Living in Germany, I keep noticing the same shape turn up in separate conversations, often enough now that I’ve stopped putting it down to coincidence. The East comes up: Russia, China, sometimes both in the same breath, and before long the talk has turned toward connection rather than distance. Not agreement: nobody I’ve spoken to here claims to support either government wholesale. But a working assumption that a bridge is worth maintaining, a conversation worth attempting.
I don’t share that reflex. What I carry instead is closer to a wall.
I was raised to think of East and West as two different things, not two ends of one exchange. The West had done the work: it built the institutions and ran the experiments that produced most of the world people now live inside, whether they chose to or not. The East, in the version handed to me, mostly watched and copied, took what the West had made and put its own stamp on it after the fact.
Britain is an island, and an island teaches you to look outward from a coast rather than across a border. There’s a wall here too, if you go looking for it: Hadrian’s, built to hold Roman Britain’s edge against whatever lay beyond it. But it sits well outside anyone’s living memory, and it never marked two versions of one argument facing each other across a single divided country. There’s no place a British person can stand and say we were split down the middle, within one adult lifetime, half answering to one system and half to another. The Channel does the dividing instead, permanently, in one direction, and everything past it becomes simply the far side.
Germany’s position is different, and I wonder whether that has something to do with what I keep hearing here. For four decades within living memory the country was split down the middle, one half answering to NATO, one half to Moscow, a wall running straight through the capital.
I was twenty-four when I watched the Brexit vote from outside the country, feeling the usual ambivalence I feel toward these sort of shenanigans. But the pull between insularity and looking outward had been sitting within my own self for a good while before I crossed the Channel for good.
Now I live among people who often reach for the East more readily than the Brits I grew up around ever did, still carrying the upbringing that only ever showed me a coastline.
It’s taught me where the coastline is: that the view I was raised on is one civilisational answer among others, built by a particular geography and history, and mine only because of where and when I happened to be made.
What that leaves me with isn’t an answer to which view is truer. It’s the narrower version of seeing both at once: the wall I was built with, and the bridge instinct I keep meeting here, without settling fully into either.