In 1989 I spent the first three weeks of August buffing and polishing V. I. Lenin’s shoes. The footwear belonged to a gargantuan statue prominently located at the entrance to the Volkspark Friedrichshain in East Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic, henceforth to be referred to here as East Germany or the GDR.
My presence during the GDR’s final socialist summer owed to a stubborn determination to be different from the rest of the backpacking tourists, and to spend as much time as possible in the East Bloc during my months-long European sojourn. I’d become fascinated with the countries behind the Iron Curtain, and as a contrarian, political affiliation was no consideration.
Ideological free agency definitely has its privileges.
As you might expect, the notoriously hardline GDR was little interested in budget travelers, backpackers, hippies, punk rockers and other forms of decadent Western life, even if the politburo desired the “hard” western currency we carried in our money belts. Prepayment for expensive hotel rooms and guided package tours was the custom for those seeking to visit East Germany.
The question for me was this: How to spend time in the GDR without breaking the bank?
The unexpectedly answer came from Vermont: Volunteers for Peace, which was, and remains, an organization dedicated to the principle of international volunteer exchanges between all willing nations, and generally speaking, among people of all ages.
During the Cold War, VFP provided numerous opportunities to evade the restrictive entry requirements outlined above in return for a modest registration fee and two or three weeks of volunteer labor toward a specified project, which might be assisting at an archeological site, or helping rebuild a house for use as a daycare center, or agricultural work.
For the GDR, cooperation in such comparatively tiny exchanges meant international brownie points. For me, the problem was solved. A $100 registration fee was mailed to VFP, the requisite visa paperwork completed, and the GDR was penciled into a summer’s itinerary that included the month of June in...Read more
