ABSTRACT
Of greater concern to the Stasi than the small religious communities and sects was the emergence towards the close of the 1970s of what can broadly be described as an alternative political culture which managed to find a relatively safe haven in the Protestant churches. Many emerged from existing circles and they recruited heavily from among the so-called GDR generation which had grown up in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. Members of this generation had been influenced by emancipatory tendencies in the West since the mid-1960s and by the democratic socialism of the Prague Spring. The autonomous groups constituted an 'alternative political culture' in that they articulated outside official channels a series of peace, ecological, women's, human rights, gay and Second/Third World issues. Because of the severe restrictions imposed by the SED and implemented, among other bodies, by the Stasi, autonomous activities in the public sphere were largely confined to the protected space afforded by the Protestant churches.
