Life Behind the Iron Curtain

Private images from a lost world of communism in Eastern Europe. Communists claimed they were building a socialist paradise. Most people think they created hell on earth. What was life really like for the people of Eastern Europe, effectively imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain? The answers are sometimes surprising. While some cannot forget the abnormality of those times, others feel that they led perfectly ordinary lives. This series, through rarely seen archive and personal testimony, captures the real lives of those living under communist rule. It was a way of life that disappeared when communism collapsed across Eastern Europe two decades ago. East Germany was socialism's showcase state. One of its iconic faces was a children's TV puppet called Sandman. He was designed to send East Germany's children happy to bed and to win their hearts for socialism. It simply had to reflect life in East Germany. It had to transmit class consciousness and feelings of solidarity. It had to reflect life in East Germany. The Sandman was made by people who used to live under socialism. They had a vision of socialism and communism and were happy to spread that vision, namely the vision of a better world, a more just world. And East Germany's role model for that better world was the Sandman's favorite holiday destination, the Soviet Union. East Germany was born out of the ruins of the Second World War. ...emerge from the Soviet zone of occupation established with the total defeat of Nazi Germany. Everywhere, symbols of the Soviet Union and images of its leader, Joseph Stalin, showed where the real power now lay. In the summer of 1945... 14-year-old schoolgirl Erika Riemann went back to her old school in the company of friends. A day she would never forget. We saw that Hitler's portrait had been replaced with Stalin's. So I drew a bow with some lipstick on Stalin's moustache. Because when I saw his portrait I thought he looked sad. That wasn't a good move. I never wanted to be an artist again in my whole life. Erika was sentenced to 10 years in prison, part of which she spent at the former Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. Here she was subjected to a mock execution. We had to go into a shower room. They told us they would do the same things they had done to the Jews, that there wouldn't be water coming out of the showers but gas. That was a very terrifying situation. There was great panic and then great relief when only warm water came out. I spent time in the fortress at Torgau, where many women were raped. I hadn't been raped yet, but the decision had been made that I'd be next. Still only a child, Erika suffered repeated physical and sexual abuse, like this episode in Torgau prison. It's affected my whole life. I hadn't had any sexual experience at the time. But I had to take all my clothes off and to sit on a bowl which was pushed down the stairs amongst all the men's baying. I can't talk about it. I've felt the repercussions till this day. I felt ashamed and dirty. I'm a mother and a grandmother, but after all these years, it still remains and I still feel dirty and degraded. It's very hard to endure such things when you're that young. Over 150,000 Germans were detained by the communists in special camps like Sachsenhausen. Almost a third of them died in captivity. In August... In August 1952, 80,000 young pioneers were invited to Dresden because we, the children, had to carry on socialism. At the age of 12, I was proud to attend the first pioneer. near meeting in Dresden. We knew about the Hitler Youth during the Third Reich, but they also wore neckties and played drums and trumpets. They wore uniforms. When the Pioneer Organisation was founded, many adults were opposed because it reminded them of the Hitler regime. So parents said, that's not going to happen to our children, not again. But my father was a teacher, and so he had the task of recruiting children for the Pioneer Organisations. The Pioneers served the newly formed workers' and peasants' state of East Germany, a one-party dictatorship modelled on the Soviet Union. Its propaganda stressed the dangers from Western imperialism, including the bizarre claim that America was dropping plagues of Colorado beetles from the air to destroy socialist crops. They would praise us for having collected those beetles. The very same American aeroplanes that had bombed Dresden, they would tell us, had also unleashed those beetles. Evil American imperialism. We made our first pioneer vow in Dresden. We children vowed that we would do anything to avoid such a terrible and evil war in the future. 80,000 children together said, that we promise. And I made that vow not with my mind, but with my heart. Stalin was the great hero. He was a god to us. Stalin the intelligent. Stalin the great hero. the wise. Stalin was the representative of the free world, the free world of socialism, and he was our role model. We would follow him unconditionally. We will follow him unconditionally. It was a high point for Stalinism in East Germany and a dangerous time for those not so singing the party's tune. Ursula Ruhmann was a dancer in Revue and Cabaret. By 1952, she'd landed a job as a scriptwriter with the state-owned film company DEFA. I had a contract with DEFA on a movie called The Destinies of Women. And The story was about women in East Berlin and women in West Berlin. The women in the East would be politically orientated and organized. Those in West Berlin would only be little dolls who cared about nothing but jewelry and fashion. Obviously the East Berlin authorities wanted to show that life was good only in the East. and everything in the West was corrupt. The Destinies of Women, filmed on the streets of East Berlin, was released in 1952. The regime wanted such films to help build socialism, and Ursula's employers now wanted her to become a communist. The chief scriptwriter asked me why I wasn't a member of the party. Berlin was then the espionage capital of the world. And for those like Ursula living and working on this front line of the Cold War, East Germany could be a lawless place. I drove to Friedrichstraße. I went to the Friedrichstrasse. There, two gentlemen addressed me by name, inviting me to get into their car, telling me that they would take me to my work at DEFA. We drove very fast for quite a while. I was a bit surprised by this because my office wasn't that far away. I'd been kidnapped and nobody knew. Protesting her innocence, Ursula was sentenced to 15 years hard labor for espionage by military court and transported almost 2,000 miles away to a labor camp in Vorkuta, Siberia. We were close to the polar sea. There was a wind with ice crystals. The summer was almost worse. The tundra around Fokuta was a marshland. There were hordes of mosquitoes. To work in 45 degrees centigrade heat, without sun protection, without water for 12 hours every day. 1945 onwards tens of thousands were sent from Eastern Germany to Siberia, many of them never to return. Ursula, one of the lucky ones, was released in 1954, still protesting her innocence. Only years later would she reveal that she had in fact worked for British intelligence since before her arrival in Berlin. I would do errands for the English. I worked as a courier. In retrospect, it seems I don't understand how I could have been that stupid. Six months after Ursula's kidnap, on 17 June 1953, the workers rose up against the workers and peasant state. What had begun as a strike amongst construction workers over pay soon turned into wider demands for free elections and the resignation of the government itself. By late morning, Soviet troops stationed in East Germany had to intervene. At 11.30 we heard the tanks, the chains of the tanks. Then we realized the Russians were coming. The crowd started howling. And when the people at the end of the demonstration refused to give way, the soldiers fired in the air. And when you hear gunfire, you start running automatically. Horst Kreta, a Berlin petrol pump attendant, was in the thick of the action that day. We threw stones at the tanks. Seeing the tanks firing in your direction, the sheer sound of it causes you to piss in your pants. Someone had died on the Marx Engels Square that day. He was run over by a