Rainer Rudolf Müller was born in Borna, south of Leipzig, on 26 September 1966, and grew up in Benndorf (later incorporated into the town of Frohburg). Despite having done very well in school, he was not allowed to sit the upper secondary school leaving exams in 1983, because he had not taken part in the GDR’s secular coming-of-age ceremony (Jugendweihe), was active in the youth work of his church and, at the age of 15, had earned the ill will of the organs of repression in the GDR by wearing the “Swords to Ploughshares” (Schwerter zu Pflugscharen) patch. He completed vocational training in masonry, during which he participated in a five-week strike for better working conditions in 1984. As a result, no position was offered to him at the end of his apprenticeship, although GDR law required that he be placed in one. He then worked in church facilities in Borna, south of Leipzig.
Müller applied to do his military service in an unarmed unit in 1984, and then, in 1986, announced that he would refuse conscription completely. He was never called up. His refusal to serve had other consequences though: his admission to Leipzig’s Karl Marx University to study theology, which was based on an upper secondary equivalency examination he passed in 1986, was revoked. A year later, he began to study at the Theological Seminary in Leipzig, working as a carer for disabled persons and the elderly during the inter-semester breaks. He was expelled from the seminary in 1988 for having criticised the SED-friendly church course during the peace prayers in the Nikolaikirche. The only option left to him was to attend the church institution, which was not recognised by the state, as an auditor. An opposition group, the Leipzig Justice Working Group (Arbeitskreis Gerechtigkeit, AKG) was able to support him with roughly 125 marks a month (he became a member of their team of spokespersons in 1988), but he had no other source of income.
Müller worked with several environmental, peace and human rights groups in those years: He had fairly closer contacts with the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights (Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte, IFM) from 1986 onwards; in 1987, he became active with the Church Solidarity Group (Arbeitskreis Solidarische Kirche) and he worked with a Borna-based environmental group (Umweltgruppe Borna) from 1987 to 1989. In 1987, he worked with a human rights group (Arbeitsgruppe Menschenrechte, AGM) that formed around the parish priest Christoph Wonneberger; 1988/89 in the AKG and, in 1988, he began to work in a new group aimed at bringing together human rights from all over East Germany (Arbeitsgruppe zur Situation der Menschenrechte in der DDR) as well.
The Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS) persecuted him in operation “Martyrs” and in late 1988 decided to put him in prison (together with Gesine Oltmanns and Thomas Rudolph). In May of 1989, they went so far as to physically abuse him. He was arrested at demonstrations several times, imprisoned, banned from certain locations and sanctioned with fines. During the peace movement he kept in touch with groups in other towns, such as Großhennersdorf and Vipperow, where he participated in the fasting for peace event. Environmental policy was another focus of his activity. From 1985 to 1987, he published the samizdat periodical “Namenlos” with Hartmut Rüffert in Borna. He also represented the Umweltgruppe Borna in the “Frieden konkret” network. He was arrested while demonstrating against the nuclear power plant being built in Stendal.
In 1988, Leipzig became a leading centre of the opposition. The mass demonstrations that sealed the fate of the communist dictatorship started there. This was the result of a productive collaboration among several grassroots Leipzig groups and their activities, which were aimed at generating public attention and asserting human rights. The fact that the movement did not exclude people who had applied to emigrate meant that it was able to tap the resistance potential of people with nothing left to lose in the GDR, who willing to engage in activities that would put their livelihoods at risk.
Following the arrests and forced deportations of Berlin opposition figures in January 1988, Thomas Rudolph, Bernd Oehler, Rainer Müller and other activists in Leipzig intensified their efforts to coordinate across regions and, in the summer of 1988, they initiated the “Saturday circle”. This was a monthly meeting in Leipzig to which they invited representatives of independent libraries, samizdat publishers, peace groups, environmental groups and human rights groups from Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Berlin to exchange experiences and informational material, prepare joint actions and draft political statements.
The human rights network Arbeitsgruppe zur Situation der Menschenrechte in der DDR, which began its work on the International *Human Rights Day in 1988, grew out of these gatherings. Its founding proclamation called for fundamental civil rights. The idea was that the dissemination of information about human rights violations would lead to social change.
The network arranged vigils and special prayer services, calling for the release of the activists detained in East Berlin in November of 1987 and in January of 1988. Early in 1989, Leipzig’s AGM and AKG called for a GDR-wide day of action on behalf of political prisoners in Czechoslovakia. Müller learned the Czech language so he could translate documents published by Czech dissidents and disseminate them in the underground periodicals “Ostmitteleuropa” and “Varia”. He and Thomas Rudolph kept up contacts with opposition figures in Czechoslovakia, in the context of subgroup within the Justice Working Group that focussed specifically on East-Central Europe. They regularly exchanged information with Petr Uhl, who was committed to the development of a “counter”-public sphere (analogous to counterculture) encompassing the opposition across all East European countries. They also kept stable channels of communication open with opposition groups in most of the other countries of Eastern and Central Europe.