Quotes About GDR

As a 7-year-old child, I saw the Wall being erected. No one - although it was a stark violation of international law - believed at the time that one ought to intervene militarily in order to protect citizens of the GDR and whole Eastern bloc, of the consequences of that - namely, to live in lack of freedom for many, many years.

For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.

Apparently, even in the GDR, sleep deprivation amounted to torture, and torture, at least of minors, was not official policy.

Julia and her family, like many others in the GDR, trod this line between seeing things for what they were in the GDR, and ignoring those realities in order to stay sane.

The penalties for being an accessory to the attempt to flee the [GDR] were greater than the crime of trying to flee itself.

But in Potsdam people come up and say'—he puts on a small sorry voice—'"You were right. Capitalism is even worse than you told us it would be. In the GDR you could go out alone at night as a woman! You could leave your apartment door open!"' You didn't need to, I think, they could see inside anyway.

But there was also a car—for the GDR an expensive car, a Russian Lada—that

It was a condition of sanity both to accept 'GDR-logic' and to ignore it. 'If you took things as seriously as people in the west think we must have, we would have all killed ourselves!

Von Schnitzler's job was to show extracts from western television broadcast into the GDR—anything from news items to game shows to 'Dallas'—and rip it to shreds. 'That man radiated so much nastiness he simply wasn't credible. You'd come away feeling sullied, as if you'd spent half an hour atrociously badmouthing someone.

By the time of the GDR's demise, two in every 13 citizens were informers.

Considering that the GDR—to adapt Mirabeau's description of Hohenzollern Prussia—was little more than a security service with a state, it demonstrated in the glow of retrospect a remarkable capacity to evoke affection and even longing.