lectureship contract at the Charité. Politics In 1985 Ackermann became a member of the East German version of the Christian Democratic Union ("Christlich-Demokratische Union Deutschlands" / CDU). Since the late 1940s the Christian Democratic Union of Germany had become one of ten bloc parties and mass organisations with seats in the East German national parliament (Volkstag). Seats were allocated according to fixed quotas, without reference to "election results", by the ruling Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED), which also controlled the bloc parties through an administrative structure called the National Front. In the central European countries that based their political structures on the highly centralised Leninist model that had been implemented in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, national parliaments had little power, but the fact that they were seen to include members from a range of "political parties" and popular movements helped to widen the visible power base which formed one of the pillars underpinning the government's legitimacy. In 1986 Ackermann became the chairwoman for the local Christian Democratic Union of Germany in Neuenhagen, her home town. The Neuenhagen Christian Democratic Union of Germany was an unusually active local branch, with a membership of sixty, all of whom could be relied upon to appear for the annual Christmas celebrations. However, only around fifteen turned up regularly for meetings and contributed significantly to party activities. It was, Ackermann indicated, partly in order to try and broaden participation from the local party membership, that from the time she took over chairmanship of the local party in 1986, she arranged for a series of relatively "provocative" presentations to take place, linked by the theme "Do we need more democracy?" ("Brauchen wir mehr Demokratie?"). In June 1988, as chair of the Neuenhagen local party, Ackermann sent an internal letter to Gerald Götting, the Christian Democratic Union party national chairman in Berlin. There may have been input from fellow members, but it is widely assumed that the text of what came to be known as the "Neuenhagen letter" was composed by Ackermann herself. The theme of the letter was reform ("der Reformprozess"). It identified an institutionalised resistance to reform. Local party members could in some ways be taken as a microcosm for East German society as a whole. In personal conversations, where the "psychological barriers" presented by public discussion could be set aside, you would find the concerns, anxieties, irritations,