Eva Pieper (1956) learned early on to distort the truth to her advantage. She lied when she thought it would help her stay out of trouble. This was common practice in East Germany (the GDR), where it was better to keep your real thoughts and actions to yourself. The truth might just have dire consequences. Pieper often lied even to her father, who had a senior position in the communist party. After her forced departure from the GDR at the end of 1978, it took her years to trust that she could simply say what she thought. Pieper is a life coach and presentation skills trainer in Amsterdam.

The DDR 

After the Second World War, Germany was divided in two, with one part controlled by the Allies and the other ruled over by the Soviet Union. East Germany, from 1949 officially called the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was led by the communist SED party, a puppet of the Soviet Union. After the Iron Curtain hermetically sealed off the border between East and West, the SED decided to build a wall in Berlin – not intended to keep refugees out, but to prevent its own residents from defecting to the West. Through terror, censorship and an enormous secret police service (Stasi), every form of dissent was suppressed. Only in the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, did overt resistance to the regime start to grow. The Wall fell on 9 November 1989 and East and West Germany were reunited a year later.