POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 67
through the strong resonance within church youth groups. For the fi rst
time in a long while, GDR citizens seemed to be willing to engage in col-
lective action, demonstrated by the thousands of signatures collected in
protest against rearmament within the Warsaw Pact states following the
stationing of Pershing II missiles in West Germany.^84
The environment, on the other hand, was not one of the top priori-
ties of the organized protest movements in the GDR. Protests against
pollution were important for the transformations of the 1980s because
they unavoidably hit home with many people and had not been consis-
tently criminalized by the East German authorities. The omnipresence of
hefty air pollution, for instance, mobilized even “normal” GDR residents.
Likewise, the detrimental eff ects of chemical manufacturing in the Halle-
Bitterfeld region were so obvious that the fi rst burgeoning alliances be-
tween local functionaries, scientists, and citizen activists were formed in
response. This eff ectively resulted in the fi rst cooperative eff orts between
church and state organizations, such as the Society for Nature and the
Environment of the Kulturbund. All these actions took place locally, and
Figure 1.1. “In East and West: Swords into Ploughshares”: Two Civil Rights
Activists from the GDR (Peter Rösch and Roland Jahn), Who Had to Leave
Their State, Protest against Nuclear Weapons of the NATO in Mutlangen,
West Germany, in 1983 (source: Ullstein-Bilder, used with permission)