The house where my grandfather was born. Feb. 1971

State-owned hotel in one of the towns where our relatives lived. Note the red propaganda banner on the street. July 1979

4 July 1979
Barbed wire electric fences, floodlights, mine fields, watch towers, and guns ... This is the edge of the world for millions, even billions, of people. As we sat at the [border] zone waiting for our papers to be processed and our belongings and money declared ... One of the guards was a friendly young man who spent a few minutes talking with Dad about the University of Kaiserslautern [where my dad was working that year]. I could tell by the faraway, wistful look in the guard's eyes that he wanted to get out.

Once across the border I felt like I was on another planet, a bleak, monotone planet. All the houses are a dun-colored yellow or brown, the sky is dim, the sun pale, the trees and grass faded. Even the wild red poppies look dull. The roads are terrible. There were few cars on the road, all of Russian manufacture, similar appearance, and poor quality.

It is difficult to breathe freely in East Germany.

We stopped in Auerbach to get our visas. There were several propaganda posters around the town: "We love our Socialist fatherland." "The more Socialism, the more freedom."

[Redacted for privacy] is a poor, filthy industrial town. There is a brook running through it which also runs by a brewery. It smells sickeningly, even at a distance, of stale beer and sewage. The air is as polluted as the stream. The sun hardly finds its way through the smog, when it shines at all. The outsides of the buildings are horribly run down and dirty while the streets are literally the pits. None of the people look very healthy; there are three or four poorly-stocked grocery stores for a city of 11,000. Prices are quite high, quality poor, and salaries very low - 400-600 marks per month.

Street scene in an East German town, July 1979

Our hotel rooms were nicer than I had expected, clean and modern. On the other hand, they were expensive (as foreigners, we had to pay twice the regular rates) and had no hot water.

I can't believe how small [relatives'] apartment is; it's barely large enough for five people. They have some nice possessions, including a color TV. [This town was close enough to the border that they could get West German TV signals on their televisions, but they were forbidden to watch it. At work, people would secretly trade what they had been able to write down of the West German TV schedule. When we were at the relatives' place one evening, they closed the curtains and pulled out their copy of the schedule from where it was hidden so they could watch TV.]

5 July 1979
The apartments we saw were very small and primitive but clean, with lace curtains and lovely displays of china and crystal. The latter items are no longer available. I noticed that everything that has to do with the government is really scuzzy and low class, while the people really care about having a neat home in the old style.

People really treasure their nice things because they can't easily get them now. Near [this town] there is a nice housing development with large houses and yards. Only influential members of the Communist party can live there.

We saw the church whose dome my great-grandfather built. Church services are permitted but are closely monitored.

We passed a huge long line at the vegetable shop. It makes me mad - the young people have to work all day to survive, and rely on the grandparents for shopping. But a lot of those old people simply aren't able to stand in those long lines.

Karl-Marx-Stadt [Chemnitz] is the ugliest, crumbliest, dirtiest, grayest, most depressing city I've ever imagined. It consists of lousy streets, decrepit old houses, and rows of identical new apartment buildings. There is a huge Russian army base by [elderly cousin S's] apartment. I tried to help the kids find a playground, but I wasn't sure where I was and wasn't allowed to go. I got so depressed that I went back to S's and did a whole English lesson [still trying to finish my home study for that year of school].

S has a Kleingarten [garden plot] and thus is able to have fresh fruits and vegetables, at least in the summer. The 1 km walk to her garden is so much easier than standing in line for an hour to buy a wilted cucumber. [I remember she had fresh rhubarb, to make a cake or torte with, which she was storing in her bathtub for lack of anywhere else to keep it.]

S's son said that he would save every pfennig and sacrifice anything to go to the States for a few weeks.

7 July 1979
The people in the country no longer have their own farms and cows, but they do have vegetable gardens and chickens. [The farms were all joined together and made into communal farms.] The farm people are considerably healthier than the rest of the population and have the added luxury of owning their own homes [the homes their families have owned for generations].

There are many people in East Germany who are skilled in handwork. Cousin D used to make little crocheted baskets and Cousin H's friend is quite good at woodwork. They aren't allowed to sell the things they make.

11 July 1979
I wonder what it would be like to work as a border guard. It must be strange, seeing the hills on the other side every day for years but not being able to go to them.

Across the border, the sun seemed brighter, the grass greener, etc. At the gas station, [my youngest brother] R got out and kissed the ground. For the first time in five days, I could breathe deeply without getting lungfuls of smog.