I don’t have a lot of good pictures from way back in 1989, but it was an important trip while studying in Tuebingen. The picture of the brown coal is weird but symbolic – the workers’ paradise was actually a really bad place to live as a worker – that brown coal really polluted the atmosphere. But when I was there, the students and others we met didn’t want to live in a capitalist country. So I wrote my thesis when I got back to school that there would not be a reunification. But the time I got my grade back, the wall had fallen. Don’t be fooled by polls I guess.

A student in a bar asked me how I could live in a country where people lived on the street and I didn’t know if I would get a job. Good questions I guess, but missed the overall point that the opposite didn’t really exist in their country.