RUTH AARDSMA-BENTON

An abridged extract from the author’s 2018 Western Michigan University master’s thesis with the above title.

When people ask me about my thesis topic, I often get a strange look or slight chuckle at my response. While some of this might be because I do not look like someone familiar with punk music, I think these reactions have more to do with the odd combination of my topic. The image many people have of punks seems antithetical to Christian religious beliefs, and it seems unlikely that a punk subculture might have had any sort of relationship with a church. However, that is what happened in East Germany. I believe that studying this relationship can provide a different perspective for understanding youth culture, marginalized groups, and the churches within East German society, and the events that led to the collapse of the East German state.

A punk subculture emerged in East Germany during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was an expression of some youths’ disillusionment with life, their frustrations with the government, and their pessimistic view of a future that seemed pre-planned. Drawn to music that was raw and at times belligerent, the punks refused to conform, disengaged from the established system, and expressed their views through song lyrics and other acts of defiance.1

Unlikely allies

In the eyes of the state, punks were a threat. They “suffered harassment by East German police—identification verifications, interrogations, and orders to leave public spaces.” As time went on, the government had a more difficult time explaining why youths would turn to the punk subculture, and the conflict between punks and the state increased.2 Ultimately, this led to a crackdown on the punk subculture by the Stasi secret police in 1983, known as Härte gegen Punk [German: hardness against punk]. 

Due to the state’s efforts to eliminate the punk subculture, punks turned to what may seem to be an unlikely ally for shelter: the Protestant churches. The churches  occupied a unique place within East German society because the government had granted them limited free space for religious purposes. This was a liminal space between what constituted “public” and what was “private.” The churches were a private institution, yet also functioned like a “counterpublic,” or “a public outside the official public sphere that, while lacking official political power, nonetheless exercises agency.”3 

There is no simple answer that describes the relationship between punks and the churches, because the punk subculture and different groups within the churches had different points of view. The churches were already providing shelter for other dissident groups, such as pacifists and environmentalists, and the punk subculture began to become involved with some of them. As people were turning to the churches for social and political reasons rather than for religious reasons, the traditional role of the church as a religious organization appears to have diminished.4 

For some members, this was acceptable as the churches were meant to be a “church for others,” to minister to those marginalized by the state, and to provide a safe place for alternative communities to develop. In particular, the legacy of the Bekennende Kirche or Confessing Church’s opposition to Hitler during the Nazi period was very influential for Protestant churches in the G.D.R. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leader in the Confessing Church, and the theologian Karl Barth were among those who believed that the church was called to engage society and politics. The Confessing Church argued that when the ideology of the state and church disagreed, the church needed to stay true to its beliefs rather than conform to the state. Part of this involvement in society meant that the church was not only for Christians, but was to “become a ʻchurch for othersʼ and would speak openly in the public sphere about questions of social justice.”5

Musical interactions 

Other members, however, worried that their churches could compromise themselves in terms of their beliefs. Some of the leadership within the churches wanted to minister to East German youth, but they feared that working with punks might create a situation where the churches in East Germany would be restricted by the state and become unable to minister to anyone. Some people felt the churches were simply going beyond their proper role in engaging East German society. 

A key avenue through which the punk subculture began interacting with the churches was music. According to Hayton, “already by 1981, Protestant churches had begun opening their doors to punk, providing spaces for youths to gather, share ideas, listen to music, and even stage (rare) concerts.”6 Although the S.E.D. [Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, the G.D.R.’s ruling political party] controlled who was legally allowed to perform concerts or record music, churches could offer punks and other musicians who did not have state approval an opportunity to play, as long as it was incorporated into part of a church’s religious activities.7 One type of service that punks participated in were known as youth services. These began in 1971 and continued after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rauhut states that “through their vitality, these special services celebrated actual tidings of joy and attracted as many as 3,000 believers and non-believers from all over the G.D.R.”8 Punks also participated in the Blues Masses, religious services that were created in the late 1970s when a blues musician, Günter “Holly” Holwas, approached Rainer Eppelmann, a youth pastor at Samariterkirche [German: Samaritan Church] in Berlin, about performing at that church.9 

