Nope I never visited the German Democratic Republic, but my parents did it. Every time they pass the border, the boarder control take their passports for "inverstigations"...If the passed the control and they drove on the country road, police stopped them again to check their trunk again..just tormenting.

YOu have to know that a part of my parents come from western Berlin. So if they want to visit western germany, they HAVE TO drive through the GDR. So western Berlin was a enclave. In this time you could flee to western Berlin, if you like to refuse to serve for the new founded, at that time, German Armed Forces. They can't "take you" . So it was the "save" site for pacifists

I was there when the wall came down. An unbelievable experience.

I went up there to police the Pink Floyd concert with the border police, but it was that good an atmosphere we mainly just watched the show.

CX.

I wasn't there when it was communist, but you can still see the difference when you drive from West Germany to the former East Germany, although I guess things are slowly getting better. Along the major autobahns they've built new service stations, but you still see old torn down rusting communist stuff and some of the villages that have a lot of buildings build during that era look so bleak, just boxy gray buildings etc...

@djohnsto77

True.
You can truely see the ugly part of Berlin if you go over e.g. Checkpoint Charlie as described above...

We have big problems in East Germany. Rarely jobs, Nazis in the parliament "NPD"(german:"Landtag"), Nazis on the street...
It's sooo paradoxical. Before the fall of the wall Honecker called the wall the "anti-Fascist protective barrier"...Oh my god it's so pathetic!! What do you see now? A neo-facist party moves into the a parliament (Landtag) in east Germany!

What can I say...Build that wall again

I was there in 1966 on a Jugend Lager (youth camp) by Rostock for an event called Die Ostsee ein Meer des Friedens (the Baltic, sea of peace). It was quite old fashioned then, very organized, but friendly.

We saw the newly build wall, die Schützmaur gegen den Fascismus und Revangcismus. We were all socialists back in those days. Unfortunately we was run over by the greed of Kapitalismus. Food was very cheap and everybody had work, I remember.

When the wall fell, I said: "You just wait, they'll gonna be longing back to the good old days in Die Bauern und Arbeiter Republik".