The Page 99 Test: Andrew Demshuk's "The Filthiest Village in Europe"

Sunday, May 24, 2026

Andrew Demshuk's "The Filthiest Village in Europe"

Andrew Demshuk is Professor of History at American University. His books include Bowling for Communism, Demolition on Karl Marx Square, and Three Cities After Hitler.

Demshuk applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Filthiest Village in Europe: Grassroots Ecology and the Collapse of East Germany, with the following results:

The Page 99 Test highlights correspondence and Stasi observations surrounding an “Environmental Church Service” held in a deeply polluted East German village in June 1984. Even as critique of glaring environmental degradation challenged state power, those who put on the event had to work closely with state officials (including Stasi informants) to ensure state buy-in. Such collaboration not only helped well-meaning state officials share their expertise and increase public awareness of state efforts: it also enabled organizers to negotiate state expectations and prevent the event from getting banned. This case example dovetails with my broader research into Stasi informants, which challenges black-and-white narratives about collaboration and resistance to state power in East Germany. While one should never downplay negative consequences that always came from informant spying, the Page 99 Test draws out how informants sometimes played an important role in alerting state authorities to serious problems (such as environmental degradation) that required redress. Through their recommendations to handlers, informants even sought to foster local campaigns the state might otherwise have repressed.

The Filthiest Village in Europe explores what I call “grassroots ecology”: how East Germans who ranged from local functionaries to village pastors and concerned mothers banded together to try to improve apocalyptic environmental conditions. Downwind from the massively polluting Espenhain carbochemical plant and surrounded by open-cast brown coal pit mines, by the 1980s the village of Mölbis had become infamous as the “Filthiest Village in Europe.” Although Mölbis was not the site of major demonstrations in fall 1989, it was shrouded in thick smog and discharged frothy water pollution that poisoned the environment twenty kilometers to the north in Leipzig, which was destined to host the “peaceful revolution” that overthrew one-party rule. While the book’s early chapters investigate how the centralized economy meted out catastrophic pollution to the area around Mölbis, by page 99 the book is well into examining how an unruly local pastor named Siegfried Rüffert and a circle of friends who founded the Christian Environmental Seminar (CUR) instigated national awareness of the region’s scandalous pollution. By the time of the second Environmental Church Service in Mölbis in 1984, the savvy pastor Christian Steinbach had assumed a leadership role that captured the everyday negotiation between state and civil actors. Although after 1989 Steinbach presented his state liaison Manfred Seela as little more than a Stasi spy, at the time “theirs was a congenial relationship of mutual assistance, in which Seela won popular buy-in, while Steinbach secured state protection and resources,” such as access to saplings for tree-planting campaigns. Based on earlier cooperation with Seela’s state recultivation company, Steinbach requested Seela’s participation in a roundtable discussion at the Environmental Church Service. Other Stasi informants also backed Steinbach’s effort, insisting to their handlers that Seela’s participation was not ceding state control of environmental policy, but rather using a popular grassroots event to publicize state environmental achievements. In effect, “by deftly soliciting and compromising with state authorities, Steinbach won SED participation that protected and enhanced CUR events.” Nor did Stasi interference manage to curtail critical voices, as the event became a stage on which one of Steinbach’s CUR cofounders assailed state environmental policies and classification of environmental data– taboos that were undermining public trust in state policies. Even more incendiary was a request from the audience for a public fundraising campaign to clean up the Espenhain plant– an idea Steinbach himself took up four years later with an illegal signature campaign that transgressed the very boundaries of state power he had previously worked so hard to satisfy. Ample experience had shown him that working within the existing system’s expectations would not bring meaningful change amid ever worsening environmental conditions. In effect, however much the Page 99 Test highlights the ambivalent role of some Stasi informants, informants still represented a system that was by nature repressive and thus unwilling to meaningfully heed justified criticism from below.