There was also a diaconal aspect to the Blues Masses. On the one hand, as Rauhut summarizes, the Blues Masses were supposed to help “young people who had been pushed to the margins of society or even criminalized due to their attitude to life and political stance” to find a community. Rauhut continues by noting that on the other hand, they were also supposed to introduce these youths to the Christian faith as “an alternative form of finding meaning and truthfulness in life, a way of being that the atheistic worldview of socialism had erased.”10 Youth attendance at these events grew. The 13 July 1979 service at Samariterkirche included 500-600 youth, and the 14 September service had 1,000 youth.11 Eventually, the concerts had to be moved because Samariterkirche could not hold all of those who tried to attend. The services, with their blend of music, skits, and religious elements, attracted a wide range of people, including punks.12

Open Work youth program

Another church-affiliated program that the punk subculture participated in was Offene Arbeit [German: Open Work]. This was a youth program that began in the late 1960s in Thuringia and by the 1980s had spread across East Germany.13 A July 1983 Offene Arbeit document in central church archives focuses specifically on working with punks. After describing the punk subculture and the problems punks faced, it argues that the church should be working with them, because it was the church’s duty to minister to all people, regardless of the social group to which they belonged. As part of its diaconal and outreach work, the church should be guiding and mentoring these young people to help them improve their lives. This requires people to witness to punks primarily through caring for them, being understanding of them, and accepting them without prejudice. It also recommends teaching others about the punk subculture in order to explain why punks behaved as they did. The document asserts that the subculture’s first need was to have a place where punks could gather without fear, not be judged by how they looked, and address the issues that they were upset about.14 

Here again, there were tensions within the churches over what their role should be in engaging society and whether or not church space was being used appropriately. The question of whether or not a service was religious was important, because if it was not religious, the church was running the risk of overstepping the boundaries set by the state. One archival account of a service held at Berlin’s Galiläa-Kirche [German: Galilee Church] with the theme Traum und Wirklichkeit [German: Dream and Reality] illustrates related questions about the use of space in churches. During  the service, a punk band performed and sang nihilistic lyrics that challenged church doctrine. The account’s author, Peter Wensierski, records these lyrics as: Laßt Euch nicht verführen, es gibt kein höheres Wesen, laßt Euch nicht vertrösten, denn hinterher kommt nichts, which can be roughly translated as, “Stop being seduced, there is no higher being, stop being misled, because nothing comes after this.” In response to their performance, the worship pastor gave a “spontaneous sermon” that explained the problems with the philosophy the punks expressed. The punks stormed off. In his description of these events, Wensierski sums up the “mixed feelings” of those who remained as desiring dialogue with non-Christian youth while not wishing to attract them to the church superficially.15 There was a desire to include non-Christians such as punks, but not at the cost of compromising core beliefs and values.

Friction

Punks could also bring unwanted attention to other opposition groups because of their behavior and the fact that there were many I.M.s [German: Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or unofficial collaborators with the Stasi secret police] within the subculture. Dennis and LaPorte provide the example of a punk band in Jena that 

consisted mainly of I.M.s. It took advantage of the good offices of Ulrich Kasparick, the minister responsible for youth work (Jugendpfarrer), in allowing it to use church rooms in order to undermine his work on behalf of the peace and human rights groups in the city. The band’s loud noise, drunkenness, and damage to property led to so many complaints from the public that an exhausted Kasparick gave up his post.16

After similar friction resulted in an Offene Arbeit program at Berlin’s Pfingstkirche [German: Pentecost Church] attended by hundreds of punks being closed down in 1983, the punk subculture continued to be involved with Protestant churches. However, there is a sense that they did not truly feel welcomed that runs through many of the narratives told by former East German punks. According to Moldt, very few real relationships were developed between punks and church ministers. He writes, 

Christians in the G.D.R. were citizens of the G.D.R. after all and thereby no less narrow-minded, intolerant or arrogant than their atheist co-inhabitants. Maybe they’d subconsciously developed a heightened sensitivity for marginal groups. Mostly this sensitivity—if it existed at all—did not show. If it showed, it mainly did because supporting such people could help [in] gaining mercy from the lord.17

Often those who tended to be higher up in the church hierarchy were concerned that the churches were straying too far from their religious purposes and needed to rein in the activities taking place in the churches in order to preserve the freedoms already won by the churches. In fact, a key reason the S.E.D. had given the churches some of the freedom they had was because the state assumed that the churches would be able to police and maintain order of the groups located within the churches. According to Ozawa-de Silva, “church leaders were instructed by their state interlocutors to ʻdisciplineʼ and ʻintegrateʼ their rank-and-file. They were to deal with outspoken pastors internally.” However, the loose structure of the Protestant churches made this difficult. Ozawa-de Silva also explains that within the Bund der Evangelischen Kirchen [the federation of Protestant churches in the G.D.R.] “the primary role of superintendents and bishops was to provide spiritual care, or Seelsorge, for pastors, not to tell them what to do.”18

