GERALDINE FAGAN

Religious activity was closely watched in all Communist states. The G.D.R. (German Democratic Republic) was no exception—indeed, its churches were surveilled to an inordinate degree by the Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi.1 Paradoxically, however, the G.D.R. authorities’ desire to present their westward-facing country as a promotional storefront for the entire Eastern Bloc led them to grant churches unusual leeway for community organization. 

A landmark March 1978 meeting between head of state Erich Honecker and East German church representatives— the first since the G.D.R’s foundation in 1949—resulted in greater church autonomy for activity such as media broadcasts and importing literature. In return, churches were obliged to keep out of political affairs.2 

But as the only institutions not fully integrated into the state apparatus, East German churches attracted a broad range of dissenting groups, particularly activists with an overlapping concern for peace issues, the environment, and fundamental human rights. In this way, congregations came into close contact with parts of society they might never have encountered in free conditions. 

The most unlikely example was the punk subculture. By the early 1980s a significant number of young East Germans were playing raucous music and/or dressing defiantly as part of an indigenous punk movement. This drew fierce government opposition, including arrests. The response of some Lutheran ministers was to shelter the punks. Despite its disorderly behavior, Pastor Siegfried Neher of Christ’s Church in Halle saw punk as an existential scream echoing Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”3 At St. Nicholas’ Church in Leipzig, Pastor Christian Führer [d. 2014] permitted the punk band Wutanfall [German: Rage Attack] to play in a chapel used for youth work.4 

Now retired, Pastor Curt Stauss ministered in Merseburg—close to both Halle and Leipzig—and was active in the Offene Arbeit [German: Open Work] church youth initiative. He recalls the church being the only safe place for punks. “They were culturally so extremely different! How they found one another: the church had a treasure—large premises—and also another: employees with big hearts, with a strong sense of solidarity for people who were persecuted or discriminated against.” These church workers were typically Sozialdiakone [German: deacons for social welfare], in addition to a small minority of ministers: “The vast majority of pastors and even more congregations were moderately sized, middleclass, and ‘orderly’—exactly what the punks rejected.”5

Risky ministry

Harboring punks was definitely outside the Lutheran comfort zone. While applauding Deacon Lothar Rochau’s efforts to minister to the children of chemical plant workers in a new part of Halle, church member Mechthild Hofmann also recalls that, “the ordinary congregation was actually fearful of the young people whom Rochau gathered—how they looked, the punk groups.”6 Pastor Führer’s daughter Katharina Köhler recalls him taking her along to meet  Wutanfall because he expected—as someone who loved Bach—that he would not tolerate their music, but still “felt that these young people were searching for something.”7 

Such ministry was doubly risky. Local officials branded Pastor Neher an enemy of the state, and Stasi intimidation reached a point where his young son needed psychiatric help. When Deacon Rochau began to organize events away from church premises, he was arrested, jailed, and expatriated to West Germany.8 Despite these efforts, there is no indication that the largely atheist punks found Christian faith. Pastor Stauss is not aware of any church influence, citing two godchildren who became punks. “They do not wish to have anything to do with the church (except for me); their father was a pastor. They reject anything that looks like ritual.” (According to Pastor Stauss, one point of contact does exist, however—the church’s working group against right-wing extremism. “‘Against Nazis’ is also their struggle.”9 ) 

Yet in a further paradox, it was the friction between the churches and the various groups they sheltered which ended up generating a viable opposition movement to the Communist regime. Without the church’s protection, such activists would never have been tolerated by the state. Without the church’s failure to fully integrate such groups, their activities would not have spilled over into the public square. Perhaps most crucially, without the churches’ nurturing of a commitment to non-violence, the massive demonstrations of the 1989-90 Peaceful Revolution might not have posed such a quandary for East German law enforcement. As retired church worker Albrecht Kaul notes, “They were ready for everything, except candles and prayer.”10

Leipzig peace prayers

The church at the epicenter of those demonstrations was St. Nicholas in Leipzig. Regular Friedensgebete [German: prayers for peace] began there in September 1982, shadowing the emergence of a broader autonomous peace movement in East Germany.11 The prayers for peace were the church’s response to youth dissatisfaction with the growing militarization of society.12 A conflict over the prayers flared up in 1988, when Pastor Christoph Wonneberger—who worked closely with the environmentalists’, women’s, and human rights’ groups that coordinated the prayers—spontaneously allowed a collection to be taken for a jailed opposition activist. Fearing the prayers were becoming too political and could endanger other church activities, Dean Friedrich Magirius and Pastor Christian Führer reasserted control over the format of the prayers, prompting a protest by dissenting group members during congregational worship. The dissenters then began to gather for the peace prayers on the square outside the church rather than within.13 

By September 1989, the city authorities were pressurizing St. Nicholas’ Church to cancel the peace prayers, now held every Monday evening at 5 p.m. On Monday, 11 September, police violently attacked a crowd of some 600 gathered on the square. Church representatives formally objected to the mass arrests and fines that followed.14 Week by week, the crowds at St. Nicholas’ grew: 1,000 on 18 September; 5,000 on 25 September; 10,000 on 2 October.15 Emphasizing peace, the prayers always closed with a reading of the Beatitudes, including “Blessed are the peacemakers”; outside, participants sang the hymn Dona nobis pacem [Latin: Lord, grant us peace] and countered provocations with calls of Kein Gewalt! [German: No violence!].16  

