64 FRANK BÖSCH AND JENS GIESEKE
ments and their—apparent or real—counterparts in the East. The West-
ern protest movements were often part of cross-border networks that
spread from the West to the East. Environmental protests, for example,
emerged in the United States and France at the beginning of the 1970s
that funneled into joint actions along the Rhine in particular. Likewise,
forms of protest that developed in the FRG spread abroad, such as the
occupation of the construction site for the planned nuclear power plant
in Wyhl in 1975.^73 Above all, it was the peace movement and the anti–nu-
clear power movement that accumulated an immense amount of support
as well as infl uence over political decisions in West Germany, even when
compared internationally.^74 These “new social movements” are referred
to in the plethora of studies on this topic as a long-term “mobilizing col-
lective actor” or as a network of social groups with a collective identity
that either wanted to bring about or put a stop to a social change.^75 They
can also be termed “communicative networks” because their main goals
were to set the political agenda or infl uence the public, and due to their
loose organizational natures, they were also permanently engaged in in-
ternal communication.^76
Around 1980, corresponding protest movements also developed in
the GDR that initially joined the pacifi st bandwagon and later turned
their attention to environmental issues. Although they were quite small,
they were no less visible to the SED and the West, and they were well-
linked to their Western counterparts. Initially, characteristic parallels can
be detected between the movements in the FRG and the GDR. In con-
trast to the USSR, for example, the leading fi gures of dissidence (such
as Robert Havemann, Wolf Biermann, or Rudolf Bahro) were reformist
Marxist Communists with ties to the West German New Left as well as
theorists of Western Marxism.^77 However, a programmatic shift also oc-
curred in the East in the second half of the 1970s. Marxism and even
the general social theory foundation of these movements were increas-
ingly pushed aside by a muddled mix of programmatic interests such
as the critique of militarization, calls for a basis democracy, ecological
criticism directed against civilization, and, above all, an anti-totalitarian
ethic of resistance against the pressure to conform and participate in
the Communist regime. The idea was to counteract this coercion with
“Living in Truth” à la Václav Havel. Additionally, these diff erent political
agendas shared a common critique against the alienation of modern in-
dustrial societies along with the mutual desire to fi nd an “authentic” way
of life. This affi nity was personifi ed, for example, by Petra Kelly and Bär-
bel Bohley, although their political fates refl ected the limits of such an
understanding of politics that distanced itself from the pursuit of power
and compromises.^78