Serious differences of opinion had already emerged during the preparations for the seminar. There was disagreement not only about how the topic should be addressed but also about whether the seminar should be held at all, whether Western German supporters should be involved, and whether the seminar’s results and any statements it produced should be published, as well as the degree to which the work should be clandestine vs. out in the open. These disagreements created a rift within the group preparing the seminar. The group split in two, with what evolved into the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights (Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte, IFM) with Wolfgang Templin, Bärbel Bohley, Gerd Poppe and others on one side and the group “Gegenstimmen” (meaning votes against/dissenting voices) which took shape around Reinhard Schult, Thomas Klein and Silvia Müller on the other. The MfS, which had unofficial collaborators in both of the groups, used these to stoke the strife in order to interfere with their activities. At the roots of the clash, though, were two different understanding of human rights in the minds of the dissidents involved. While Reinhard Schult and some others criticised what they saw as the IFM’s “bourgeois understanding of human rights”, the IMF faulted Reinhard Schult and his friends for insisting on working in small circles in the underground. The concept at the core of the dispute is encapsulated in a statement made by the IFM in 1987 declaring that it had decided to exercise the rights guaranteed in international treaties.

The IFM followed through on this declaration in “Grenzfall”, a periodical published by the IFM that printed the names and contact addresses of its authors. What is more, “Grenzfall did not have the protection of ties to a church congregation – in those days, other samizdat periodicals were printed with a note reading “only for use within the Church”, which enabled them to get around the state censorship apparatus. Within the IFM, there were continuing arguments over Templin’s work with a group of would-be emigrants called the Working Group for Citizens’ Rights (AG-Staatsbürgerrechte). This was a national advocacy group that argued that its’ members had a right to emigrate that was guaranteed under international human rights conventions that the GDR had signed.

Concerned about the IFM’s activities – the publication of “Grenzfall”, the release of statements in the West, the development of working relationships with West Germany’s Green party, the cooperation with opposition groups in Eastern Europe, the forging of a variety of contacts across the GDR and the formation of working groups focussing on specific topics (education, employment, etc.) – and with them the IFM’s increasing influence on other peace and environmental groups in the GDR, the SED and the MfS decided to destroy the group in the winter of 1987/88.

The MfS believed that the printers who produced “Umweltblätter”, a periodical published under the aegis of the Church, were also printing the IFM’s “Grenzfall”, but its agents failed to catch them in the act, despite extensive planning. Their attempt to do so in an MfS raid of the Zionskirche in East Berlin in November of 1987 triggered a wave of protest, in the form of vigils and special masses, throughout the country. Another wave of solidarity with opposition figures arrested in connection with the official Luxemburg-Liebknecht demonstration in January of 1988 triggered a GDR-wide cycle of mobilisation that ultimately culminated in the formation of political opposition groups and opposition political parties in the summer and autumn of 1989.

Templin and his wife were among a group of the several people arrested in January 1988. Their children were placed in an institution. Shut behind prison walls, they knew nothing of the wave of solidarity sweeping the country. Behind the scenes, the SED, State Security and the Church agreed that the couple, along with their children, would be released and that Templin family would leave for a two-year “study visit” to the FRG, which the Evangelical Church would finance. So Templin was living in Bochum in West Germany during in the cycle of mobilisation of the groups that played out in 1988/89 and could only be involved at a distance.

Templin returned to the GDR right after the Wall was opened 9 November 1989. He acted on the IFM’s behalf at the Central Round Table and was an IFM spokesperson from 1989 to 1991. After the free elections to the Volkskammer, the GDR’s national legislature, in March 1990, he worked on the staff of the Alliance 90/The Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) parliamentary group and was also a member of the “Curatorium for a Democratically Constituted Federation of German States” (Kuratoriums für einen demokratisch verfassten Bund Deutscher Länder). From September 1991 to May 1992, he was a full-time salaried member of the founding “spokes-council” of the political party Alliance ‘90. Subsequently he was unemployed and a critic of the 1992/93 association agreement between Alliance ‘90 and the Greens. He helped to found the Citizens’ Bureau (Bürgerbüro e. V.) to advance the understanding and recognition of the harms resulting from the SED dictatorship, worked on the research staff of the Stasi records agency and headed up the Moscow office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation from 2010–2013.

Wolfgang Templin now lives as a free-lance writer/journalist in Berlin, most of his work involves the history and politics of Eastern and Eastern Central Europe, in addition to advancing the understanding and recognition in society of the communist past.