FDJ student summer
The FDJ Student Summer was a vacation work program for students in the GDR organized by the Free German Youth (FDJ) since 1966 .
The students were encouraged to make at least once during their studies for three weeks in the summer of paid work, thereby promoting the "connection to the working class." At the same time, this counteracted the labor shortage in the main harvest season and the vacation months. However, this was only apparently voluntary, because if you did not start work you had to reckon with consequences such as exclusion from your studies.
The students were deployed in almost all areas of the economy, in particular as harvest workers in agriculture , building cable trenches for the Deutsche Reichsbahn , in lignite opencast mining and other businesses as well as in socialist countries.
literature
- Stefan Sommer: The great lexicon of everyday life in the GDR . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89602-532-5 .
