Gerd Poppe was born in Rostock on 25 March 1941 and completed his upper secondary school in 1958. His parents – his father was an engineer and his mother a secretary – had no long-term influence on his political convictions. However, his mother’s liking for culture and the arts gave rise to his interest in an eclectic interest of literature, music and film. Later in life, his friends and fellow activists were impressed by his astonishing knowledge of music and film history. He began to study physics at the University of Rostock in 1959 and earned his Diplom degree in 1964. From 1964 to 1976, he worked at a semiconductor plant in Stahnsdorf on the outskirts of Berlin.

Poppe became involved in opposition groups in 1968, under the influence of the anti-authoritarian student protests in Western Europe and of the *Prague Spring. He combined his activities in the cultural opposition with activities in the political opposition right from the start. He met with alternative cultural groups and opened his flat to non-conformists. He also began to articulate opposition to the Communist dictatorship relatively early, for instance, by signing a proclamation protesting the *invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops at the Czechoslovakian embassy in Berlin on 22 August 1968. Within a matter of days, officials at Poppe’s workplace were notified that he had done so by the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS). From that point on, Poppe was a subject of systematic observation and persecution by the MfS – in the operations “Monolith” and “Atelier”, and others. From 1976 to 89 he and his then wife, Ulrike Poppe, were the subjects of operation “Zirkel”, whose records filled 30 volumes. The MfS employed its social/psychological “decomposition” measures (Zersetzung) against Gerd Poppe over the course of many years, and he was also the target of frequent detentions and fines. In the eyes of State Security, Gerd Poppe belonged to the small hard core of implacable enemies of the SED regime.

In 1975, Poppe called up for military service. A member of the reserves with no prior service, Poppe refused to serve in an armed unit and spent six months as a “construction soldier” of the National People’s Army (Nationale Volksarmee, NVA). When Wolf Biermann was stripped of his citizenship in November of 1976, Poppe sent a letter of protest to Erich Honecker. This resulted in the withdrawal of an offer of a position previously promised to him at the Academy of Sciences. Effectively barred from working as a physicist, Poppe worked as a machinist at an indoor swimming pool (1977–84), and then as an engineer at the building office of the Church welfare agency Diakonisches Werk Berlin (1984–89).

The Biermann affair and the resulting emigration of many of the GDR’s critics, as well as the discussions surrounding the 1977 publication in Western Germany of Rudolf Bahro’s book “Die Alternative convinced Poppe that efforts to promote political change from inside the official institutions and structures in the GDR were unlikely to be effective. He also came to believe that it was essential to create an opposition “counter”-public sphere. From 1980 to 1983, Gerd and his wife, Ulrike Poppe, regularly hosted readings by critical and in some cases banned authors in their flat in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg. In doing so, they were continuing a tradition started by the poet Frank-Wolf Matthies, who had organised readings of this kind in his own Berlin flat before emigrating to the West. Events of this kind were also held in other homes, for instance the flats of the Ekkhards, Wilfriede Maaß, Stephan Bickhardt and Ludwig Mehlhorn.

Poppe had also helped his wife and other activists to open an alternative nursery school in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg. The idea was to get their two younger children and the children of their friends out of the domain of state control. The alternative nursery school operated from early 1981 until 14 December 1983, when the state ordered that it be destroyed and prohibited from restarting.

In the early 1970s, Poppe came to know and admire Robert Havemann and Wolf Biermann but also Rudi Dutschke. In addition to helping to form his political views, encounters and friendships of this kind taught him that there were others who felt as he did. In the late 1970s, he began to build up and intensify contacts in Eastern Central Europe with, for instance, members of Czechoslovakia’s *Charter 77 and of the Hungarian opposition. In the early 1980s, he began to make a name for himself as a key protagonist in the independent peace and human rights movement in the GDR. His own politicisation and intensity of his rejection of the system increased with every psychological and social “decomposition” measure (Zersetzung) and other form of repression that he and his family were subjected to. In this period, his own experiences and views constantly overlapped with those of the East European opposition and the Western peace movement. He had extensive contacts in both movements, despite having been under a complete travel ban since 1980.

By 1983/84, the independent peace movement had passed its peak in both East and West Germany, and Poppe began to focus increasingly on human rights issues. For him, this shift of focus was associated with two important decisions. One was that the East-West cooperation in the peace movement should be carried over into human rights work. This meant that East German activists should be talking not only with non-governmental organisations and West German opposition parties but also with the parties in West Germany’s coalition government. Poppe’s participation in a discussion with West German CDU politicians at the home of Ralf Hirsch in 1987 and his subsequent defence of the decision to do so in the samizdat periodical “Grenzfall” gave rise to harsh acrimony and mutual accusations in opposition circles. Poppe’s change of focus in 1983/84 was also linked with the decision to practice and advocate intensive and systematic cooperation with the Western media. This, too, resulted in fierce controversy: some members of the left-leaning opposition rejected the idea categorically – though admittedly, more in principle than in their actual practice. Poppe had also realised that the opposition was going to have to venture out from the shelter of the Church, because the Church itself had become a sort of surrogate adversary: rather than talking about the state of the government and society, activists were spending more and more of their time and energy in clarifying the complicated relationships between the grassroots opposition groups and the church leadership.