COURAGE rarely failed Bärbel Bohley. Others quailed at the hands of the East German secret police, the Stasi. Frail but steely, she mocked them: an eye for the absurd, she said, helped to keep her mental distance from those “brutal, cold, murderous, contemptuous people”. “I will get out of here; you won't,” she once snapped at an interrogator.

She was right. Born in the ruins of Berlin in 1945, her early life was shaped by the post-war division of her country into western (soon West) Germany, and a Soviet-occupied zone that claimed to be the “German Democratic Republic”. But in the end it was not the bullying communists who shaped the wiry little painter. It was she who shaped them—and their downfall.

Her life as an artist started in her 30s, after unhappy early stints in industry and teaching. Her métier was brightly coloured pictures with dark angry lines, part abstract, part-figurative. Her inspiration, she said, came from Käthe Kollwitz, the great radical pacifist painter and print-maker of the Weimar years, venerated in post-war East Germany. The regime liked that, and her work: she won prizes, including a trip to the Soviet Union. But the promised Utopia turned out to be shockingly grim and grey. In 1980 the idealistic socialist convictions of her youth, long undermined by the regime's hypocrisy, finally crystallised into ardent opposition.

She differed from cultured dissidents elsewhere in the communist world: it was not her work that angered the authorities, but the authorities that angered her. Her object was never to get power or set an agenda, but to rescue her country, and to get its citizens thinking and agitating for themselves: in the words of a friend, just ramming her “I” against the “we” imposed by the state.

Her protest started when she objected, loudly and scornfully, to her own tiny part in the Warsaw Pact's military machine: being trained as a battlefield first-aider for the possibility of a nuclear attack from the West. She objected to women being drafted at all, and in 1982 formed Women for Peace to make the point.

The opposition she joined was tiny, mostly confined to a few parishes in the Protestant church, heavily infiltrated by the Stasi and weakened by the systematic exile of its leaders to the West. The authorities took the standard forms of vengeance. She was booted out of the official artists' union, then jailed for six weeks for “treasonably” passing information to her friends in Western disarmament campaigns. She was banned from exhibiting her work in any gallery. Her son, not enrolled in the communist youth movement, could not go to university. She carried on painting and agitating regardless.

At the start it seemed hopeless. The East Berlin regime was propped up not only by its ubiquitous secret police and a huge network of informers, but also by a monolithic control of the media and repressive capabilities ranging from the subtle to the brutal. Moreover, few East Germans appeared to want change. Democracy seemed as fanciful as Ms Bohley's other favourite cause, demilitarisation.

Only once did the regime crack her resolve, in 1988, when it persuaded her to leave the country for a six-month stay in Britain. Through a fug of cigarette smoke, her hosts found her intense, charming, stubborn and prickly. She returned to East Germany by subterfuge, to the chagrin of the authorities who had hoped to lose her.

But it was their turn to give up, not hers. Abandoned by its Soviet backers, demoralised by economic failure and having lost the will to kill, in late 1989 the regime crumbled in weeks. Ms Bohley and her friends in the newly founded New Forum opposition movement found power lying on the street and picked it up. She had no plans for it, but her message of personal dignity, civil courage and independent thought had triumphed. At least for a few weeks.

The tide went farther and faster than Ms Bohley had hoped. She wanted not simply to dissolve the GDR into West Germany, but to build something better and different: less greedy and more human, more Trabant than Mercedes. “East Germany needs its own style of living,” she would say. But the people disagreed. Shopping, travelling and real money proved far more tempting than idealism.

Time to go

Ms Bohley mourned that, but did not bemoan it. Although she was keener on democracy than capitalism, she accepted the inevitable. Unification had mixed blessings, she said: “We wanted justice and we gained the rule of law.” Not bad, but not quite the same thing. A convinced social democrat, she shocked friends by inviting Chancellor Helmut Kohl to her home in Berlin's grungy Prenzlauer Berg. But she loved the place and its camaraderie, detesting the yuppies with their “bronze doorbells” who moved in later.

After reunification she fought to hold the Stasi to proper account, perching in their offices to make sure the files were preserved for all to see. But thereafter she drifted off to do charity work in former Yugoslavia, modifying her pacifism in the process. In interviews and speeches she was a sharp if largely unheeded critic of the West's economic, political and spiritual failings. “Chic clothes but empty faces,” she said.