Protestants in Communist East Germany

In the Storm of the World

Wendy R. Tyndale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317074106
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This is the story of how the Protestants in the GDR struggled to survive while striving to put their theology into practice and remaining true to their vision of what the role of the church should be - a 'church for others' as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it. Having taken the reader from the foundation of the GDR, through the peaceful revolution, to the unification of Germany, the story ends with some reflections on the church's past as well as on the challenges it faces in present-day Europe. Protestants in Communist East Germany makes a unique contribution to existing literature by drawing not only on written sources but on a series of first-hand interviews with theologians, pastors and lay people of different ages whose experiences, views and analyses bring the story to life. The East German church's relationship to the state will probably always remain controversial and the vision for a different socialism in the GDR espoused by those involved in the peaceful revolution may now be considered illusory. Nevertheless, many of the issues raised by the Protestants in the GDR remain as vital challenges to the churches in Europe today. Foreword by Paul Oestreicher.

Chapter 1
Revolution by Candlelight

Daring and doing for justice, not whatever you please,

Seizing with courage what is, not dwelling on what might be;

Freedom is made in the deed, not by thought taking flight.

Abandon your fears; go into the storm of the world

Borne up by God’s will and your faith – only trust,

And freedom will welcome your spirit with joy.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer1

Monday, 9 October 1989 is considered by many to be the day of the revolution in East Germany. The peaceful demonstration in Leipzig is perhaps the best-known event, but what happened in Dresden during the previous week and the Prayers for Peace in other cities such as Magdeburg all contributed to making that Monday a memorable and historic day.

Leipzig

‘We were ready for anything, only not for candles and prayers. They rendered us powerless’, said Horst Sindermann, a leading member of the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), in April 1990. On the night of Monday 9 October 1989, many city authorities in Leipzig must have been thinking the same as they went home bemused and fearful, unable to make sense of what had just happened but with a feeling of foreboding that momentous changes lay ahead.

For almost a month the thousands of people who turned up for the weekly Prayers for Peace in the Church of St Nicholas [Nikolaikirche] had regularly been spilling out into the streets for candle-lit demonstrations. Opposition to the increasingly beleaguered regime of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) [Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutchlands], as the East German Communist Party renamed itself in 1946,2 had reached unprecedented levels. Even long before the demonstrations had begun, the security forces had been blocking the streets every Monday to prevent the crowds from reaching the Peace Prayers. They had often attacked and arrested those who managed to get through, but they had been unable to put a stop to the prayers, which had been going on for the past seven years.

On 5 October Johannes Hempel, Bishop of Saxony, had called a meeting of the pastors of the different churches in Leipzig to discuss whether the prayers should be suspended on 9 October. Social and political tensions had been rising in the run-up to the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR to be celebrated on 7 October, and some pastors had expressed their fears that the security forces would react with violence both then and on the following Monday. But the bishop held his ground: ‘If we carry them out in our own way, it is less likely that it will come to violence. If we don’t have the prayers, we won’t be able to exert any influence’, he argued. And the decision was taken to go ahead.3

It turned out that the pastors’ fears about violence on 7 October had not been unfounded. In Leipzig itself the police violently attacked defenceless demonstrators on the day of the anniversary and locked up hundreds of them in some nearby stables. At the same time an article had appeared in the Leipzig People’s Newspaper calling for the ‘counterrevolution’ to be brought to a definitive end, if necessary by force of arms.4 In Berlin, where thousands of people marched from Alexanderplatz to the River Spree, across from where Mikhail Gorbachev was witnessing the celebrations, 5,000 police acted with a degree of ferocity that reflected the desperation of the authorities. They forced the demonstrators to leave their route, driving them down into side streets, making arrests as they went.

The authorities had good grounds for their desperation. Even some members of the Free German Youth [Freie Deutsche Jugend] (FDJ) broke away from their planned slogan ‘FDJ – SED, alles ist bei uns OK’ [‘everything is OK with us’]. Calls of ‘Gorby, help us!’ were heard as they marched past the Russian president in their dark blue shirts and red neck ties – the Free German Youth, the ‘reliable assistant and fighting reserve’ of the SED! No wonder the Polish communist leader Mieczysław Rakowski is said to have muttered to Gorbachev, ‘But these are Party activists. This is the end!’, as he observed the spectacle.5 Referring to the need for change in the GDR, in his speech Gorbachev urged the SED to ‘find answers to questions with all forces in society’, and added, ‘If we lag behind, life immediately punishes us’.6

It was against the background of these events that two days later, on Monday 9 October, schoolchildren in Leipzig were told to go home in the afternoon, avoiding the city centre. The hospital was getting ready to receive a large number of injured people. By 2.00 p.m. the Church of St Nicholas was already half filled by 600 SED members. They were fulfilling Party orders to take up places by arriving for the Prayers for Peace three hours early.

