disappointments, and political disagreements that you would find in the wider population and in workplaces, together with more positive attitudes and other joys. But none of the "opinion research" undertaken by one-on-one conversations was reflected in the state institutions or in the state-controlled media. The closely thought through "beef" of the letter was divided into four sections: The growing wave of emigration pressure and its handling by the state authorities ("Die Ausreise-und Reisewelle in der DDR und ihre Handhabung durch den Apparat "), Absence of any spirit of [political] pluralism ("Der fehlende geistige Pluralismus"), The condition of representative democracy ("Der Stand der Vertretungsdemokratie,") and The church/state relationship. Back in the early 1950s, as the East German leadership struggled to impose itself, the "Neuenberger letter" might have led to arrest and imprisonment or worse. Back then the leadership were confident that they could rely, where necessary, on fraternal Soviet intervention to impose order, as happened in 1953. In the 1980s, however, with the winds of Perestroika blowing across from, of all places, Moscow, there could be no such confidence. In shared export markets the Soviet Union and East German were increasingly coming across one another as commercial rivals, while at the government level the personal relationships between the two leaderships were terrible. The East German leadership, therefore, lacked the iron confidence to impose its will uncompromisingly on dissenters. Nevertheless, authorship of the "Neuenhagen latter" did not come without personal cost to Ackermann. The Ministry for State security launched an Operativer Vorgang (loosely:"operational process") against her. Research projects on which she was working were cut. On 13 April 1989, on flimsy grounds, she lost the post to which she had been promoted at the (East) German Academy of Sciences as deputy section leader of the Central Institute for Cancer Research. She had to reckon with the constant possibility that her car would be tampered with overnight. Ackermann did not withdraw from politics, however, and her actions were indeed part of a wider series of changes, although it was hard to anticipate exactly where those changes were leading. In May 1989 she stood successfully as a Christian Democratic Union candidate for election to the local council in Neuenhagen. In October 1989 she was one of those who called for an "extraordinary Christian Democratic Union party conference", and on 31 October 1989 she was one of the Christian Democratic Union members who met at