Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his fifth blog.
Behind old enemy lines, Germans have stories to tell.
Delightful cities of music and religious history, such as Eisenach and Leipzig, offer also a journey through the old East German world of hidden bunkers, secret police and a life so fearful that citizens didn't dare let their children talk at school about family time at home. They feared any talk might lead the police to arrest them for social violations or government taboos, such as watching television shows beamed from the west.
"We lived a lie," said Ralf Paesler, an environmentalist in Eisenach, about 170 miles southwest of Berlin.
Paesler said that in East Germany, when you walked out your door, talked on the telephone, wrote a letter or discussed anything in public, you presented yourself as a good, enthusiastic citizen in the repressive society of the German Democratic Republic (the GDR).
Wartburg Castle, above, has dominated Eisenach for nearly 1,000 years.
Paesler must have been persuasive, as he tested government authorities when he claimed he was a conscientious objector to war -- this in a country that didn't recognize objections of any kind.
Somehow, said Paesler, he managed to get through more than a year in the army without touching a weapon. He said he learned the concept from what he heard about America during the Vietnam war.