Almost 20 years after the fall fo the Berlin Wall an architect has come across an abandoned apartment in the eastern German city of Leipzig where time has stood still since the communist era.

It evidently hasn't been touched since early 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the place is filled with East German furniture, fittings and grocery brands that give a glimpse of everyday life in the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) 20 years ago.

Mark Aretz, an architect who renovates buildings in eastern Germany, inadvertently walked into history while he was refurbishing a building in the Leipzig district of Reudnitz last week. When he unlocked an apartment on the third floor it was as if he had stepped out of a time machine into the humdrum surroundings of the kind of apartment millions of East Germans once lived in.