One day in 1989 I was in Berlin with my test engineer, Nick, for a meeting with Siemens. As we were strolling out for a beer and bratwurst we could sense an air of excitement - it turned out to be the start of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Siemens later “acquired” an electronics company in the former East Germany, near Greifswald on the Baltic coast. They wanted to meet us to discuss a new telephone IC project. Their engineers had very few computers, and most of the design work had been done by “hand”, whereas we tended to use a lot of trial and error design, using fast computers to test ideas very quickly.
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| En route, Berlin to Greifswald |
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| Snack time |
A group of us drove north from Berlin; that was fascinating on at least two counts: one was the presence of Russian soldiers in their high-peaked caps, who had previously kept order in East Germany. After the accession of the GDR to the West, there just wasn’t the accommodation for all those soldiers back home, so they had to bide their time in Germany.
The other sight I remember was the quaint Trabant cars, made locally, contrasting with the occasional BMW wrecked on the side of the road. I was told by an “Ossi” engineer later that the youngsters now just didn’t have respect. Under Communist rule they had to work for years (and be a good citizen) to earn a Trabant; but now they could buy a BMW cheaply - it had little value. Trabbies became a bit of a collector’s item in the UK!
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| The road north |
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| Nat Semi colleagues |
Rather strangely we were accommodated in a very swish and beautiful hotel on the beach. This was clearly used by the political chiefs in former times. Other reminders of past history were the close proximity to the Polish border and Peenemunde, the V-2 rocket base during WW2, and also the site of Stalag II-C, a Nazi POW camp.
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| The "hotel" on the beach |
