Bärbel Bohley (née Brosius) was born on 24 May 1945 in Berlin, where she continued to live until the end of the GDR, with the exception of six months of 1988 spent in forced exile in the West. Her father was a technician, her mother a homemaker; politics played no appreciable role in the family. After finishing upper secondary school in 1963, Bohley supported herself with short-term jobs for several years until she was accepted as a student of painting and the art academy in Berlin’s Weißensee district in 1969. She had one child from a marriage with an artist from Halle; after the divorce a few years into the marriage, her son lived with her.

After graduating from the art academy in 1974, Bärbel Bohley met with some success as a freelance painter and graphic artist. Her work was shown in international exhibitions and she twice received a promotional award from the Staatliche Kunsthandel (lit. State Art Trade). In 1976, she was elected to the governing body of the Berlin chapter of the Association of Visual Artists (VBK).

Bohley’s political activism developed out of interactions with visual artists and writers on Berlin’s diverse art scene. The large family of her husband also played a role in this: it included theologists and other artists with many contacts in the relevant social settings in Halle. It is no accident that there were several other opposition activists in the GDR whose last name was Bohley.

The external stimulus for her first resistance activity was the increasingly militarised climate in GDR society, which affected schools, factories and even kindergartens. NATO’s 1979 Double Track Decision, which introduced a new round of the international arms race, played into this. Women’s groups in various Western countries had been protesting the build-up of nuclear weapons for years. In early 1980, activists began gathering signature for a petition by women calling for peace (“Anstiftung der Frauen für den Frieden”) first in West Germany, then in East Germany as well. Bohley was among the GDR’s signatories of this petition. This was the first time that people in both East and the West Germany jointly articulated protest, marking the beginning of the “trans-bloc” peace movement.

Bohley first came into contact with Robert Havemann and his circle during this period. When new legislation providing for the conscription of women in the event of a state of defence was enacted in March 1982, Bohley and other women began lodging submissions with the GDR leadership announcing their intent to refuse to comply if called up and calling for public debate on the issue. In October 1982, a signature drive initiated by a group that included Bohley and Katja Havemann succeeded in gathering signatures nation-wide. The group Women for Peace (Frauen für den Frieden) emerged out of this context. This group, which existed up through the demise of the GDR, engaged in a range of activities within and outside of the church in the period that followed, and became part of the core around which the independent women’s movement coalesced. Contact with West German activists, including Petra Kelly, co-founder of the Green Party and many in her political circles, was key element in the approach taken by this group, which sought to act across and overcome the divide between the two blocs.

With deployment of NATO’s new weaponry well underway, and the GDR lost interest in the Western protest movement in late 1983, and immediately instituted harsh measures against its allies in the GDR. Bohley, who had already been dismissed as a board member of the Berlin chapter of the Association of Visual Artists and whose work could no longer be shown in exhibitions, was arrested together with #Ulrike Poppe. By that time both women were quite well known, though, and the authorities, under pressure from the West, released them in January 1984.

These events played out during the most active phase of the independent peace movement, after which resistance against the policies of the GDR leadership diversified, as individual groups coalesced around specific issues. This process was accompanied by clashes between those with different individual ideological views. However, it was now possible to achieve a certain degree of continuity, in terms of activists and organisational structures, which would carry through to the end of the GDR.

Bärbel Bohley was a founding member of the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights (Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte: IFM) which emerged in late 1985 after the split between those with traditionally leftist and post-Marxist views into independent groups. The IFM saw itself as a group of activists seeking to promote political and civil rights and lay some of the groundwork for a civil society. It intentionally kept its activities separate from the Church. This approach, which was and remained rare among opposition groups right through to the end of the GDR and posed additional practical difficulties. Its members did include practicing Christians, however, and the group always maintained close relations with the Church and with many individual pastors and congregations.

Bohley was involved in numerous IFM activities: petitions and open letters, events held in church congregations and samizdat publications, as well as attempts to build up national networks within the developing opposition movements and maintain close contacts with political friends in Western Europe, above all Petra Kelly. One of the most important actions of the IFM early on was a submission to congress of the SED in 1986 that signed by people from all over the country. The submission questioned the legitimacy of the leadership of the party and called for open social dialogue about the democratisation of the country.

In the second half of the 1980s, State Security viewed Bohley as one of the best known, high profile and active opposition figures in the GDR. The state therefore made a second attempt to get rid of her and intimidate her associates, by arresting her along with several other opposition activists in January 1988. These arrests triggered a wave of solidarity on a scale never seen before in the GDR, as well as international protests both in the East and in the West. The Church intervened, and then all of the arrested activists then forcibly deported to the West. No trials were held, except in one case. A six-month ban on entry to the GDR was imposed on Bohley and Werner Fischer in February of 1988. This measure, for which there was no legal basis or precedent, caused considerable consternation in the GDR, but it remained unclear what had led up to it–with respect to the actions and motivations of the authorities or to those of the prisoners. Equally unclear was what would happen at the end of the six months. However, Bohley managed, with a great deal of help, to return to the GDR in August of 1988.

Bohley’s activism continued unabated after her return. The escalation of political tensions but also the development of oppositional activities triggered new controversies among the groups. Initiatives and individuals began to identify themselves publicly as part of the opposition for the first time. Bohley was one of them, but she also sought a form of organisation that would be able to encompass more than the tight circle of opposition activists. She saw an ever more urgent need to overcome the social isolation that plagued these groups in a country lacking a public arena and civil society.

While activists had been discussing various ways to open up opposition groups since 1988, and even mooting the idea of founding (illegal) political parties in this context, Bohley believed that what was needed was a way to reach and involve the broadest possible section in society. Her aim was a movement that spoke to and articulated the needs of as many people as possible. Out of this came the initiative to create the New Forum in the spring of 1989: Bohley, Katja Havemann and Rolf Henrich published its founding proclamation “Aufbruch ‘89” in September of 1989 along with a call for signatures. The response was astonishing: within a few weeks, tens of thousands of people from all over the GDR had signed the proclamation, and even more had expressed approval for the initiative. The initiators were virtually inundated with letters, calls and visitors. The New Forum, which wanted to register itself as a nation-wide association, intentionally did not have a political program, but instead called on people to mobilise themselves, to engage in democratisation from below. The New Forum’s success was due to its ability to articulate the dissatisfaction in society in a manner that accommodated as many viewpoints as possible and to the fact that it emerged at precisely the time when a mass movement had become inevitable.

Like many in the GDR opposition, Bohley is one example of an activist whose political engagement was motivated by ethics rather than ideology, an engagement was geared towards attitudes rather than programs and the needs of people rather than those of parties and their interests. Suspicious of hierarchies and professional politicians, she began to feel that she did not belong in politics shortly after the autumn of 1989, and the feeling grew even stronger after German reunification. She served for a brief time on the East Berlin municipal council (May to December 1990), but then began to withdraw from political life. From 1996-1998, she ran a reconstruction programme in Bosnia with returned war refugees and then set up a children’s holiday camp for Bosnian orphans in Croatia.

In 2008, Bärbel Bohley returned to Berlin for treatment of the cancer that ultimately killed her, in 2010.