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“You see the mistakes of one system—the surveillance—and the mistakes of the other—the inequality—but there’s nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. “And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“45,000 sections of reinforced concrete—three tons each.
Nearly 300 watchtowers.
Over 250 dog runs.
Twenty bunkers.
Sixty five miles of anti-vehicle trenches—signal wire, barbed wire, beds of nails.
Over 11,000 armed guards.
A death strip of sand, well-raked to reveal footprints.
200 ordinary people shot dead following attempts to escape the communist regime.
96 miles of concrete wall.

Not your typical holiday destination.

JF Kennedy said the Berlin Wall was a better option than a war. In TDTL, the Anglo-German Bishop family from the pebbledashed English suburb of Oaking argue about this—among other—notions while driving to Cold War Berlin, through all the border checks, with a plan to visit both sides of it.”
― Joanna Campbell, Tying Down the Lion

“While the Antifascist Action and all opposing groups were banned after Hitler became head of state, the antifa communist ideology never went away. From the ashes of WWII, it was absorbed and institutionalized in the official state ideology of what would become the German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany. From 1949 to 1990, East Germany existed as a communist state carved out of the Weimar Republic by the Soviet Union, one of WWII’s victorious Allied leaders. For over forty years, the extremely repressive conditions in East Germany exemplified what “antifa�� state-building actually looks like.”
― Andy Ngo, Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy

“Auch wenn zwei Staaten in Deutschland existieren, sind sie doch füreinander nicht Ausland; ihre Beziehungen zueinander können nur von besonderer Art sein."

("Even though two states in Germany exist, they are not foreign countries to each other—their relations with each other can only be of a special kind.")

First Inaugural Address as West German Chancellor, October 28, 1969”
― Willy Brandt

“The penalties for being an accessory to the attempt to flee the [GDR] were greater than the crime of trying to flee itself.”
― Anna Funder

“The former East Germany hardly had a monopoly on complicity. Life’s every moment caught one out in one form or another.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“More riveting to me in the end than the politics of Berlin was the vast social experiment its division had become... it was possible to have freedom and plenty in the West and craft an empty life; it was possible to "have nothing" in the East and create a life of intimacy and dignity and beauty.”
― Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

“...this is a two-fold country, and, what's more, everyone in it is two-fold, one part possibility and the other its refutal”
― Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T.

“I find it difficult to say whether the leadership's 'second echelon' could have preserved the German Democratic Republic. Helmut Kohl later told me he had never believed that Egon Krenz was capable of getting the situation under control. I do not know �� we are all wiser after the event, as the saying goes. For my part, I must admit I briefly had a faint hope that the new leaders would be able to change the course of events by establishing a new type of relations between the two German states �� based on radical domestic reforms in East Germany.”
― Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs

“The history of the GDR journalism is a story of partisanship.”
― Patrick Conley, Der parteiliche Journalist

“Восточная Германия была огромным местом лишения свободы, управляемым русскими, Штази воплощала в себе наихудшие крайности немецкой авторитарности и бюрократического педантизма, все, у кого есть мозги, и все, у кого есть характер, бежали на Запад до возведения стены, но узники, оставшиеся искупать коллективную вину страны, были парадоксальным образом освобождены от немецкого начала в себе. Те, с кем я познакомился в Йене, были скромны, непунктуальны, импульсивны и щедро делились тем немногим, что имели.”
― Johnatan Franzen - Джонатан Франзен

“The problem in the DDR wasn't No Future, the rallying cry of British Punk. As Planlos guitarist Kobs liked to say, the problem in East Germany was Too Much Future.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“Kids in tje East had also grown up with a genuine sense of fear that the world might actually come to an end during their lifetime. That it probably would in fact. For some this fueled nihilistic feelings - one reason Toster from Die Anderen, for instance, never got deeply political was because he stopped giving a shit.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“And as the Stasi began to pay more and more attention to the new network, they made the same mistake they had when trying to break up the punk scene a few years before: they sought to identify leaders and focus on undermining them. The Stasi assumed every organisation had a top-down structure like the Stasi, like the Party, like the dictatorship.”
― Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

“Yeah, I guess I am a sadistic piece of shit. What can you do? What else is there to do? My grandfathers were Soviet officers in Germany. They were Men. Now what is my Father? he's a little bitch who ran away from Russia in 1998. What's his fate? Well. He's gonna get fucked in the ASS with so many different things, you can't even imagine.”
― Dmitry Dyatlov

“Some of the “songs�� on offer were served up with screams and inarticulate noises to an audience consisting mostly of teenagers who, whipped up by the music, carried out degenerate motions.”
― Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

“From 1971, the rates paid were means-tested, allowing working class families with children privileged access. A four-person household in West Germany spent around 21 percent of their net income on rental costs while a similar household in the East only needed 4.4 percent.”
― Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

“This project was hugely successful, perhaps one of the most effective aid projects ever conducted. Vietnam is now the world’s second largest producer of coffee, producing around 30 million 60-kilogram bags every year, and its industry employs 2.6 million people. Its Robusta beans have a high caffeine content and are ideal for granular and instant coffee, which is drunk in large quantities around the world. Only 6 percent of the produce is used internationally, while the rest is exported at an estimated annual worth of $3 billion.”
― Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

“The last diplomatic crisis had been all too recent. A month earlier, a West German man, who had travelled through the GDR, had died of a heart attack when questioned by border guards in a barrack in Drewitz, Saxony-Anhalt. As such, this was nothing out of the ordinary. The psychological pressure that East German border guards deliberately built up during questioning proved too much for an estimated 350 people in total who died of heart failure at inner-German checkpoints.”
― Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

“Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart,�� that was officially used to refer to the Berlin Wall.”
― Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

“In other fields too, female ambition had become the norm. By 1988, over 90% of East German women fought their own battles in the workplace. The GDR had reached the highest rate of female employment in the world as women entered every last bastion of previously exclusively male domains.”
― Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

“Ci sono persone che si sentono a loro agio a parlare della propria vita, come se riuscissero a ricavare un senso dalla successione di eventi casuali che le hanno rese quel che sono. Questo comporta una sorta di fede preveggente nella vita; la convinzione che causa ed effetto siano legati, e che essi stessi siano qualcosa di più della semplice somma del loro passato.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall