The commercial school was right in the centre: Peterstraße, Petersteinweg, Hainstraße. Most of them were comrades. I was one of the very few who wasn’t in the party. I was also surprised that I managed to go to university. My parents were self-employed with a bakery at the time. When I was admitted to the EOS, i.e. the Abitur, my father first had to make a bit of a fuss – along the lines of, the grades are good after all. But you were in the minority. That’s why I tell myself today – as a Green, you’re often in the minority – it’s not difficult for me. I learnt that in the GDR and it also gave me strength.

Since ’88, I’ve been going to the St Nicholas Church at intervals to pray for peace. It has always interested me, as the only one in our seminar group. Leaving the country would never have been an option for me. When everyone left via the embassies – Hungary, Czechoslovakia – in ’89, I thought: No. I don’t want that. I never wanted to go to the West. I had no close relatives there, so I wouldn’t have known where to go. I did have distant relatives, but I never liked them, they were more of a deterrent. But I said I would stay here deliberately. I wanted to change something in the GDR. I became more and more aware of this in the summer of ’89, and when I had the opportunity to take to the streets in Leipzig, I said: that’s exactly it. That’s where you feel comfortable now. And this is the right place for you now.

When the border was open, something changed. All these people came with their flags with the emblem cut out of them. I didn’t like that. “We are the people” became “We are one people” and there were calls for rapid reunification. I thought: now you’re going to get Kohl, that can’t be right. I didn’t want to preserve the GDR now either, but I didn’t like the trend that the Monday demonstrations were taking. Especially not when nationalist tones came in. I thought: How terribly fast this is going! Four weeks earlier there was still a consensus and suddenly I asked myself: am I still demonstrating with the right people? But I said that I always go anyway because I thought to myself that I didn’t want to leave it to the others. The last demonstration was on the Monday before the last GDR parliamentary elections in March 1990.

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->