POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 65
Scholars still disagree as to whether the term “new social move-
ments” can be used in reference to the much smaller counterculture of
the GDR. Before the fall of the Wall, Hubertus Knabe argued that this
term could be used for the GDR, citing the overwhelming sociocultural
similarities.^79 Critics countered by noting that it was diffi cult to draw a
line between “old” and “new” protest movements in East Germany; they
also pointed out that protest took on an entirely diff erent form and sig-
nifi cance within a dictatorship.^80 Nonetheless, every protest in the GDR
was—whether intentionally or not—also a protest against the prohibition
against protesting, which meant that it questioned the system on two lev-
els simultaneously. Even beyond such links, cross-system similarities can
be detected between East and West Germany. For example, the protest
groups were mostly local in their outlooks and loosely structured; they
were formed temporarily, but had long-term moral goals that strove for
social change without refl ecting personal material interests. They were
also more strongly rooted within the younger generation, enjoying more
support from academics than workers and exhibiting a higher percent-
age of female involvement. Moreover, they often cultivated an alternative
lifestyle on both sides of the Wall that diff ered in its habitus, which turned
the movement itself into the message.
In the West, however, Communist groups remained rather small and
often fl uid groups. These “K-Gruppen” were hierarchically organized and
dogmatic, and they pointedly rejected a leftist-alternative hippie lifestyle.
At their peak in 1977, they had about twenty thousand members, but they
disintegrated into smaller splinter groups following Mao’s death and the
RAF (Red Army Faction) terrorist attacks.^81 Even the German Commu-
nist Party (DKP) never surpassed 0.3 percent of the second ballot in the
West German federal elections, despite massive fi nancial support from
the GDR. Yet the communists in the West received a disproportionate
amount of public attention thanks to the Cold War and the RAF. In par-
ticular, the so-called Radicals Decree of 1972, which made constitutional
loyalty a prerequisite for employment in the civil service and mandated
checks on many university graduates, drew the question of membership
in Communist organizations into the spotlight of public debate.
In general, however, the ideological spectrum of the West German so-
cial movements was much broader. Protests were often sparked by ex-
treme events that mobilized support in East and West alike. The arms
race, in conjunction with the NATO Double-Track Decision in 1979, as
well as the introduction of instruction in warfare in GDR schools in the
year prior, for example, blew wind into the sails of the peace movement.
Likewise, on both sides of the Wall, the construction of nuclear power
plants and nuclear accidents such as those at Three Mile Island in 1979