3rd year German class invades East Germany

Back in October 1979, I went on an exchange trip with my School, the Benjamin Britten High School, to Burgwedel in the old West germany. As part of the visit, we went on a bus trip to visit the town of Goslar and went on to look at the border with the East.

The border was meant not to keep the West out, but to keep the East in, and so the barbed wire fence was some 15 metres inside the border, and the border itself was marked with just red and white signs warning that that was where the border was.



Our exchange partners strode to the border and carried on right up to the fence. Thinking this was normal, we followed, right to the fence, pulling on the wires which we found out later were attached to automatic machine guns.

As we stood there, two guards came screaming down on a huge motorbike, the guy on back carrying the biggest machine gun I ever saw. One of them took out a camera, so we hammed it, pulling all sorts of poses, including the old Churchill Vs. we took to throw stones onto the rough ground the other side of the fence, which we also found out later was a mine field. We all survived.

Late, we found out that the guards watched to which coach we got into, checked to see who had hired it to make sure it wasn't a horrible Western plot to overthrow their country. The East German Government then took the case to the international peace court and got massive compensation from the West Germans, and all coaches banned from some 2km of the border.

Listen to me explain this to DJ Danny Baker on Radio 5 this morning, as 'my 3rd form German class invaded East Germany. I'm on after about 55 minutes.

The follow up was that our class was the first official visitor to what it was hoped to be our German twin tow. Lowestoft already had a Dutch one (Katwijk, which in the 90s ditched Lowestoft as the Dutch deemed poor old Lowestoft too dull to be a twin town!).

So the German town, Gross Burgwedel, laid on a civic reception for the class, and it was all very formal, until they brought out the food, open sandwiches, some of which had what looked like raw sausage meat.

Now, the role of a food fight in a formal situation is never a good one. Sadly, soon all sorts of food was being thrown about, and we had a fine old time. It came of something of a matter of pride that when the local paper came out, our food fight made the front page. Which was nice.

In the end Lowestoft did not get that town as a twin, as due to a technicality, Gross Burgwedel was not a town, but part of a civic area called just Burgwedel.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0418mqk