When state dignitaries from neighboring socialist countries visit the GDR, they are graciously invited to the Palace of the Republic in East Berlin. There they find 5000 representatives of the people of the GDR who have come with their admissions tickets to a celebration of friendship. The top-ranking men explain to them how the relationship between the two states and the situation world-wide have developed. First though, there is music and a big welcome: young girls in short skirts bring bouquets of flowers, are kissed by the dignitaries and disappear again. The fact that they use young girls as the trimming for a state function in the same way they provide the speakers with drinking water and flowers probably does not occur to the chiefs of protocol of the first socialist country on German soil, as the GDR is called. The officials would deny any such accusation because they are, after all, particularly proud of their behavior in relation to women. For years they have repeated complacently their conviction that the women's question has been solved in the classical sense, that equality has been realized both under the law and in practice, that exploitation, oppression and discrimination have been eliminated. Sometimes when there is enough time, they add: of course, there are still some remnants of the bourgeois behavioral patterns of the past; but there is a constant struggle around eliminating them. Hanna gave me an example taken from everyday experience of a past that has not yet disappeared. She is a reader in an East Berlin publishing firm, 39 years old and divorced with two sons. On the 8th of March, International Women's Day, she was at the Book Fair in Leipzig. What follows is an experience she had in a restaurant in Leipzig: "I was still eating when one of a group of men at the next table approached, offered his hand and said: 'Happy Women's Day!' He misunderstood my discomfitted smile, sat down next to me and continued: 'On a day like this you shouldn't be alone.' I answered that I was on a business trip and got along quite well alone. He appeared not to hear or not to believe me; at any rate, he thought we should celebrate the evening and waved to the waiter. My mind worked on a comment that would make it clear to him that I did not need his companionship, a comment that wouldn't sound too friendly but not too crass either. The waiter came then and asked which champagne it would be, Rotkippchen (Red Riding Hood) or a Soviet cham-