Although the popular movement that toppled East Germany`s communist government three years ago had no single leader, many people in the East still refer to Baerbel Bohley, a self-effacing artist, as ”Mother of the Revolution.”
After the Berlin Wall fell and the East German state ceased to exist, however, Bohley chose not to enter national politics. She might have run for a seat in the Parliament or sought a government post in Bonn, but instead she has all but faded from public view.
”Money or power would not suit me,” she said at a Berlin cafe one recent afternoon, reflecting on her career. ”After all I went through in East Germany, I want to live a normal life for a while.”
For Bohley, 47, normal life consists of a low-profile job helping to draft a new Berlin City Charter. Die Andere, the alternative weekly newspaper that she co-founded soon after the wall collapsed, has gone bankrupt.
Bohley`s perspectives of life under communism and her views of the German unification process ring with authority. She has lost none of the moral and political insight that propelled her to the forefront of East Germany`s human rights movement.
In assessing responsibility for the several decades of repression under which people in East Germany lived, Bohley is especially hard on public figures who collaborated with the powerful secret police, the Stasi. Yet she takes no pleasure in the prospect of seeing Erich Honecker, the former East German leader, on trial.
”The trial is a very convenient way of fixing responsibility on one man, or one group of men, for injustices that we all contributed to,” she said.
”We all could have done more to end that system, or at least to resist its power. The guards who shot people trying to escape are also guilty because they could have refused to serve. Even people like me didn`t do enough, or didn`t start working soon enough.
”When Honecker visited West Germany, the red carpet was rolled out for him and every politician shook his hand, even though they all knew what kind of a government he was running. Now, as a way of escaping their own responsibility, they are pointing the finger at him.
”I`d like to punish Honecker by putting him into one of those miserable old-age homes he built and forcing him to live on a minimum pension.
”It`s unconscionable that so much money is being spent on his trial while the victims of the communist system, people who went to jail for 10 years or had their lives ruined, are still living in poverty.”
She insists that she never set out to become a rebel. The East German system, she said, turned her into one.
She was still a student when she began to ridicule the civil defense training that all Germans were given to prepare them for a possible nuclear attack.
Schoolchildren in East Germany were taught that they could improve their chances of surviving an atomic inferno by hiding under their desks or holding schoolbags over their heads.
As time when on, Bohley became an outspoken pacifist, organizing a series of small protests under the slogan ”Achieve Peace Without Weapons.”
In 1980, after signing a declaration condemning the continuing Soviet occupation of neighboring Czechoslovakia, she was banned from all travel, even to other communist countries.
In 1983, Bohley was arrested during a candlelight vigil advocating universal disarmament. The next year she was dropped from the list of tolerated artists, meaning that she no longer could display her work in public. She also has spent time in jail for human rights activities.
Surviving by painting ceramics, Bohley became a prominent figure in East Germany`s diffuse, unorganized dissident movement. She was a familiar part of the scene in Prenzlauer Berg, a section of East Berlin where many offbeat artists lived.
”There was no public life in East Germany, no place where the country`s real problems could be openly discussed,” she recalled. ”All we had were informal and unconnected groups interested in issues like disarmament, feminism and environmental protection.”
From this amorphous mass, Bohley and several friends organized New Forum, a national coalition, which in the late 1980s stepped into East Germany`s political vacuum and began demanding political change.
New Forum played a leading role in organizing the mass-protest rallies that led to the breaching of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the government.
”I never believed the wall would stand forever, but I wasn`t sure I would live long enough to see it fall,” she said. ”The people I worked with wanted to reform East Germany. We never thought the country would disappear and be swallowed up by the West.”
Like many people in eastern Germany, Bohley chafes under the perceived arrogance in the attitude of people from western Germany. Politicians in Bonn, she said, are inflicting injustices that have disrupted the lives of millions of easterners and led many into despair.
”For half a century we have not been allowed to decide for ourselves what we want,” she said.
”In the old days, whenever we asked why things had to be done a certain way, we were told, `Because that`s the way they are done in the glorious Soviet state.` Now, since reunification, we`re told that we have to do everything the way it was done in West Germany.
”People in the East are angry and depressed, but they aren`t doing anything about it. Instead of putting real pressure on the government in Bonn, they have retreated into lethargy. They aren`t standing up for themselves.”
This language sounds much like that used by organizers of a new eastern political movement called the Committee for Fairness. But Bohley scorns the organizers as ambitious politicians mainly interested in personal power.
Some have suggested that Bohley herself would be a good leader for such a movement, but she is not yet prepared to plunge back into politics. She will not rule out the possibility of running for office, but for now she wants to enjoy her new freedom by traveling to foreign places.
”A month in New York,” she ventured, ”that would be my idea of a fascinating vacation.”
