The Mondpaca Esperantista Movado, founded in 1953 in Austria, had great significance for the reorganizing of the Esperanto movement in European socialist countries. The movement published a monthly journal called PACO. The magazine was published every month in a different country, sometimes behind the Iron Curtain. The January issue might have been edited by the Japanese MEMsection, the February issue by the French section, the March issue by the Bulgarian section, etc. Also, the German Democratic Republic’s MEM section published several issues of PACO.
Even before the formalization of the Esperantist movement in the GDR, there had already appeared a ten-page 1960 Esperantobooklet published by the German Peace Council. Edited by Ludwig Schödl and Karl Maier, it had a circulation of 6,000 copies. After the foundation of the cultural associationCentra Laborrondo de Esperanto-Amikoj, this organization became the GDR’s MEM section, and from 1966 to 1989 it published regularly the annual special edition of PACO. The edition of 1966 had 32 pages, those from 1967 and 1968 had 36 pages, and the rest had 40 pages. There was a regular bimonthly series, printed with better-quality paper. In addition, the annual special issue from the GDR brought more content and had better design. These editions of PACO contained material about international political problems and multiple cultural articles, as well as notes on interlinguistics, esperantology and studies of the advance of the Esperantist movement in East Germany and abroad. To be of a similar standard to widely circulated publications, it had the collaboration of professional graphic artists from the Dresden editorial office of :de:Zeit im Bild|Zeit im Bild. This way the magazine was richly illustrated and presented in the A4 format. The print run was generally from 5,000 to 6,000 copies. MEM distributed the magazine not only inside the GDR but worldwide. Cumulatively, the 24 issues published totalled 944 pages. Issue 162 of Der Esperantist contained a cumulative index of articles. The chief editors were Eugen Menger, from 1966 to 1971, and Detlev Blanke, from 1972 to 1989.
