164 FRANK UEKÖTTER
The environmental community was inevitably fragmented in the GDR,
but it had its hierarchies nonetheless, and the scholarly literature refl ects
these hierarchies to the present day. A great deal of attention has been
devoted to the environmental library in the parish hall of the Zionskirche
in East Berlin, in part because of the dramatic failure of a nighttime Stasi
raid on 25 November 1987. The attempt to drive a wedge between the
church and environmental groups backfi red. While the parish council of
the Zionskirche supported a vigil calling for the release of the imprisoned
members of the environmental library, groups from other cities sent mes-
sages of solidarity.^65 A path can thus be traced from these events to the
establishment of the green-environmental network called Arche in 1988,
which linked together grassroots groups from all over the GDR.^66 Interna-
tional cooperation among Eastern European environmentalists was also
fostered by the Greenway network that connected activists from Poland,
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia in 1985 and had spread to all
the Soviet bloc countries by 1989 (apart from Romania and Albania).^67
However, this boom in networks did not mean everything went smoothly;
the movement was also plagued by considerable internal tensions. Internal
strife was yet another parallel between the East and West German milieus,
perhaps because new social movements in general are quite susceptible
to quarrels thanks to their emphasis on grassroots democracy and their
habitual aversion to hierarchies. In what seems like a bizarre example in
hindsight, the tensions between the environmental library and the Arche
network culminated in a formal declaration of incompatibility on 2 May
1998 that forced members to choose between the two organizations.^68
For the most part, the green movements in both German states oper-
ated within their own distinct political universe until 1989. If cross-border
exchange took place at all, it worked best through media channels. The
East German author Monika Maron, for example, published her debut
novel Flugasche (Flight of Ashes) in the West with S. Fischer Verlag in
Frankfurt in 1981. It is the story of the journalist Josefa Nadler, who found
herself in trouble with the SED and her colleagues after reporting on an
aging power plant that was responsible for severe pollution in a town
named “B.” In one of the most cited passages in the novel, Maron calls
the town of “B.,” which was easily recognized as Bitterfeld, “the dirti-
est town in Europe.”^69 “Real socialism” in this region dominated by the
chemical industry took yet another blow when the Soviet Union lost the
European Football Championships fi nal on 25 June 1988. Environmen-
tal activists took advantage of the fact that the football-loving state ap-
paratus was temporarily distracted by the match and shot documentary
fi lm footage of the disastrous environmental situation. The fi lm material
was smuggled into the West, where it aired in September on the ARD