East Germany under Ulbricht and Honecker was a very different place from Germany under Hitler, but it was still a one-party dictatorship. Popular backing for the government could never be taken for granted. There is no sign that Lippmann ever joined the ruling party. He himself stated later that he came to politics through the media, and he identified with leading Social Democrats through watching political debates on television. In East Germany the Social Democratic Party had been forcibly subsumed into the ruling party back in 1946, and it is not clear which leading Social Democrats he had in mind with this comment. It is certainly the case that comrades living near the Inner German border would, under some circumstances, have been able (illegally) to watch television programmes from West Germany, where the SPD was one of the two largest mainstream political parties. From the media and / or from less formal information sources, Lippmann was well aware of the Charter 77 civic initiative in nearby Czechoslovakia, the rise of "Solidarity" in neighbouring Poland through the 1980s and of the "Place of Heavenly Peace" atrocities in June 1989. He was appalled by the reaction of East Germany's ruling SED party and the "Bloc parties" which it controlled, which celebrated the suppression of student protests in Tiananmen Square in ways which "no honest person understood" ("... was kein ehrlicher Mensch verstand"). For Lippmann, that became a defining moment for East Germany's own unfolding "peaceful revolution" of 1989/90.