tank. There was a blanket and a wooden cross which said, murdered by the Soviet army. It was a day of glory for me. We showed them what could be done. The police could do nothing. The government could do nothing. The secret police, the Stasi, could do nothing. Over 50 civilians were killed that day. In the clampdown that followed, more than 20,000 were arrested. Scores were executed. The country's leaders had been caught off guard. From now on, security and the control of the people would be the government's overriding concern. The people themselves were concerned about simply getting by. The 1950s were austere times, and food and goods were in limited supply. Families and organizations in West Germany sent aid packages to the East. We were so happy and surprised as we lived such a frugal life. When the package arrived, we couldn't believe our eyes. The wrapping was so attractive and colorful. We'd never seen anything like this. Roland, the youngest, couldn't open the presents fast enough, helping Wolfgang beaming at his discoveries. My father had a 1954... In 1954 my father received the 8mm camera 8K8. These are the first films he recorded at Christmas. I'm the baby, 18 months old. That's his self-made gramophone. We lived in Berlin in Karlshorst, which is under Soviet occupation. Only state functionaries and those employed in ministries were allowed to live there. My father worked in television as a cameraman. He was of course a member of the party, but he wasn't totally convinced about it. My mother's wearing a necklace. Of course, that's only for the film. Now she's trying out the new vacuum cleaner. It's called the Omega. Debu ron ni fea do. It was East Germany's people's vacuum cleaner. In 1960, Khrushchev came to East Germany. When he passed through Karlshorst on his way to the airport, my class and I had to wave. Only much later, when I'd developed the film and got it back home, I realised I'd waved at Eric Milker, the head of the Stasi, who was sitting next to the driver. In the 1950s, people had few creature comforts. We were happy when we got hold of goods which weren't available every day, like bananas, which we bought in the West. Before 1961, it was still possible to drive into West Berlin. We were lucky to be able to drive to West Berlin. On August 13, 1961, construction began on the Berlin Wall. East Germany called it an anti-fascist protective wall designed to keep the West out. In fact, it was built to lock East Germans inside their socialist paradise. Around 3 million of them had already fled to the West, threatening the very existence of East Germany. One of those preventing people from escaping was Hagen Koch, the young pioneer at Dresden, who is now a member of the expanding Ministry of State Security, known as the Stasi. In the afternoon, we reached the border crossing at Checkpoint Charlie. I was ordered to paint a thick white line on the street at that border crossing point. I stood with one leg in the way. and the other in the east. And my assignment was to show the evil, and I repeat, evil people in the west, so far and no further. Capitalism is over there, and here is socialism. I painted that line and was still firmly convinced that that border would avoid a third world war and help to maintain peace. Many people were against it. I was not the only person who was for it. Growing up behind the wall were these schoolchildren in the village of Golzo. They were about to become the subject of a long-term television project. Winfried Jerschel was the youngest child in his class. They built a new rural school, brand new and impressive. It was an East German film, and an East German film was always a propaganda film. They obviously wanted to communicate the message that a small village has a brand new school and all the children are happy. I remember that the questions at school became more probing, such as what does the Sandman look like. They wanted to see what programs we were watching at home. During the early years, They imprisoned people when they watched television from the West. Our antenna was always pointed towards the West. The teacher tried to find out if people were watching television from the West. East Germany was an atheist state, but Marie-Louise came from a religious family. We were six children and my parents worked on the collective farm. I was a Protestant. I wasn't one of the young pioneers who all wore the same neckerchief. Nevertheless, I was allowed to sing in the choir. I wore my private clothes. Winfried wanted to be an inventor and was of a practical inquiring nature. We learned a lot about the political theories of Marx and Lenin. Once I asked my teacher when does the real communism start, real communism without money. The teacher was obviously as smart as I was and said that we would succeed in trading without money sometime after the millennium. As an ignorant child, I thought that's fantastic. I thought it was great, because I didn't think it would be different. Today the sun is burning all over us. On that path from socialism to the communist millennium lay East Germany's version of the swinging 60s. How wonderful! Singers like Frank Scherbel, dubbed East Germany's Cliff Richard, were sometimes told by the party what to sing. But they were never told. At the time I was in the army and there was a song, Girl in front of the barricade, will you wait for me and I'll ask you to go out with me today, which I hadn't sung because it was too stupid. I feared for my career because I didn't know what kind of songs they would make me sing. Because I didn't sing Girl in front of the barricade, I was demoted and had to spend two days in prison. shoulder sticker up Harrison this musical a kind of East Side Story starring Frank was officially sanctioned each clover this it was the party that decided to create a distraction for the people missing any load to the board it was side story is the model you cook Frank's co-star and then wife Chris Dirk misses much about East Germany. Art and culture had a much higher value placed on them. In East Germany singers weren't a commodity. Today singers are a commodity that has to be bought and sold. There are many things I miss. Chris Dirk enjoyed socialist life behind the wall. I didn't lead a bad life and I have to say that the Berlin Wall didn't really disturb me. And it makes me angry when East Germany is often reduced to Stasi and I don't know what. Sometimes I have a feeling that they think we lived in clay huts. Most East Germans, like Jürgen Hartwig, the baby in the 1950s home movies, conformed to what the state required of them. Here he attends his Jugendweihe, a secular coming of age ceremony for 14 year olds introduced by the communists. Despite appearances, however, Jürgen was no communist. I was actually west-orientated. I was interested in beat music. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones. It was clear I wasn't a socialistically orientated person who would wear a blue shirt for the free German youth. I started wondering how to make it to the West. I tried to escape through Hungary in 1973, but things went wrong and I was sent to prison for two years. By the late 1970s, disillusion with the reality of life in East Germany was spreading. This is my farewell video. I was 19, had just passed my A-levels and going into military service. It was a real rite of passage. Behind the clouds, almost hidden, lies an unknown... This is my room in Dresden, in my parents' house. All the posters of my ideals, my dreams, all these were shattered. Learning the truth about the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia, which had happened a decade earlier, was a defining moment. This is footage from East German TV of some of our tanks, like the ones that advanced into Czechoslovakia in 1968. I actually remember being there, aged 10, looking at the tanks leaving for Prague, and I remember winking at one of the soldiers. But when I joined the army, I realized what they had done, and I felt angry, and betrayed. Space exploration and the achievements of the Soviet cosmonauts were reflected in the Sandman. They had something to do with the belief in progress. It was believed that communism would also be established. in space. Obviously, it was used to make socialism appear victorious. The day before that space