system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why did the process of German reunification after 1990 prove to be so unexpectedly difficult?

Would similar difficulites be face by Korea today?
gpt
Actually the process of German reunification while extremely costly and not without its problems did go relatively smoothly.

A Korean unification by comparison would be orders of magnitude harder.

The price of German unification is estimated to have been over 2 trillion Euro and still be costing a tidy sum each passing year a quarter of a century later.

However when Germany reunited conditions were almost optimal for it compared to Korea.

The people in West German outnumbered those in the east about 4  to 1, while currently North Korea has about half as many people as South Korea. It should be obvious that four guys pooling their resources to lift another guy up will have an easier time doing it than if there were just two of them trying the same thing.

Another thing that gets often forgotten is that while East Germany was poor compared to West Germany, they were still one of the richest countries of communist block, having relatively high standards of living. Looking back you often hear jokes about the state of the infrastructure and the lack of goods available in East Germany. How there were so few phones and how you had to wait years to get the car you wanted and how there were long lines everywhere.

On the other hand in North Korea peasants are literally starving. The state of the industry and infrastructure in North Korea is a joke compared to the one of East Germany a quarter of a century ago.

Lifting East Germany technologically up to the level of West Germany was a monumental task, but the gap between the two countries was small compared to the gap between North and South Korea.

Then there are the people. Germany was divided for a shorter time than Korea has been so far. When Germany reunited, families reunited. They had only been divided for a few decades and despite the travel restrictions many had never lost contact entirely. People knew each other. They remembered each other. There were plenty of people who remembered what it had been like before the division and people kept writing letters to their cousins and were even allowed to visit sometimes.

The result was that when reunification happened in Germany it was for many a personal thing. Older people reunited with family and young children were introduced to their cousins that they only had seen pictures of before.

By comparison Korea has been divided since 1948 and with conditions in North Korea (and for some time to a lesser degree in the south too) there aren't many left who remember the time before. They occasionally make this show about reuniting families under controlled circumstances, but if you look at the people involved you see that they get older and older. There aren't many people in a country that has to deal with starvation that make it to the age of 80.

Unlike Germany the two populations have been divided much more strongly. There is almost no contact by comparison and by the time a reunification might happen nobody will still be alive to remember family on the other side personally. The two Koreas have become strangers to one another.

And it is not just their attitude to one another. East Germans were well educated and if you didn't make the mistake of majoring in something politics related, chances were that your East German University degree would still count for something in a unified Germany. North Korea is falling behind however.

And then there is the propaganda. Of course you had propaganda in East Germany too, but it seems to be a lot worse in North Korea. It will be a lot harder to reintegrate someone from North Korea into polite society as they seem to have less of a clue about how the world actually works.

All in all reuniting North and South Korea would be a far more daunting tasks  than it was to reunificate Germany.

Germany is one of the richest country in the world and their tasks was much easier. South Korea while rather rich themselves would have a much harder time of it.

It seems impossible for reunite Korea without the financial help of the international community. It would be worth it for the stabilizing influence alone for most of the local and the worlds big players, but it would be a monumental task still that would take many, many trillions and many decades  to accomplish.

And of course first there must be an opportunity for it. A peaceful transition as happened in Germany is the best case scenario, but it seems unlikely that the North Korean regime would collapse peacefully into a people who actually want democracy and freedom and reunification.