ABSTRACT
Alongside emigration and individualistic and lifestyle-based forms of non-conformity, dissent in the late 1970s and early 1980s clustered around Church-based ‘grassroots groups’ that organised meetings and other events over issues such as peace, ecology, sexism and the ‘North-South divide’. They represented a breakthrough, in terms of numbers involved (depending on what activities are counted, between 5,000 and 50,000 would be a reasonable estimate) and because they formed the most vibrant and public oppositional presence that the country had seen in a generation. Rather than advocate direct confrontation with the state, they sought to exploit the grey area at the fringes of the permissible and to develop ‘socioethical’ critiques of regime policies, resulting in perpetual friction with the authorities. They pressed against the limits of legality with mass bicycle rides, music festivals, street theatre, public ‘happenings’, vigils, petitions, human chains and the sending of ‘protest postcards’ to random addresses. Although most of those involved denied harbouring overtly oppositional intentions, this was partly for tactical reasons. Certainly, as the Stasi saw things, the logic of their activities pointed towards opposition. The groups, one report warned, ‘are continually striving to amass and organise those individuals whose aim is to weaken, undermine, politically destabilise, and even transform the GDR’s social relations’.1
