ENTANGLED ECOLOGIES 157
and ecology.”^35 In programmatic terms, this made for a striking parallel
to the “quality of life” motif adopted by West German social democrats in
their eff orts to sharpen their political profi le at the time—environmental
policy was intended as part of the party’s promise of prosperity for every-
one.^36 The creation of the GDR’s Ministry for Environmental Protection
and Water Management (West Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Envi-
ronment was not established until the 1986 Chernobyl disaster^37 ) was
accompanied by the formation of a working group for “environmental
protection and environmental management” at the East German Acad-
emy of Sciences. It was founded at the urging of the economic historian
Hans Mottek, who also became the head of the environmental research
commission at the academy.^38 But ambiguities soon found its way into
the daily business of environmental policy, and they certainly did not di-
minish over time.
As Tobias Huff has pointed out, the pinnacle of GDR environmental
policy was reached as Honecker came to power in May 1971.^39 But the
noble intentions of the party leadership soon became stuck in the wheels
of bureaucracy. While ministries typically received a corresponding body
in the SED central committee party apparatus, no such parallel party in-
stitution was established for the Ministry of the Environment. Moreover,
the Minister of the Environment as of March 1971, Hans Reichelt, had
no access to the political resources of the SED because he belonged to
the Democratic Farmers’ Party of Germany (Demokratische Bauernpartei
Deutschlands, or DBD).^40 All in all, the GDR’s socialist environmental pol-
icy remained a fl eeting vision due to the notorious lack of resources and
the byzantine structures of the SED state. Environmental policy, like so
many other aspects of the socialist system, also seemed to suff er from the
worsening and ultimately terminal sclerosis in the GDR’s fi nal years. For
example, when Dresden’s sewage treatment plant was damaged by an
Elbe river fl ood in 1987, it remained out of commission until after the fall
of the Wall, and the city’s untreated wastewater fl owed directly into the
river.^41 In the fi ght against sulfur dioxide emissions, which had been the
subject of international negotiations since the early 1980s, the GDR re-
sorted to the falsifi cation of data in order to camoufl age the government’s
impotence.^42 The failure of the administration to come to grips with such
problems made environmental issues a fi tting vehicle for protest move-
ments, as did the offi cial socialist ideology that defi ned environmental
problems as a leftover of the capitalist past. According to dogma, social-
ism would overcome the exploitation of nature, a trope that provided dis-
sidents with evidence of how the SED state was out of touch with reality.^43
But in the 1970s, the diff erences between the two German states were
matters of degrees, as both regimes were wrestling with implementation