Photo Gallery East German Identities
One of the contestants on Germany's answer to American Idol, Annemarie Eilfield from Dessau, which was formerly in East Germany, proclaims: "We East Germans are not ashamed of our bodies."
Oh capitalism! So cosy -- and yet still so foreign? Eilfeld poses in Dessau-Rosslau on her parents' terrace.
In the GDR Museum in Berlin. Children born in 1989 and afterwards only know about the GDR through school books or anecdotes.
The border between Hungary and Austria in the summer of 1989. Refugees from the east took the opportunity of the European Picnic and a symbolic border opening to flee to western Europe.
The first Berlin Wall being built in 1961.
A document from the files of the East German secret police. The undersides of socialism -- a depressed economy, the Iron Curtain, a surveilled society and political party bigwigs -- are only stories for the younger generation.
A nudist beach in East Berlin. For some, nudism was a form of protest and freedom against the communist state.
The beginning of the end of the relationship: Mikhail Gorbatschov and Erich Honecker embrace in October, 1989.
