"The basic formula of any dictatorship is, firstly, spreading lies and suppressing the truth. And secondly, destroying any kind of solidarity, so that in the end, you don't even care anymore if your neighbour is arrested, and you just keep quiet," says Christian Halbrock, one of the co-founders of Umweltblätter, the environmental zine printed out of the tenement building basement in East Berlin that Eisenlohr helped to publish. "We didn't want to live with those daily lies, we wanted to live with the truth, and to show with our own, authentic, truthful lifestyle that we were serious about that."
Named "Operation Trap", the raid and arrests were part of the Stasi's attempts to crush a group of people fighting for a cleaner environment – and for the right to speak out. The secret police's tactics ranged from interrogations and jail to bizarre mind games. In one incident, informants who managed to infiltrate the environmental movement covertly took coffee from a shared pantry without putting money into the coffee kitty. It was a psychological manoeuvre, aimed at sowing conflict and mistrust within the groups.
That plan did not work out – neither the psychological manipulation, nor the dramatic crackdown. On the contrary: Operation Trap became one of the very rare cases in history in which the Stasi was forced to back down. Standing against them were a tiny group of self-described peaceniks and eco nerds, who printed a magazine with a run of just a few hundred copies, and regularly ran out of ink. At one point, the US Congress even weighed in and sided with the producers of the little magazine. How did it all happen?
Interviews with dissidents from that time, and internal reports from the Stasi's secret archive, which was opened after the fall of the Berlin Wall, tell the surprising story of how a small environmental movement managed to take on a powerful dictatorship – and ultimately, won.
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