More political sausage for the day, folks. Bear with me. I know it’s a bit on the dry side, but it’s where I’m at for the next couple of weeks and all of it relates to another thing I’ve got on the burner at present. I’ll try to make it entertaining by being as irreverent and slapstick as I can, without losing the thrust of the argument.

So I was rummaging through yet another old stack of books last week when I happened across Anthony Bailey’s excellent early-‘80s travelogue Around the Edge of the Forest: An Iron Curtain Journey that recalls his early-1980’s journey along the fringe of the East and West German border area along – as the book’s title promises — the wooded forest separating the two former belligerent Germanys.

I nearly upended the shelf on which Bailey’s book was resting in my sudden zeal to prise it from the stack, given how rare it is these days in Prague to find books of this type in homes. Two decades after Wall Fall, the interests of most denizens of this post-Communist statelet is decidedly far away from discussions of past crimes and ignominies, with its focus pointed clearly towards the West.

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I’ve been on something of a North Korea tear of late as some will know, having blogged about the unpredictable DPRK extensively last week here, here, and here. Like the iconic British wartime PM Churchill once said — and I’m paraphrasing, naturally — if you gaze far back enough into history, you’ll have all the answers you need for tomorrow. This is why Anthony Bailey’s book is so instructive and why I nearly banged my noodle on the shelf to retrieve it.

I’ve been giggling as I near the end of the read, because the author was fond of quoting several of the West Germans he met along his journey who were so confident beyond a shadow of a doubt about their reasoning on the outbreak of an imminent hot war between the Cold War foes – remember, this is 1981-2 were talking about here, two years into Regan’s first Presidential term — some of whom were predicting a union between the rival belligerents perhaps only within a century’s time. As I finger my way through it, it’s shocking to read how wholly unprepared Germans were for the sudden implosion of “Communism” and how they believed with every fiber of their being that the Iron Curtain was there for good.

So what’s the North Korean connection, you ask?

Indeed, the conditions prevailing between today’s disputing Koreas do bear a certain resemblance to the former (some say still extant) German rivals, though I note how experts such as Barbara Demick, Kongdan Oh & Ralph Hassig, B.F. Myers, and Deborah Braughtigam – to a (wo)man – all eschew the need to spout definitive theories about the imminent collapse of the Kim cult or even of a future DPRK union with the southern democratic and US-sponsored half of the peninsula. Korea exists very much in a sort of Krakauer-ian up in the air state, and the cited scholars amply furnish their respective stocks of research and primary source material – hardly easy to lay paws on considering the Knox-like secretiveness of the Kim regime – to back up their respective erudite positions. Can there be any lesson from the German experience in what shall guide the fate of the two Koreas? Given the striking similarities between the two regions: a DMZ,

two contentious political ideologies, two well-stocked militaries, third-party sponsorship for both nations – albeit ironically in North Korea’s case, given how much joint US/South Korean aid it receives from the very same two “enemies” it simultaneously reviles and lambastes in its domestic propaganda – do the experts analyze Korea from a German Cold War perspective, or not?

Bailey’s book was a choice find amidst yet another old book dust pile and my hand was guided to it. Now that I’m nearly done, I wonder how those Korean scholars (not to mention the legions of panda huggers and dragon slayers) see a way out of the Korean conflict through the roots and eventual resolution of the Soviet-US contretemps which played out in post-war Germany.

Anyone ever consider this before?

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