By Christy DeSmith for the Harvard Gazette
Addie Esposito ’25 grew up with stories about life in Germany.
“My mom was there for two years just after the Berlin Wall fell,” Esposito said. “She actually has three tiny pieces of the Wall, one for me and each of my sisters.”
At Harvard, Esposito’s fascination with German culture, and the complicated legacy of its post-World War II split into East and West, deepened. A double concentrator in government and German, she was able to fully immerse herself in these interests while completing an internship in the German parliament last summer. Working at the Bundestag also allowed Esposito to launch an ambitious project studying how the Cold War continues to shape German identity today.
“She completed this rich, rich analysis of the persistent divide between East and West,” said her thesis adviser, Daniel Ziblatt, the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. “When Germany unified in 1990, the expectation was that this divide would quickly pass. What’s remarkable is that it has endured for more than a generation and become a permanent feature of German political culture. … In some ways, it’s analogous to regional divides in the U.S. after the Civil War.”
Esposito first visited Germany with her mother at age 5. “I was just fascinated by the language,” she recalled. “My mom said I started saying German words in my sleep, just some basics like ‘blau,’ which is blue, and ‘Brot,’ which is bread.”
In middle school, German was the obvious choice for Esposito’s foreign language elective. In high school, the Raleigh, North Carolina, native completed a two-week exchange program in Frankfurt, Germany, and interned at a nonprofit run by her mother’s friend in a small town near the French border.
As a College first-year, Esposito enrolled in Ziblatt’s “Democracy: Breakthroughs and Breakdowns,” drawn to the professor’s expertise in authoritarianism and democracy in the U.S. and in Europe — Germany in particular.
“I thought, ‘This person is at the intersection of all my interests,’” Esposito recalled. “I kind of clung to him like a barnacle ever since.”
“I’d love to be the ambassador to Germany. I would be thrilled to work for the State Department. I would like to use my German no matter what.”
Ziblatt helped Esposito land her position with a member of the center-left Social Democrat Party representing part of Hamburg, Germany. This provided her with access to the full chamber, which totaled more than 700 legislators at the time. “It meant I could go anywhere I wanted in the Bundestag unaccompanied,” said Esposito, whose internship was made possible by the Center for European Studies.
One area, however, was strictly off-limits. Mainline German political parties have constructed what they call “a firewall” against cooperation with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is most popular in the country’s eastern states.
“For the parliamentarian with whom I was working, that meant zero contact,” Esposito explained. “Therefore, the AfD was initially excluded from my interview pool.”
In the end, the former Harvard International Review co-editor in chief surveyed 183 parliamentarians to learn about their backgrounds as well as the contours of their identities. Esposito also did face-to-face interviews (in German) with 48 members, including 17 members from the former Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic (GDR). Once her internship was complete, she moved to secure what Ziblatt characterized as “rare” research interviews with two members of the AfD.
