I attended a small scientific meeting in the DDR in the 1980s, in Wernigerode in the Haartz mountains.
I traveled with 2 others from the UK in a hired car, a fancy, for the time Ford Mondeo. Once of the autobahn in the DDR you could smell the smoke from the brown coal and the shit on the fields (organic!), little Trabants with elderly farming couples. I felt a real capitalist pig in the Modeo. The buildings looked unchanged from the 1940s, with political slogans painted in that old gothic script. I saw steam trains in regular use. We stayed in a miners holiday camp, which was somewhat more dilapidated than a Butlins holiday camp (but only somewhat, yes we went to one of those in the early 90s). To be honest, despite being a Trot, I thought the DDR was supposed to be the most economically advanced of the “deformed workers’ states”, so I was shocked by the backward nature of the economy. There may have been full employment but is that not comptaible with economic development? We can’t blame all that on the West, the dead hand of the appratchniks and the lack of democracy played a role.
At the meeting there were DDR (and “Eastern block”) scientists trying to do good science with very limited resources. I got chatting to one during lunch. There was an important DDR prof in the research area of the conference (which was why it was there) but this guy didn’t like him because political favouritism meant that the Prof, as a party member close to the leadership, had lots of resources, was personally much better off, while others really struggled. Cronyism.
My lunch new found friend told me that before the wall went up he used to cycle all over Europe on holiday, and happily returned to the DDR, sounded like there was commitment there, at least at that time.
After a while my “informant” suggested we had better part as he claimed there were certain to be Stasi informants present watching us talk and it would be better for him if we didn’t carry on.
All in all, a very interesting and thought provoking experience, a bit like a big international meeting in Moscow I went to in the 80s!
BTW the town of Wernigerode had been restored to it’s almost Medieval quaintness. http://www.wernigerode.de/en/