This episode of Radio GDR, the East Germany podcast, lives up to Paul Harvey's famous expression, "and now you know the rest of the story." In episode 24, Shane Whaley interviewed Eric Friedman who, as a 10-year old boy in 1988, accompanied his mother Celeste Barber, a teacher in the English Department at Santa Barbara City College in California, and stepfather Frank McConnell on a Fulbright grant-sponsored tour as an English teacher at Humboldt University in East Berlin. Eric and Celeste co-authored the book Ghosts of East Berlin, a must-read personal account of their time behind the Berlin Wall. In this episode, you'll learn how Celeste and her family ended up in East Berlin, how she met her dear friend Adelheid, who lived with a view of the wall from her apartment, and how the family coped with living in what Celeste calls "No Mans Land." While she experienced challenges and even some scary moments with the Stasi, the GDR's secret police, Celeste nonetheless had some very human moments via her friend Adelheid, Frank's students and even a Russian woman on the street car. Not everything behind the Berlin Wall was as gray as expected.

A conversation with author Michael Wagg. In The Turning Season, he goes in search of hidden histories and footballing ghosts from before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He revisits the 14 clubs that made up the 1989 DDR-Oberliga, East Germany's top flight. From Aue in the Erzgebirge mountains to Rostock on the Baltic Sea, this quirky account of his whistle-stop tour is for fans who know that football clubs are the beating hearts of the places they play for. There are portraits of the lower levels as well as the big league, stories of then and now that celebrate the characters he met pitch-side. There's Mr. Schmidt, who's found a magical fix for the scoreboard at Stahl Brandenburg; Karl Drössler, who captained Lokomotive Leipzig against Eusébio's Benfica; and the heroes of Magdeburg's European triumph, last seen dancing in white bathrobes, now pulling in to a dusty car park by the River Elbe. The Turning Season turns its gaze on East German football's magnificent peculiarity, with 14 enchanting stories from a lost league in a country that disappeared.

John Paul Kleiner chats with the author of Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany. Andrew Demshuk.

Bowling for Communism illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve of the 1989 revolution by exploring acts of "urban ingenuity" amid catastrophic urban decay. Andrew Demshuk profiles the creative activism of local communist officials who, with the help of scores of volunteers, constructed a palatial bowling alley without Berlin's knowledge or approval. In a city mired in disrepair, civic pride overcame resentment against a regime loathed for corruption, Stasi spies, and the Berlin Wall.

Reconstructing such episodes through interviews and obscure archival materials, Demshuk shows how the public sphere functioned in Leipzig before the fall of communism. Hardly detached or inept, local officials worked around centralized failings to build a more humane city. And hardly disengaged, residents turned to black-market construction to patch up their surroundings.

Because such "urban ingenuity" was premised on weakness in the centralized regime, the dystopian cityscape evolved from being merely a quotidian grievance to the backdrop for revolution. If, by their actions, officials were demonstrating that the regime was irrelevant, and if, in their own experiences, locals only attained basic repairs outside official channels, why should anyone have mourned the system when it was overthrown?

John Paul Kleiner and Dr Ed Larkey return to Radio GDR/The East Germany Podcast for part 3 in our series on East German Pop Music. In 1971, East German leader Ulbricht is out and is replaced by Erich Honecker Our experts discuss how music listening in East Germany evolved and changed in the 1970s including The Red Woodstock Festival of Political Song. Ed Larkey attended the festival and shares his observations with us. Includes clips of some of the music tracks mentioned. Check show notes for the full Spotify playlist.

In this episode of Radio GDR East Germany podcast, Steve Minegar speaks with Dr. Claudia Sandberg. a film scholar and filmmaker at the University of Melbourne in Australia and a colleague of Katrin Bahr. Born in the GDR and raised watching DEFA films, Claudia's research focuses on migration and mobility in European and Latin American film, Cold War memory and archives. Part of her interest concerns Chile and Chileans in East German feature films and documentaries during the 1970s and 1980s. Among other works, she made the documentary Hidden Films: A Journey between Exile and Memory (Vimeo password included with the hyperlink) in 2016 together with Argentine filmmaker Alejandro Areal Vélez. This project was co-funded by the Berlin-based DEFA foundation.

On today's episode of the East Germany Podcast, GDR Objectified's John Paul Kleiner and Shane Whaley chat with the Herr Helge Heidemayer, director of the Hohenschönhausen Memorial in Berlin. You will learn: 1) About Hohenschönhausen a) What was Hohenschönhausen? b) Who was incarcerated there? c) What was the prison's place in the GDR justice system? And Much More!

In this episode, our hosts return to look at the broad theme of pop and politics in East Germany. 'So we're looking at ways that East German authorities, the party, the free German youth organization struggled or worked to frame youth culture in a way that was appealing to East German, young people, but also delivered the desired ideological content.

John Paul's thesis at the outset here would be that in the 1950s and early 60's the East German authorities, the SED's goal was to create or to have a youth culture that was socialist in form and in content.

Today we chat with the author of Interflug - East Germany's airline, Sebastian Schmitz. This is the first book published in English about Interflug. Don't worry though, you do not need to be an aviation nerd to enjoy this one!

In this episode, we ask Sebastian your questions as we learn more about Interflug, her history, her planes, her employees and her passengers on the East Germany Podcast. And Much More

Communist East Germany's Interflug was an airline like no other. Their route map was flown by exotic Soviet-built airliners and shaped by political alliances, with trips into war zones in some of the most obscure corners of the planet, all under the constant surveillance of an ever-present police state.

On this episode of Radio GDR the East Germany Podcast, Steve Minegar explores the lives of East Germans who, in the name of international solidarity and cooperation with fellow socialist countries, worked on behalf of the GDR in Mozambique in the 1980's. He has the distinct pleasure of being joined by Dr. Katrin Bahr, Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. Born in East Berlin, Katrin and her family spent time in Beira, Mozambique in the early 1980s where her father was assigned to a railroad company. Over the last few years she has curated photo-exhibitions in the USA, Mozambique, and Germany about everyday life experiences of East Germans in Mozambique. Katrin is the co-founder of the Third Generation Ost network in the United States, which aims to open up new perspectives and approaches on research topics focused on the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Her personal life story and the missing narratives of East Germans in the discourse around the history of the GDR motivated her to pursue a PhD in German Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research topics cover post-colonial Mozambique, East German material, and visual culture, and East German memory studies.

I have always wondered what small-town life was like outside of Berlin in the GDR. In this episode of Radio GDR, Bill Blosen and I sit down to talk about his experiences traveling to Görlitz, a small medieval town on the East German-Polish border. Photos at www.radiogdr.com/30 He went there to visit family as a young man in the 1980s before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bill and I both work in technology and recently got to talking about our respective language skills. When Bill said he spoke German, I mentioned my recent travels to Germany and interest in the GDR and was pleasantly surprised to discover his personal journey behind the Iron Curtain. He tells us about his grandparents' concern over approaching Soviet soldiers during World War II, their experience with shared housing after the founding of the GDR, his travels through checkpoints at the Inner German border and on the cobblestone Reichsautobahn to Görlitz and the lessons those trips taught him about gratefulness and freedom. From East German speed radars to tips on getting blue jeans past pesky border guards, Bill's story will fascinate you.