How the Cold War continues to shape German identity

Addie Esposito ’25 grew up with stories about life in Germany.

“My mom was there for two years just after the Berlin Wall fell,” Esposito said. “She actually has three tiny pieces of the Wall, one for me and each of my sisters.”

At Harvard, Esposito’s fascination with German culture, and the complicated legacy of its post-World War II split into East and West, deepened. A double concentrator in government and German, she was able to fully immerse herself in these interests while completing an internship in the German parliament last summer. Working at the Bundestag also allowed Esposito to launch an ambitious project studying how the Cold War continues to shape German identity today.

“She completed this rich, rich analysis of the persistent divide between East and West,” said her thesis adviser, Daniel Ziblatt, the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. “When Germany unified in 1990, the expectation was that this divide would quickly pass. What’s remarkable is that it has endured for more than a generation and become a permanent feature of German political culture. … In some ways, it’s analogous to regional divides in the U.S. after the Civil War.”

Esposito first visited Germany with her mother at age 5. “I was just fascinated by the language,” she recalled. “My mom said I started saying German words in my sleep, just some basics like ‘blau,’ which is blue, and ‘Brot,’ which is bread.”

In middle school, German was the obvious choice for Esposito’s foreign language elective. In high school, the Raleigh, North Carolina, native completed a two-week exchange program in Frankfurt, Germany, and interned at a nonprofit run by her mother’s friend in a small town near the French border.

As a College first-year, Esposito enrolled in Ziblatt’s “Democracy: Breakthroughs and Breakdowns,” drawn to the professor’s expertise in authoritarianism and democracy in the U.S. and in Europe — Germany in particular.

“I thought, ‘This person is at the intersection of all my interests,’” Esposito recalled. “I kind of clung to him like a barnacle ever since.”

“I’d love to be the ambassador to Germany. I would be thrilled to work for the State Department. I would like to use my German no matter what.”

Ziblatt helped Esposito land her position with a member of the center-left Social Democrat Party representing part of Hamburg, Germany. This provided her with access to the full chamber, which totaled more than 700 legislators at the time. “It meant I could go anywhere I wanted in the Bundestag unaccompanied,” said Esposito, whose internship was made possible by the Center for European Studies.

One area, however, was strictly off-limits. Mainline German political parties have constructed what they call “a firewall” against cooperation with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is most popular in the country’s eastern states.

“For the parliamentarian with whom I was working, that meant zero contact,” Esposito explained. “Therefore, the AfD was initially excluded from my interview pool.”

In the end, the former Harvard International Review co-editor in chief surveyed 183 parliamentarians to learn about their backgrounds as well as the contours of their identities. Esposito also did face-to-face interviews (in German) with 48 members, including 17 members from the former Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic (GDR). Once her internship was complete, she moved to secure what Ziblatt characterized as “rare” research interviews with two members of the AfD.

“It’s pretty common for students to rely on pre-existing surveys for their theses,” he said. “But in this case, she used her own interviews to dig a lot deeper into how people think about their lives — and how those lives relate to politics and history.”

Esposito’s approach, with its unusual focus on political elites, uncovered regional attachments more pronounced than what pollsters had found with the broader German public. She discovered that more than half the parliamentarians from the former GDR still identify more as East German than anything else.

The identity proved somewhat less central for parliamentarians who grew up after East Germany’s Peaceful Revolution of 1989. “But it was still incredibly high,” Esposito said, with more than 40 percent of Millennial and Gen Z members from the region selecting East German as their primary identity.

A different pattern was observed with parliamentarians hailing from the part of the country once occupied by the U.S., Great Britain, and France. Just 9 percent of those Esposito surveyed identified as primarily West German. More than half identify as broadly German. More than a quarter identify as broadly European.

“West German identification isn’t really a thing,” Esposito said.

Esposito drew on her interviews to advance what she calls an “underdog” theory of East German identity. “It’s strengthened both by adversity and triumph,” she said. “That makes the identity incredibly durable.”

Outsiders can be too quick to connect the phenomenon to the East’s persisting socioeconomic disadvantages, Esposito noted. “There’s also this sense of positive distinctiveness rooted in feeling responsible for reunification. People said things like, ‘We earned this freedom — we’re the reason the wall fell.’”

The thesis also builds on previous findings concerning the East/West divergence in regard to 20th-century history. The East German dictatorship, founded in 1949, positioned itself as an anti-fascist state and distanced itself from Nazi crimes, she said.

In fact, lawmakers with the AfD (both from the former GDR) made statements Esposito interpreted as trivializing the Holocaust — by comparing it to COVID-19 restrictions, for example.

This dynamic helps explain the nuances Esposito recorded in how East and West Germans express national pride. “West Germans’ responses often followed a pattern of ‘I am not proud to be German, but I am proud of Germany’s achievements,’” she writes in her thesis. “East Germans often dropped the hedging language.”

Those from East Germany — comprising 16 to 26 percent of the overall population, depending on how the region is defined — also spoke of experiencing discrimination, a phenomenon Esposito corroborated in interviews with lawmakers from the West.

“She had this incredible access to the highest level of politics in the country,” Ziblatt observed. “And she used it to engage politicians in these long conversations about what it means to be German.”

Next up for Esposito is a master’s in public policy at the Hertie School in Berlin, where she’ll have the opportunity to complete public policy internships while perfecting her German. “By the time I finish at Hertie, I want to be fluent,” Esposito said.

Longer term, she hopes to earn a Ph.D. in political science. “Honestly, my dream position would be to do what Professor Ziblatt does now,” she said. “But I’m also interested in the public policy side of things. I’d love to be the ambassador to Germany. I would be thrilled to work for the State Department. I would like to use my German no matter what.”