Quote Originally Posted by gerefan2 View Post
We had compulsory football or cricket for 2 hours every day and on Saturday were forced to attend and watch school matches against other schools.

At weekends I was marched off to Sunday School and then Mass at the local church.
That's awful! I never liked ball games, but during school and army had to participate in a total of about 20 football games. At school there was no way out, at the army they quickly realized that I'm of no use and let me run in the stadium instead.

We had Saturday morning school in the GDR, and the best thing for me about the fall of the wall wall that Saturday morning school was abandoned in it's course (or rather shortly before, I vaguely remember an announcement by Margot Honecker, then minister of education in the GDR). I liked to sleep long; having to wake up for school on Saturday morning, but no school in the afternoon, made no sense to me.

I escaped a subject at school LER (Lebensgestaltung-Ethik-Religion, in English approximately lifestyle-ethics-religion) by a few years. I never liked those soft subjects, rather preferred natural sciences.