A small but creative public act that happened in Berlin in 1988 is seen today as something of a milestone. It also offers useful insights for Occupy Wall Street.
OWS gives voice to the grievances that are shared by the vast majority of the Americans. Yet, oddly, the public support, even if it is substantial, is not overwhelming. A recent poll says 35% of the general public had a favorable impression of OWS. Clearly, the movement has an image and narrative challenge to address. Let's look at how history could help.
In the German Democratic Republic, ruled by by a communist party that called itself SED, there were dissidents who demanded freedom of movement and freedom of speech among other policy changes. These demands reflected the popular mood. The dissidents might as well have called themselves "We're the 99%" because in a communist country the ruling elite enjoying privileges denied to anyone else comprises less than 1.5% of the society, according to an analysis by a former member of the ruling class in the Soviet Union.
The GDR government was at first reluctant to even acknowledge the mere existence of the dissenters (even though the Stasi, the secret police, was vigorously persecuting them). Later, on the rare occasions that the GDR's propaganda machine would mention the dissidents, it would depict them as fringe elements, and their demands an attempt to undermine the workers' paradise by introducing values of the capitalist world.
Obviously, the United States is very different from the erstwhile GDR. As Herman Cain would say, these are apples and oranges. One is a liberal democracy while the other was a dictatorship. Civil liberties that Americans enjoy were simlply unimaginable for people living on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.
But the approach dissidents used on January 17, 1988, can help OWS today to handle the narrative and image challenge the movement is facing.
In the GDR, every January there would be a mass government-sponsored demonstration in Berlin in remembrance of the 1919 murder of two founders of the German Communist Party, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. This was one of the four biggest national holidays. Thousands of East Germans would march from the city center to a cemetry in the Friedrichsfelde neighborhood to lay wreaths at the tomb. The Politburo members would be up on a specially erected grandstand and the ordinary masses would pass by, holding banners with Rosa Luxemburg quotes about the superiority of communism and immiment demise of capitalism.
In late 1987, dissidents decided to use the demonstration to their advantage. As Jon Berndt Olsen, Professor at the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, describes:
However, in 1988 this particular day of remembrance turned into an act of open protest through the active re-appropriation of Rosa Luxemburg’s words and legacy in a manner that struck to the core of the SED’s own cultural legitimacy. The resulting wave of arrests led to an outpouring of solidarity with those in prison and marked the beginning of the mass protest movement that eventually led to the massive demonstrations in the fall of 1989 that brought down the Communist government.
The initial idea to use the words of Rosa Luxemburg during the celebration in January 1988 was first thought up by singer and songwriter Stephan Krawczyk and his wife Freya Klier, a well-known theater director, in the fall of 1987. [...]
The participants in the counter-demonstration planned to meet at 9 am, join the march, and unveil their own slogans when the right moment came. The slogans that the group decided to concentrate on were: “Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently;” “He who doesn’t move doesn’t feel the chains;” and “The only way to rebirth is the widest democracy,” all of which were taken from the writings of Luxemburg.
Most of the protesters were detained by the secret police long before they were able to reach the demonstration. All in all, some 120 people were jailed and charged with crimes. But the arrests led to more protests:
The following day, demonstrations of solidarity with those arrested during the counter-demonstration began to occur all across the GDR. The demonstrations during the week that followed were the greatest wave of protest since the 1953 workers' uprising. All around Berlin and throughout the GDR opposition groups gathered to plot out a response and collectively called for the general release of those arrested. Such vigils took place in over forty cities in the GDR, most resulting in the founding of solidarity committees and the drafting of protest resolutions.
Supporters in the West also rallied (pictured above) and some of the opposition leaders were expelled from East Germany. But the crackdown planted seeds for the successful non-violent protests that happened a year later and which culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall.
What these dissidents achieved was to show that they were ordinary people like everyone else and their demands were for basic rights. In the process, they demonstrated that the politicians had broken the social contract and that their policies were at variance with the declared founding principles.
What happened on that cold, wet, slightly snowy winter Sunday in Berlin took place in an entirely different political environment. Yet OWS could adapt the approach to its own situation. Use of relevant words from past presidents and Founding Fathers would help show that OWS is an American-pie mainstream movement whose values are congruent with the founding principles of the country. Imagine OWS protesters holding signs with quotes from Thomas Jefferson that "banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies." Or James Madison's concern that corporations might do a great deal of mischief if left unguarded. Perhaps, a striking banner would be one with President Reagan's words on the need to close tax loopholes for the rich. Or Adam Smith's that "the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more in proportion."
That kind of approach on the part of OWS would make everyone sit up, take notice, and realize that this is not political theater but a new kind of movement striving for genuine change.