The Rise and Fall of the
East German Civil Rights Movement

ON DECEMBER 17, 1996, SEVEN PROMINENT FORMER EAST GERMAn civil rights activists left Bündnis 90/Grünen (the affiliated civil rights alliance and Green party) and the Social Democratic Party, (SPD) -- the political parties they were attached to -- to join the ruling conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Another former civil rights campaigner defected from Bündnis 90/Grünen on December 24, and four more in January 1997, all five party officials on the regional level. One of the converts explained his astounding step by alleging that Bündnis 90/Grünen and the SPD were moving toward an alliance with the Democratic Socialist Party (PDS) which they felt was an unacceptable development. They said their change of allegiance was perfectly consistent with the democratic movement they had once initiated, identifying with the hoary Bavarian Christian Socialist Union (CSU) slogan of the 1970s, "Freedom or Socialism."

These events had been foreshadowed by a tea party which took place on August 23, 1995 in the home of one of the best known former civil rights activists, Bärbel Bohley. There, in the East Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg, both famous and notorious as the residence of former dissident writers, some of whom were later found to have been Stasi (East German secret police) agents, German Chancellor Kohl partook of Ms. Bohley's tea. He had asked to meet six civil rights veterans, all of them by then dyed-in-the-wool right-wing conservatives. It was, incidentally, the place where, five years earlier, Bohley had welcomed Dr. André Brie, PDS national committee member, acting on behalf of Gregor Gysi, then chairman of that party. The purpose of that meeting was to discuss an election alliance of civil rights groups and the PDS which, however, never materialized.

The meeting with Kohl took place in 1995 with elections to Berlin's parliament looming ahead. Kohl, Bohley and her other guests agreed that public support for German unification was at a low ebb. Particularly in East Germany, the debate on the defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the clearly very much alive PDS was going the wrong way: "We must get people to regain the correct view of the GDR," was their joint conclusion. By this, they meant that people's belief that nothing relating to the GDR was worth preserving was on the wane and needed to be reinforced. For this purpose a Citizens' Advisory Office was founded under Kohl's patronage. Apart from providing jobs for acceptable former dissidents it was to advise and assist people with hitherto unattended claims for compensation for discrimination or persecution under the East German Communist Party (SED) regime in the GDR. The institution's chief assignment was, however, to draw attention to the crimes of the former regime and counter the general trend in East Germany toward a more balanced evaluation of both systems.

The August 1995 tea party drew public attention to the shift away from the democratic left by a considerable number of prominent former civil rights campaigners. It inspired a public protest by a group of 63 former GDR dissidents against the new political stance of their former prominent leaders, revealing the chasm developing between most of the prominent civil rights activists and the rank and file. The protesters issued a statement elaborating their views on the developments in East Germany.

It was, they said, the result of a deliberate policy. With the assistance of old established and newly formed power structures, GDR national property has been frittered away to benefit the established wealthy and the newly rich. Social and civil rights achieved in the GDR in 1989 are being gradually abolished. Not only is compensation withheld or inadequately granted to the victims of the old regime but the revision of property rights of the East German people, rent rises, fundamental cuts of basic social services, rising commercial handicaps and legal restrictions of the freedom of opinion and of the press, new police legislation and expanding privileges for the secret services are again depriving people of civil rights. This spells hardship for many, and again allows the state to control its citizens. In addition, the Bundeswehr takes an active part in global military intervention, refugees claiming asylum in Germany are sent back to their persecutors, the arms trade is booming and dictatorships receive economic and political backing. We take exception to people who provide the Chancellor with the blessing of the GDR civil rights movement.

Opposition to the SED regime which had promised the people democracy and socialism and gradually ruined the chances of establishing either was part and parcel of GDR history from the very beginning. Time and again, people expressed their opposition to the totalitarian features of the GDR. The party leadership's official pronouncements always clashed with the actual political practice of a bureaucratic dictatorship. The earliest political opposition came from old socialists and communists in the ruling party. Many newly recruited and often young members of the party opposed the official course because they wanted a socialist system in keeping with their understanding of Marx and Engels, untainted by arbitrariness, bureaucracy and corruption.

