This is before the wall fell in late Summer 1989. You can see some of the preparations for the 40th Anniversary of the GDR - no one had any idea what was to play out in just a couple of months...
@@johnmacaroni7028 Yet, the soldiers who were clearly being filmed 2:00 in front of them didn't shoot the camera man. So who am I suppose to believe here?
@@wildman958 you can believe what you want. There are hundreds of thousands of testimonies from people that lived through it. Hardly any film footage from 60s 70s 80s.. Millions spied on, untold documents was shredded before they were stopped by citizens crashing through the main doors of the Stasi HQ. The individual filming could, most probably was stalked and harrased by the Stasi. Bit like England today.
@@wildman958 I know a few instances, where people ripped film out of cameras (flashing-fogging it, if you know anything about pre-digital photography), just as they got arrested. for taking photos of anti-government activities, meetings, problematic sites, "the wrong places" around town etc.... had the organs gotten their hands on those films, they could have gotten other faces, and evidence for more arrests and sentances.... but unlike the west, they didnt even need any solid proof or reasoning to detain you, interrogate you in their active ways, send you to a mental facility for a month, get you kicked out of uni or your job.... ffs they could relocate you to another city and bar you from even going back to visit unless you got an permit. all that without even a showtrial or conviction. if you had the misfortune of getting convicted, oh boy, they still didnt need any proof, it just meant they were more angry at you, and it meant a looong time inside a squalid horrid cell. and afterwards, when released, you were a subhuman.... all this doesnt of course take for tourists, but they still were followed. and if they talked to a local for too long, you guessed it - the local got the abovementioned treatment of interrogation with threats of ruination. if the person seemed suspect, they could get their own caseworker, and if they had more contacts with westerners, or god forbid, exchanged objects with them, the threats became true fast.... the east was an paranoid neurotic horrid place
I spent a day there in '86 just to check out where my grandmother had lived. Couldn't find her home but got a small taste of what drove her off from there.
An excellent video, as a visitor to Berlin in 1989, very realistic. It would be fascinating if someone could make a similar 2 minute video at exactly the same locations 30 years later; then people could see the changes for themselves.
Interesting to see - again. I was in East Berlin just months later; on a visit to Berlin from Denmark, where we spent a day in East Berlin. I think it was in february 1990, before the reunification, but after the fall of the wall. I still remember the sound (and smell) of those 2-stroke engines on the Trabants. DDR probably couldn't be saved and/or reformed in any way, it was too far behind BRD and Krenz/Modrow were just custodians of already-doomed state. But it still gives me a little sting in the heart to see this.
Great footage! I lived in Germany in the late 1980s as a child and hope to revisit in the next couple years. I got to experience the Fall of the Berlin Wall in person...an experience I'll never forget! My family lived near Giessen and we just happened to be visiting Berlin when the Wall fell on Nov. 9th 1989, a very lucky coincidence. My Father had a camcorder at the time and recorded our experience at many of the same sites as your video!
@@pedromendesrbd The reason for less cars is because it wasn't a manufacturing priority. Public transport was incredibly cheap and city blocks were planned in a way that essentials (Park for exercise/playground, medical clinic, and small food store) was in walking distance. It would actually be more expensive overall to buy and maintain a car in what was the GDR, they weren't in massive demand, so the government didn't feel a need to mass produce them if there wasn't a massive need.
In many respects East Berlin was kept well maintained to convey a deceptive facade of success and prosperity to foreigners. And it certainly was a facade by the 1980’s as the regime flirted with financial insolvency with increasing regularity as the decade progressed. Such deceptions aside though the DDR’s second city _Leipzig_ was a rather more fitting attestation to the country’s inexorable decline....
@TheBerlin09 Thanks. I have a few more misc. Berlin vidoes I'll post in the next day or two. Looking back, I wish I had captured more of my time in Berlin. It was a very cool and interesting place back then...
It was great Times in Berlin. I miss the old DDR. For those that haven't lived in those era haven't got a clue and will never have an ounce of clue. Say no more.
Spidy Man sentimental nostalgic - romantic in its.purest form - projecting feelings in the past.to overcome.the.miserable state and condition of present time...
I certainly don't miss the Cold War! Many people in those days, including myself, had a foreboding feeling that the Soviet Red Army and East German forces were just one millimeter away from seizing West Berlin. That would have meant war.
So we are not entitled to make our mind on Nazi-Germany. For those, that haven´t lived in those era haven´t got clue and will never have an ounce clue! Say no more. What Kind of logic. And BTW, East-Berlin during GDR times, war a Privilege ( and moving from other parts of GDR to Berlin limited ). Living in Cottbus, Eisenhüttenstadt, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Bitterfeld or somewhere else was much less fun! And I missed West-Berlin, during GDR times. This is the REAL sad loss of the reunion.
Jay Rumas And weeping as they lost jobs, lost savings, lost homes, welfair & could not aford to travel anyway even thouigh they were allowed. In fact in the DDR they were given subsidized holidays to other east block countrys now they never travel. up to 60% want those times back.
+Jay Rumas If you look at an electoral map of Germany you can see that most votes for The Left party (the party is just called "The Left" and it's essentially a successor to the former ruling party of East Germany) are exactly in the territory where East Germany used to be. And more, they are the most voted party in East Berlin ! So you have people who have actually lived in socialist GDR voting for the most left-wing party in German politics. What does that tell you?
On another note: Capitalism doesn't seem so bad to us because we have welfare states and social democracies in Europe, which implement what could be perceived as "socialist" policies like nationalisations and (almost) free healthcare and education. And still many countries struggle with these issues and poverty and homelessness are still rampant.
My aunts father was a refugee from Ukraine. He came to England just After WWII. He absolutely hated the socialist regime his family had been made practically penniless by it. The freedoms he had in England he couldn't actually believe and often said they were beyond his wildest dreams compared to how he had been living in Ukraine. I genuinely do not understand how anyone can think the Soviet Union was a utopian paradise. In reality it was no better than the Nazi regime. It resulted in millions of deaths, seized land and property off people and kept everyone pretty much destitute with no real way of progressing up the ladder.
Hi there! I'm currently working for a documentary and am curious about what your licensing fee looks like for your video. Please let me know if you would like to speak further and what the best way is to reach you. Thank you!
What are we supposed to take away from this: smiling, clean people with no money worries, walking around a modern, orderly city? There's a lot of self-deception with the market fetishist types.
“ smiling, clean people with no money worries, walking around a modern, orderly city?” Weird then that a substantial number of these purportedly content East Berliners were marching on the very same streets but a mere couple of months later shouting (in German obviously) “Gorby save us!” to the visiting Soviet leader...
@@XxXgabbO95XxX Both sides did that in the cold war. However I agree the DDR was in dire need of democracy, just not capitalist democracy. That was the big mistake of 20th century socialism.
At the time of this footage _thousands_ of East Germans had fled and were fleeing the DDR through then Czechoslovakia and Hungary, desperate to reach the Capitalist West... Also, the regime operated a neat if clandestine little venture: Ransoming off its _own people_ to West Germany in exchange for some much needed hard currency. This lucrative arrangement became so important in staving off financial insolvency that it was secretly included in the _national budget_ as a viable resource. It’s existence was known only to three men at the time: Erich Honecker, Erich Mielke and whoever was the economist at the time. “Socialist works”...I’d hate to think what the DDR would’ve been like had it not. ;)
Yugoslavia was the most liberal socialist state at the time, as it wasn't part of the Warsaw Pact and it wasn't behind the Iron Curtain. People could travel everywhere freely and most had enough money to do so.
