Bärbel Bohley, the leading figure in Neues Forum, even described the opening of the Berlin Wall as ‘unfortunate’, because it forestalled ‘reform’ and precipitated elections before the parties or the voters were ‘ready’. Like many of East Germany’s ‘dissenting’ intellectuals (not to speak of their West German admirers) Bohley and her colleagues still envisaged a reformed Socialism, shorn of secret policemen and a ruling party but keeping a safe distance from its predatory capitalist doppelganger to the west. As events were to show, this was at least as unrealistic as Erich Honecker’s fantasy of
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