Gerhard Zwerenz, a Member of Federal Parliament for the PDS, one of these early dissidents in the SED who left the GDR in the late 1950s, said:

Long before civil rights activists or the church dignitaries became vociferous, comrades whose original dream of socialism was dearer to them than party discipline, were risking their liberty and sometimes their lives. Nobody, then, in the East or West gave them the least support.

The 1953 anti-SED rising, which was put down by Soviet tanks, was largely an East German working class protest against the attempt of the authorities to cut their wages by raising production targets. It did not have the overwhelming support of intellectuals. The cuts, incidentally, were withdrawn on the eve of the rising. The GDR Government was careful after that not to antagonize the industrial workers by any onslaught on their wages or working conditions. All subsequent political opposition was initiated by middle-class intellectuals.

Those who still figure prominently in the media as representatives of the former GDR opposition generally became civil rights campaigners in the 1970s and 80s. In the late 1960s, the Prague Spring -- the attempt in Czechoslovakia to reform the system which was brutally suppressed -- had filled many middle-class intellectuals, artists and writers with great hope. Those who publicly expressed their admiration for the Czechoslovak reformers were discriminated against and often persecuted.

The dissident movements of the 1970s and 80s, whose criticism focused on the retrograde GDR environmental policy, its military and foreign policies, the militarization of public education, and generally on curbing civil and human rights incompatible with the government's official pronouncements, consisted largely of middle-class intellectuals. Their policy was to insist on the implementation of the various international agreements, e.g. the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which the GDR government signed, tongue in cheek, to improve its international reputation. Protests against the regime, particularly among writers, scholars and artists, also flared up when the popular dissident songwriter Wolf Biermann was deprived of his GDR citizenship in 1976. The ban on any publicity relating to environmental pollution in the GDR aroused the legitimate wrath of dissidents who collected and clandestinely published relevant data.

BY 1981, A RELATIVELY STABLE DISSIDENT GROUP HAD RALLIED around chemistry professor Robert Havemann who had been condemned to death by the Nazis and survived only because of the national importance of his research work. After the defeat of the Nazis, he was prominent in the SED. In the mid-1960s, he was expelled from the SED and lost his professorship for attacking the dogmatic features of GDR scholarship and the undemocratic policies pursued by the Political Bureau of the SED. Under constant surveillance by state security officers, confined to his house near Berlin and deprived of the right to travel, he was nevertheless able to retain contact with his friends in the GDR, with the West German media and with his West German publishers. After his death in 1986, his friends and followers continued their opposition to the regime. West German radio and television popularized his and his friends' pronouncements which, thereby, also proliferated in the GDR. They demanded disarmament not only in the West but also in the East and popularized the peace movement's slogan, "Swords to Ploughshares." After 1986, the Havemann group cooperated with other dissident organizations and established the autonomous peace movement in the GDR. They addressed an open letter to GDR State Council Chairman Erich Honecker enjoining him to grant GDR citizens civil rights; they criticized the economic and ecological policies of the GDR and warned of the growing neo-Nazi menace.

The Protestant Church in the GDR which, subsequent to a phase of uncompromising anti-Communism, had reestablished itself as a basically loyal if critical Church within East Germany, provided most of the dissident groups with a certain amount of protection. Under this umbrella, Women for Peace was founded in 1982, with Bärbel Bohley, Katja Havemann and Ulrike Poppe as founding mothers. Along with other autonomous peace groups they formed the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights (IFM) in 1986. This organization, supported by the autonomous Environmental Library, published an illegal paper, Grenzfall (Bordercase), which was very critical of the system.

Another initiative was geared to the Rejection of the Principle and Practice of GDR Isolation (from the West). The campaigners tried to mobilize as many Protestant parishes as possible to support their demands for unrestricted travel and other civil liberties. The writer, Christa Wolf, and the Protestant churchman, Manfred Stolpe, present Prime Minister of the State of Brandenburg, were involved in publishing the Appeal to Interfere on our Own Behalf on September 12, 1989 which became the inaugural manifesto of the civil rights group Democracy Now. The group, among whose leading lights were a physician, a professor of theology and a film producer, demanded that "the socialist revolution which had not gone beyond mere nationalization of private enterprise be continued and made viable." They also called for a "socialist alternative to West German consumer capitalism."

