East Germany

Compared to the rest of Germany, the economy in the former East Germany has struggled. In the small village of Golzow, the population had shrunk to the point where authorities were considering closing the village’s only elementary school. That’s when the town mayor invited Syrian refugee families to move in.

East Germany never had a lot of cash on hand. What it did have was political prisoners, and plenty of them. So during the Cold War, the communist regime ransomed hundreds of thousands of people to the West in exchange for much-needed hard currency.

The board game called Bürokratopoly isn’t about getting filthy rich, though players might feel filthy after they’re done playing. The popular German game was created by dissidents in communist East Germany years ago as a satire about power and corruption. Now it has become a teaching tool for German kids trying to understand what it was like to live in the Communist East.

During the Cold War, all things Western were either forbidden or held in deep suspicion among officials east of the iron curtain. Yet, somehow, the culture of skateboarding that cropped up in California made it into East Berlin, where it thrived. A new documentary looks at that evolution.

Edward Snowden’s saga has sparked debate in Europe about how governments there are keeping tabs on their own citizens, as Time correspondent Vivienne Walt in Paris explains to anchor Marco Werman.