166 FRANK UEKÖTTER
integration of environmental protest movements in Eastern Europe. Was
it the general change of the political climate that paved the way for the
erosion of the political and socioeconomic base of the East German envi-
ronmental groups, which would mean that it was more or less the victory
of neoliberalism that accounts for their demise? Or had environmental
issues in Eastern Europe really only been a vehicle for other grievances,
which meant that eco-camoufl age was no longer required in an open
society?^76
Two points are clear. First, environmental issues were not cardinal
topics in Eastern European societies at large in the 1980s. Second, en-
vironmental protests were tightly interwoven with other concerns. The
protest against the Ignalina plant, for example, was not only directed
against nuclear technology—whose risks had become quite apparent af-
ter Chernobyl—but also against a symbol of much-hated Soviet hege-
mony. Similarly, there was an affi nity between environmental and peace
activism within groups affi liated or close to the Church that was clearly
refl ected in phrases such as “the protection of God’s creation” in which
both strands were intertwined.^77 Likewise, the rubric of “urban ecology,”
which proved to be the most agile segment of GDR environmental activ-
ism within the state-sanctioned Society for Nature and the Environment
(Gesellschaft für Natur und Umwelt), covered a variety of topics that were
all compatible with the general idea of improving the quality of life.^78 The
Thuringian environmentalist group in Knau-Dittersdorf, for one, drew at-
tention to the complex problem of factory farming through its protests
against a major pig farm, tapping into a topic that would not receive great
attention in the German public until the twenty-fi rst century.^79 Yet this
link between environmental issues and other topics was not an Eastern
European peculiarity. It corresponds to a widespread pattern within the
Global South that Joan Martinez-Alier has referred to as the “environ-
mentalism of the poor.”^80
West German environmentalists moved in the opposite direction. They
saw environmental problems as distinct issues, disconnected from the
broader context.^81 This allowed environmentalism to diff use into various
political milieus, leaving only a few stubborn conservative politicians who
branded the protest movement a leftist conspiracy.^82 As a result, West
German environmentalists remained insensitive to how environmental
problems were tied to social injustices. It was hardly noticed, for exam-
ple, that the discrimination against Turkish migrants in Günter Wallraff ’s
controversial bestseller Ganz Unten from 1985 also showed in the exces-
sive pollution to which they were exposed.^83
Reunifi cation thus resulted in the collision of the two distinct worlds of
environmental activism that had existed in the East and the West. There