Peace Movements and the Demilitarization of German Political Culture, 1970s–1980s

This chapter examines the relationship between peace movement activism and demilitarization in both East and West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. It focuses on the history of peace activism in the two parts of the divided Germany: the liberal-democratic West German Federal Republic (FRG) and the socialist dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Such an approach reveals not only the common themes they addressed and the transfers of ideas across the Iron Curtain, but also the ways in which governments addressed them as mirror images in the Cold War for ideas. While the peace movements in the West could appear in the contemporary political-cultural mainstream as the results of communist infiltration, the GDR government regarded the independent peace movement in the East as the result of the infiltration of the GDR by dangerous bourgeois-capitalist pacifists.