Reflections on Unification

Bärbel Bohley was one of the founders of Neues Forum, the civic movement at the forefront of East Germany’s peaceful revolution of 1989. An artist by vocation, Bohley had been expelled from the country’s Federation of Artists in 1983 and prohibited from exhibiting on account of her involvement in the independent peace and human rights movement. She repeatedly found herself in trouble with the authorities in the years that followed as she played an increasingly prominent role in calling for social and political change in East Germany. Following German unification in 1990, Bohley campaigned to give citizens access to their Stasi files.