mission, former Golzo schoolgirl Marie Louise married Stefan, an army pilot and party member. Despite her religious background, she is committed to the workers and peasants state. I thought of East Germany as my country. I definitely felt at home there. Actually, even today, I still remain an East German. By now, Marie-Louise was bringing up a family. She felt part of the appeal of East Germany lay in its support for women, especially mothers. She liked the emphasis on child care facilities, on women's economic independence and professional opportunities. Women had many rights there. Being a woman in East Germany was good. I have good memories. It was easier than today, for example. You had the certainty that even if you were a single mother, you would never have ended up sitting in a flat without heating, or worrying about your electricity bill. We were paid electricity bills. We felt secure and looked after. East Germany's idea of looking after its citizens also involved spying on them. No act was too intimate to be observed. And no other country in history has spied on its citizens as East Germany has, with one in six of its population informing on the rest. High up on the watch list of the state's enemies was the emerging punk rock movement. And so it goes. All I wanted was to have a bit of fun, but the state obviously saw it differently. We were criminalized, we were politicized. Chaos was the lead singer in a punk rock band called Wuttenfall, meaning fit of rage. His best friend Zappa was the bass guitarist. What Chaos didn't know was that his best friend was a Stassi informer. My code name was Captain. They gave me a phone number and when I called I was to say Captain speaking. Zappa had succumbed to persistent Stasi pressure for information about the punks he knew and signed an agreement with the secret police. The Stasi dictated to me a two-page text full of that gibberish saying, I see you, Captain. I swear not to undertake anything against socialism and I will work with the Ministry of State Security. I simply thought that I'd sign it and then they'd let me go and I'd be done with it. But they had that lousy signature of mine. So they continued to approach me and say, you've signed it, so... so now you can tell us when the concerts are. And I had to sit around at the Stasi building for hours and hours. I said, OK, I will inform you when the concerts take place. I didn't expect it to be so drastic for me. By the end, there were nine informers set on me. They wouldn't pause. In return, I had to swear that I would vote in the next elections. Chaos only found out about his best friend's treachery after the wall came down, when he read his Stasi file. I felt great disappointment at my friend's behaviour, especially because of the breach of trust. It was a mistake. It was a horrible year. I was at the mercy of the Stasi. Heidi Krieger's life was also dramatically affected by the Stasi. Heidi was one of communism's star athletes. Here she is seen winning gold in the shot at the European Championships in 1986. The winner of the German Democratic Republic, 21 metres... I loved being a sporting champion for East Germany. I liked representing my country abroad. Simply because my narrow-mindedness would make me believe, with our achievements we strengthen the socialist republic. But Heidi paid a heavy price for her sporting success. Unwittingly, Heidi was one of 10,000 East German athletes who were part of a Stasi-run doping program. At one point, shortly after I'd turned 16, the coach suddenly stopped me from doing anything. He started giving me packs of pills. He would tell me, these are to help you, everyone takes them. You'll handle the training program better, you won't get ill, and if you're injured you'll recover more quickly. I trusted him and started taking those pills. There are teenagers whose sexuality hasn't been fixed yet during adolescence. And probably I was in that situation. I was neither fish nor fowl. In that period they gave me those pills. Because of the pills, my balance switched over to the masculine side. Massive doses of anabolic steroids over several years changed Heidi's body forever. I realized they'd made a lab rat out of me, because they saw my potential. East Germany has taken my life away from me, and without asking, I wasn't allowed to decide for myself what I wanted to become. The effects of the doping system finally forced Heidi to undergo a sex change operation. And today, Heidi is called Andreas. Heidi still exists. I'm still a bit Heidi. That is my life. I used to be a woman and I'll probably always remain a woman up to a certain extent. The man ultimately in charge of East Germany's doping program was Stasi leader Eric Mielke, filmed here on a hunt. This is the Schorfheider, the Kaiser hunted here. Nazi leaders hunted here. And hunting here was a way of life for some Politburo members, a time when important business was done. We usually went hunting on Tuesdays after the Politburo meeting. Milka was an enthusiastic but inaccurate hunter. Milka had specific ideas about hunting because he wasn't a very good shot. The forester who went with him had to intervene and shoot the prey to try and make him look successful at least once during the hunt. Milka was a very good shooter. Stasi officer Berndt Bruckner was party leader Erik Honecker's bodyguard. His boss was addicted to hunting. Honecker was determined. It might have rained cats and dogs or even snowed and he would still want to go hunting with his fur hat on. On our good, loyal, reliable hunting helpers, our comrades of the district of Erfurt, who have joined us, a threefold today! Today! Today! Today! Today! The state hunt is over. Animals had to be imported from other Eastern Bloc countries like Hungary, because they'd killed so many. They overdid it. From time to time they didn't respect the hunting restrictions on certain game. They shot everything. That was too much. In a profoundly unfree society like East Germany, any free space was to be treasured. Nudism had long been popular, especially on the beaches. New disc floats were an attraction at parades attended by party leader Erich Honecker. And the regime's attitude to public displays of eroticism was changing. I was employed in the Amherst sector, as it was called in East Germany. To take your clothes off in an erotic fashion was something very new. I started with my Edelweiss striptease. People laughed and were enthused. because they hadn't seen anything like it before. Striptease was not a common thing in East Germany, but at one point there was a big bang and striptease started booming. This footage shows Heidi Witwer's audition for a striptease licence in the late 1980s. The shop assistant from Leipzig soon finds herself in demand at exclusive Communist Party functions. It was clear that the Stasi was involved and that similar things had always existed. At some events people arrived exclusively in monopoly capitalist cars I became aware of what things actually occurred in East Germany I saw champagne in huge bowls fruit like bananas and everything we didn't have I earned lots of money. I wish I could still get that dosh. I bought all those things which ordinary citizens couldn't afford to buy. As artists, we were lucky to perform at marvellous and fantastic events. There were some great things about East Germany. Former Golzo schoolboy Winfried still appeared to be buying into the communist dream. He's getting married to Sabine, whom he met at a dance. They enjoy a good socialist wedding. But at work Winfried is in trouble. He's joined the party but is summoned to appear before a party meeting for misrepresenting his qualifications. We are meeting to decide how to punish you for your wrongdoing, which we might have to record in your party book. We will give you a chance to defend yourself. You must tell us what you did for the Party. and explain why we, as a collective, should not punish you. It's been made clear to me by you that I must never lie again while working in the factory. I would have liked to travel to the West and probably would have stayed there, but it wasn't possible, so I had to make other plans. I played along. along with the system. By the mid-1980s, East Germany was a decaying society, morally and economically. You can see it in