Episodes

Radio GDR co-hosts, Steve and Shane share news of the upcoming Season 3 and how you can help us!

In this episode of Radio GDR our host John Paul Kleiner () interviews Debby Pattiz about the unusual semester she spent in the GDR back in 1988 as a Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island, USA) student at Wilhelm-Pieck Universität in Rostock.

What do you do with a hundred thousand idle spies? By 1990 the Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state security service folded. For forty years, they had amassed more than a billion pages in manila files detailing the lives of their...

Thanks to Tim Mohr for taking time to speak with John Paul Kleiner (GDR Objectified blog) and Prof. Ed Larkey (University of Maryland - Baltimore County) about his book Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall....

In this episode of Radio GDR - the East Germany podcast, we are joined by Patrick Hoffmann, assistant director, pedagogue and historian at Borderland Museum Eichsfeld, one of the more than 20 museums along the former Inner German Border Founded in...

From being raised by a World War 2 veteran who spent time in a Soviet prison camp to having of view of the Berlin Wall from her apartment to meeting westerners like Celeste and her family who she finally visited in California after the wall fell,...

This episode of Radio GDR, the East Germany podcast, lives up to Paul Harvey's famous expression, "and now you know the rest of the story." In episode 24, Shane Whaley interviewed Eric Friedman who, as a 10-year old boy in 1988, accompanied his...

A conversation with author Michael Wagg.  In The Turning Season, he goes in search of hidden histories and footballing ghosts from before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He revisits the 14 clubs that made up the 1989 DDR-Oberliga, East Germany's top...

John Paul Kleiner chats with the author of Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany. Andrew Demshuk.    illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve of the 1989...

John Paul Kleiner and Dr Ed Larkey return to Radio GDR/The East Germany Podcast for part 3 in our series on East German Pop Music. In 1971, East German leader Ulbricht is out  and is replaced by Erich Honecker Our experts discuss how music...

In this episode of Radio GDR East Germany podcast, Steve Minegar speaks with Dr. Claudia Sandberg. a film scholar and filmmaker at the University of Melbourne in Australia and a colleague of Katrin Bahr. Born in the GDR and raised watching DEFA...

On today's episode of the East Germany Podcast, GDR Objectified's John Paul Kleiner and Shane Whaley chat with the Herr Helge Heidemayer, director of the Hohenschönhausen Memorial in Berlin. You will learn: 1) About Hohenschönhausen a) What was...

In this episode, our hosts return to look at the broad theme of pop and politics in East Germany. 'So we're looking at ways that East German authorities, the party, the free German youth organization struggled or worked to frame youth culture in a way...

Today we chat with the author of Interflug - East Germany's airline, Sebastian Schmitz. This is the first book published in English about Interflug. Don't worry though, you do not need to be an aviation nerd to enjoy this one!  In this episode,...

On this episode of Radio GDR the East Germany Podcast, Steve Minegar explores the lives of East Germans who, in the name of international solidarity and cooperation with fellow socialist countries, worked on behalf of the GDR in Mozambique in the...

I have always wondered what small-town life was like outside of Berlin in the GDR. In this episode of Radio GDR, Bill Blosen and I sit down to talk about his experiences traveling to Görlitz, a small medieval town on the East German-Polish border. ...

East Germany Podcast Host Shane Whaley's Amazon Explore review of The infamous Berlin Wall: stories of the Death Strip and a divided city tour. Shane works in the tours and activity industry hosting a podcast for tour operators called Tourpreneur. He...

In this episode, you will hear how Peter Keup's life was made a misery following his family's application for an exit visa. Peter discusses how his life was never to be the same again. How he was treated as a pariah by the East German state, which...

In this episode of the East Germany Podcast - Radio GDR we go on a journey of Rock and Pop Music of East Germany. Our good friend John-Paul Kleiner (GDR Objectified) is in the East Germany podcast host chair for this one. He is joined by Dr Edward...

Dedicated to the memory of Neil Tooley

In this episode of the East Germany Podcast we ask Christine the podcaster behind the East German Fashion History Podcast , why she is fascinated with East Germany and East German Fashion.

In 1988, a reluctant 10 year old American boy, Eric Friedman moved to East Berlin. His father Frank was granted a Fulbright grant to lecture at Humboldt University. Eric shares his experiences living in East Germany in his memoir The Ghosts of East...

In this episode of the East Germany Podcast, Shane Whaley is joined by Anthony Russell. Anthony shares with us what fascinates him about East Germany. Anthony was so fascinated by the GDR that he chose to live for a year in Rostock as part of his...

In this episode of the East Germany Podcast, Shane Whaley is joined by Cold War Conversations Podcast Co-Host James Chilcott. James shares with us what fascinates him about East Germany. James tells us how he visited the Fulda Gap as a schoolboy and...