DURING THE TERMINAL PERIOD OF THE GDR'S EXISTENCE, the dissidents became more daring. All the while, dissident groups were undermined by agents provocateurs and informers working for state security, nearly always recruited from among their ranks. State security continued to keep the dissident groups under surveillance, subjecting them to discrimination and collective and individual repression. They raided the Environmental Library on November 25 and 26, 1987 confiscated Grenzfall, and arrested campaigners who were later released. On January 17, 1988 a number of dissidents planned to unfurl a banner at the traditional Luxemburg-Liebknecht demonstration with the caption: "Freedom Is Always Freedom for the Dissenter," a quote from Rosa Luxemburg. They were about to put their plan into action when they were rounded up, arrested and indicted for rioting. Some were expelled from the country and allowed to depart to Britain or West Germany, a punishment which many GDR people then considered a reward.

The civil rights activists were in contact with the major dissident group of Czechoslovakia, Charter 77, and with the Polish Solidarnosc movement. They carried on a correspondence with refugees from the GDR in West Germany and elsewhere, and were in touch with leading members of the West German Green Party. As the GDR weakened, the dissidents cooperated more closely with the West German media, particularly the broadcasting companies and certain television channels. A prominent former dissident, Werner Fischer, recently told the media: "We asked them (a particular West German television channel) to be on the spot when we planned any activity and then told them what to say about it in that day's news report."

A dissident cameraman, though also under Stasi surveillance, toured the country photographing and filming refuse dumps where toxic waste was disposed of, or woods where trees were withering as a result of air pollution. He provided the evidence which enabled West German television to draw attention to the derelict urban areas in the GDR where houses were crumbling, and to GDR neo-Nazi activities. Thus, with the help of the Western media, the cameraman was able to make public the skeletons in the GDR closet. Certain dissidents also maintained close relations with VIPs in the CDU, the FDP and the SPD.

ON SEPTEMBER 9-10, 1989 -- WITH THE GDR IN ITS DEATH AGONY -- the major dissident group, New Forum, was formed in Grünheide near Berlin. Its founders were Bärbel Bohley from the IFM, Rolf Henrich, a lawyer who had been expelled from the SED for writing a book very critical of the regime, and Hans-Jochen Tschiche, head of the Evangelical Academy at Magdeburg, who had belonged to Professor Havemann's circle. The New Forum snowballed, becoming the most popular and widely known opposition group; within two months, it collected 200,000 signatures in support of its inaugural statement. Two more groups were formed in September 1989. On September 3, a left-wing group of Christians and Marxists emerged calling for state enterprises under workers' and employees' control and for a planned economy without bureaucracy. They subsequently became the United Left Party which faded away after the 1990 elections. The other new group was the right-wing Democratic Awakening founded in Berlin on October 29, 1989. It established itself as a political party in December. Among its founders were the Reverend Eppelmann, the lawyer, Wolfgang Schnur, later ousted as a state security informer, and the Rev. Friedrich Schorlemmer, who was soon to convert to the SPD. The East German branch of the last-mentioned party, which first called itself SDP,^* was founded on October 7, 1989 by Ibrahim Böhme (also later compelled to retire from politics because of his contacts with the Stasi), Stephan Hilsberg and Markus Meckel, two more Protestant clerics, and by Angelika Barbe, now in the Christian Democratic Union. In its inaugural address, the SDP called for "an ecologically oriented social capitalism" but also for the continued existence of two German states.