Solidarity vigils 

In early October thousands also began to attend nightly vigils in East Berlin in solidarity for those arrested in Leipzig. These were centered on Gethsemane Church, where a hand-painted banner announcing “Watch and Pray: Intercession and Vigil for Those Unjustly Arrested” hung above the entrance, referencing Matthew 26:41. In Leipzig, the Monday peace prayers continued despite an ominous threat of a violent police response: On 6 October, a local newspaper published a letter from a combat group commander declaring readiness to use weapons against “these counter-revolutionary actions.” On Monday, 9 October 1989 the authorities tried to thwart the peace prayers by occupying most of the pews in St. Nicholas’ Church with plain-clothes state personnel during the afternoon. However, three other nearby churches opened their doors; that evening also saw a peaceful procession through the city with an unprecedented 70,000 participants.17 

Together with mushrooming protests in East Berlin and elsewhere in the G.D.R., University of California Berkeley Professor of German History John Connelly assesses this vast Leipzig demonstration on 9 October to be “the decisive moment in the East German revolution.”18 The Berlin Wall opened a month later, on 9 November. 

The churches’ pivotal role in the outcome of these events is rarely recalled today. Surviving 1980s church initiatives continue quietly, such as Gethsemane Church’s regular Wachet und Betet [German: Watch and Pray] worship services in Berlin. When this author visited in October 2019, around 30 prayed for prisoners of conscience in Turkey, contemplated Psalm 102, and joined in a rendition of a popular 1970s hymn, Der Himmel geht über allen auf. [German: The heavens are above everyone].19 In Leipzig, prayers for peace continue at St. Nicholas’ Church every Monday at 5 p.m., albeit requiring registered attendance, masks, spaced seating, and no singing in 2021 due to the spread of COVID-19.

Wall commemorations 

Although central to the commemorative space at one of the last remaining stretches of the Berlin Wall, church contributions are also understated. Dedicated in 2000, the solemn Reconciliation Chapel stands on the site of the 19th century Reconciliation Church. This found itself in the death strip between outer and inner enclosures following the Wall’s construction in 1961, and was blown up by the G.D.R. authorities in 1985. Nearby is Garten im Niemandsland [German: Garden in No Man’s Land], a project begun in 2018 by the Chapel congregation. This sees gardeners with varying degrees of church involvement cultivating flowers and vegetables in the former wasteland of the death strip: an apt symbol of the mundane yet meaningful Christian outreach underpinning the seismic social transformation of 1989-90. 

Pastor Stauss warns against seeking strong visible evidence of the church’s work, however. “Offene Arbeit and the work with punks was constantly being questioned by the congregations and church leaders as to whether they had baptized people or brought them to faith. …The church workers answered that social welfare ministry had to be without intent; that it is not missionary, but diaconal. What comes out of it lies in God’s hands.”20 Also at the Berlin Wall commemorative space, a memorial erected by the nearby Church of Sophia is engraved with Zechariah 4:6: “‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord Almighty.” For Pastor Christian Führer in Leipzig, the events at his church in 1989 were “a shocking confirmation” of the truth of this very verse. “It was a spiritual process which took us into world history… the incredible experience of the power of powerlessness.

Notes:

1. Elisabeth Braw, God’s Spies: The Stasi’s Cold War Espionage Campaign inside the Church, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019.
2.  Jane Holslag, Berlin Fellowship: East German Perspectives and Missional Encounter 1961- 1989, Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2013, 118; Matthias Hinkel et al (eds.), Die Friedensgebete in der Leipziger Nikolaikirche, Leipzig: Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirchgemeinde St. Nikolai zu Leipzig, 2017, 43.
3. Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2018, 111.
4. Hinkel et al., 56. 
5. Pastor Curt Stauss, email to the author, 27 January 2021.
6.  Mechthild Hofmann, interview with the author, Halle, 23 October 2019. 
7. Hinkel et al., 116-7.
8.  Mohr, 80, 115, 118. 
9. Pastor Curt Stauss, ibid. 
10. Albrecht Kaul, Wegen Gefährdung des sozialistischen Friedens: Bewegende Schicksale von Christen in der DDR, Gießen: Brunnen, 2019, 127.
11. John Sandford, The Sword and The Ploughshare: Autonomous Peace Initiatives in East Germany, London: Merlin Press/END, 1983, 22-3.
12.  Hinkel et al., 55. 
13.  Ibid., 120, 142.
14.  Ibid., 81.
15.  Mohr, 320-1. 
16. Kaul, 115.
17. Hinkel et al., 119-28. 
18. John Connelly, “Moment of Revolution: Plauen (Vogtland), October 7, 1989,” German Politics & Society 20 (Summer 1990), 71. Notably, a Lutheran dean, Thomas Küttler [d. 2019], was instrumental in keeping the peace during a protest by 20,000 people in the city of Plauen on 7 October 1989. 
19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APCOUTKpCV8.
20. Pastor Curt Stauss, ibid. 
21. Kaul, 128. 

Geraldine Fagan is editor of the East-West Church Report.