scot47

In the last summer of the German Democratic Republic (1990) I worked as a tutor on the regular summer course for German students and teachers of English at the "Paedagogische Hochschule Karl Liebknecht". This was housed in the Servants' Quarters (Communs) of the New Palais in Potsdam. Perhaps it had been suitable as a Royal Pa;lace - it was not a great environment for teaching or teacher training.

My contacts with "The Workers' and Peasants' State" started in 1963 and continued on and off until the end.

It has gone for ever now and all that I have is a few fading memories. The architecture is still there -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Pa...mvokQ4He5KrMi0

Assanah

Potsdam is very nice.

How was working in the East?

scot47

It was a summer job that only lasted for 6 weeks. It was at the time when we knew that the GDR was about to be taken over by the "Klassenfeind" in Bonn. There were suicides, nervous breakdowns and the beginning of the psychological condition known as "Wendekrankheit"

http://www.eurekaencyclopedia.com/in...nified_Germany

Most of the people I knew and mixed with had a certain sympathy for the high ideals of the founders of Socialism on German soil. There were many dissidents but I did not know them.

scot47

I have a friend who still lives in "die erste sozialistische Strasse auf deutschem Boden". Formerly Stalinallee it is now Karl-Marx-Allee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Marx-Allee

Gordon Barlow

My best memory of East Germany was the leaving of it! Not for ideological reasons at all: I was 25 and too callow and uneducated to know much about the politics of Europe. But my travelling companion and I exited East Germany at Checkpoint Charlie, after a week's sight-seeing in the DDR - which I was told (at both ends of the checkpoint) was out of the question and strictly forbidden. It's a long story, but to keep it short... we turned up at the Eastern guardhouse at about 20 minutes to midnight on the last day of our visa (bought at the border with Poland a week before), to be told that we must go around to the other side of West Berlin and exit/enter there. In a masterpiece of bluff and bullshit, I managed to persuade the guards to let us go through anyway. The reaction of the US soldiers at the other end of the obstacle course was sheer disbelief. We were the first and only travellers to have done the crossing, they said. They were of half a mind to send us back!

In those days one could cross from West Berlin to East, at Checkpoint Charlie, and return; that was a special one-day-tourists' privilege that I had done a couple of years before. But to formally leave the DDR, that route wasn't allowed. Fun times!