these photographs of ordinary people's lives. The fact that such images were exhibited at all is as surprising as their realism. While I was in the plant that makes rubber in Thuringia, I met Andreas, king of soot. His job was to weigh the soot and mix the right amount with the rubber. Every Wednesday at one o'clock there'd be a big guards procession in Unter den Linden by the Stasi guards Felix Dzerzhinsky regiment. There used to be the same old man leading the parade who would march as though he was the Führer, the leader. I often remember Tamerlan. She was that powerful type of woman. Her flat looked horrible. Elderly people were always afraid of her. People got small pensions. She was a soulmate. She had wonderful strength. One day I was lying on the grass in an area where new... building was going on. I had a hangover. I felt a breeze on my cheek, opened my eyes and saw a little girl with blonde hair and snow-white skin. I told her, you look like an angel. And she answered, I am an angel. She ran away and came back dressed as an angel. Gundela's photos prompted great interest from the Stasi. They had plans to arrest her on bogus charges of working for the CIA. In the ceiling of my studio was a beam which was hollow. I wasn't naive and I was concerned about my photographs. I would hide them in that hollow beam. I always expected the Stasi to show up at some point. A new generation was seeking alternative lifestyles outside party structures. That's us in the Trabant. That was the last really bad winter. That was 1985. You were pregnant but didn't know it yet. That's Roland trying to fix the Trabi. No petrol. There was mashed potato and it was important that we could eat well, eat lots, eat fatty food. Here you can see it. Look how skinny you were. You've got more muscles now. And that was also. We didn't have a bathtub and we were very happy to take a bath at Roland's before New Year's Eve. I grew up in Dresden where no West German TV existed. It was called the valley of unknowing. I was very unknowing in many ways. There's a saying, living in East Germany was like driving with the handbrake on. I felt that very much. You weren't allowed to do things independently. You always had to file a motion and wait for approval. That was the summer of 85. We'd just fallen in love. We'd known each other three months and we dared go on holiday together. Here we're in my flat in Berlin showing off the holiday souvenirs. You can see how much we fancied each other. This was our wonderful shower device. We did it ourselves. It had a very thin hose which fitted the water tap. We would put a bowl in there and sit in that bowl one at a time. Our daughter was already born and we lived in a very small flat where rain would drip from the roof and rats would gnaw away at our vegetables. Actually it was horrible. Bau auf, Bau auf, Bau auf, Bau auf! Increasingly, official rallies like this one held little appeal for young East Germans like Andreas and Carmen. Richten wir die Heimat auf! Bau auf! A spirit of rebellion was gradually emerging, sometimes in the most surprising places. I have lost myself, the city is so big. The often grim reality of living in East Germany was something Michael Schmidt, a children's film animator, wanted to feature in his work. Oh, that stinks. I wanted to represent a bit of East German reality. That is, I wanted to show houses with crumbling plaster and broken gutters. But I was told it was too realistic, so my film was rejected. Michael responded by secretly making an erotic version. The policeman shows the girl how to get to the park, where he wants to seduce her. Karl Marx is first of all unbiased. At first the Karl Marx monument remains impassive to the tearing up of the rule book. But then his eyes start roving and you realize that after all the monument is alive. A little bump comes out of the pedestal as he follows the action with his eyes and takes in the girl. And then as he also sees the girl, he... That's when you realize that even the great Karl Marx has urges. This man was sacrosanct, and at that time it was not allowed to make fun of him. But Gorbachev was already in charge, and people started to think of Marx as old-fashioned. People knew that many things Marx had written in his Bible didn't work. That is communism as it was envisaged. By now, even the Sandman was harboring illegal thoughts. This episode proved controversial, as paragliders were banned in East Germany to prevent people using them to escape across the border. And it is the border, and especially the wall, that remains the symbol of East Germany, shutting its citizens in and dividing families. Jutta Gallus Fleck with her two young daughters made an unsuccessful escape attempt from East Germany. This led to her family literally being torn apart. Her two daughters were forcibly adopted by the state. On average, more than seven people were in prison every day for trying to escape. Jutta was sentenced to three years in prison for attempting to flee East Germany. All I was allowed to keep was one photograph where I was pictured with my girls. But I had to cut my head off from that picture. I had to cut my head off because I wasn't allowed to preserve any identity, just a number. In their mother's absence, the girls threw themselves into dancing. Every day at school we were told how bad capitalism was and that our mother was a bad person. and that she had done wrong. Jutta's freedom was eventually bought by West Germany. Over the years, the communist regime made over one billion pounds from the trade in selling its own citizens. Once in the West, Jutta campaigned for the release of her two children. I went to Checkpoint Charlie almost every day for six months. I was a child. I'd put my placards on, and looking towards the east, I would say, they are what I want. Honaker regime, give my daughters back. My children who are in forced adoption and who live in a state children's home, I want to have those children. Give me my children back. Their only communication was via letters which were censored. I can say we weren't allowed to draw Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse was western propaganda. It was forbidden to draw such things. After six years of separation, Jutta was finally reunited with her daughters in August 1988. That was incredible. No one will ever be able to take that away from me. For us, that day is the day of our personal reunification. I'm very proud of the fact that we managed to make it happen before the wall came down. By the autumn of 1989, discontent with the regime was growing apace. That was the big demonstration in Berlin. Curiously, it wasn't about getting rid of East Germany. That was not the issue. And neither was the reunification of Germany. It was about reforming our country. Back then we still believed it would be possible to create another type of socialism. Now you see flowers attached to a police car. The security forces kept well back. Unlimited freedom of travel was a very important demand. And when we got it, we lost many other things. Many East Germans like Carmen and Andreas miss aspects of their socialist state. Guaranteed employment, generous welfare benefits and a certain camaraderie are often cited as examples of what was lost when the Berlin Wall came down. Actually, we used to lead a good life. There were many things in East Germany that disturbed us and made us angry, and I'm glad they don't exist anymore. But nevertheless, we had a good life in many ways. East Germany was a child of the Cold War, and its end came with the end of the Soviet Empire two decades ago. Given the revelations that have emerged since, from places like the Stasi files, it is perhaps surprising that anyone should feel nostalgic about it. Yet the country lasted for 40 years, long enough to produce a new kind of society. A socialist paradise it wasn't. But while few want communist East Germany back, some genuinely miss aspects of their lives there. Next time, the lost world of Czechoslovakia, where communism tried to reform itself and failed, consigning people to an era of forgetting. And there's a BBC book written by Peter Malloy to accompany the series. The acclaimed film comedy Goodbye Lennon is tonight at 11.50. Coming up next on BBC Two, comic relief does top of the pops. MUSIC PLAYS

