GDR British visitors saw the two German states
Earlier, before Erasmus, that was complicated with the academic stay abroad: visa, health insurance, change money. In addition, there was no internet, so you could not find a flat from afar. So the first week you slept in the hotel and daily phoned the classifieds of the local newspaper. If one wanted to go to Germany as a foreign student, an additional difficulty was added: One had to decide in which of the two Germanys one wanted to study.
If the last sentence surprises, he is either too young or was socialized in West Germany (like me), where it was quite self-confident that anyone who could choose would prefer the West to the East. "It was not that easy to get into the GDR," many will interject, but I've just heard a sound document from 1988 that nullifies these and other of my assumptions.
In the last full year of German division Deutschlandfunk interviewed British students of German literature who had spent semesters abroad in the FRG and the GDR, in some cases alternatively, sometimes cumulatively, and were thus able to report and compare first hand from both German states. I recommend to listen to the program yourself. The refreshing openness and pertinent observations of the students are worth it. And one is always surprised, even by the fact that there was a student exchange between the GDR and Great Britain. For the British students, the GDR seemed more exotic than the FRG, and the latter could still be visited as a tourist, so many of them decided to stay in a socialist country.
As is still the case in Germany today, the British colleagues found the FRG universities to be anonymous mass institutions, in which they felt left alone. It was hard to find connections or even friends. "The Germans were not interested in talking to us," they said, and many who are currently trying to integrate in Germany knowingly nodding. In contrast, in the GDR the recording was better organized, but also friendlier and more cordial. The British students themselves suspected that it may have been because they enjoyed as East Europeans in the GDR an exotic status. Because they also reported that the visiting students from "socialist brother countries" (for example, Bulgarians and Poles) were not treated fraternally, but with German national pride arrogance.
Anyone who comes to Germany from abroad is afraid of the bureaucracy (even today). Bureaucratic were both states. But in the GDR, someone always volunteered to help, whereas in the FRG students most often heard the sentences "we are not responsible" and "this is your problem".
But they found the study itself better in Germany. Although the freedom at the German universities was initially confusing, but the events were at a high scientific level. In the GDR, the Germanists felt under-challenged and found the lessons even "childlike" in its anti-capitalist propaganda.
By the way, they could not find any big material differences. Like us in the West, the British had heard stories of long bouts of empty shops in East Germany and were accordingly surprised when they saw nothing of it. Although they found the people in the FRG more materialistic (if they already stated that in the 1980s, what would they say today?), The quality of life in the GDR is somewhat higher. There, the restaurants were better and accessible to the average citizen. Even students did not cook themselves, but went to eat. The cafeteria food was identical in both German states: "Every day potatoes, meat and some sauce. And in both countries the same cheap plastic dishes. That's how I always imagined a prison canteen. "
Outsiders, of course, are the ideal interlocutors in order to find out what the West Germans thought about the East Germans and vice versa. The Germanists, who apparently studied both German states in the UK, were shocked in the Federal Republic of Germany about the lack of knowledge, indeed the lack of interest in the GDR. You had an incontrovertible, negative image that did not come about through your own experiences and that you did not even want to shake by your own experience. These descriptions were very familiar to me, because even today this corresponds to the Eastern European image of many Germans. It's poor, it's negative, you do not want to go there, you do not want to meet anyone from there, and you do not want to know any better. One of the students described that she always received the same reaction when she told in the FRG that she had previously lived in the GDR: "Oh" and then silence. It's the same with me when I talk about Romania or Lithuania in Germany. "Oh," and then a blank expression that reveals the empty map to the east of the Oder-Neisse line.
In the GDR, on the other hand, there was a positive western image that did not coincide with reality. A funny anecdote: The British young academics told of the unemployment in the UK. The East German fellow students were quite astonished, because "we have always read about it in our books, but we thought that was anti-Western propaganda and did not believe it."
At the end another surprising moment (from minute 42:25). The interviewer asks the students, who both got to know German states, where they would rather work, if they had to choose between the FRG and the GDR. The choice is clear. These intelligent, educated experts in Germany (as we know, thanks to John le Carré, when the British secret service recruited preferably Germanists at the time) all opt for the state, which will not survive the following year, thanks also to the contribution of its fellow students.