The Other Far East

There’s a running joke inside Germany that nobody bothers explaining to outsiders: the eastern states—Brandenburg, Thuringia, Saxony—are treated with the wide-eyed bafflement most Europeans reserve for places requiring a visa and a shot record. Mention moving there for university and watch the face. A kind of polite horror, as if you’d announced relocation to somewhere genuinely remote and unknowable.

This is the whole premise behind "Studieren in Fernost"—a campaign to push young people toward underpopulated universities in the former East. The name plays on Fernost, the German word for the Far East, the same one used for Japan and South Korea, applied here without apparent irony to Potsdam and Erfurt. Which is either a brilliant piece of self-awareness or an accidental confession about how the country still processes its own geography.

Reunification happened in 1990. You can drive from Hamburg to Leipzig in under three hours. And yet the mental image persists—the East as a blank, something to be ventured into rather than simply moved to. The campaign dispatched teenage journalists on a literal "safari" through these regions, as if sending correspondents to report back from unknown territory. The absurdity is presumably the point, or at least the campaign hopes it is.

Whether it works is another question. The demographic drain from eastern universities has been real and stubborn—not because the places are mysterious but because the jobs were elsewhere, the connections were elsewhere, the mythology of making something of yourself was written around western cities. No amount of ironic rebranding changes that math. Still, there’s something worth sitting with in the joke: that the distance in your head can outlast the distance on the map by decades, that a reunified country can still carry an internal border existing entirely in the imagination.