The answers are sometimes surprising. While some cannot forget the abnormality of those times, others feel that they led perfectly ordinary lives. This series, through rarely seen archive and personal testimony, captures the real lives of those living under communist rule.

It was a way of life that disappeared when communism collapsed across Eastern Europe two decades ago. East Germany was socialism's showcase state. One of its iconic faces was a children's TV puppet called Sandman.

He was designed to send East Germany's children happy to bed and to win their hearts for socialism. It simply had to reflect life in East Germany. It had to transmit class consciousness and feelings of solidarity. It had to reflect life in East Germany.

The Sandman was made by people who used to live under socialism. They had a vision of socialism and communism and were happy to spread that vision, namely the vision of a better world, a more just world. And East Germany's role model for that better world was the Sandman's favorite holiday destination, the Soviet Union.

East Germany was born out of the ruins of the Second World War. ...emerge from the Soviet zone of occupation established with the total defeat of Nazi Germany. Everywhere, symbols of the Soviet Union and images of its leader, Joseph Stalin, showed where the real power now lay.

In the summer of 1945... 14-year-old schoolgirl Erika Riemann went back to her old school in the company of friends. A day she would never forget.

We saw that Hitler's portrait had been replaced with Stalin's. So I drew a bow with some lipstick on Stalin's moustache. Because when I saw his portrait I thought he looked sad. That wasn't a good move.

I never wanted to be an artist again in my whole life. Erika was sentenced to 10 years in prison, part of which she spent at the former Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. Here she was subjected to a mock execution.

We had to go into a shower room. They told us they would do the same things they had done to the Jews, that there wouldn't be water coming out of the showers but gas. That was a very terrifying situation. There was great panic and then great relief when only warm water came out.

I spent time in the fortress at Torgau, where many women were raped. I hadn't been raped yet, but the decision had been made that I'd be next. Still only a child, Erika suffered repeated physical and sexual abuse, like this episode in Torgau prison.

It's affected my whole life. I hadn't had any sexual experience at the time. But I had to take all my clothes off and to sit on a bowl which was pushed down the stairs amongst all the men's baying.

I can't talk about it. I've felt the repercussions till this day. I felt ashamed and dirty. I'm a mother and a grandmother, but after all these years, it still remains and I still feel dirty and degraded. It's very hard to endure such things when you're that young.

Over 150,000 Germans were detained by the communists in special camps like Sachsenhausen. Almost a third of them died in captivity. In August... In August 1952, 80,000 young pioneers were invited to Dresden because we, the children, had to carry on socialism. At the age of 12, I was proud to attend the first pioneer.

near meeting in Dresden. We knew about the Hitler Youth during the Third Reich, but they also wore neckties and played drums and trumpets. They wore uniforms.

When the Pioneer Organisation was founded, many adults were opposed because it reminded them of the Hitler regime. So parents said, that's not going to happen to our children, not again. But my father was a teacher, and so he had the task of recruiting children for the Pioneer Organisations.

The Pioneers served the newly formed workers' and peasants' state of East Germany, a one-party dictatorship modelled on the Soviet Union. Its propaganda stressed the dangers from Western imperialism, including the bizarre claim that America was dropping plagues of Colorado beetles from the air to destroy socialist crops. They would praise us for having collected those beetles. The very same American aeroplanes that had bombed Dresden, they would tell us, had also unleashed those beetles. Evil American imperialism.

We made our first pioneer vow in Dresden. We children vowed that we would do anything to avoid such a terrible and evil war in the future. 80,000 children together said, that we promise.

And I made that vow not with my mind, but with my heart. Stalin was the great hero. He was a god to us.

Stalin the intelligent. Stalin the great hero. the wise. Stalin was the representative of the free world, the free world of socialism, and he was our role model.

We would follow him unconditionally. We will follow him unconditionally. It was a high point for Stalinism in East Germany and a dangerous time for those not so singing the party's tune. Ursula Ruhmann was a dancer in Revue and Cabaret.

By 1952, she'd landed a job as a scriptwriter with the state-owned film company DEFA. I had a contract with DEFA on a movie called The Destinies of Women. And The story was about women in East Berlin and women in West Berlin.

The women in the East would be politically orientated and organized. Those in West Berlin would only be little dolls who cared about nothing but jewelry and fashion. Obviously the East Berlin authorities wanted to show that life was good only in the East.

and everything in the West was corrupt. The Destinies of Women, filmed on the streets of East Berlin, was released in 1952. The regime wanted such films to help build socialism, and Ursula's employers now wanted her to become a communist. The chief scriptwriter asked me why I wasn't a member of the party.

Berlin was then the espionage capital of the world. And for those like Ursula living and working on this front line of the Cold War, East Germany could be a lawless place. I drove to Friedrichstraße. I went to the Friedrichstrasse.

There, two gentlemen addressed me by name, inviting me to get into their car, telling me that they would take me to my work at DEFA. We drove very fast for quite a while. I was a bit surprised by this because my office wasn't that far away.

I'd been kidnapped and nobody knew. Protesting her innocence, Ursula was sentenced to 15 years hard labor for espionage by military court and transported almost 2,000 miles away to a labor camp in Vorkuta, Siberia. We were close to the polar sea.

There was a wind with ice crystals. The summer was almost worse. The tundra around Fokuta was a marshland. There were hordes of mosquitoes.

To work in 45 degrees centigrade heat, without sun protection, without water for 12 hours every day. 1945 onwards tens of thousands were sent from Eastern Germany to Siberia, many of them never to return. Ursula, one of the lucky ones, was released in 1954, still protesting her innocence. Only years later would she reveal that she had in fact worked for British intelligence since before her arrival in Berlin. I would do errands for the English.

I worked as a courier. In retrospect, it seems I don't understand how I could have been that stupid. Six months after Ursula's kidnap, on 17 June 1953, the workers rose up against the workers and peasant state.

What had begun as a strike amongst construction workers over pay soon turned into wider demands for free elections and the resignation of the government itself. By late morning, Soviet troops stationed in East Germany had to intervene. At 11.30 we heard the tanks, the chains of the tanks.

Then we realized the Russians were coming. The crowd started howling. And when the people at the end of the demonstration refused to give way, the soldiers fired in the air.

And when you hear gunfire, you start running automatically. Horst Kreta, a Berlin petrol pump attendant, was in the thick of the action that day. We threw stones at the tanks.

Seeing the tanks firing in your direction, the sheer sound of it causes you to piss in your pants. Someone had died on the Marx Engels Square that day. He was run over by a tank.

There was a blanket and a wooden cross which said, murdered by the Soviet army. It was a day of glory for me. We showed them what could be done.

The police could do nothing. The government could do nothing. The secret police, the Stasi, could do nothing.

