Why German? My interest in foreign languages started when I was very young. My great grandparents and grandparents spoke Polish, although I don't remember more than a few words, but also, my father traveled all over the world throughout most of the 80's & 90's, bringing us back items (books, cards, toys, food, etc) from all the countries. Japanese, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, German, this list goes on. Out of all those languages, I was so fascinated by the way the German looked and how I was able to recognize some words, because they were similar to English words.  Around age 11, I started teaching myself German. My father knew enough to be conversational and my older sister was taking German in high school, so they also shared what they knew with me and by the time I entered high school and took my first German class, I knew more than my classmates! Since German is a grammatically complex and difficult to learn language, this scared away most students. I admit that it was pretty hard and at times I wanted to transfer out and just take Spanish or French. However learning German taught me the valuable skill of never giving up! When you fail, dust yourself off and try again and that hard work really does result in success. By the time I graduated high school, I was extremely comfortable with having conversations in German and understood just about everything that I read.  After spending a year in art school, I transferred to a university. A little lost in what I wanted to study, I signed up for German, because I loved it. After my assessment with the professor, she tested me out of all beginner and intermediate level German classes and talked to me about making it my major. As a German Major with a strong base in the language, I was able to dive in deeper to the linguistics, origin and evolution of the language as we know it today. My love of the Germanic branch of language has taken me on to learn Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish.  Why the Interest in the DDR? My interest in the former GDR (DDR) started after seeing the wall coming down in 1989. A few years later, my father traveled to the former east for business, bringing home a lot of pictures of the factories he worked at, but also of the city and landmarks in the area. I specifically remember looking at the sky blue, lime green and off-white little boxy cars in the background – the Trabi.  In my Junior year, we had two German exchange students in my school. One from Leipzig and the other from Berlin. Both were born in East Germany. They were surprised by my interest in the former GDR and were open to sharing their memories of living in it, the protests, and the wall coming down. After graduating high school in 1998, I spend five weeks in Leipzig. While there we also visited Berlin and Dresden and in all three cities, the buildings, roads, and people still provided me a glimpse into the former GDR. I returned again almost yearly from 2000 through 2008, 2015 with the last time being 2022. With each visit, less and less of that era was visible.