Quotes About East Germany

The people in East Germany have lived through so many changes in the last 15 years like never before in the country, and they did this often with great enthusiasm. But in the West we also have a high degree of transformations.

Per capita the East Germans drank more than twice as much as their West German counterparts.

What surprises me about living here is that, no matter how much is taken out, this linoleum palace continues to contain all the necessities for life, at the same time as it refuses to admit a single thing, either accidentally or arranged, of beauty or joy. In this, I think, it is much like East Germany itself.

Rigid, state-enforced sex equality is a Marxist policy, pursued to the outer limits in the old East Germany and now being adopted here.

You know, I grew up in the East part of Germany so we never had English in school, we had to learn Russian.

Very early, it became clear to me that East Germany could not function.

I was the very first athlete in East Germany allowed to go professional.

I sometimes joke - but the joke is not so wrong - that after my time in East Germany, I could either afford therapy to work through what happened under the Communists or move to New York.

Thirty years ago, this promise, this allure of democracy, drove hundreds of thousands of people in East Germany onto the streets. What courage they showed! It was these brave people, these peaceful heroes and heroines, who brought the Wall tumbling down.

Show me what society that ever existed that did not use the tools that they had available. Ask any person from East Germany... you will never hear somebody say, 'The Stasi never bothered me because I didn't have anything to hide.' That's not a thing that people say.

Since German reunification in 1990, historians and researchers have been free to work in the East, where the lost Nazi art collection disappeared.

Socialist personality in German. In East Germany and the rest of the Soviet bloc, a prescribed set of attitudes and behaviours that confirmed you as politically correct. In theory, the socialist personality was a repository of moral rectitude and 'class consciousness'. In practice, it was an embodiment of that long-suffering creature Homo sovieticus, and effectively meant not having a face, a name, or a destiny, unless it was the right one.

New York is the opposite of East Germany, the crown of individuality. That's why I can work well here and find out what I personally think of the pieces I'm learning. I can lay aside all the baggage of German education. In any case, whatever I do, I can't lose it altogether.

On November 9, 1989, while CIA experts on Soviet and East German politics were briefing President George H. W. Bush on why the Berlin Wall was not likely to come down any time soon, a National Security Council staff member politely entered the Oval Office and urged the president to turn on his television set—to see both East and West Germans battering away at the Wall.

I grew up in East Germany, and we were short on technology. So my father was really proud to be the owner of a turntable.

In Germany, especially, the sealing of the East-West border by the Berlin Wall (1961) ended the migration from East Germany that had sustained the West German labor market and thus increased the need for workers from other sources.

The danger of contacts of any kind was exposed in 1970 by the arrest, trial and subsequent acquittal of Will Owen, the 68-year-old Labour MP for Morpeth, on Official Secrets charges. Owen, who headed a travel firm specialising in visits to East Germany, was also a member of Parliament's Estimates Committee, and he was charged with giving Czech intelligence information of a confidential nature.

We do not like to think of the United States as a police state, a nation like East Germany that people had to escape from, but the slaveholding states were just that.

The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phony and fragile as East Germany did thirty years ago.

Nuking Russia might not be a bad idea as far as the bleedin' world is concerned. They've plunged a lot of people into miserable lives. You've only got to be in East Germany to see it. It's a horrible way to live. It's like Doncaster.

She concentrated on the former East Germany, stronghold of the infamous secret police, the Stasi (the Ministry for State Security).

The former East Germany hardly had a monopoly on complicity. Life's every moment caught one out in one form or another.