In October 1989, escalating mass protests were met by police repression. It was feared that the GDR authorities might make an attempt to put down mass opposition by armed force. This seemed likely in view of the authorities' public approval of the bloody suppression of the mass protests in China. But it did not happen. The opposition remained non-violent and the authorities, who no longer had the support of the Soviet Union, refrained from armed interference. Moreover, SED members at branch meetings indicated their collective unwillingness to support any such attempt. Also, the regime's armed and security forces had practically disintegrated. On October 18, 1989, a faction of the SED Political Bureau compelled Honecker to give up his post. On November 4, more than half a million people rallied at Berlin's Alexanderplatz to demand democratic reforms. On November 9, a date of great and many-faceted historical relevance,^** the SED Central Committee virtually pulled down the Wall by granting unrestricted transit from East to West to all GDR citizens. Hoping to retain power by easing the political tension in the country, they actually not only put an end to their ow rule but, unfortunately, eliminated the possibility of any independent development in East Germany.

At that time, most of the GDR opposition was still in favor of retaining an independent GDR state and reforming East German society. New Forum declared in an Open Letter of October l, 1989: "Reunification is not our aim, we want to retain the two German states since we do not want the capitalist system." This was signed by Professor Jens Reich, one of the New Forum leaders. He added: "Most of our followers are opposed to capitalism. They are committed to the reconstruction and reform of socialism to make it acceptable to the majority of people in the GDR." Reformers in the established political parties agreed. Prominent among them was a group of reformers from the SED who established the Party Democratic Socialism in December 1989, electing Gregor Gysi as chairperson. Neither the weekly demonstrations in Leipzig which had continued since September 1989, nor the rally on November 4 of that year in Berlin, called for an end to socialism or for unification.

After the opening of the Wall, however, the tide turned and a wave of anti-socialist nationalism set in. The slogan "We Are the People" became "We Are One People." Left-wing activists and supporters of a reformed socialist GDR were attacked at the regular Monday night mass demonstrations by people who had never before been politically active or had ever had any pre-Wende connection with dissident groups. The writers Christa Wolf, Stefan Heym (he later became, for a brief period, Acting President of the Bundestag as its oldest member) and dissident film producer, Konrad Weiss, initiated an appeal, "For Our Country," in support of the continued independent existence of the GDR, which was signed by over a million GDR citizens.

The civil rights movement, among whom the Independent Women's Federation (UFV), founded in December 1989, played a very active role, joined the reformed or newly formed political parties at the Central Round Table, a newly established democratic institution rallying representatives of all major political parties and civil rights groups which acted as a plebiscitary element to ensure that the (provisional) government pursued the reform policies demanded by large sections of the electorate. They filed more than one hundred bills, among them a Social Charter and a Draft Constitution -- among the most democratic documents in German history.

Early in December 1989, prominent Social Democrats in West Berlin and West Germany suggested forming a new provisional government composed of former civil rights activists, Provisional Prime Minister Hans Modrow, Gregor Gysi, then Chairman of the reformed SED-PDS, and the writer Christa Wolf. This suggestion came to naught since the reformers were too divided to come to an agreement. Above all, the civil rights campaigners did not realize that a completely new situation existed which called for new strategies and an end to fighting the battles of yesteryear.

EARLY IN 1990, CHANCELLOR KOHL SUCCEEDED IN OVERCOMING foreign and domestic opposition to a merger of the two German states and started promoting an Anschluss-type unification. By March 1990, when the last GDR general elections took place, that country's first and only unmanipulated ones, all contestant political parties but the PDS and certain left-wing civil rights organizations had turned coat and supported speedy unification. The Democratic Awakening allied to the CDU approved of Herr Kohl's policy. The SDP gave up its affiliation to the civil rights movement and eventually merged with the West German SPD. In their election addresses early in 1990, however, the New Forum, the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights (IFM), Democracy Now, the United Left Party, the (GDR) Greens and, allied to them, the Independent Women's Federation (UFV), still demanded an independent, reformed and democratized GDR with a social and ecological market economy.

Convinced by a barrage of propaganda that unification would turn the GDR into thriving lands, 40 percent of the GDR electorate voted for the East German branch of the Christian Democratic Union, trusting that party to provide them with the coveted Deutschmark. This gave the CDU the necessary majority to form a coalition government with the Social Democrats.

