In September 1989 Małgorzata Chodakowska took a hiking trip in the Tatra Mountains (Polish side) with a couple of friends. While walking one day the girls fell into conversation with a solitary East German hiker. Klaus Zimmerling was a mechanical-electrical engineer from the Wachwitz () quarter of Dresden. (It later turned out that Zimmerling was a frustrated engineer, but a passionate hobby-winemaker.) That evening they agreed to team up for the final part of their break and at the end of the trip Chodakowska and Zimmerling exchanged addresses. Two weeks later she arrived at Dresden on the train from Warsaw to be met by Klaus clutching a bunch of flowers and solemnly unrolling a red carpet across the platform: they were evidently in love. Significant travel restrictions were still in force between central European countries in the "Soviet Empire", but 1989/90 was a period of massive and lasting social and political change. By the end of 1990 Chodakowska had joined her lover in Dresden and the couple were married. At this point, however, Małgorzata Chodakowska still had not completed her course at the Academy in Vienna. Street protestors had breached the Berlin Wall in November 1989, however, and it became clear, after East Berliners—some exultant and others merely intrigued—streamed past bemused border guards, that neither the watching Soviet soldiers nor their East German proxies had received orders to kill. There would be no repeat of 1953. Long-standing restrictions on foreign travel rapidly disappeared and Zimmerling was able to accompany his bride to Austria where she completed her artistic studies in Vienna and he undertook a twelve month internship on an organic winery up-river at Wachau.