Bill Meyers

Lived in Germany for many years, currently back in the USA; received a Rockefeller Fellowship in the 1980s; conducted interviews on dying trades (shoemakers, basket weavers). Bill Meyers (*1940), a Germanist originally from Detroit, has been visiting the GDR repeatedly since 1974. As part of a self-imposed mission to break down enemy stereotypes and with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation between the Cold War parties, he recorded numerous videos on everyday life in East Germany from the mid-1980s onwards. He toured extensively throughout the USA with these films. In the mid-1990s, Bill Meyers returned with his footage to the place where it was shot. The very first interview portrays the Strassburger family, a model family from Dresden, and shows ‘why they are perfectly happy in the GDR’.