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https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241108-the-green-activists-who-defied-the-stasi-before-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall>
'East Berlin, late November 1987, around midnight. In the basement of an old
tenement building, 14-year-old Tim Eisenlohr is stapling pages coming off a
printer smuggled in from the West. He and his friends are publishing a
semi-legal magazine about the environmental problems plaguing their Socialist
state, the German Democratic Republic: air pollution, dirty rivers, acid rain
and hazardous nuclear reactors. Cut off from Western Europe by a fortified
border with a death strip, and separated from West Berlin by the Berlin Wall,
they are trying to spread information the East German censors don't want anyone
to see.
Suddenly, the door flings open, and "around 15 armed members of the
Staatssicherheit burst into the room, some with their guns drawn, led by a
prosecutor", recalls Eisenlohr, referring to the East German secret police,
also known as the Stasi. "They call out: 'hands up, switch the machine off,
stand against the wall!'"
The men search and photograph the room, confiscate the printer – and then one
of them utters the Stasi's notorious, cryptic line used to take away people for
interrogation: "You're summoned to clear up an issue." One by one, Eisenlohr
and the others are bundled into cars and taken to the Stasi's headquarters.
Named "Operation Trap", the raid and arrests were part of the Stasi's attempts
to crush a group of people fighting for a cleaner environment – and for the
right to speak out. The secret police's tactics ranged from interrogations and
jail to bizarre mind games. In one incident, informants who managed to
infiltrate the environmental movement covertly took coffee from a shared pantry
without putting money into the coffee kitty. It was a psychological manoeuvre,
aimed at sowing conflict and mistrust within the groups.
That plan did not work out – neither the psychological manipulation, nor the
dramatic crackdown. On the contrary: Operation Trap became one of the very rare
cases in history in which the Stasi was forced to back down. Standing against
them were a tiny group of self-described peaceniks and eco nerds, who printed a
magazine with a run of just a few hundred copies, and regularly ran out of ink.
At one point, the US Congress even weighed in and sided with the producers of
the little magazine. How did it all happen?
Interviews with dissidents from that time, and internal reports from the
Stasi's secret archive, which was opened after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
tell the surprising story of how a small environmental movement managed to take
on a powerful dictatorship – and ultimately, won.'
Via Rhysy and Joerg Fliege.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
