When the wall dividing East and West Berlin into Soviet and Western spheres of influence (respectively) came down in 1989, leading to the reunification of Germany as a single country the following year, a lot changed fairly rapidly, including how the region was governed and how laws were defined and enforced.
There were still differences in how people thought and behaved, however, and these lingering distinctions between folks who grew up in what were previously Eastern and Western portions of the country came to be known as “die Mauer im Kopf,” or “the Wall In the Head,” referring to the persistence of those previously enforced distinctions, even after the physical wall and regional governments that enforced these differences had disappeared.
Research into this German-specific disunity has found that decades after the reunification of the country under a single government, East German cultural identities persisted (despite, or perhaps in part because of the success and dominance of West German ideas, economics, and so on).
This is thought to be partially the consequence of economic shocks that rippled across East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also because the now-defunct East German government—though toppled because the majority of its people didn’t like it—still represented a culture that was now disappearing, which seems to have led to a sort of cultural backlash, despite those associations being linked to an abusive, not-terribly-capable system of leadership.
This has changed somewhat in recent years.
Research from mid-1993 found that only 22% of West Germans and a mere 11% of East Germans felt that they were part of a single nation, but more recent research has shown that ideological markers (like those associated with religion) have converged substantially: religiosity becoming more important in the East and less important in the West.
Trust in the government has also become more aligned (previously, the West had far more faith in their governmental system than the East), and folks across Germany have a near-identical life evaluation score—about 40% of the total population (averaged across former East and West regions) report that they are thriving.
There are still some distinctions, though, especially in terms of politics.
East Germany has favored far-right political parties in recent years, and has (in line with that preference) become a lot less happy about immigration and the influence Western powers, like the US, have on local policy.
What’s interesting and potentially useful about this concept of “Head Walls,” or “Walls of the Mind” is that physical realities—governments, but also physical infrastructure like walls—can influence the behaviors, priorities, and overall thinking of people well into the future, even beyond the lifespan of those realities.
This has implications for all sorts of things, but it’s perhaps especially notable at a moment in which the physical world around us is changing at a rapid pace (due to climate change, due to renewed conflicts, and due to the rebuilding and replacing of infrastructure), as it suggests we could retain physical-reality-linked biases well past the rational lifespan of those biases.
This implies that, at times, positive changes could be more difficult to implement than we might initially suspect, due to cultural mores linked to a previous version of the status quo.