Growing Up in the Soviet . (Communist East Germany) | Interviews With Locals

Cycling across the world, interviewing locals along the way! Note: views expressed are not my own. Have you ever wondered what life was like in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin wall? Petra grew up behind the iron curtain in the communist . (German Democratic Republic), a Soviet satellite state formed after WWII. I met her in Rauen, a small village some 60km East of Berlin, where she sat down with me to talk about her experience living in a country that no longer exists, including her run-in with East Germany’s stasi (secret service), and the West’s misconceptions about the nation she once called home. She lived close to the East German border, which enabled her to have some level of exposure to West Germany, since they received West German radio and TV signal, even though tuning into anything other than the East German TV and radio signals was a punishable offence. But she had very little experience of the outside world before West and East Germany reunification