When Evelyn Zupke is asked to look back on what led her to become a part of the GDR opposition, the civil rights movement, her thoughts turn to her family and experiences at school. She was born in 1962 in Binz, on the island of Rügen, where her mother and grandparents settled after fleeing Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad) in 1945. She never knew her father. The perfect Communist world in which she grew up – with no Western television or radio, no relatives in the West – could not really be all that perfect, she need only watch her mother and her grandfather to know that. Her grandfather would say “They are criminals” as soon as the SED leaders appeared on “Aktuelle Kamera” – the evening television news roundup in the GDR. And then there were her uncles, artists “eligible to travel” – the foreign currency they brought back was welcomed by the “Wall state”. Over the course of multiple trips, Zupke’s uncles smuggled the entire book “Die Alternative” by regime-critic Rudolf Bahro into the GDR, concealing a few more pages in hollow spaces in their vehicle each time. In those days, people went to jail for giving that book to the wrong person.

One of her fellow students was supposed to be expelled: he had changed his mind after “volunteering” to enter an officer training course after the “red-light therapy” of basic ideological training. The other students were asked vote on whether to confirm his expulsion. Even his best friends raised their hands. Only two students dared to vote no: Evelyn Zupke and one other girl. The student in question changed his mind again and was allowed to remain.

Despite her rebelliousness, Zupke passed her school-leaving exam with the second highest grade. She was told by a teacher that there was no point in her applying for university though, because there was a note in her file saying she was “not suited for study at university”. Zupke was not particularly upset by this. At 18, she had already had enough of the GDR education system. “I just wanted to get away from everything that education to be a socialist citizen entailed; studying at university was part of that.” She took employment at the agency that organised holidays for union workers. The Party paid less attention to the restaurants and food services sector. She worked as a waitress, a (“certified”) ice-cream vendor and a bartender. Before long, the management proposed her as a candidate for studies; the agency would pay the fees. A co-worker who had quickly joined the SED had already been “delegated” to a study programme. If she were to join, she would be next. “... and bye-bye”, said Zupke, meaning “there was no way I was going to do that!”

She really irritated the management in 1984. She and her boyfriend (they married shortly thereafter) were unwilling to take part in the “puppet show of the GDR election”. A popular slang word for elections in the GDR was “Zettelfalten” (folding slips): a ballot slip was valid if it was folded and placed in the voting urn, it didn’t have to be marked in any way. The outcome was always the same, voter turnout of around 99.5% with around 99.5% of votes in favour of the SED ticket. When her boss was unable to change her mind at the buffet on the election day morning, the atmosphere changed. Her co-workers no longer said hello when they saw her. The otherwise fairly lax hygiene inspectors kept a close eye on her every day. She was on her way to becoming an enemy of the state. Particularly since both she and her boyfriend still had ties to the Church. They found work at the Church social welfare agency Diakonisches Werk Bethanien in Anklam: her husband working a handyman and she as a carer for severely disabled children. Two years later, they did not vote in the Volkskammer election either; there was no retribution for Church employees.

The marriage broke apart. In 1987, Evelyn Zupke moved her child and household, minus her husband, to Berlin. She lived worked with disabled children at the Stephanus Foundation of the Church’s social work agency in Berlin’s Weißensee. There, she sought out the peace group Weißensee Friedenskreis, one of the many opposition groups that formed in the mid-1980s in the GDR. Now, she knew people who thought the same way she did. Her flat soon became a gathering place, in part because it was on Church premises.

The peace group came up with the idea of proving that the SED state itself was falsifying election results. Pretty much everyone knew this to be the case. Those who did not go to vote would hear election workers ringing their doorbells and those of their neighbours on the election day. Nonetheless, the GDR reported over 99% voter turnout. It was obvious, too, that the number of people who went into a polling booth to cross out names was greater than the reported number of votes against the SED. There were election workers who had said they had counted more no-votes in their polling place alone than were officially reported for the entire municipal district. But how could they get evidence of the fraud? The GDR only published the results for entire towns or city districts, never the results from individual polling stations. So they would have to obtain the results for all of the municipal districts and tally them. The next “elections” were scheduled for 7 March 1989.

Evelyn Zupke and others started to organise. She announced the plan at the parish house. They were seeking volunteers to note down the officially determined results in polling stations and report them. A lot of people were interested, a sure indication that large parts of the population were fed up with the no-choice elections. In other Eastern Bloc countries, such as Poland, Hungary, the Soviet Union, voting now had a different meaning: CPSU General Secretary Gorbachev had himself photographed as he pulled the curtain of his polling station closed. The peace group sent two observers to each polling station.

