When I visited Georg Katzer in a small town near East Berlin in 1983, neither of us realized that the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—indeed, the Hungarian People’s Republic where I came from and the whole so-called socialist camp including the Soviet Union itself—had but six more years to exist. Katzer welcomed me not only because I had been sent by Hungarian Radio to do a program on contemporary music in the GDR and he was pleased that his music would be broadcast in Budapest, but also because for people in East Germany, Hungary was almost a Western country. We were allies in the Warsaw Pact, we were bound together by the ties of eternal and inseparable friendship as the official party slogan went, but the powers that be in Berlin made it difficult for East German citizens to visit the People’s Republic of Hungary. For good reason: it was on Hungarian soil that families and friends from both halves of Germany could meet. Travel from the East to the Federal Republic was all but impossible.

For all the rigidity of the German communist system and the stifling atmosphere that manifested itself the moment one left the plane at Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport— features that were far less present in Hungary—we also had a great deal in common. I found that I could unwind much faster with someone from the GDR than someone from the other side of the border because we shared the same destiny, we spoke each other’s language. While Hungary was not divided into two halves, there was nevertheless a kind of Western Hungary: all the expatriates who had fled in the late 1940s, in the wake of the revolution in 1956 or in later years, on a visit to the West from which they did not return. For all of us, the West meant personal freedom, the freedom to express one’s opinion, higher living standards, a more humane way of life.

Some East German composers were lucky enough to have a publisher in the West. Paul-Heinz Dittrich, for instance, was taken up by Universal Edition in Vienna. That meant that his scores reached the Federal Republic and they were performed for political reasons, independently of their quality (not that he was a poor composer).