Chapter three analyzes how non-party or state actors countered official environmental claims, developed alternative narratives, and challenged authority. In the GDR, Church-based environmentalism evolved on the fringes of society and in a transnational context. Environmental engagement, its impetuses, and its forms led to a critique with theological underpinnings as well as practical frustration about degradation. Church-based activists fostered contacts with independent actors to the east and west, establishing networks across central Europe. In the FRG, the environmental movement became formalized in the Green Party, which underscored the SED’s inability to adapt. In the Soviet bloc, Poland modeled a less repressive attitude toward society that opened opportunities for independent actors, especially Solidarność, which the SED feared would undermine the entire bloc’s security. The SED increasingly distrusted neighboring countries and the potential impact of their reforms at home. The GDR’s position as hinge between east and west became a liability for domestic stability.

Chapter 4 looks at the beginnings of human rights dissent in East Germany, starting with the Christian churches in 1968 as part of a plebiscite on a new socialist constitution during the International Year for Human Rights. Although Christians were among the loudest voices calling for the entrenchment of human rights during the discussions surrounding the constitution, Protestant church leaders decided, in the wake of the Helsinki Accords, to endorse the SED’s claims to realise human rights. In so doing, they hoped to gain recognition from the state and more effectively facilitate private protests against state abuses of their congregants. Many seeking to leave the GDR turned to human rights provisions in the Helsinki Accords and other international agreements to argue their case, but when these demands were refused human rights rhetoric was largely abandoned. Similarly, while the East German intelligentsia became increasingly disillusioned with the GDR in the 1970s, few wanted to take up the cause of human rights against the SED for fear of being seen as endorsing Western anti-communism.

In the 1980s, many disillusioned East Germans dropped out of the official social system and created a parallel civil society within the Protestant Church, striving towards disarmament, demilitarisation and environmentalism. While these activists sought to eschew politics, the SED’s repression of a social sphere outside of party-approved organisations demonstrated to many that political reform was imperative to achieving even purely moral goals such as peace. In 1986, a small group of activists created the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights, sparking a rallying cry for disparate groups of disaffected East Germans, who invoked human rights not as the antithesis of socialism but as a core value forgotten and abused by the SED. Simultaneously, the SED’s ideological bulwark against such a movement began to crumble as it sought to create a socialist version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Despite initial enthusiasm from allies who saw it as a means to unify the socialist world against Western pressure, one country after another pulled out, scared off by various human rights guarantees contained within. Simultaneously, reformers began to see human rights as a rhetorical tool to liberalise sclerotic political institutions to save the socialist project as a whole.