“It applies, as far as I know, immediately,” Schabowski said, and the Berlin Wall came down
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Maria Karsten was born on 24 March 1942 in Olomouc to Karla and Jaroslav Pospíšilík. At the end of the war, she experienced air raids in Brno, and after the communists came to power, she experienced the abolition of the nuns from the hospital in Nové Město na Moravě and their removal to Bílá Voda. After graduating from the Faculty of Science in Brno, she worked for a while as a foreign language guide, where she met her future husband, Horst Karsten. She married him in 1965 and moved to the GDR a year after their wedding. After the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops - thanks to the fact that she and her son retained their Czech citizenship - she was allowed to continue visiting Czechoslovakia. From 1970 she worked at Humboldt University in the computer centre, where she remained until her retirement (2004). In East Berlin she experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the time of recording she lived alternately in Berlin and Mecklenburg.
