Gerd Poppe

"We then established the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights with a small group of people. The starting point for this was the end of 1985, when a seminar on human rights, which was to be held in a church room, had to be cancelled. And that was the beginning of this initiative, which in the period that followed was based very strongly on the content of the Charter 77, in particular because the Charter 77 strove to define a concept of peace not just consisting of military activities or the absence of war, but as it called for a balance of internal and external peace. They basically said that if a country did not respect the rights of its citizens in their own country, then its peace declarations and manifestations intended for the outer world are not trustworthy either. We had actually completely taken over this position by the early eighties."

"Since 1980, we organized the literary readings. Before that time, they had been taking place at Frank-Wolf Matthies, but since 1979, when he left the country to the west, we held them at our place. And there really were very, very interesting readings, with Adolf Endler, for instance, or with Elke Erb, Lutz Rathenow, with Wolfgang Hilbig - at that time we didn't know that he'd become one of the most significant German writers. So these readings were of course very interesting and they were of course immediately labeled as subversive. Up to the point of being fined for them - this happened to me. The Stasi and the police would often patrol at my door, checking the people who came into the apartment. And after three years, I gave it up and the sessions were continued in other apartments. By then, I had already been fined for the second time and it was basically an attempt to prevent any further reading."

"And now there's the fall of the Wall on top of it. For me this was of course a decisive milestone in my life. I had not seen that part of the world for 28 years and for another 20 years, I also hadn't seen the other part, and now suddenly you could travel over there. The masses streamed. I will never forget this, that evening and the details. We were sitting in an apartment in the former Wilhelm-Pieck-Straße, Torstraße today, and we sat there with several people and discussed with a French renegade. And somehow I stepped to the window and there was an enormous number of Trabant cars. They were on one side of the street, and the opposite side was empty. All of them driving in the same direction, one after the other. And I said: 'Erhard, turn on the TV, something is going on'. And so we saw the images, we saw them jiggling the fence, in the moments before the border crossings were opened. And of course, I jumped up and ran there as well and then I walked around West Berlin all night long. Even after all this time, I still had a few addresses in my head and could orient myself reasonably well. I tried to visit some of my friends in West Berlin but nobody was home since they had all gone to East Berlin at the same time."

"At the same time we established an independent kindergarten because we didn't want our children to go to the official kindergarten, we were against this type of education. So we decided to do it ourselves, involved a woman and set up the kindergarten in an apartment in the Husemannstraße that belonged to tenants who were friends of ours and who had moved to the country. That apartment had originally been a shop and it had shop windows so you could see inside. This of course immediately alerted the state power as soon as they realized what was going on there. It was not at all common for parents to look after their children privately, so to speak, and to do it in front of everyone's eyes, which made matters even worse. The people went on the sidewalk, looked in the shop window and wondered: 'What's going on in there? Oh, maybe we could do it as well'. So, anyway, it existed for three years, between 1980 to 1983, and in a similar manner to these readings it was interpreted as a hostile act, but surprisingly it wasn't resolved immediately, because they were watching us first for a while, before they finally thoroughly destroyed the Kinderladen in December 1983. They arrived in the morning, at 5 a.m., disguised as construction workers with a truck. They sealed off the road on both sides, they smashed the shop window, kicked in the door, took the children's beds and the toys and tossed everything on the platform of the truck. Then they simply bricked up the shop window, the door, everything was bricked up. The first woman came with her child two hours later and stood in front of a wall that hadn't been there before."

"This made me pay attention to the developments there and it also made me cherish the hope that perhaps certain reforms were still possible in the GDR and that perhaps the freedoms would also become larger for us and that policy changes may also result from it. This hope was, of course, very soon disappointed, in particular with the crushing of the Prague Spring. In the GDR, significant attention was dedicated to the events in Czechoslovakia at this time, much more than, for example, to the Polish Solidarnosc later on. So the sympathy for the 1968 movement in Prague was very, very big, and consequently, there was also a lot of dissatisfaction, anger and protest when the Russian tanks rolled into the country. And also in general, I was really interested in this region, even in the following years, and in 1968, when these hopes were dashed, I went with friends to the Czech Embassy in East Berlin and lodged a protest letter, or even a solidarity letter to Dubček. So I very clearly expressed my dissatisfaction with the invasion and also with the involvement of the GDR in it. Thus, when I'm being asked for the beginnings of my opposition stance, it actually goes back to this year 1968.This was a key year for further development."

"As I said, in 1983, they arrested my wife, but by then these peace activists from Holland were very active, she received hundreds of letters in jail. Well, of course she did not get to read them in pre-trial detention, but the Stasi of course could see what a noise it had triggered. Then Petra Kelly went on a tour, meeting a ton of people and pleading for their release. At first, two of the four arrested women were released. Bärbel Bohley and Ulrike initially remained in prison. But then, all world protested against the arrest and that was probably the reason why after six weeks they came back home. Because these Western protests were so strong. This was a new development that we hadn't known before."

"However, since the beginning of the seventies, for a brief period, we had the feeling that there was a certain easing of tensions. But that period was over very quickly after the takeover of power by Honecker, who very quickly reverted to the old way of repression and pressure that had been employed ever before. It was also similar to the Ulbricht era; the level was actually frightening by this ruling class. Anyway, in 1976 Biermann was expatriated and there also were all kinds of harassment of critical authors, artists and so on. So the expatriation of Biermann really meant a further stepping up the pressure. Together with a girlfriend of mine, we wrote a letter of protest and sent it to Honecker and at the same time I quit my work in Stahnsdorf and was about to look for a new job. It took me quite some effort to find one - I had already passed a job interview, everything had been arranged and then came this Biermann expatriation and the protest against it, and then I was informed by telephone that my job had been already given to somebody else."