After Merkel
After Merkel

Summary/Abstract: When Paul McCartney was coining lyrics for Those Were the Days, performed magnificently and with touchy romantic crescendo by Mary Hopkin, a young, bright and promising student in Templin was dreaming of cracking nuts from theoretic physics, when growing up. After moving with the family from her birthplace in Hamburg, West Germany, to Quitzow, East Germany, the profession (a pastorate position) of her father was the reason, she got to know what would occupy her adult life. This author, at the very same time, was listening to Mary Hopkin (and The Beatles, of course), reading comics and science fiction and dreaming of becoming a journalist (what he later did). But above all he was listening to stories endlessly told by his mother about her life during the WWII years in Germany, southern from Dresden. She was one of tens of thousands of Slovenes, expelled from home by the Nazi regime and enforced to work, although being in her early teens. The first out of the three visits with his mother to those places, in the summer of 1981, through the neutral Austria and socialist Czechoslovakia to communist East Germany, gave him the firsthand experience of the Eastern Bloc affairs, not to say about the Cold War spirit on the spot.

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