Yvonn, tell us a little about your childhood.

I grew up in East Germany, which was then Russian-occupied until the Berlin Wall came down when I was fourteen years old. My childhood was very different from many people growing up here, in Australia. We had no phone and no car. We had two channels of TV. We listened to records. Our apartment had a toilet half a staircase down. Heating was a beautiful tiled coal oven. It feels, when you talk about it, like a childhood from the ’50s. But for us kids, it was normal. There was often a shortage of certain foods in the shops, so my grandparents had a small plot of land. It was like a garden colony. You go there on the weekends; you tend to your gardens. How many kids were in your family?

I have an older brother, so just the two of us. I consider my childhood extremely happy and beautiful. We didn’t have many toys. We played a lot outside. We were very free. My parents rarely saw us until they called us in for dinner.

What about when the Wall came down—how did that change your life?

Life for adults was so limited and controlled in East Germany, and all of a sudden we are confronted with capitalism. The Wall came down and we believed every advertisement we watched on TV and