Eva Lehmann-Lilienthal

I took early retirement in mid-1990 and now had time on my hands. In line with my social interests, I immediately threw myself into social work. There was a call, perhaps not so well known to younger people, to work on a new democratic constitution for the whole of Germany – in line with a passage in the Basic Law of the FRG that Germany would need a constitution if unification were to come about. The thing is called a Basic Law and not a constitution – and was actually intended to be provisional, only for the time until unification. This gave rise to the first all-German citizens’ movement under the leadership of civil rights activist Wolfgang Ullmann: “In free self-determination for an all-German constitution with a referendum”.

The person Wolfgang Ullmann was important. That was great! And it is also important to say how we worked extremely democratically in ten working groups. I was part of the “Human Rights Working Group”. It was led by a woman from Amnesty International called Edith Müller. I thought she was fantastic. It was my first contact with people from West Germany and it was basically positive. They were all democratically minded people from a wide variety of social, philosophical and political groups. We went through the entire Basic Law. We discussed it bit by bit. And then there were suggestions from individuals for changes or we said: No, it can stay as it is, etc. There were of course extremely different opinions.

Read more: in „Mother, don’t worry. Everything is fine here. Everyday life from 1989“. Publication of Frauenkultur Leipzig, 2009; 2nd edition in 2021. click here->