The triumph of the East German satellite of Kohl's party in the March 1990 elections eliminated all options but the Chancellor's policy. Ms. Bohley then commented as follows on the election results: "The process of democratization has come to an end because the people have lost confidence in their own power and exchanged the hegemony of the SED for that of the CDU."

Under the de Maizière Government, that last GDR coalition cabinet's policy was determined in Bonn by the West German government with little parliamentary opposition. The majority of the spokespersons of the civil rights movement by then also approved of or had resigned themselves to the Anschluss-type merger, giving up their former political vision of a democratic and socialist GDR. A minority continued to demand the implementation of democratic civil and human rights.

The New Forum, once so popular in East Germany, dissolved into factions with its following dropping to less than 3,500 by 1991. By that time, Democracy Now had dwindled to 650 activists and Initiative for Peace and Civil Rights to a mere 200. One section of the civil rights movement affiliated to the West German Green Party which thus became the Bündnis 90/Grünen party. The new party offered no appreciable resistance to government policy. Another group of former civil rights campaigners remained outside the newly merged party. The independent section of New Forum declined and finally dissolved itself in 1996; other groups have likewise become politically insignificant.

In September 1990, a number of civil rights activists staged a sit-in in the former headquarters of the GDR Ministry of State Security (Stasi) in Berlin to prevent their records from being moved to West Germany. They also went on a hunger strike to compel the authorities to keep these records accessible to the public. The Reverend Joachim Gauck, a former civil rights activist from Rostock, was appointed by the Kohl government to head the very generously staffed Office for the Records of the GDR Ministry of State Security and the records were handed over to him. Through the authority's arbitrary interpretation, those records became an instrument for incriminating and discrediting GDR citizens, ruining the reputations of many prominent academics, writers and artists and depriving many people of their jobs often merely because their names were found on some Stasi record. While Gauck's office is supposed to release information on individuals to third parties, only at the request of authorized personnel managers in connection with the screening of East German civil servants and others in the public service, unauthorized and often incorrect derogatory information about left-wingers and others critical of the establishment are leaked to the media. On the other hand, Stasi records on Nazi criminals are kept under lock and key.

IN THE 1990 FEDERAL GENERAL ELECTIONS, THE BÜNDNIS 90/GRÜNEN PARTY won 1.6 percent of the national and 6 percent of the East German vote. Since then their popularity in East Germany has steadily declined. Many former civil rights activists and sympathizers were disappointed with the outcome of German unification. They also resented the civil rights movement giving up its uncompromising opposition to infringements on civil and human rights and merely continuing to focus on its former vanquished enemies. Although a Grass Roots Round Table was initiated, committed to dealing with social problems and to demanding a new democratic constitution for the whole of Germany, it failed to get the necessary public support to implement any of its demands. Meanwhile many former civil rights campaigners in leading positions were actively supporting the Government's policy of discriminating against and expropriating East Germans. Increasingly, their chief political enemy became the PDS and Brandenburg's very popular Prime Minister, Manfred Stolpe (SPD). They engaged in indiscriminate red-baiting and publicly slandered leading PDS officers. This became the favorite pastime particularly of Konrad Weiss who had adopted an extremely right-wing stance. He demanded that the PDS dissolve itself, denying that it had, in any way, reformed. He and certain others attacked the writer Stefan Heym, a former dissident himself, and a man kept under surveillance by the Stasi for years, when he was selected for a PDS mandate in the Federal elections in 1994. They also demanded that the former SED leadership and the Ministry of State Security be prosecuted as criminal associations, equating them with the major Nazi and war criminals at the Nuremberg Trial. Konrad Weiss even suggested the German Government send a commando unit to Moscow to capture Honecker who had taken refuge there.