Church from Below

In September 1987, tensions within the church about appropriate use of church space and debates about how far the churches should engage society caused a segment of the church to form the Kirche von Unten [German: Church from Below]. That June, the dissident group event Kirchentag von Unten (Church Day from Below) took place during the official church Kirchentag in Berlin.19 Some have placed attendance at the alternative event at 6,000 people.20 According to Hayton, it was a blend of “religious sermons, public information forums, art installations, and performances by a number of punk bands.” The Kirche von Unten’s founders were individuals and groups that had a long history of involvement with dissident groups or had important roles within the dissident movement, including a number of religious and youth outreach figures from the Offene Arbeit programs.21 

One essay in a volume collected by the Kirche von Unten refers to the churches as being duckmäuserisch [German: groveling], compromising too much with the state, and not really living out the concept of being the “church for others.” Another essay raises the point that, rather than addressing the reasons why some of the youth had become marginalized, churches instead were focusing on rehabilitating them.22 From the perspective of the Kirche von Unten, churches were not ministering to the needs of the youth and were not addressing the underlying social issues. This was the same problem that a document on Offene Arbeit work had pointed out earlier: an attempt to rehabilitate these young people would only alienate them.23 

Not surprisingly, the punk subculture tended to work more closely with this Kirche von Unten portion of the church. The relationship between the punk subculture and Protestant churches in East Germany thus contributed to growing activism within the punk subculture. The churches provided the shelter necessary to survive the government’s crackdown, and this was where the punk subculture was socialized into other dissident groups, thus making it an active component in the opposition movement that developed in East Germany in the 1980s. 

Notes:

1. For example, “L’attentat - Ohne Sinn,” APPDKrebszelle/ YouTube, 10 September 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbn9Zwc9Aj0.
2. Jeff Patrick Hayton, Culture from the Slums: Punk Rock, Authenticity and Alternative Culture in East and West Germany, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013, 427, 437.
3. Alison M. Furlong, Resistance Rooms: Sound and Sociability in the East German Church, Ph.D. dissertation, The Ohio State University, 2015, 43. 
4. John P. Burgess, The East German Church and the End of Communism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 51.
5. Furlong, 10, 20.
6. Hayton, 467.
7. Furlong, 44-45; Hayton, 417.
8.  Michael Rauhut, “With God and Guitars: Popular Music, Socialism, and the Church in East Germany,” Popular Music and Society 40, no. 3 (2017), 297.
9.  Furlong, 44.
10.  Rauhut, 297.
11. Dirk Moldt, “Die Blues-Messen (1979-1986). Mehr als ein Kapitel der kirchlichen Jugendarbeit in der DDR,” in Evangelische Kirche Berlin-Brandenburg-schlesische Oberlausitz, Archivbericht Nummer 16 (Berlin: 2006), 142-3.
12. Furlong, 43.
13. Hayton, 470-71.
14. Evangelisches Zentralarchiv [EZA], Berlin, 101/3493, Vorlage für die KL am 1. Juli 1983 betr.: Punk-Arbeit, 2-3.
15. EZA 101/1871, epd ZA Nr. 141 vom 28. Juli 1981, “Punker in Ost-Berlin” by epd-Redakteur Peter Wensierski, 5.
16. Mike Dennis and Norman LaPorte, State and Minorities in Communist East Germany, New York: Berghahn Books, 2011, 166.
17. Moldt, 104, 107.
18.  Brendan R. Ozawa-de Silva, “Peace, Pastors, and Politics: Tactics of Resistance in East Germany,” Journal of Church and State 47, no.3 (Summer 2005), 513-18.
19. Hayton, 490-92.
20. Furlong, 74.
21. Hayton, 490-92.
22.  Kirche von Unten, ed. Wunder gibt es immer wieder—das Chaos ist aufgebraucht, es war die schönste Zeit. Fragmente zur Geschichte der Offenen Arbeit Berlin und der Kirche von Unten. Berlin: Eigenverlag, 1997, 7-12, 18.
23.  EZA 528/61, “Offene Arbeit”/Sozialdiakonische Jugendarbeit, 3. 

Ruth Aardsma-Benton is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan.