korean representatives. We then boarded the North Korean airline Air Koryo, flying first to Moscow then on to Pyongyang. It was a big moment.” Providing an opportunity to travel to North Korea was just one of the ways Berlin, during the time of its own division following Germany’s defeat in World War II, and its subsequent carving up between the Soviet Union and Western Allies, linked people to the Korean peninsula. Described as a window to the East by those close to the story, the divided city was one of the few places in the world in the 1960s and ’70s where communication between the two Koreas was possible. Lee, whose parents had moved to West Germany for work in the ’60s, says the unique context granted him the chance to understand North Korea beyond the propaganda. “If you grew up in South Korea, like my father, you were raised to believe terrible things about the North Koreans. For example, that they have horns like the devil. So in East Berlin, there was a window to meet North Koreans and see them as they are, not in the evil light they were being portrayed in.” In 1949, post-World War II and amid the Cold War, East Germany – officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – and North Korea established diplomatic relations. The move was followed six years later on the opposite side, when West Germany and South Korea established ties. This building of relations meant the Koreas were more closely connected with the two sides of Germany, some 9,000km away, than they were with each other. In desperate need of assistance to rebuild cities destroyed by the Korean war, the North in 1953 began sending students to East Germany to be trained in the relevant labour skills. Meanwhile, in West Germany from the early ’60s, a South Korean community was steadily growing, with intellectuals, coal miners and nurses welcomed as part of the country’s Gastarbeiter (guest worker) programme. It is estimated that about 8,000 coal miners and 10,000 nurses from South Korea were employed in West Germany from 1963 to 1977. While East Berliners were not allowed to freely travel to West Berlin, West Berliners could acquire a day pass to visit family members living on the other side of the border. Seizing this opportunity, South Koreans living in West Germany would purchase the pass, travel to the border station at Friedrichstrasse and cross towards the North Korean embassy within walking distance of the landmark Brandenburg Gate. Dr Sang-Hwan Seong is a professor in German language education at Seoul National University, whose research areas include Cold War history and German-Korean relations. Over Zoom from Seoul, he says that “from the early 1960s onwards, there were many young South Korean intellectuals, the highly educated elites from the top South Korean universities, who were able to come to study in West Germany. “This was only a decade or so after the end of the war, and many of them had family members in North Korea [so] South Koreans in West Berlin would visit the North Korean embassy in East Berlin to make inquiries about their lost loved ones. The North Korean embassy officials had no reason to be hostile to them.” Seong says many of these South Korean intellectuals were able to find out whether their parents were still alive, and a few went on to secretly visit North Korea. “North Korean officials issued them with a North Korean passport and some people received cash and scholarships,” he says. “This could be interpreted as espionage, and South Korea could put you on trial so it was a very sensitive issue. However, South Korean officials knew nothing about this.” But in 1967, South Korean intelligence officers abducted 17 South Korean intellectuals, guest workers and students from West Germany before extraditing and accusing them of having secretly visited North Korea and forming an espionage ring in East Berlin. The mass kidnapping dampened relations between South Korea and West Germany and it took years for the pair to normalise ties. Liana Kang’s father was a 19-year-old electrical engineering student from a wealthy farm- and factory-owning family from North Korea who had worked with the Japanese during their occupation to keep hold of their assets. They were then forced into hiding after communist rulers took hold of the country, but SH Kang was among a handful of students granted the opportunity to study abroad. Travelling by train through China, Mongolia and Russia until they arrived at Ostbahnhof station, in East Berlin, in 1953, Kang’s father and the other students were expected to integrate into East German life immediately. “The first thing they had to do when they arrived was to learn German,” Liana Kang says over the phone from her home in Luxembourg. “Within a year, the students were expected to go from zero knowledge to being able to understand it at a university level. As one can imagine, it was a lot of pressure. “My father told me that the ones who were not intelligent were sent to Mongolia or China to study agriculture or something similar. The most intelligent students were sent to Eastern European countries such as Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. “He said that it was already a privilege to be sent to an Eastern European country but being sent to East Germany was the most prestigious. He was very, very proud of being sent to East Germany.” By the mid-’50s there were roughly 350 North Korean students registered in the GDR. Easing themselves into East Berlin life, they were a sociable group who enjoyed mixing with the locals. It was at a social event that Maria W’s father and East German mother met. “My parents met at a New Year’s party in Alte Villa, near the Grosser Garten, a prominent park in central Dresden that was a popular gathering spot for students. Back then Alte Villa functioned as a dormitory for students,” Maria, who asks that we don’t use her surname, says from Berlin. “It wasn’t long before my parents had fallen in love and my mother had fallen pregnant with me.” My father is a very special person and I was always proud to see him with my mother. And I would always emphasise that my father is not just Korean, he is North Korean Liana Kang In the late ’50s, North Korean students were invited home to visit their families, and deeper background checks were conducted. Kang’s father, however, was doing an internship in what was then Czechoslovakia so missed out on the trip. Kang says just 60 per cent of the students returned, and her father’s missed opportunity turned out to be a life-changing event. “My father’s good friend was among those who had returned on that trip,” she says. “Since he knew about my father’s family history, when he came back to East Berlin he told my father that he should not return to Pyongyang because he knew my father would not be allowed to return. So they decided to defect to West Berlin together.” In total there were 21 defectors and, Kang says, the journey was a simple one. “They just took the train from Dresden to Berlin, and then they went into the subway. It was very, very easy,” she says. “At this time there were a lot of East German defections and they were all dealt with by the West German government. But foreigners who defected from the East were dealt with by the Americans. So my father and his friend were brought into a West German refugee camp. “The next day, they were transported in a car, blindfolded, to another part of Berlin, where they were interrogated by the CIA. They had to tell their story repeatedly during that time, were subject to lie detector tests, and were not allowed to go out.” Despite the difficult conditions, Kang says the pair were treated well by the CIA officers and her father tasted Coca-Cola for the first time – he later said he had never tasted anything so “spectacular”. After six weeks, they were free to go wherever they wanted, but the next step was not an easy one. Kang, now 55 and a high-school German language teacher, says her “father said the most difficult thing for him was to make decisions. Aside from taking the decision to defect, this was the first time in his life that he actually had to make a decision for himself because up until that point, everything had been decided for him”. Across the border in Dresden, considered then to be one of the GDR’S economic and cultural centres, Maria’s father, Hwang Il-nam, was among those who left East Germany in the ’50s and failed to return. Her mother, she says, was open about what had happened. “After my father returned [to North Korea], my parents kept in touch by writing letters but the letters didn’t contain anything in particular, and after a year they stopped coming. I don’t know if it was my father who stopped writing or if authorities stopped delivering the letters to him, but after forcing their return, I don’t think either North Korea nor the GDR wanted these couples to keep in touch.” Back on the other side, Kang’s father had settled in Aachen, a city in West Germany close to the border with Belgium and Holland that had a sizeable South Korean population thanks to the Gastarbeiter programme. In 1961, he met Kang’s mother and, two years later, they married. As a North Korean in a South Korean community, Kang’s father was not particularly trusted. “There were some incidents in the mid-’60s where South Korean workers died because they didn’t understand enough of the German language,” she says. “My father then decided that he would teach them [the language]. “Initially, South Koreans thought this was a nice idea but then some people started to question his motives for teaching. Some thought he was a spy wanting to indoctrinate them and convert them to communism.” Two children followed, first a son, Andree, in 1964, then Liana, in 1966. Kang says she enjoyed standing out among Germans and South Koreans alike. “I felt my brother and I were special and we never had the feeling that we were worth less than anybody else,” she says. “I’ve spoken to a lot of mixed Koreans, and especially those from my generation say they always had the sense of being less than the other German children. “But for us that wasn’t the case. My father is a very special person and I was always proud to see him with my mother. And I would always emphasise that my father is not just Korean, he is North Korean.” It was a different story for Maria growing up in the GDR. She says she didn’t notice that her father was missing, it was more that she felt she lacked a father figure. But years later, she learned through a social worker that there were about 25 other people whose fathers were North Korean and who had left in the same way. They ended up forming a group, known as the “children of North Korean fathers”. “Meeting the rest of the group was really helpful,” says Maria, “I finally had people who knew exactly what I was going through. We formed a deep connection where we were able to talk about our past traumas and what it was like growing up without a father. “Even though I didn’t realise it as a child, I think my mother would’ve wanted a partner in her life and it was only once I was grown up did she find a new partner. Most women in the same circumstances as