Bärbel Bohley, Reinhard Schult and Wolfgang Templin, himself a former Stasi informer, and Marianne Birthler, then Minister of Education in Brandenburg, tried to unseat Prime Minister Stolpe by alleging that he had not served his church, as he claimed, but the unjust state. They also alleged that records held by Gauck revealed that he had been a Stasi informer and had harmed civil rights campaigners. When Stolpe denied the allegation, Günter Nooke, then chairperson of the Brandenburg state parliamentary party of the Bündnis 90/Grünen, publicly called him a liar. This incident did not lead to the downfall of the Prime Minister but to a split in the Bündnis 90/Grünen. Birthler relinquished her post in protest against the Prime Minister's refusal to resign from office and Nooke formed a new party with the right wing of the Bündnis 90/Grünen. When this splinter organization eventually faded away for lack of public support, he joined the CDU.

Red-baiting went hand in glove with a generally reactionary stance. Thus Weiss attacked a bill to legalize termination of pregnancy supported by members of his own parliamentary party. He asked Ms. Süssmuth, Chairperson of the Bundestag, to disallow the bill as incompatible with public morality. He personally apologized to the Chancellor for Bündnis 90/Grünen deputy Ms. Köppe's intervention. She had accused leading CDU/CSU politicians of complicity and corruption in connection with illegal East-West contacts organized before the fall of the Wall by former Stasi Colonel Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski. Another former civil rights activist, Werner Schulz, leading Member of the Bündnis 90/Grünen parliamentary party of the Bundestag, defended Bonn's policy of eviscerating GDR industry, alleging that there was no alternative to it. Wolfgang Templin, another former civil rights activist who turned right-wing, indiscriminately supported the claims for compensation by former prisoners detained at Buchenwald concentration camp by the Soviet military authorities in the immediate post-war period. While some were, without doubt, innocent victims of Stalinist repression, many were confirmed Nazi activists and war criminals.

INCREASINGLY, HOWEVER, SUPPORT FOR PROFESSED RIGHT-WING and anti-communist ex-civil rights activists waned in their own party and among the general East German public. Thus, Werner Schulz canvassed in vain for an alliance with the conservatives. The Bündnis 90/Grünen lost all their seats in East German state parliaments except for Saxony-Anhalt. There, the SPD formed a coalition government with them in 1994 under Prime Minister Reinhard Höppner supported by the PDS. This support was essential for a viable alternative to an SPD-Conservative coalition. The legitimacy of such a political structure became a bone of contention for all German political parties. The Federal parliamentary party majority of the Bündnis 90/Grünen realized that former civil rights campaigners who continued to focus on red-baiting would lose what was left of the bonus provided them for their opposition to the GDR regime in East Germany during the Wende. They therefore confirmed the legitimacy of the so-called Magdeburg model, as did the SPD leadership, emphasizing their acceptance of it for Saxony-Anhalt only, and not for other states or for the German Federation.

The Bündnis 90/Grünen Party, anxious to ally itself to the SPD also on the national level, pursued an increasingly pragmatic policy. It gave up many of its former demands, e.g. for Germany to resign from NATO, for shutting down the nuclear power plants, and for banning genetic manipulation. In addition to the support by certain former civil rights activists for the Conservative Party's campaigns against the PDS, right-wing trends have generally increased since the 1994 Federal elections. On December 13, 1995, Bündnis 90/Grünen deputies, among them formerly rigidly pacifist civil rights activists, voted jointly with the coalition parties and the SPD in favor of Bundeswehr participation in NATO intervention in Bosnia. This provided the ruling coalition with an overwhelming majority in favor of the first foreign military assignment for the Bundeswehr.

Bündnis 90/Grünen leaders also contributed to the dismantling of the German welfare state. In September 1995, spokespersons of the Federal parliamentary party agreed that it was necessary to reduce social services in order to consolidate Germany's economic position. Moreover, tax reductions for industrial enterprises and investment bonuses were proposed as a method to boost German industry's international competitiveness. Werner Schulz insisted that the German level of social security was excessive and that net incomes of wage/salary earners needed downscaling. He pleaded for relaxing the "rigid regulations which obstruct the enterprises' upswing" and advised the "consistent elimination" of obsolete or unprofitable enterprises in accordance with Treuhand Holding practice in East Germany. He also called on the trade unions to accept voluntary wage freezes, not only for the East, but for the whole of Germany. Party budget expert Oskar Metzger and Margarete Wolf of the Federal parliamentary party advocated slowing down the adaptation of East German wages to the higher West German level.

