An Interview with Rev. Jane Holslag

A retired Presbyterian minister and mission co-worker from the United States, Jane Holslag initially served in Orange County in southern California after her ordination in 1982. She first visited the G.D.R.—indeed, Europe—in 1980 as a team member of Berlin Fellowship, with repeat visits in 1982, 1984, and 1986. Continuing to work with the Fellowship, she spent 1987- 88 as assistant minister to a local congregation in West Berlin. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) commissioned her as a mission worker in the newly unified city, seeking to encourage partner relations with Reformed congregations across the former Communist bloc. A ministry of American Christians visiting East German congregations, Berlin Fellowship was initiated in the fall of 1961, soon after the Berlin Wall was built. From 1967 onwards, groups of up to a dozen American Presbyterians traveled as tourists twice annually to the G.D.R. for 10-day visits to multiple congregations, for which they broke into several smaller groups. The Fellowship program was formally celebrated and closed in 1996. Rev. Holslag now lives in Berlin. In late 2019 the editor of the East-West Church Report met her in the former Eastern sector of the city to discuss the work of the Fellowship, which forms the focus of her thought-provoking 2013 doctoral dissertation, Berlin Fellowship: East German Perspectives and Missional Encounter 1961-1989.  

You note in your dissertation that there were many international church partnerships with East German congregations between the end of the Second World War and 1989. What was noteworthy about Berlin Fellowship?

The founders of the Fellowship were very concerned that the East Germans would have a say in what happened and be willing to take the risk. We were never an unannounced presence, but we were always in a group of three to five people, and in some villages ours would be the only Western car. People who participated came back on repeat visits, but they were not guaranteed to return to the same places. In fact, that was something we tried not to do. It was so hard to leave and never see folks again, to leave and not be able to pick up a phone and call them, or to write to them.

That was one of the Fellowship’s rules? 

We assumed letters would be opened, and they were. Every piece of mail that came into the country was opened.

So the visits were very informal.

Organized, but not according to any program. When we went back to our congregations, or the people who supported us to go, they would typically ask, “Well, what did you do?” “We talked. We walked in the woods. We looked at old churches. We had meals together. We worshipped together. Sometimes we did a Bible study, but only if there were two translators, because it was too hard for one person.” “So you didn’t do anything?” You can see there the difference in mentality. It was more just about Christian fellowship. There was no agenda—if we had an agenda, it got killed around the second day. As much as we trained and tried to help Americans to be sensitive, culturally aware, and so on, everyone thought, on the second or third day, “I’m going to be here for seven more days. How am I going to do this! I’m not doing anything.”

We did not speak German—we were stupid Americans! (Laughs.) We tried to educate ourselves before we came, but often we had to look on a map to see where East Germany was as we flew into it. I am being a bit critical, but that is my experience. We did not have more than the mission mentality of “We’re going to go and take to them what they need to hear. We’re going to bring them the good news of the Gospel. Yes, they’re Christians, but they’re behind the Iron Curtain, and we’re not.” I’m drawing this out, but that was a big piece of it. 

So we knew we were not going to do anything other than getting to know each other. We went wherever the discussion led, or wherever the pastor or other host in charge of our visit chose to take it. Often, there were questions about why the United States and the Soviet Union had to have missiles pointing at each other across the [East-West German] border. We had discussions that went long and hard at these issues, but there were questions about everything from the issue of preventing war with weapons to, “How do you solve problems on your church council?” 

Above all, we went to smaller towns and villages that had less exposure to Americans or other Westerners. We were often the first Americans people had ever met. In one case, a man came up to me with tears in his eyes and thanked me for being a good host. I understood that much German at the time. I said to him that I was never a host, what did he mean? “I was a prisoner of war in Virginia for almost three years. It was the best time of my life.”  

How far were you surveilled during your visits to the G.D.R.? Your dissertation describes how the Stasi secret police had one person informing on Berlin Fellowship for most of its existence, but that does not seem to have had a huge impact on its operations. 

It had no impact, in my estimation, until the whole thing was over after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. And then the impact was that this informer would not talk or meet with any of us. I have written to him four times and never received an answer, but my letters never come back. To our knowledge, he is still alive.

I have read as much as I will ever care to read of the Stasi files—maybe a thousand pages. There was no file on Berlin Fellowship, so I had to go through different people’s individual files. I had thought—my mistake!—that I was going to get some kind of take on the Stasi’s perspective, but the files were pure bureaucracy. It was people being employed to keep a tab on something they knew was “meaningless” within two years of their informant being sent into the Fellowship. It was labeled meaningless—bedeutungslos—by a Stasi officer I interviewed who signed off on all these reports. We were not big, and we didn’t make a splash. We were somewhat suspect but not very, because we always went through the church leadership—the bishops knew about us. I asked this official pointedly: If they knew that we were bedeutungslos soon after they sent in their I.M. [German: Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, or unofficial collaborator] to spy on the Fellowship in 1970, why did they keep on doing it? “Why not? We had a quota to produce. We needed so many pieces of paper.” 

So there is no real analysis in the files? 

