Learning courage from East German pacifists

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Twenty five years ago, the Soviet bloc was shaken by unarmed uprisings which would lead to the demise of Communism and the end of the Cold War. The most dramatic event was the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The rebellions of 1989 were part of the civil resistance tradition of Gandhi and King. Every once in a while, vast numbers of ordinary people rise up nonviolently and cause an emotional crisis in society and disrupt humdrum everyday life. These social upheavals have occurred with increasing frequency in recent decades in the Philippines, Chile, South Africa, Serbia, Tunisia and Egypt.

I recently talked with Boulder schoolteacher Zuza Bohley, who grew up in East Germany. Her entire family were politically active pacifists and were under constant surveillance and harrassment by the Stasi (the secret police). Amnesty International publicized their troubles.

Zuza has lived in the U.S. since 1986 and moved to Boulder in 1990. She volunteers for many non-profits like the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, Intercambio de Comunidades and the Boulder sister city project with Jalapa, Nicaragua. She recently became the Rocky Mountain regional representative to the United Nations Association.

In 1977, Zuza’s father, Karl Bohley, was accused of printing leaflets in support of his friend Wolf Biermann, a popular iconoclastic folk singer/songwriter who satirized the East German government. The Stasi came to the Bohley home to apprehend Karl. He promptly asked the kids (Zuza, a brother and three sisters) to come into the living room where he demanded that the secret police produce an arrest and/or search warrant. He said to the kids, “See! We don’t have any freedom here!” The Stasi agents “stepped back and left,” Zuza says. Shortly after that, her father disappeared. They couldn’t find out what happened to him.

Zuza was 13 at the time. She was soon taken captive by the Stasi at a friend’s birthday party and interrogated for four hours.

Six months later, they found out that their father was secretly put on trial, jailed, tortured and then deported to West Germany. A year later, she and the rest of her family were also deported and traded to West Germany for 50,000 marks.

“We never asked to leave,” she says. “We wanted to change things from within.”

Zuza’s aunt, Barbel Bohley, “played a key role in the collapse of East Germany” according to the London Guardian and was known as “The Mother of the Revolution.” Barbel was a well-known painter who was kicked out of the artists’ association after she formed the independent Women for Peace in 1983. Soon, she was arrested and jailed for six weeks on suspicion of “treasonable supply of information” to British anti-nuclear activists and to the West German Green Party.

Barbel Bohley was a founder of the New Forum, an opposition group formed in the last days of the regime. They wanted to stay in East Germany, didn’t want capitalism or a rapid German reunification but a democratic and humane socialism. After the regime fell, Barbel led a sit-in at Stasi headquarters to prevent files from being destroyed. She was disgruntled with the ruthless way the West Germans took over everything in the East.

East German dissidents were mostly artists, writers, scientists and pastors. They were influenced by Latin America’s Catholic liberation theology movement, the teachings of anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the tactics of non-violence as reflected in the West German peace movement and the U.S. civil rights movement. However, after the regime’s demise, the dissidents went off in different political directions.

Zuza Bohley says that “Ossis” (East Germans) are now treated as “second class citizens” by “Wessis” (West Germans) in the unified Germany. She feels that Ossis are more “down-toearth… more Latin at heart ” and “think of the common good.”

Zuza is disturbed that so many Americans are non-political and afraid to challenge authority. She remembers her dad telling her, “The government wants you to be afraid. If you are afraid, they have won.” You may think that doesn’t apply to Americans but there are increasing authoritarian tendencies in this country. For example, former NSA executive Thomas Drake studied the Stasi and concludes that the NSA’s model of “Collect it all, know it all” is precisely the Stasi model.

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