The right to holidays was enshrined in East Germany's constitution. "In return, we would bring them something from East Germany, which was always a lovely, friendly gesture." Worf recalls that East German citizens weren't allowed to exchange many East German marks into Czech crowns, which made staying with acquaintances and friends imperative back then. But they took every opportunity to visit their native region and old friends from school.
After the Second World War, they were among the roughly three million Germans who were expelled. Wolfgang Worf's parents hailed from the Sudetenland region in what is today the Czech Republic. After an upgrade to the popular 601 model of the ubiquitous East German-made Trabant car - lovingly dubbed the Trabbi - the long trips to the neighboring country became a little more bearable, he told DW. The car was decidedly small, and had no windows that could be opened in the back. Sometimes they traveled as often as three times a year.
"My parents had a model 500 car, and I remember that I always had a hard time breathing in the back," said Wolfgang Worf, whose family regularly took trips from Weimar, in East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic (GDR), to Liberec, in what was then Czechoslovakia, in the 1970s and 1980s.
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