Oh, no. “Frau Müller’s chicken soup was too salty today,” but nothing about the conversation at Frau Müller’s. This was about an East Berlin group that met monthly with staff from the West. The informer was in that group and a trusted member of it. 

Everyone knew that churches were under scrutiny. People assumed that whenever we would gather in a home, or in a church for an open meeting, there would be someone there listening who would go home and speak a report into a tape recorder, or something like that. But we did not assume that this person would be among the most trusted in the Fellowship. Sometimes, Bärbel [Eccardt, a senior Fellowship co-ordinator] gave him the whole itinerary. He knew where we were, who we were with, whose home was whose, who was in charge of the meetings. 

Did you also go to your hosts’ church services?

Yes, we went to many worship services. They were standard services and very well attended. We never preached, because that was not allowed [by the G.D.R. authorities], and we were conscious of trying to keep a low profile. But we often brought readings of around 20 minutes for those congregations that tended to host us. People wanted to hear this—there were Westerners in town, someone from outside. The local churches did not use the kind of rhetoric that North American Christians use, even though it was a pretty conservative group of Christians that came. But they never made fun of us. They said, “We like the fact that you are different from us. We would never say things that way, but we know what you mean.” That kind of learning does not take place unless you are willing to cross the boundary of your prejudice, your fear, or your shyness, or of what you think all Americans are, or all East Germans are. You have to let that go.

Perspectives on missional encounter are the main theme of your dissertation. How did this research emerge from your involvement in Berlin Fellowship? 

An open-ended question I asked when I was conducting interviews between 2003 and 2006 was, “Why was Berlin Fellowship important to you?” There were some pastors who only had us there once and did not want us back. There were others who fought every year to have a team come to their congregation. When I asked one pastor, she just looked at me and said, “Well, Jane, if you had not come to us, we would never have gotten out of here.” She was not talking about leaving. She was talking about the experience, the encounter, of being met by fresh air. 

So it was like an internal escape to meet someone from outside the G.D.R.?

Yes, and she said that with such emotion and self evidence, as if it was a stupid question. At that point I was reminded of an answer I had heard from a friend who had been near death with a form of cancer. He was talking about a man who had come and sat with him for days and days when he was too weak even to talk. He said, “If Jim had not been there, I may not have made it.” I asked what Jim had said to him. “Nothing.” He was just there, present. 

For me, that was an “Aha!” experience. The starting point of my research had been that I was tired of reading stories by Westerners talking about their experience. I thought, “Well, what about these other people, what did they have to say?” Why did they keep participating? Was it all that wonderful? Ten years or more later, no one was trying to make it seem more wonderful than it was, and they knew that sometimes there were boring conversations that never went anywhere. But there were also good friendships that happened for an hour. If there was a teenager who knew both English and German, they translated for you and the mother of the family. You had a magic half hour in the kitchen with a person you had never met and would never see again. 

I think that is part of the nature of fellowship that is transformational if we allow it to be. And so the question of my dissertation became: Is fellowship—what we are doing here— in some way a missional presence, a missio Dei? Is God in the midst, in the mix? And how do we know it? Perhaps we do not recognize it at the time, but when we look back we think, “Oh wow, I am different, I have learned something” or “I want to go back and talk to her again.” You return to your home setting after those encounters and you look at it a little differently. You begin to be more aware of what is there that you have never seen. I speak as a Westerner—I do not know if the Eastern participants would say the same, but I have heard indications of that. 

Much of mission history is our take on it. Not all of it, by any means, and it is not necessarily bad, but it is only one side of the story. Fellowship, or koinonia, is one of the classical signs of the Christian Church as the Body of Christ. We might think of fellowship as being a coffee hour or shared meal after worship, which it is, but is it not more? In that case, what do those at the other end receive, and what were they able to give? Here, some of my findings were very surprising. For instance, I was surprised—or taken aback by my own ignorance—when I realized that the East Germans had put work groups together and invested a great deal of time in deciding what they were going to do when we visited. 

In another situation, the American side might have gone in with various plans and programs… 

And we did, sometimes! 

…but the fact that the East German state created artificial conditions in which you could not do things easily meant that you were forced to be open to the circumstances. 

We were forced to accept what was offered to us. We sat down to meals or Kaffee und Kuchen [German: coffee and cake], we went for a walk in the forest without knowing where we were going or why we were doing this. We might be going outside so that nobody would be eavesdropping on us, or because there were not enough chairs in the living room for all of us to sit in. Or, because there was a ruined church in the forest that the village was proud of because they had kept it from becoming a total ruin, and they wanted to show it to us. 

I remember one long hike to such a ruined church where we had a short time of prayer and singing. Afterwards, an American college student on our team asked me, “Jane, what was that all about?” He was young, and he really didn’t get it. I said, “Well, we heard stories about how old the church was and that it was where the original congregation started. How it was ruined during the Thirty Years’ War [1618-48] and how they hold their Easter sunrise service there. What were we listening to?” He looked at me and said, “Family history. They were telling us who they are.” We have to let that be what it is, ponder what was given us as guests. And if you have to figure it out, you figure it out.