ENTANGLED ECOLOGIES 165
(Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or Consortium of the Public Broadcasting
Institutions) investigative reporting show Kontraste, cementing the image
of Bitterfeld as a symbol of the environmental catastrophe in East Ger-
many.^70 Similarly, the West German media was also mostly responsible
for the popularization of Michael Beleites’s Pechblende. While only a very
few East Germans actually had a chance to read this samizdat publica-
tion, a great number of them saw a documentary based on this study that
aired on West German television on 3 November 1987.^71
But while West German television certainly reached both German au-
diences, there were notable divergences in the modes of perception. In
the GDR, journalists from the West were a trump card in the struggle to
create something akin to a public sphere. Despite all the legitimacy is-
sues that arose from working with “Western media,” this cooperation was
still one of the few ways to raise public awareness.^72 The eff ect that such
popularization could have can be seen, for instance, in the way the coun-
cil of the Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) district reacted to Pechblende.
It distributed its own “Informational Materials Concerning the Status of
Radiation Protection in the Southern Districts of the GDR,” which eff ec-
tively meant that the district government felt the need to fi ght for public
opinion on this issue.^73 In the West, by contrast, reports on the GDR’s
eco-problems established the impression of a late socialist environmental
catastrophe, but the political purpose behind these reports was less clear.
After all, it was easy to underscore the merits of West German environ-
mental policy if Eastern Europe was used as a foil.^74
After 1989, environmental activism diff ered greatly between East and
West. On the whole, the green-environmental network Arche formed the
basis of the Green Party that was founded in the GDR in November 1989.
The party gained seats in the People’s Chamber (Volkskammer) in March
1990 and then the Bundestag in December 1990. However, the Berlin
Arche chapter took a somewhat diff erent path as it began to care for the
homeless in 1990, setting up a shelter in a parish in Treptow.^75 Shifts
like these were a very typical phenomenon in the former Eastern Bloc
states, where the prominence of environmental issues within the pro-
test movements prior to the Wende contrasted sharply with the almost
complete collapse of many environmental movements after 1990. By way
of example, an estimated one hundred thousand Lithuanians protested
against the Soviet nuclear power plant Ignalina in September 1988. The
construction of a third reactor was canceled before the collapse of Soviet
rule, but the two existing reactors remained in use until they were shut
down at the request of the European Union during the negotiations over
Lithuania’s membership. It is diffi cult to say what actually led to the dis-