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Some FDJ activists dressed up for their demonstration.
So the current system should be criticized
Photo: Lena Laine
An old woman stands in Zwickau on Bahnhofsstrasse and cries.
Slowly the tears run down her cheeks.
Her bags and pouches are almost touching the floor, her shoulders sagging so much.
The woman followed the hustle and bustle on the street in disbelief: a crowd of around 40 people had gathered for a demonstration.
You run after a man who is wearing a Björn Höcke mask.
It should make the right-wing extremist politician contemptible.
But this Höcke is not what shocked the passer-by.
Nor is it the Trabi that is on the trailer of a bus.
It's the blue jackets and waving flags of the young people: FDJ is written there, underneath the sun symbol.
FDJ, the Free German Youth, that was the youth organization of the GDR.
"That's horrible," says the woman who lived in the GDR.
The FDJ was founded in exile in Paris in 1936, fighting against fascism and war.
In the GDR, the FDJ grew into a youth association, the only state-approved youth organization with up to 2.3 million members.
Membership in the FDJ was voluntary in GDR times, but those who did not enter were not allowed to take a high school diploma and were often not admitted to study.
In the worst case, they were threatened with admission to a state re-education institution.
The FDJ served as a cadre forge for the SED, where adolescents had to internalize the state ideology.
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