Over 50 civilians were killed that day. In the clampdown that followed, more than 20,000 were arrested. Scores were executed. The country's leaders had been caught off guard.

From now on, security and the control of the people would be the government's overriding concern. The people themselves were concerned about simply getting by. The 1950s were austere times, and food and goods were in limited supply.

Families and organizations in West Germany sent aid packages to the East. We were so happy and surprised as we lived such a frugal life. When the package arrived, we couldn't believe our eyes. The wrapping was so attractive and colorful.

We'd never seen anything like this. Roland, the youngest, couldn't open the presents fast enough, helping Wolfgang beaming at his discoveries. My father had a 1954...

In 1954 my father received the 8mm camera 8K8. These are the first films he recorded at Christmas. I'm the baby, 18 months old. That's his self-made gramophone.

We lived in Berlin in Karlshorst, which is under Soviet occupation. Only state functionaries and those employed in ministries were allowed to live there. My father worked in television as a cameraman.

He was of course a member of the party, but he wasn't totally convinced about it. My mother's wearing a necklace. Of course, that's only for the film. Now she's trying out the new vacuum cleaner.

It's called the Omega. Debu ron ni fea do. It was East Germany's people's vacuum cleaner. In 1960, Khrushchev came to East Germany. When he passed through Karlshorst on his way to the airport, my class and I had to wave.

Only much later, when I'd developed the film and got it back home, I realised I'd waved at Eric Milker, the head of the Stasi, who was sitting next to the driver. In the 1950s, people had few creature comforts. We were happy when we got hold of goods which weren't available every day, like bananas, which we bought in the West. Before 1961, it was still possible to drive into West Berlin. We were lucky to be able to drive to West Berlin.

On August 13, 1961, construction began on the Berlin Wall. East Germany called it an anti-fascist protective wall designed to keep the West out. In fact, it was built to lock East Germans inside their socialist paradise.

Around 3 million of them had already fled to the West, threatening the very existence of East Germany. One of those preventing people from escaping was Hagen Koch, the young pioneer at Dresden, who is now a member of the expanding Ministry of State Security, known as the Stasi. In the afternoon, we reached the border crossing at Checkpoint Charlie. I was ordered to paint a thick white line on the street at that border crossing point.

I stood with one leg in the way. and the other in the east. And my assignment was to show the evil, and I repeat, evil people in the west, so far and no further.

Capitalism is over there, and here is socialism. I painted that line and was still firmly convinced that that border would avoid a third world war and help to maintain peace. Many people were against it. I was not the only person who was for it. Growing up behind the wall were these schoolchildren in the village of Golzo.

They were about to become the subject of a long-term television project. Winfried Jerschel was the youngest child in his class. They built a new rural school, brand new and impressive. It was an East German film, and an East German film was always a propaganda film. They obviously wanted to communicate the message that a small village has a brand new school and all the children are happy.

I remember that the questions at school became more probing, such as what does the Sandman look like. They wanted to see what programs we were watching at home. During the early years, They imprisoned people when they watched television from the West. Our antenna was always pointed towards the West. The teacher tried to find out if people were watching television from the West.

East Germany was an atheist state, but Marie-Louise came from a religious family. We were six children and my parents worked on the collective farm. I was a Protestant. I wasn't one of the young pioneers who all wore the same neckerchief.

Nevertheless, I was allowed to sing in the choir. I wore my private clothes. Winfried wanted to be an inventor and was of a practical inquiring nature. We learned a lot about the political theories of Marx and Lenin.

Once I asked my teacher when does the real communism start, real communism without money. The teacher was obviously as smart as I was and said that we would succeed in trading without money sometime after the millennium. As an ignorant child, I thought that's fantastic. I thought it was great, because I didn't think it would be different.

Today the sun is burning all over us. On that path from socialism to the communist millennium lay East Germany's version of the swinging 60s. How wonderful!

Singers like Frank Scherbel, dubbed East Germany's Cliff Richard, were sometimes told by the party what to sing. But they were never told. At the time I was in the army and there was a song, Girl in front of the barricade, will you wait for me and I'll ask you to go out with me today, which I hadn't sung because it was too stupid.

I feared for my career because I didn't know what kind of songs they would make me sing. Because I didn't sing Girl in front of the barricade, I was demoted and had to spend two days in prison. shoulder sticker up Harrison this musical a kind of East Side Story starring Frank was officially sanctioned each clover this it was the party that decided to create a distraction for the people missing any load to the board it was side story is the model you cook Frank's co-star and then wife Chris Dirk misses much about East Germany.

Art and culture had a much higher value placed on them. In East Germany singers weren't a commodity. Today singers are a commodity that has to be bought and sold. There are many things I miss. Chris Dirk enjoyed socialist life behind the wall.

I didn't lead a bad life and I have to say that the Berlin Wall didn't really disturb me. And it makes me angry when East Germany is often reduced to Stasi and I don't know what. Sometimes I have a feeling that they think we lived in clay huts.

Most East Germans, like Jürgen Hartwig, the baby in the 1950s home movies, conformed to what the state required of them. Here he attends his Jugendweihe, a secular coming of age ceremony for 14 year olds introduced by the communists. Despite appearances, however, Jürgen was no communist.

I was actually west-orientated. I was interested in beat music. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones.

It was clear I wasn't a socialistically orientated person who would wear a blue shirt for the free German youth. I started wondering how to make it to the West. I tried to escape through Hungary in 1973, but things went wrong and I was sent to prison for two years.

By the late 1970s, disillusion with the reality of life in East Germany was spreading. This is my farewell video. I was 19, had just passed my A-levels and going into military service. It was a real rite of passage.

Behind the clouds, almost hidden, lies an unknown... This is my room in Dresden, in my parents' house. All the posters of my ideals, my dreams, all these were shattered.

Learning the truth about the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Czechoslovakia, which had happened a decade earlier, was a defining moment. This is footage from East German TV of some of our tanks, like the ones that advanced into Czechoslovakia in 1968. I actually remember being there, aged 10, looking at the tanks leaving for Prague, and I remember winking at one of the soldiers. But when I joined the army, I realized what they had done, and I felt angry, and betrayed.

Space exploration and the achievements of the Soviet cosmonauts were reflected in the Sandman. They had something to do with the belief in progress. It was believed that communism would also be established. in space. Obviously, it was used to make socialism appear victorious.

The day before that space mission, former Golzo schoolgirl Marie Louise married Stefan, an army pilot and party member. Despite her religious background, she is committed to the workers and peasants state. I thought of East Germany as my country.

I definitely felt at home there. Actually, even today, I still remain an East German. By now, Marie-Louise was bringing up a family.

