In 1987, when Gorbachev's perestroika had facilitated academic exchange between the Soviet Union and the West, the Leningrad Germanist Vladimir Admoni gave a lecture at the Technical University of Braunschweig.

It was not only a technically interesting event - Admoni's book on the German language structure is still a standard work today - but it was also a harrowing encounter with history.

During a small group in the office of the chair holder Helmut Henne, Admoni said that as a very young man during the blockade of Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was called then) in 1941/42 he had written propaganda in German.

Such poems were dropped on leaflets over enemy lines and were intended to induce the German soldiers to surrender and desert - a difficult undertaking given the fact that Hitler's troops were still deep in Russia at the time and seemed to be on an unstoppable triumphant advance.

Eventually Admoni started reciting one of the poems from November 1941 that he still remembered 46 years later.