my mother later married or had a German partner.” As Maria and Kang got older, they both delved deeper into their paternal family tree. With the fall of the Berlin Wall leading to easier and cheaper international travel, Maria was able to go to North Korea in 1991. Equipped with little knowledge of how to look for her father, she was also unsure of whether he would want to see her, or whether doing so would somehow endanger him. She says she had learned that many of those returning students had been “re-educated” to fall in line with North Korean values as they were considered to have become too liberal during their time abroad, and may have married and had children with so-called proper North Korean comrades to help them resettle back into the country. Maria says she had to find a discreet way to reach her father: “Since I couldn’t speak the language and couldn’t move around freely in North Korea, my only option was to go to the embassy [in Berlin] to ask for help. So me and my husband [then boyfriend] came up with an excuse to meet him. “We told the people at the embassy that my husband’s father used to be my father’s professor back when he was studying in Germany and that we had a gift for him from his father. The package included a book and a letter from me in which I indirectly hinted at my true identity but never explicitly said I was his daughter in case someone else opened it. “We went to the embassy and they said they would give it to him but I doubt they did, especially since I had very little information about him that I could provide.” With the “children of North Korean fathers” group playing a supportive role for those seeking to contact their parent, in 2007, Maria made an appeal to the German Red Cross to help find her father, but to no avail. Other children did the same and most received messages that their father had already died. For Maria, that confirmation came 12 years later, in 2019, when she received news that her father had passed away in 1988 following an illness. Upon hearing the news, she says she felt relieved that he was already dead when she visited the country: “The thought that maybe I could have met him back then but missed my chance had been consuming me but knowing he was already dead when I was in Pyongyang provided some relief.” Maria, who moved to Berlin in the ’80s to study and now works at a Korean-German cultural organisation called Korea Verband, remains close with the group. Over the years they have gone on holidays together, including to Vietnam and South Korea, and have continued to meet, though less so during the pandemic. “People in Germany usually don’t know a lot about Korea in general let alone about the North Korean students who came here, started a family and then suddenly had to leave again,” she says. “If anything’s known about Korea it’s mostly about the Korean war and how the Koreas are separated.” Kang says she spent many years trying to get her father to open up about his life and they planned to visit North Korea together at one point, but both talking and visiting was too painful for him. It was not until she decided to pursue it for her PhD that her father, who turns 90 in December, was willing to talk. “My strong feeling is that as soon as my father defected, his family were sent to a prison camp,” she says. “I cannot talk about this to my father as he hopes and thinks they are all doing well. But I don’t think anybody survived. And if they did, I will never contact them because that would endanger them.” After reunification, Germany established diplomatic relations with both the Koreas and official statistics show that there are more than 40,000 Koreans currently living in Germany, with a sizeable proportion in Berlin, Frankfurt and Aachen. For second-generation Korean-Germans, views on reunification are often complicated. As Kang says, “I have some great fears if reunification in Korea was to ever take place. I fear reunification might be bloody because people could get violent against those who oppress them. I also have fears that since South Korea is a capitalist country and North Korea is full of landscapes that are so beautiful and breathtaking this heritage will be taken by South Korean real estate sharks.” Thinking back to his historic trip to Pyongyang as a student, Lee says he was upset about how little interest the world showed in the moment. “It was a significant moment and it could have been bigger if the world had taken notice. I travelled to Pyongyang just a few months before the Wall came down and I was so angry after it fell. We had tried to do something for Korean reunification when we were in Pyongyang but nobody supported us. “People were saying that it was ridiculous to think we could unify a divided country. Yet that’s exactly what happened just months later in Germany.” More than three decades on, Lee says his dreams of a reunified Korea are less hopeful. “I’m afraid about what will happen when the generation who experienced a unified Korea, like my parents, die. The generations to follow will only know a divided country [and] will have no emotional bond with the idea of a unified Korea. “People look at Germany and say reunification cost former West Germany too much and South Korea wouldn’t be able to afford it, but I think this is the wrong approach. If you really want to have reunification, you have to rethink everything. “You cannot take Germany as an example, because Germany hasn’t reunified in the best way possible for people on both sides. And these are the lessons we will have to learn for Korean reunification.”