She felt part of the appeal of East Germany lay in its support for women, especially mothers. She liked the emphasis on child care facilities, on women's economic independence and professional opportunities. Women had many rights there. Being a woman in East Germany was good. I have good memories.

It was easier than today, for example. You had the certainty that even if you were a single mother, you would never have ended up sitting in a flat without heating, or worrying about your electricity bill. We were paid electricity bills.

We felt secure and looked after. East Germany's idea of looking after its citizens also involved spying on them. No act was too intimate to be observed.

And no other country in history has spied on its citizens as East Germany has, with one in six of its population informing on the rest. High up on the watch list of the state's enemies was the emerging punk rock movement. And so it goes.

All I wanted was to have a bit of fun, but the state obviously saw it differently. We were criminalized, we were politicized. Chaos was the lead singer in a punk rock band called Wuttenfall, meaning fit of rage.

His best friend Zappa was the bass guitarist. What Chaos didn't know was that his best friend was a Stassi informer. My code name was Captain. They gave me a phone number and when I called I was to say Captain speaking.

Zappa had succumbed to persistent Stasi pressure for information about the punks he knew and signed an agreement with the secret police. The Stasi dictated to me a two-page text full of that gibberish saying, I see you, Captain. I swear not to undertake anything against socialism and I will work with the Ministry of State Security.

I simply thought that I'd sign it and then they'd let me go and I'd be done with it. But they had that lousy signature of mine. So they continued to approach me and say, you've signed it, so...

so now you can tell us when the concerts are. And I had to sit around at the Stasi building for hours and hours. I said, OK, I will inform you when the concerts take place.

I didn't expect it to be so drastic for me. By the end, there were nine informers set on me. They wouldn't pause. In return, I had to swear that I would vote in the next elections. Chaos only found out about his best friend's treachery after the wall came down, when he read his Stasi file.

I felt great disappointment at my friend's behaviour, especially because of the breach of trust. It was a mistake. It was a horrible year. I was at the mercy of the Stasi. Heidi Krieger's life was also dramatically affected by the Stasi.

Heidi was one of communism's star athletes. Here she is seen winning gold in the shot at the European Championships in 1986. The winner of the German Democratic Republic, 21 metres... I loved being a sporting champion for East Germany. I liked representing my country abroad. Simply because my narrow-mindedness would make me believe, with our achievements we strengthen the socialist republic.

But Heidi paid a heavy price for her sporting success. Unwittingly, Heidi was one of 10,000 East German athletes who were part of a Stasi-run doping program. At one point, shortly after I'd turned 16, the coach suddenly stopped me from doing anything. He started giving me packs of pills. He would tell me, these are to help you, everyone takes them.

You'll handle the training program better, you won't get ill, and if you're injured you'll recover more quickly. I trusted him and started taking those pills. There are teenagers whose sexuality hasn't been fixed yet during adolescence.

And probably I was in that situation. I was neither fish nor fowl. In that period they gave me those pills. Because of the pills, my balance switched over to the masculine side.

Massive doses of anabolic steroids over several years changed Heidi's body forever. I realized they'd made a lab rat out of me, because they saw my potential. East Germany has taken my life away from me, and without asking, I wasn't allowed to decide for myself what I wanted to become. The effects of the doping system finally forced Heidi to undergo a sex change operation.

And today, Heidi is called Andreas. Heidi still exists. I'm still a bit Heidi.

That is my life. I used to be a woman and I'll probably always remain a woman up to a certain extent. The man ultimately in charge of East Germany's doping program was Stasi leader Eric Mielke, filmed here on a hunt. This is the Schorfheider, the Kaiser hunted here.

Nazi leaders hunted here. And hunting here was a way of life for some Politburo members, a time when important business was done. We usually went hunting on Tuesdays after the Politburo meeting. Milka was an enthusiastic but inaccurate hunter. Milka had specific ideas about hunting because he wasn't a very good shot.

The forester who went with him had to intervene and shoot the prey to try and make him look successful at least once during the hunt. Milka was a very good shooter. Stasi officer Berndt Bruckner was party leader Erik Honecker's bodyguard. His boss was addicted to hunting. Honecker was determined.

It might have rained cats and dogs or even snowed and he would still want to go hunting with his fur hat on. On our good, loyal, reliable hunting helpers, our comrades of the district of Erfurt, who have joined us, a threefold today! Today! Today!

Today! Today! The state hunt is over. Animals had to be imported from other Eastern Bloc countries like Hungary, because they'd killed so many. They overdid it.

From time to time they didn't respect the hunting restrictions on certain game. They shot everything. That was too much. In a profoundly unfree society like East Germany, any free space was to be treasured. Nudism had long been popular, especially on the beaches.

New disc floats were an attraction at parades attended by party leader Erich Honecker. And the regime's attitude to public displays of eroticism was changing. I was employed in the Amherst sector, as it was called in East Germany.

To take your clothes off in an erotic fashion was something very new. I started with my Edelweiss striptease. People laughed and were enthused.

because they hadn't seen anything like it before. Striptease was not a common thing in East Germany, but at one point there was a big bang and striptease started booming. This footage shows Heidi Witwer's audition for a striptease licence in the late 1980s.

The shop assistant from Leipzig soon finds herself in demand at exclusive Communist Party functions. It was clear that the Stasi was involved and that similar things had always existed. At some events people arrived exclusively in monopoly capitalist cars I became aware of what things actually occurred in East Germany I saw champagne in huge bowls fruit like bananas and everything we didn't have I earned lots of money. I wish I could still get that dosh.

I bought all those things which ordinary citizens couldn't afford to buy. As artists, we were lucky to perform at marvellous and fantastic events. There were some great things about East Germany.

Former Golzo schoolboy Winfried still appeared to be buying into the communist dream. He's getting married to Sabine, whom he met at a dance. They enjoy a good socialist wedding. But at work Winfried is in trouble. He's joined the party but is summoned to appear before a party meeting for misrepresenting his qualifications.

We are meeting to decide how to punish you for your wrongdoing, which we might have to record in your party book. We will give you a chance to defend yourself. You must tell us what you did for the Party. and explain why we, as a collective, should not punish you.

It's been made clear to me by you that I must never lie again while working in the factory. I would have liked to travel to the West and probably would have stayed there, but it wasn't possible, so I had to make other plans. I played along. along with the system. By the mid-1980s, East Germany was a decaying society, morally and economically.

You can see it in these photographs of ordinary people's lives. The fact that such images were exhibited at all is as surprising as their realism. While I was in the plant that makes rubber in Thuringia, I met Andreas, king of soot. His job was to weigh the soot and mix the right amount with the rubber.