Even finding out where all the polling stations were was difficult. The GDR kept their location a secret. Asking at the city hall did not help. Zupke recalled the conversation: “Could you please give me a list of the polling stations in the municipal district?” – “What do you need that for?” – “Finding out where polling stations are is a civil right.” – “You are not going find out from me!” With painstaking effort though, the group did manage to compile a list of all the addresses, except that of the polling station in the School of the Arts. As it turned out, that polling station had the largest number of votes against the SED, more than 50 percent.

Not all groups were particularly enthusiastic about the idea from Weißensee to expose the meaninglessness of the elections. In the end though there were many groups that took part in Berlin, as well as in Leipzig, Dresden, Erfurt and Rostock. In Leipzig, hundreds of young people burned their polling cards on the evening of the election day, making it obvious that they had not voted.

The activists had an efficient procedure for tallying votes: the polling station observers brought the results on index card to Zupke’s flat. There were Stasi agents standing in front of the building but they did not stop anyone. However, Stasi presence was large enough that the director of the Stephanus foundation ordered the people eagerly tallying the votes to leave the building. He had already been instructed by the Church leadership to prevent Zupke from organising the election observation in her flat. Zupke and her team gathered up all of the index cards with the results and drove to the home of Mario Schatta, who had started the peace group. Zupke: “With the Stasi tailing us all the way there. I still don’t understand why they didn’t stop us.”

Late that evening, they went to the Church of St. Elisabeth in Berlin's Mitte district, which had been selected as the meeting point for observers from the districts of Prenzlauer Berg, Mitte, Pankow and Friedrichshain. To great applause, they announced the nearly fully counted result for Weißensee: “2,156 no votes.” It was clear to everyone that the SED was not going to admit that so many people had voted against them. The official tally was 1,011. More than half of the votes against the SED were left out of the count. The same picture emerged in other cities.

Election fraud was a criminal offense in the GDR. So Zupke and members of many opposition groups filed criminal complaints, using “forms” prepared by the peace group. To no avail. One public prosecutor told her: “The truth is what it says in ‘Neues Deutschland’.” No one was convicted of election fraud on the basis of the complaints until after the GDR had ceased to exist.

The members of the peace group were unwilling to drop the issue. “Responsible citizens” (Zupke: “That was us!”) called for protests on the 7th of each month at 5 pm (slogan: “Never enough election fraud”): in Sophienkirche on 7 June; on Alexanderplatz on 7 July ; in Hoffnungskirche on 7 August and on Alexanderplatz again on 7 September. From then on, the Weißensee peace group was seen as “a little bit crazy” by insiders. By holding the demonstration on Alexanderplatz, the group was deliberately venturing outside of the Church’s protection in order to reach a wider public. In early July, Pastor Rudi Pahnke tried to change their minds, charging that while they might claim they would be demonstrating under the slogan “No violence”, what they were planning to do on Alexanderplatz was –“I can still hear him say it” –“violence with the tongue” .

On 7 September, the Stasi took overt and quite brutal action against the election-fraud protesters. Clearly, a new wind was blowing. The 7th day of the next month, October, was the national holiday marking the (40th) anniversary of the foundation of the GDR, or the “GDR’s birthday” as the children were taught in school. Even within the peace group, there were, understandably, fears that holding a protest on that day, on Alexanderplatz of all places, would be taking things a step too far. It might turn out to be a “hot” day. Initially, only Zupke and fellow rebel Frank Pfeiffer were in favour, but in the end, they persuaded the others to go ahead with it. “It” being a demonstration among thousands of celebrating people.

The GDR police left the demonstrators largely alone at first. Some of the celebrants joined in. Then a cry rang out: “To the Palace”. The “Palace” was the Palace of the Republic, where state leaders were holding their celebration, with Gorbachev and the heads of other Eastern Bloc countries, as well as Western diplomats, in attendance. (That very afternoon, the head of the CPSU had said “Life punishes those who come too late.”) In the end, the police pushed the demonstrators back to Alexanderplatz. Well out of sight of the palace, they unleashed a brutal attack on the protesters and arrested many. 

The perseverance that Evelyn Zupke and her fellow protesters demonstrated at the 7 October demonstration on Alexanderplatz made them heroes of the GDR revolution; they became role models due to the courage of their convictions demonstrated by them there. For hundreds of protesters who were arrested that, the police brutality they witnessed or experienced, put an end to any lingering delusion of that the GDR was “fundamentally humane” at bottom: “How did I get to that point? I don’t really know. There I was, all of a sudden, in the middle of it all! Evelyn Zupke received the Order of Merit of the State of Berlin from Berlin’s Governing Mayor Klaus Wowereit (SPD) in 2001.