Further Media
Christian Reichl's report card reflects the upheavals that gradually began to take hold in the nine-year-old's life after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
However, the process began rather gradually. Christian Reichl experienced the fall of the Wall primarily as an almost incomprehensible media event: “Even as a child, this border and this wall were somehow a constant in life [...].”
Soon, many of his school friends were traveling to the West and reporting back on their experiences. A few weeks later, Christian Reichl also crossed the inner-German border to Bavaria for the first time and gained his own impressions of the West. When the course was finally set for German reunification, Christian Reichl's everyday school life also underwent changes: the behavior and demeanor of the teachers was different, and the school system was gradually adapted to the West German model.
These transformations can be seen in the letterheads of the report cards from 1989 to 1993: the East German model of the ten-year "Polytechnical Secondary School" (POS) was abolished and the report card forms changed accordingly.