I visited Hungary myself a few years later and found unbelievable new freedoms for the Magyar citizens to find work abroad and return each year. I stayed with a Hungarian of Jewish ancestry named Gyorgy who told of his being sent to by his company to study business in France as part of an educational exchange program.
Gyorgy had taken to the learning opportunity with great seriousness. He spent his time in Paris learning how a western company functioned and solved problems, but his state-owned company colleagues simply spent their time in Paris partying and celebrating their days in the West.
In short, Gyorgy saw potential in what the West had to offer and wanted to bring back the knowledge and customer-service orientation to his homeland, especially in the area of communications and technology in which he was already skilled. In contrast, his Hungarian colleagues did not have such a long term vision and saw an educational trip simply as a vacation in the west, i.e. not as something that could be implemented back in their homeland.
During this same era, there were many new political and educational exchanges between East and West. For example, my alma mater friend, Mark Jantzen went to the Humboldt University in East Berlin to study theology in the late 1980s.
The West German Green Party sent a delegation to visit East Germany’s Erich Honecker and had criticized him and human rights publicly on TV seen in both East and West Germany. [The Green party openly kept relations with both the Communist Chairman Erick Honecker’s, party and many dissidents in the East German Republic.]
http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=2458
To various other degrees, many other parties, peace groups, churches and student groups encouraged east and west exchanges, too.
Similarly, the West German courts became more and more lenient on West German peace protestors as the Pershing Missile Crisis of 1983 enfolded. This was a marked change from their treatment in 1968 and through most of the 1970s.
As NATO stationed missiles and other weapons tipped with nuclear warheads that could land across the iron curtain in East Germany and neighboring states, millions of Germans and West Europeans protested. The Warsaw Pact saw it in its own interest to support such protests.
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/coldwarfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=events.details&thisunit=0&eventid=24
In short, peace protests against remilitarization and the further militarization of Germany in the West was often mirrored in East Germany.
According to various East German researchers, “The roots of the organized opposition involving the independent peace movement go back to the early 1960s, when considerable resistance emerged to East Germany's remilitarization, especially in Protestant circles. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Protestant activists objected to the introduction, in the summer of 1978, of compulsory pre-military training for fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds. Soldiers, who had fulfilled their military obligation through work in special military construction units, pressured Lutheran Church leaders to support nonviolence and disarmament. In February 1982, the term peace movement began to be used in connection with peace initiatives that originated outside official party or government circles. The initiatives stemmed from a forum organized by the Lutheran Church that challenged the official government view that peace can be maintained only through armed strength. In the mid1980s , the independent peace movement has sought the formation of a civilian peace service as an alternate to military service and the demilitarization of East German society.”
http://www.country-data.com/cgi-bin/query/r-5093.html
Peace researcher, John Bacher, noted several decades ago, “The first independent peace activity in the GDR was a response to the introduction of conscription in 1962. Some 3000 persons refused service on the grounds of conscientious objection~ Less than a dozen were actually imprisoned. The national Lutheran church took up their cause, and its pressure resulted in the creation in 1964 of special army ‘Construction Units’ (Bausoldaten) for conscientious objectors. This remains the most liberal provision for conscientious objection in any of the Warsaw Pact states. Popular pressures against militarization since 1975 have increased the civilian quality of this construction corps. Former members of the Bausoldaten have become prominent in the independent peace movement. They have kept in touch with each other and have organized peace seminars. Their distinctive clothes have been called "a uniform for a division of the peace movement, an East Germany speciality."
Lazarus observed, too, “In the 1980s, work for peace began to be decentralized and extended to areas outside East Germany's major urban centers. For example, by the mid-1980s the Protestant student community in Rostock had organized a monthly Peace Worship Service. Every six months a ‘Retreat and Meditation Day’ on the theme of peace took place in the Land-church of Mecklenburg. Standing workshops for peace were formed in numerous student communities, and peace seminars, often attended by hundreds of people, were held in Karl-Marx-Stadt, Meissen, Waldheim, Zittau, Kessin, and elsewhere.”
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