Finally, we drove a huge herd of young cattle from the pasture to the large cattle barn, where the animals had to be chained. The calves and heifers, most of which already had strong horns, had been grazing from spring to fall and were therefore quite feral.
The cattle could not be chained so easily. It was like a rodeo in the Wild West. After the cattle drive, none of us was without scrapes and bruises. Despite intensive showers in the milking facility, our dormitory smelled like a cow barn.
The LPG members were proud of their harvest workers and pampered us as best they could under the simple rural conditions. There was not even a pub in the settlement.
In front of the only store the size of a living room, which the kindergarten teacher opened for an hour in the evening, there was a square of railroad ties, although there was no railroad line everywhere.
There we sat with the tractor drivers until the crate of beer was drunk, which the kindergarten teacher had placed in front of the store along with one or two bottles of schnapps.
The next evening we had to pay for the empties. The cash register was always right, because there was no beer or schnapps to be found anywhere within a radius of at least ten kilometers. The harvest had welded the seminar group 11/63 together into a conspiratorial collective. This was to prove extremely useful in the following years of study.
The study of German and history, my future teaching subjects, challenged me, but it did not overwhelm me. I never skipped a lecture, and I developed a personal shorthand that enabled me to capture the essence of the lectures. I actively participated in the seminars. I was especially interested in subjects such as methodology, psychology, and Middle High German.
I also quickly learned to separate the important from the unimportant. Already after the first semester, I received a performance scholarship because of my good grades. I owed my reliable results not least to an ambitious study group I had joined.
The group included Lothar, the order-obsessed former Volksmarinemaat with his always precise brush haircut, the down-to-earth Heinz from Thuringia, whom nothing could upset, and last but not least the always funny Gerd with his saucy Berlin snout.
Gerd had a nice spacious room and tolerant proprietors. There we worked and studied together. I used my poorly furnished student digs almost exclusively for sleeping. Because after the eternal squatting in the lecture halls and seminar rooms, I needed movement. In the afternoons, optional sports were offered.
I participated as often as possible. The young sports teacher was a likeable guy. After ten minutes of warm-up gymnastics, we played volleyball, indoor handball, or small-sided soccer until we dropped. A friendly relationship quickly developed between the teacher and the students.
One day he asked us to volunteer at the German Academy of Physical Culture to participate in a series of tests to develop effective training methods in preparation for the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.
The future GDR Olympic participants were to be optimally prepared for the unusual altitude of the venue, because the medals were hanging especially high this time, in the truest sense of the word. Twice a week, the sports group now trotted into a DHfK test lab for two hours before classes.
With their upper bodies wired up, all the test subjects had to complete the sporting exercises prescribed according to scientific criteria. The pulse-heart-breathing rate and blood pressure were constantly measured by the lab technicians and recorded in tables.
After one month, the test series ended with an exhaustion test in a negative pressure chamber, in which the atmospheric pressure was simulated according to that of the venue Mexico City. All subjects received a modest allowance for participation. 𝓣𝓸 𝓑𝓮 𝓒𝓸𝓷𝓽𝓲𝓷𝓾𝓮𝓭…
💡 Do you have a Linkedin account? Then you can subscribe to my newsletter „The Bright Side of the Doom“ ✔︎