ENTANGLED ECOLOGIES 163
proof that civic protests could even bring large industrial corporations to
their knees.
The power of environmental protest was particularly fascinating for
contemporaries who had been infl uenced by Marxism as a result of their
involvement in the student protest movement and the alternative milieu.
Environmental issues were like a match made in heaven for Marxist buzz
words. For example, “alienation” could also be found in nature, and the
exploitation of the proletariat was vaguely similar to the exploitation of
nature. Moreover, Marx himself spoke of the material interaction or “me-
tabolism between man and nature” in Das Kapital.^62 Of course, this was
really a case of vulgar Marxism at heart, but after the myriad disappoint-
ments that followed in the wake of the protests in 1968, many leftists
were open to a bit of ideological fl exibility. Doubts about such arguments
were more or less relegated to the private sphere, as in the case of Rudi
Dutschke, who wrote in his diary in March 1977 that “the whole anti-nu-
clear and mass demonstrations in B[rokdorf] a[nd] I[tzehoe] are theoreti-
cally and politically troublesome for me.”^63
Quite paradoxically, Marxism was more important for West German
environmentalists than it was for their East German counterparts. Indeed,
socialism as an ideology had very little relevance for GDR environmen-
tal history in the 1980s, apart from glossy rhetoric. But if socialism was
largely meaningless for environmental issues, this also made them in-
nocent—or, rather, as innocent as political issues can be in a totalitarian
society. As a result, environmental issues off ered a convenient vehicle
for conveying East German dissatisfaction over unbridled industrial pro-
duction, the notorious lack of resources that left little room for invest-
ing in environmental protection measures, and detached GDR leaders.
Both within and beyond state-sanctioned circles, environmental protests
served as a front for proxy confl icts. Complaints over ecological problems
did not harbor the same political risks as, say, remarks about economic
stagnation or the privileges of party bigwigs. As a result, seemingly triv-
ial topics often bore great signifi cance for East Germans. For instance,
when the environmental working group in Halle, which operated under
the protection of the Protestant Church, objected in 1988 to a road paving
project through the local heath forest called the Dölauer Heide, specu-
lations ran wild within the group as to whether a military agenda was
behind the project. But, as it turned out in the end, the forest service was
merely looking to use up some bitumen that it had been allotted. After the
collapse of the GDR, the group later admitted that it had been chasing a
ghost and that the whole matter had been more about venting frustration
than achieving anything truly signifi cant.^64