East Germany 1990

I made several trips to east Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. One time I hitch hiked to Berlin with Roland. The photo of me hanging off the road sign is from that particular road trip. Got a bit scary as border controls were still in place and we had sneaked across the border but I needed a permit to get back into West Berlin! Finally got a permit and crossed at Checkpoint Charlie back into the West. On another trip I visited Eisenach and Dresden. There is a photo of the famous Frauenkirche in Dresden. The East Germans left it as a ruin after the war to depict the evil of democracy

Other photos include the old chainlink fence that divided East from West, the tower blocks in Erfurt that housed the workers. A typical queue for petrol and some of the famous Trabant cars. Couldn’t really photograph the empty shop windows, the queues to eat in a restaurant and the smell of burning coal. In 1991 I was back in East Germany, teaching English at a couple of schools in Eisenach and Erfurt for workers who were being retrained following the fall of the Berlin Wall.