Remaining active in politics and society after German reunification in 1990, he was engaged in the Wittenberg town council and several organisations as an activist for peace and nature preservation, and as a critical voice.

[2][3] As the son of a Protestant pastor,[1][4] Schorlemmer was not allowed by the East German authorities to take the exams at a normal secondary state school,[2] but he passed his at an adult education centre.

[6][2] Finally, from 1992 until his retirement in December 2007, he was head of studies of theology, culture and modern history[7] at the Protestant Academy of Saxony-Anhalt [de] in Wittenberg.

[1][4][3] In 1968, when Alexander Dubček tried to reform communism in Czechoslovakia in the Prague Spring, Schorlemmer and his friends not only sympathized with that development but also spread information about it.

[10] He was responsible for a symbolical action for peace [de] at the Kirchentag national church assembly in Wittenberg on 24 September 1983, in which a sword was turned into a ploughshare by Stefan Nau, a local blacksmith.

[1][3][11] The Stasi did not interfere because Richard von Weizsäcker, then mayor of West Berlin, attended the action, as a representative of the Protestant Church in Germany, and the Western media reported about it.

[12] In 1988, Schorlemmer's Wittenberg peace group presented twenty theses at the Kirchentag in Halle, demanding more freedom,[1][13][10] which was a provocation at the time.

[1][4][11] After this group became a political party in December 1989, and Wolfgang Schnur (who was later identified as a collaborator of the Stasi) and Rainer Eppelmann increasingly worked together with the Christian Democratic Union, Schorlemmer and various members left.

Schorlemmer and others published a passionate appeal to stay and build up a new and better kind of society there: Für unser Land [de] (For our country).

He was one of the editors of the journal Der Freitag, a weekly with a daily online edition,[1][5] and of the monthly Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik [de].