Every Wednesday at one o'clock there'd be a big guards procession in Unter den Linden by the Stasi guards Felix Dzerzhinsky regiment. There used to be the same old man leading the parade who would march as though he was the Führer, the leader. I often remember Tamerlan. She was that powerful type of woman. Her flat looked horrible.

Elderly people were always afraid of her. People got small pensions. She was a soulmate. She had wonderful strength.

One day I was lying on the grass in an area where new... building was going on. I had a hangover.

I felt a breeze on my cheek, opened my eyes and saw a little girl with blonde hair and snow-white skin. I told her, you look like an angel. And she answered, I am an angel.

She ran away and came back dressed as an angel. Gundela's photos prompted great interest from the Stasi. They had plans to arrest her on bogus charges of working for the CIA. In the ceiling of my studio was a beam which was hollow.

I wasn't naive and I was concerned about my photographs. I would hide them in that hollow beam. I always expected the Stasi to show up at some point. A new generation was seeking alternative lifestyles outside party structures. That's us in the Trabant.

That was the last really bad winter. That was 1985. You were pregnant but didn't know it yet. That's Roland trying to fix the Trabi.

No petrol. There was mashed potato and it was important that we could eat well, eat lots, eat fatty food. Here you can see it.

Look how skinny you were. You've got more muscles now. And that was also.

We didn't have a bathtub and we were very happy to take a bath at Roland's before New Year's Eve. I grew up in Dresden where no West German TV existed. It was called the valley of unknowing. I was very unknowing in many ways.

There's a saying, living in East Germany was like driving with the handbrake on. I felt that very much. You weren't allowed to do things independently. You always had to file a motion and wait for approval.

That was the summer of 85. We'd just fallen in love. We'd known each other three months and we dared go on holiday together. Here we're in my flat in Berlin showing off the holiday souvenirs. You can see how much we fancied each other.

This was our wonderful shower device. We did it ourselves. It had a very thin hose which fitted the water tap.

We would put a bowl in there and sit in that bowl one at a time. Our daughter was already born and we lived in a very small flat where rain would drip from the roof and rats would gnaw away at our vegetables. Actually it was horrible.

Bau auf, Bau auf, Bau auf, Bau auf! Increasingly, official rallies like this one held little appeal for young East Germans like Andreas and Carmen. Richten wir die Heimat auf!

Bau auf! A spirit of rebellion was gradually emerging, sometimes in the most surprising places. I have lost myself, the city is so big. The often grim reality of living in East Germany was something Michael Schmidt, a children's film animator, wanted to feature in his work.

Oh, that stinks. I wanted to represent a bit of East German reality. That is, I wanted to show houses with crumbling plaster and broken gutters.

But I was told it was too realistic, so my film was rejected. Michael responded by secretly making an erotic version. The policeman shows the girl how to get to the park, where he wants to seduce her. Karl Marx is first of all unbiased.

At first the Karl Marx monument remains impassive to the tearing up of the rule book. But then his eyes start roving and you realize that after all the monument is alive. A little bump comes out of the pedestal as he follows the action with his eyes and takes in the girl.

And then as he also sees the girl, he... That's when you realize that even the great Karl Marx has urges. This man was sacrosanct, and at that time it was not allowed to make fun of him. But Gorbachev was already in charge, and people started to think of Marx as old-fashioned.

People knew that many things Marx had written in his Bible didn't work. That is communism as it was envisaged. By now, even the Sandman was harboring illegal thoughts.

This episode proved controversial, as paragliders were banned in East Germany to prevent people using them to escape across the border. And it is the border, and especially the wall, that remains the symbol of East Germany, shutting its citizens in and dividing families. Jutta Gallus Fleck with her two young daughters made an unsuccessful escape attempt from East Germany. This led to her family literally being torn apart.

Her two daughters were forcibly adopted by the state. On average, more than seven people were in prison every day for trying to escape. Jutta was sentenced to three years in prison for attempting to flee East Germany.

All I was allowed to keep was one photograph where I was pictured with my girls. But I had to cut my head off from that picture. I had to cut my head off because I wasn't allowed to preserve any identity, just a number. In their mother's absence, the girls threw themselves into dancing. Every day at school we were told how bad capitalism was and that our mother was a bad person.

and that she had done wrong. Jutta's freedom was eventually bought by West Germany. Over the years, the communist regime made over one billion pounds from the trade in selling its own citizens. Once in the West, Jutta campaigned for the release of her two children. I went to Checkpoint Charlie almost every day for six months.

I was a child. I'd put my placards on, and looking towards the east, I would say, they are what I want. Honaker regime, give my daughters back.

My children who are in forced adoption and who live in a state children's home, I want to have those children. Give me my children back. Their only communication was via letters which were censored. I can say we weren't allowed to draw Mickey Mouse.

Mickey Mouse was western propaganda. It was forbidden to draw such things. After six years of separation, Jutta was finally reunited with her daughters in August 1988. That was incredible. No one will ever be able to take that away from me. For us, that day is the day of our personal reunification.

I'm very proud of the fact that we managed to make it happen before the wall came down. By the autumn of 1989, discontent with the regime was growing apace. That was the big demonstration in Berlin.

Curiously, it wasn't about getting rid of East Germany. That was not the issue. And neither was the reunification of Germany.

It was about reforming our country. Back then we still believed it would be possible to create another type of socialism. Now you see flowers attached to a police car.

The security forces kept well back. Unlimited freedom of travel was a very important demand. And when we got it, we lost many other things.

Many East Germans like Carmen and Andreas miss aspects of their socialist state. Guaranteed employment, generous welfare benefits and a certain camaraderie are often cited as examples of what was lost when the Berlin Wall came down. Actually, we used to lead a good life.

There were many things in East Germany that disturbed us and made us angry, and I'm glad they don't exist anymore. But nevertheless, we had a good life in many ways. East Germany was a child of the Cold War, and its end came with the end of the Soviet Empire two decades ago.

Given the revelations that have emerged since, from places like the Stasi files, it is perhaps surprising that anyone should feel nostalgic about it. Yet the country lasted for 40 years, long enough to produce a new kind of society. A socialist paradise it wasn't. But while few want communist East Germany back, some genuinely miss aspects of their lives there. Next time, the lost world of Czechoslovakia, where communism tried to reform itself and failed, consigning people to an era of forgetting.

And there's a BBC book written by Peter Malloy to accompany the series. The acclaimed film comedy Goodbye Lennon is tonight at 11.50. Coming up next on BBC Two, comic relief does top of the pops.

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Transcript for:Life Behind the Iron Curtain

Transcript for:
Life Behind the Iron Curtain