Teacher hails Rock music in school

With Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," German teacher Steffen Reinhold showed the students at Ryle High School in America that they aren't that much different from their German counterparts.

Reinhold, from Leipzig, Germany, visited the school last week as part of the two-week East German Teacher Visitor Program. To get into the program, Reinhold said, the teachers have to have been born in East Germany and never been to the United States.

Aside from the differences that existed before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Reinhold said, American teenagers and German teenagers are pretty much the same.

A music teacher, Reinhold directs a choir in his school. Like American teenagers, his students enjoy performing music that is more modern, such as "Bohemian Rhapsody," he said.

"In GDR (German Democratic Republic) time, you had to learn Russian," Reinhold said. "For 10 years I learned Russian, but I don't speak any Russian." Rather, he said, he focused on English so that he could read the lyrics in the liner notes of Pink Floyd's "The Wall."

On a trip to Hungary, when he was younger, Reinhold said he was allowed to take only the equivalent of $350 out of East Germany. During the trip he bought "The Wall," for what was the equivalent of $50, leaving him only $300 to spend on food and a place to stay.

Like others who had made the trip to buy records they could not get in East Germany, Reinhold spent the nights in Hungary at a free campground, which the Hungarians called "Idiot Camps."

"I did it just once in my life, and I did it for the records," he said.