1. Skip to content
  2. Skip to main menu
  3. Skip to more DW sites

German Living in a Corner of South Korea

DW staff (jam)August 9, 2005

There are cobblestone streets, red-tiled roofs, the occasional garden gnome and conversations in German. Sounds like your basic small German village, and it is. Only this one is in South Korea.

https://p.dw.com/p/71Nb
South Korea wants its own little piece of idyllic German life

Down on the far southern tip of the Korean peninsula, a bit of Germany has been imported. But it's not just bratwurst and beer and a couple of posters of Castle Neuschwanstein. This time an entire village is being constructed on a German model.

Each of the white-walled houses that are being built in this planned community carved out of a mountain has to follow one of five German architectural plans. The people who live here are generally German, or lived in Germany for many years. They speak the language. They like to garden and watch German television.

The place, called simply "German Village," is three years old and the improbable brainchild of the authorities in Namhae County, a rural area of South Korea which has watched its population drain away due to migration to urban areas and declining birthrates.

The county decided to offer cheap land and housing subsidies to any Korean who had lived in Germany for at least two decades. There were takers, since in the 1960s and 70s, South Korea, poor and overpopulated at the time, sent thousands of its citizens to Germany to work as nurses or miners.

"When the opportunity arose, I said, 'Let's go!' right away," Friedrich-Wilhelm Engel, 76, told The New York Times. He and his wife, Woo Chun Ja, built the village's third house. He came to German Village two and a half years ago from Frankfurt. His wife had worked in Germany for 33 years.

The uncanny re-creation of German life, and the presence of German speakers, has proven a draw for German-language students. This summer, 42 came here for an immersion course.

"It's about 90 percent German," one of the German teachers, Kai Schröder, told The New York Times. "It's better, or more like a German village than a German village, because the houses are new and big. It's an idealized expression of German living."