No future without peace … …

And why a women’s group? I was in my early 20s in 1984 and I didn’t yet have a very clear feminist position. But publications like that or ways of thinking by Benoîte Groult and Simone de Beauvoir always appealed to me. That corresponded to my way of thinking and that’s why I liked the women’s group; without the men who always have the final say. We all agreed on that. Usually there were about 15 women. Sometimes there were more, sometimes there were fewer. How many of them were always active: I would say around 7 to 10, so it was more of a small group. But apart from the environmental protection working group, there were no large groups. […]

I think we all saw ourselves very much in the tradition of liberation theology … and of course in feminist theology. We dealt a lot with feminist theology and other feminist topics. That had a big impact on me too. I learned a lot during that time: thinking, speaking, analyzing texts and appearing in public, processes in our group, so enormous opportunities for growth. […]

There were government instructions on child-rearing that we found very questionable and worth discussing. And we held community evenings in church communities – so we used the structures, so to speak, to talk to parents and say: It doesn’t matter whether you do it like that or not. It’s written down: military education. And it continues all the way into school. There definitely needs to be a certain amount of opposition to things that you don’t like at all. And questions have to be asked: Why do children have to play with tanks? Why do they have to sing the song “My brother (or my father) is a soldier” or “Soldiers marched past”? Why do children have to learn that in kindergarten? Why do they have to come home and say: “The Americans are going to shoot us with weapons and neutron bombs?” We wanted to spread this madness a little more widely, to make more people aware… […]

[…] Well, we’ve already decided to stay here. Changes…? I don’t know if we believed in change. We just wanted to raise our voices and not stay quiet. I think that was the biggest mistake of the grassroots group movements anyway, that we never seriously thought about the consequences, what might happen. We lived for the moment. That’s why the opposition was not structured in any way when the GDR collapsed. The “round table” was formed spontaneously. And of course “the people who were already there” got involved – but that slipped out of our hands very quickly. We didn’t really have that much to say there, they were completely different people. […]