1949 was also the year in which the Soviet administered occupation zone was re-founded as the German Democratic Republic , a separate Soviet-sponsored single - party state with its constitutional arrangements modeled on those of the Soviet Union itself . At the age of fifteen , already identified as a good chess player , Bernd Eisenfeld found his participation in a chess tournament officially blocked . Eisenfeld would later describe the experience as the beginning of his " immunization process ( es ) against the ruling SED party " . He also noticed that the virulently anti-American propaganda produced by the SED ( party ) contrasted with his own experiences of American soldiers whom he had met in the immediate aftermath of war , before the US forces had withdrawn to the internal German borders agreed between Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta , and whom he had encountered more recently when visiting his Godmother in the western part of Berlin ( which during the 1950s was still not as starkly divided , physically , as it became after 1961 ) . He was also prevented from completing his school final exams and from pursuing his chosen career by training as a teacher . Instead between 1955 and 1958 he trained to become a bank clerk . A second period of further study followed at the Economics Academy in Gotha where between 1959 and 1961 he studied Finance
Yalta
Yalta Conference
Bernd Eisenfeld