ENTANGLED ECOLOGIES 161
tally minded citizens. From a twenty-fi rst century perspective, politics and
civil society are two separate spheres, each with its own rules. As such,
they must be analyzed according to their own logics.
Civil society is a rather diffi cult topic in an interwoven history of the two
Germanys. Both countries had environmental movements that fl ourished
in the 1980s, but that meant vastly diff erent things. Whereas Michael
Beleites’s research study titled Pechblende (Pitchblende, also known as
uraninite) on uranium mining at Wismut circulated as an underground
samizdat publication in the GDR, several editions of Holger Strohm’s
Friedlich in die Katastrophe (Quietly into disaster) have been printed since
its initial publication in West Germany in 1973, and the book became
the defi ning compendium on the technical risks associated with nuclear
energy that every leftist bookshelf in Germany had to have.^57 Further-
more, the West German environmental movement received much of its
support from a political community that was lukewarm at best about East
Germany. Among the major parties of West Germany, none was as un-
interested in reunifi cation as the Green Party. Party members such as
Wilhelm Knabe and Petra Kelly entertained personal contacts with civil
rights activists in the East, but that does not change the general picture.
All that makes for a conceptual imbalance in a cross-border approach.
Whereas West German activists could write lengthy books warning of an
impending apocalypse, for instance, East German concerns could only be
expressed in petitions of limited scope.^58 While environmental activists in
West Germany attacked megaprojects ranging from Kalkar to Startbahn
West, East German environmental eff orts had to focus on smaller projects
and concerns that look rather petty in a naive German-German compar-
ison. Activists in the FRG could stage mass demonstrations against the
“nuclear state” whereas East German activists had to work hard just to
create something akin to a “public sphere” in the fi rst place. They never
dreamed of staging mass protests. Organizing tree-planting actions or
bike demonstrations was risky enough.^59
At fi rst glance, it seems rather easy to trace the institutional outlines of
the change of civic activism in the West. New citizens’ initiatives sprouted
up everywhere, and national organizations such as BUND and Green-
peace were established. At the same time, venerable nature conservancy
associations such as the League for Bird Protection (Bund für Vogel-
schutz) transformed into agile NGOs, albeit not without hefty internal
debates in some cases. Similarly, the Green Party became a permanent
fi xture within the West German party spectrum. But looking at events
more closely, the transformation becomes more and more diff use. There
were violent anti-nuclear protests and local eco-projects with municipal
funding and all the necessary permits, bearded hippie types and estab-