DMZ – No Man’s Land at the 38th Parallel

While Germany’s division is history, Korea remains a divided country to this day. The border that has run through the peninsula since the end of the Second World War is a legacy of the Cold War, following seamlessly from the period of Japanese colonial rule. Not even the devastating Korean War was to change that. Since 1953, a four-kilometre-wide no man’s land – the DMZ – has separated North from South over a length of 248 kilometres. A massive military presence maintains the armistice and keeps people away from the mined territory. The paradoxical effect has been a flourishing of nature: conservationists already envision it as Korea’s future “Green Belt”. Yet reunification is not in sight. Bodo Hartwig visited the DMZ at the Imjin – a river that, much like the Elbe in divided Germany, flows through both sides of the severed land.