Leading parliamentarians of the Bündnis 90/Grünen thus agreed with what the employers' federations had been saying all along, that welfare state provisions were becoming an intolerable burden on production costs and should therefore be "reformed." Like the SPD, their policy differed only modestly from the government's.

On the other hand, the Bündnis 90/Grünen Federal Assembly held in Mainz in March 1996 adopted a policy of Solidarity. Delegates called for a taxation system subordinated to the ecological needs of the country, shorter working hours, an active labor market policy and a public employment sector to stave off mass unemployment. The forthcoming 1998 general elections obliged Fischer and other party luminaries to focus on unseating the Kohl Government and shelve all contentious problems until after that event.

In November 1996, Dieter Schulte, the first ever DGB (German Trade Union Federation) chairperson to be invited to a Federal Assembly of the Bündnis 90/Grünen, called upon the delegates to resist the further dismantling of the welfare state and to defend "the foundations of our democracy and of the welfare state."

A NEW INITIATIVE FOR BRINGING ABOUT A RADICAL CHANGE of policy in Germany was attempted on January 10, 1997 when 36 public men and women published the so-called Erfurt Declaration. The first signatories were prominent former East German civil rights activists, dissident scholars, writers, artists and teachers and trade unionists. They were joined by West German writers, scholars and trade union officials.

The Declaration is highly critical of the present government's policy and advocates a new concept of gainful employment geared to social usefulness and ecologically sustainable development. The signatories call for radical cuts in working hours without loss of pay, and a guaranteed independent minimum income for every man and woman to be achieved by an effective and ecological taxation policy geared to raising revenue from money transfers, profits, estate duties, property, and land speculation rather than from those in the lower income bracket. They want to revive the tradition of the 1968 reform movement in West Germany and promote an alliance for social democracy in the spirit of the civil rights movement of 1989 in the GDR. They also plead for unconditional cooperation between all sections of political opposition. Although most of the leading lights of the established political parties have ignored or rejected the suggestions put forward in the Erfurt Declaration, many more individuals, trade union and civil rights organizations have since signed or are otherwise supporting it.

The civil rights movement in the GDR made an important contribution toward mobilizing masses to oppose and finally eliminate the repressive Honecker regime. In the aftermath, however, the movement began to disintegrate. In contradiction of its former aims, most of its prominent spokespersons eventually pursued a policy which more or less approved of, or at least tolerated, Anschluss-type unification. Meanwhile, the most ruthless faction of West German capitalism destroyed or took over the GDR economy and the most conservative neo-liberal elements in West Germany eliminated whatever achievements were worth preserving, just as they sought to dismantle the West German welfare state.

As the movement declined, the bulk of its component civil rights organizations affiliated to established political parties, and the small factions which remained independent eventually faded away. While most of the prominent spokespersons of the former civil rights movement are now part of the conservative and right-wing establishment, there are others who have not betrayed their vision of a democratic and socially just social system and who remain active at local, regional and even state levels in urban or rural councils, parliaments and in tenants' organizations, women's centers, refugee committees, citizens' initiatives against the destruction of the natural environment and in other civil rights struggles.

For most of the data used in this article I am indebted to work done by my husband Manfred Behrend.

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Notes

* This stood for Social Democratic Party, not including the attribution "German" and thus indicating the founders' disinclination for unification. return

** November 9, 1918: Revolution in Germany; November 9, 1923: Hitler's failed putsch; November 9, 1938: anti-Jewish pogrom initiated by the Nazis, the Kristallnacht, named for the smashing of shop windows by Nazi thugs. Se my articles in this journal, particularly in Vol. III, No. 4, 1992, "East Germany Under the Federal Eagle," and Vol. IV, No. 2, 1993, "Germany: The Stage is Reset." See also Hanna Behrend (ed.), German Unification: The Destruction of An Economy, Pluto Press, London, New Haven, 1995. return

Contents of No. 23