Photo Gallery GDR Remembered
A weapon attached to a border fence is on display in front of a DDR flag in a museum. Social science professors warn of a growing tendency to idealise East Germany while playing down the repressive aspects of the rigorously controlled state.
A typical East German Trabant car in the city of Zwickau. "A new form of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the former GDR) has taken shape," says historian Stefan Wolle. "The yearning for the ideal world of the dictatorship goes well beyond former government officials."
More and more young people, including those with no personal experience of the GDR, are idealizing it today. "The value of their own history is at stake," says Wolle.
East German leader Erich Honecker was greeted by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in an official visit to Bonn in 1987.
Visitors from West Berin wait for a taxi shortly after arriving in the east of the city in 1980. That year some 100,000 West Berliners visited friends and relatives in the east during the easter holidays.
The polluted air above the eastern chemical factory in Bitterfield -- the area earned itself the unenviable reputation as the dirtiest place in Europe when the wall came down.
Sparklers in their hands, flags flying, people from east and west celebrate the fall of the Wall.
This archive picture shows DDR refugees celebrating as they cross the border into Austria.
The Berlin Wall under construction in August 1961.
GDR refugees, including children, cross the border from Hungary into Austria in 1989.
The crosses bear the names of those who were shot by border police as they tried to cross the Berlin Wall.
Passersby look back at three teenagers draped in East German flags in East Berlin during the first election day since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
