Carlo Jordan was born in Berlin's Friedrichshain district on 5 February 1951, the son of a family with their own baking business. His father had returned from his time as a POW in the Soviet Union vowing never to hold a weapon again and passed this pacifist attitude on to his son. Apart from this, politics did not play a major role in his family home.

Jordan spent a lot of time in West Berlin as a small child, before the Wall was erected in 1961. He also went to a non-state-run Protestant childcare centre. His parents forbade him to join the Pioneers. He did not take part in the secular coming of age ceremony promoted by the East German state (Jugendweihe) either. The harassment from teachers that he endured during his school years for wearing Western-style clothing or having longer hair helped shape his character. He wanted to work in construction, so he left the polytechnical school after his eighth year and did the last three years of his schooling (1965–1968) in a secondary programme that included a carpentry apprenticeship. After working for a while as a carpenter, he earned a qualification as a construction engineer (1969–1972).

Influenced by the anti-authoritarian student movement in the West and Prague’s reform communism, Jordan was drawn into East Berlin’s cultural opposition, which met in a small number of cafés and clubs in the late 1960s. These were the years when rejection of the system was expressed largely in attempts to build a self-determined, non-conformist life independent of the totalitarian state.

Jordan, who had joined the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, FDJ) during secondary school, withdrew from the organisation in 1972 to protest a new regulation on the “steering” of new university and technical college graduates. The regulation provided for the compulsory placement in employment of all university or technical college graduates for a period of three years. From this point on, it was clear to Jordan that the official structures were not for him. He continued to work at state construction enterprises through 1979, but from 1980 onwards, he worked as a construction manager in Church institutions and/or a lecturer for philosophy and literature.

In the early 1970s, Jordan began to help organise cultural opposition events in Berlin. These were held in state youth clubs, which offered a way to legalise opposition activities and a place from which underground reading and study groups could be coordinated. These underground groups included the Workers and Students Club, the “Box” and “Kramladen”. This activity prompted State Security to start what turned out to be years of continual surveillance and persecution of Carlo Jordan in a series of operations: “Typesetter”, “Calendar”, “Cyclist”, “Library”, “Arch”, “River” and “Bauknecht”. In 1976, after the Protestant minister Oskar Brüsewitz set himself on fire to protest the SED dictatorship, Jordan signed a protest petition addressed to Erich Honecker. This led to a search of his flat, after which he was arrested but released shortly thereafter. No investigation was launched, but Jordan lost his job as construction manager at the large-scale construction site for the Berlin Charité hospital: the site was very close to the Wall and he was considered a “security risk”. In November 1976, he and Aljoscha Rompe wrote a submission calling for the GDR to withdraw the revocation of Wolf Biermann’s citizenship and allow him to return to the GDR.

In 1978, Jordan began a correspondence course in philosophy at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, motivated not by thoughts of his career or even epistemic considerations but by an “ethnological interest”. He wanted to learn how forces close to the SED thought and how their structures worked. He was expelled from the programme four years later though, on the grounds that he lacked sufficient ties to society. The real reason was his refusal to speak out against Poland’s *Solidarność union.

After a few years in which Jordan indulged a growing interest in developments in the Eastern Bloc, especially those in the Baltic, Central Asia, the Caucasian republics and Russia, to which he took several trips, he became increasingly involved in the peace groups in the early 1980s. Jordan was particularly involved in the work of the “Ecology” working group within the peace group of the Evangelical Student Congregation (Evangelische Studentengemeinde, ESG) of Humboldt-Universität, this group, which had been formed in 1977, was led by #Reinhard Schult and others. Ecological concerns were the central issue for Jordan at this time. The ecology group grew increasingly autonomous and action-oriented (bicycle demonstrations, independent exhibitions and ecology seminars throughout the GDR) and there began to be contention between it and with the wider peace group. In 1983, the ecology group split off from its parent group. At around the same time, the ESG peace group itself was barred from the university and found a new home in a church congregation in Berlin’s Friedrichsfelde.

In 1986, Carlo Jordan, Wolfgang Rüddenklau and Christian Halbrock founded Berlin’s Environmental Library (Umweltbibliothek). This project was also affiliated with an East Berlin church congregation (Zionsgemeinde), largely for practical reasons, this despite internal differences between Jordan and the opposition groups within the Church. 

Jordan had been interested in the idea of an independent library since 1980, when he had helped some Mexican friends in the GDR to collect books for their free library and had heard about Poland’s “flying universities and libraries”. The initiative grew into one of the most successful projects and a centre of the opposition in the GDR despite considerable criticism, some from opposition figures (who complained that it was unprofessional and lacking in appeal for Western media). The library collected banned literature, served as a venue for independent events and discussion forums and lastly, and importantly, regularly published the samizdat magazine “Umweltblätter” Jordan also wrote for other underground magazines and authored numerous books and newspaper articles (these were published in West Berlin until 1989); he also kept documentary records on the opposition’s Berlin Eco-Seminars. Though critical of the Western media, he was relaxed in his dealings with them, unlike some other opposition activists. The same applied to would-be emigrants, whose aims he saw as legitimate. Jordan himself was able to visit West Berlin in 1986 and 1989 in a private capacity. During those visits, he reached out to persons and institutions that supported the GDR opposition. Paradoxically enough, these trips took place during a period in which he was not permitted to travel within the Eastern Block (1986–1989).

There were arguments within the Environmental Library over the extent to which the library could or should network with the opposition ecological movement in the GDR. As consensus seemed impossible, Jordan and other activists from the ecological movement founded the Green Ecological Network Arche and the samizdat periodical “Arche Nova” in his flat (in at Fehrbelliner Straße 7, in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg, where he had lived as a squatter since 1982). The launch of this new network amounted de facto to a rupture within the Environmental Library. “Arche” also documented the environmental situation and the increasing dilapidation of the GDR’s cities. Some of its videos were aired by Western television broadcasters, such as the programme “Bitter news from Bitterfeld”, a work that depicted the environmental contamination of an entire region in the GDR for the first time.

During the 1989 revolution, Jordan, who began to serve as the GDR coordinator in the East European network Greenway in 1987, was one of those who pointed to the ecological crisis in the GDR while warning against an overly hasty process of unification with the Federal Republic. He advocated the convocation of a German national assembly that would draw up a new constitution for all of Germany (in line with Article 146 of the Basic Law) as the best path towards German unity. Nonetheless, he did not oppose unification. In November of 1989, he co-founded the Green Party in the GDR. He participated as a Green Party spokesperson at the Central Round Table, which met from December 1989 to March 1990. He was elected to East Berlin’s municipal assembly in the municipal elections in May 1990 and served there until Berlin’s two legislatures united. He also served in Berlin’s Parliament in 1994/1995. 

Jordan sought to counter the officially imposed view of history through his own events and lectures. He did this during the era of the GDR, and even more so after the revolution: in 1990, he initiated the project that led to the establishment of the Stasi Museum (Gedenk- und Forschungsstätte Normannenstraße) in the former MfS headquarter in Berlin-Lichtenberg. He also published works on the history of opposition in the GDR. In 2000, he obtained a doctorate from Freie Universität in Berlin with a dissertation on the history of the militarisation of Berlin’s Humboldt-Universität. In 2019, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his commitment.

Carlo Jordan died on 13 December 2023 in Berlin.