Trivia

Episodes 1-7: - Ich war Bürger der DDR - Von der Zone zum Staat - Vom Plan zur Pleite - In Fürsorge für das Volk - Geist und Macht - Schild und Schwert - Wir sind das Volk.

The people of the GDR were some of the most spied on in the world. Much of the information gained by the Stasi - the Staatssicherheit (secret police) - came from inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (informal collaborators), who were otherwise normal citizens. Estimates of their number vary, but the BStU (Commission for Stasi Records) accepts that there were around 189,000 informal collaborators in 1989, in other words one for every 90 citizens. And that didn't even include the full-time staff! Numbers also varied throughout the GDR's 40-year lifespan, rising during times of political crisis.

At the end of the WW2, Germany was split into four militarily occupied zones: American, British and French in the west, and Soviet in the east. The original aim was to work together to help reconstruct Germany, but also to ensure that it could never again become a threat to world peace. But the Cold War soon got in the way of this. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was formed by the Soviets on October 7th 1949 in the east, after the other three zones had already combined to form the Federal Republic of Germany a few months earlier. From 1949 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, these two states remained entirely separate, developing very different identities. After over 25 years of reunification, the GDR is a distant memory for many, but it still influences modern Germany.

The East German government kept a close eye on the growth in the popularity of jeans in the early years. Dance halls banned the so-called "riveted pants", and children wearing them at school would be sent home! The state saw them as an expression of western capitalism, and of rebellion. Despite being a political statement, many would go to extraordinary measures to get their hands on a pair. They would either try to smuggle them in from the West through the post, or pay extortionate prices on the black market. Sensing a lost battle, the GDR started to produce their own jeans from 1974. These never really compared with western counterparts, as they were made from partially synthetic materials due to cotton shortages. So, in 1978, in an attempt to gain popularity, the state imported a million pairs of Levi's from America. These were sold in selected universities and companies, and even in the Ministry of State Security - to the Stasi.