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| BBC ALBANIAN.com | BBC WORLD SERVICE | LEARNING ENGLISH | ||
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Lesson 28 In music we found a feeling of freedom, of getting out of the narrow-minded DDR - the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. There was a wall, so we couldn't leave and we had to rely on information coming in from West Berlin or the military forces radio AFN and the BBC. When the Rolling Stones came to do a concert in West Germany, the authorities in East Germany took fright and decided to ban us for life. That was a really big setback for us because we had hoped that it would be possible to establish our own youth culture in the DDR. The government really took fright and all the rock groups like ours were banned in 1965. We ended up having a Big Beat Revolt in Leipzig, where lots of people were arrested and thrown in jail. We weren't allowed to appear in Leipzig any more, so we took to the countryside. All our fans joined us, by tram and bicycle, and the performances were played in village inns. It often happened that the police cracked down on these venues, under some pretext, like for example dancing apart was forbidden in the GDR and young people, of course, would dance apart when they were dancing to rock 'n roll. So there were arrests. That was out of the question! You were completely isolated from the outside world. Some people went in and out of jail. Others were forced to work for certain companies. In the worst cases we were put to work in workhouses, and in Leipzig that usually meant really hard manual work in the coal mines. |
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