ABSTRACT
German television, and the chronic deficiencies of a planned economy provided fertile ground for an underground civil society that blossomed between 1972 and 1986 (the year Gorbachev introduced ‘New Thinking’ to the Soviet Union). Though rudimentary by western standards, a home-grown network of citizen initiatives-encompassing church groups, peace/ecology activists, amateur historian clubs, artistic/literary circles and human rights groups-successfully instigated what 40 years of strategizing by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) could not: the collapse of an authoritarian, state-socialist regime and the introduction of fundamental political freedoms as of 1989. Following German unification in 1990, new elites (mostly western imports) rapidly dismantled virtually all official GDR administrative, economic and cultural structures, presuming that a common institutional framework would soon, in Willy Brandt’s words, allow ‘that to grow together which belongs together’—a long divided German nation. They simultaneously eliminated 90 state-directed mass organizations that had served as the mainstay of eastern social communication and community interaction for four decades. Even GDR citizens who had actively mobilized against oppressive state practices by way of informal, underground groups found their fledgling organizations (for example, New Forum, Alliance ’90, and the Independent Women’s Union) pushed aside in the rush to unity.1 The paradox of East German democratization is that an emerging citizen-culture intent on fostering new forms of grass roots participation was deliberately destroyed, presumably to warrant its replacement by a civil-society type deemed more compatible with a western ‘free-democratic order’.
