Bernd Eisenfeld and his twin brother Peter were born in Falkenstein in the region of Vogtland on 9 January 1941. The twins also had two older brothers and a younger sister. Eisenfeld was raised mainly by his mother and his oldest brother, because his father was held in the Mühlberg internment camp by the Russians until 1948 after his release from American captivity as a POW in the summer of 1945.

Eisenfeld completed a three-year apprenticeship as a banker in 1958 and then studied financial management at a technical college in Gotha from 1959–1961. In his family home, he was taught to conform and avoid any public expression of criticism. However, his character was influenced less by this early training than by the popular uprising of 17 June 1953 and the denial of official permission for his chess club to travel to West Germany. The reason given by the authorities for this denial was that it would be wrong to accept money from the “Kaiser ministry” – the SED’s propaganda’s term for the Federal Ministry for All-German Affairs (Jakob Kaiser was the first minister to head that ministry). These experiences, along with the building of the wall in 1961, led Eisenfeld to openly reject SED rule. In 1964, he began to write letters to various bodies in and outside of Germany expressing his criticism and his protest. In them, he spoke out against the Wall and the division of Germany and called for democratic conditions in the GDR. This activism resulted in the rejection of his application to study in a correspondence programme.

In 1966/1967, Eisenfeld performed his military service in one of the unarmed units the National People’s Army (Nationale Volksarmee, NVA) as a “construction soldier”. He refused to take the oath demanded of construction soldiers and also wrote a number of collective and individual “submissions” to state bodies, which resulted in his persecution and that of three other construction soldiers in operation “Zersetzung” (social/psychological “decomposition”). He was unable to resume his work as an economist at the state bank after finishing his military service in 1967, because authorities imposed on his employment there.

Eisenfeld, who argued from a secular, Marxist-oriented background, saw the Yugoslavian model of self-administration as an alternative to the GDR's Soviet-style communist system. An enthusiastic proponent of the *Prague Spring right from the start, he believed that a symbiosis of democracy and socialism was possible. As he called for such a symbiosis in the GDR as well, State Security persecuted him in operation “Economist”, launched in 1968, due to alleged “subversive agitation”. He was also accused of having formed a “subversive group” with his brothers Ulrich, a painter, and Peter, a geologist. Ulrich and Peter Eisenfeld were also persecuted and harassed in different operations of the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS).

On 20 and 21 September, Eisenfeld distributed around 100 home-made handbills in Halle, protesting the *invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops on 21 August 1968, in which, citing Lenin, he condemned the invasion, fiercely attacking it as a violation of international law. He also sent a telegram to the Czechoslovakian embassy reading “Stand firm – Keep hoping. Bernd Eisenfeld.” The MfS reaction was not long in coming: Eisenfeld was arrested on the second day of his handbill campaign and, in February of 1969, sentenced to two and a half years of prison. He served the full sentence, the longest stretch of which he spent at the infamous Bautzen I detention facility, where he, a political prisoner, was locked in a cell with five men who were serving criminal sentences.

Even while in prison, Eisenfeld was plagued by informers and labelled “unwilling to learn”. While still in prison, he attempted to arrange to leave for the West but was unsuccessful. Upon his release on 18 March 1971, he learned that his partner had lost her secretarial job and been pressured by the MfS to leave him, taking their two children with her. She had not done so.

Eisenfeld returned to his old job at the chemical engineering enterprise in Leipzig, where he worked as a financial analyst. His employer resisted pressure from State Security to dismiss him. The MfS renewed its persecution of Eisenfeld, this time in what it called individual-surveillance operation (“Operative Personenkontrolle, OPK) and then, from 1974, in operation “Bank”. Eisenfeld re-applied for authorization to leave the GDR for West Germany twice each year, invoking the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Helsinki Final Act (CSCE). He also documented his own case and, in 1972, sent the relevant records to the United Nations. He was active in the construction soldier movement, which he helped to start, as well as in an ecumenical peace group in Halle. He sought to bring his social criticism to society at large so it would not fossilise within small, closed groups. He was also an advocate of German unity, though he did not share the fundamentally anti-capitalist convictions of Robert Havemann or Wolf Biermann, for instance. Unlike the left-wing opposition in the East and the West, he advocated Western-style democracy based on civil liberties and fundamental rights.

In August of 1975, shortly after the Helsinki Final Act was adopted at the CSCE, Eisenfeld was finally able to emigrate to West Berlin. After working in civic education on a freelance basis for several years, he took a position at the All-German Institute (Gesamtdeutsches Institut) in Berlin/Bonn in 1985. He wrote several books and journalistic pieces about the GDR. In 1978, he published a widely respected book on conscientious objection to military service in the GDR (“Kriegsdienstverweigerung in der DDR. Ein Friedensdienst?”). The MfS continued to persecute him as an “enemy of the state” after he left the GDR. Operation “Ore”, for instance, focused on his brother Peter, who had been involved in the opposition human rights debate in the GDR and then also emigrated to West Berlin in 1987. State Security also persecuted Eisenfeld in operation “Polyp” in connection with his activity as press spokesperson and chair of an association of former GDR citizens in West Berlin. The MfS continued to use its social/psychological decomposition methods (Zersetzung) against him even after his emigration to the West. For instance, the Stasi deliberately spread a rumour that he had been an informer. He was unable to obtain a permanent job in West Berlin for several years as a result. 

From 1992 to 2005, Eisenfeld worked as a member of the research staff and head of area in the research department of the federal agency created to deal with the records of the State Security Service, where he researched the history of opposition and resistance in the GDR, releasing numerous publications. 

Bernd Eisenfeld died in Berlin in 2010.