The citizens of Leipzig were fearing a blood bath. As those who had managed to squeeze their way into the church stepped out again after the prayers, they were hardly daring to think what might happen yet they must have been encouraged by the thousands more who were waiting for them outside. Some had come straight from home, others from prayers in other churches, but all had brought their candles, a symbol of thoughtfulness, concentration and peace.

On that Monday evening an unprecedented crowd of 70,000 people marched round the city. They were visibly unarmed, since each person was holding a candle in one hand and using the other to shelter the flame from the breeze. The words of Kurt Masur, Director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, whose loyalty to the regime had only recently been shaken by the arrest of a street musician, were still ringing in the air: ‘We all need a free exchange of opinion about the further course of socialism in our country … We urgently request your prudence so that peaceful dialogue will be possible’, he said, picking up a message broadcast earlier by six individuals, among whom had been three local government members in Leipzig as well as a Protestant pastor and Masur himself. Masur’s appeal then became mingled with the speeches of others who addressed the crowd and with the echoes of the demonstrators’ chants of ‘No violence’ and ‘We are the people’, reminding the state that it was supposed to be a democracy carrying out the people’s wishes.

Dressed in battle gear, the security forces were standing strategically positioned in the square beside the church, on the street corners, in the marketplace, but as the people headed for the ring road round the city they seemed uncertain how to react. Having begun to make a few arrests, they then withdrew and simply stood and watched. The sense of disbelief and joy was almost palpable. Afterwards, the commander of one of the paramilitary ‘combat groups’ said: ‘I told my group to get ready but when I saw it, there was no question of an attack.’7

Why not? Why was there no question of an attack? Why did the security forces hold back and thus help to turn the tide of history? Was it a feeling of basic human horror at the clear consequences of doing battle against such a mass of unarmed people? Was it because they saw people just like them in the crowd, people they knew, relatives, friends, sons, daughters? Or was it because they intuitively knew the game was up? Before 9 October, the Ministry of State Security, the Stasi, had already reported numerous incidents of unruliness within the security forces: cases of militiamen who had refused to attack civilians and resignations from the combat groups.

The story goes that, when the demonstration started, in consternation at the huge number of people the Regional Secretary of the SED repeatedly rang the headquarters of the party in Berlin to ask what he should do. When no one answered the telephone, the Party in Leipzig is said to have drawn its own conclusions. We shall probably never know what really happened or why on this particular day the state gave in to the pressure of the people at this extraordinary demonstration of peaceful resistance. Perhaps Christian Führer, then pastor of the Church of St Nicholas, sums up best the inexplicable mood of inspirational wisdom that seems to have possessed both the demonstrators and their opponents when he says simply: ‘The Holy Spirit was there’.8

The demonstration on 9 October in Leipzig is usually seen as the crucial moment when it became clear that the end had begun for the SED and its government. Nevertheless, Leipzig on its own would not have been so powerful had it not been for similar events in other cities such as Magdeburg and perhaps, above all, if it had not been for what had happened in the city of Dresden just a few days before, when a violent course for the future had been narrowly avoided.

Dresden

Dresden’s central railway station – an imposing building whose elegance in its recently reconstructed form has been listed for several prestigious architectural awards – was the scene of the only violence perpetrated by opposition groups in the GDR. The context was a mass exodus that had been going on all summer. Thousands of would-be emigrants had left the GDR to seek asylum in the West German embassies in Budapest, Prague and other Eastern European capitals, from where they had hoped they would be shipped off as refugees to West Germany.

In view of the critical situation caused by around 4,000 East Germans overflowing from the buildings and grounds of the West German Embassy in Prague, the SED government gave permission for those in Prague to leave but only on condition that the trains carrying them to the west would travel through the GDR. The intention behind this stipulation was to hang a cloud of shame over those who were treacherous enough to want to desert their homeland. ‘They are morally disqualified’, said the official newspaper New Germany [Neues Deutschland] on 2 October, ‘so no tears should be shed for them.’9

On the night of Tuesday 3 October 1989, the GDR closed its frontier with Czechoslovakia, barring the way for the ever-growing numbers of people who were hoping to get out. It was to Dresden, the nearest city to the frontier crossing, that they all returned, a weary, angry, frustrated stream of disillusioned people. They were joined at the railway station by scores of people from Dresden itself who, far from being ready to hurl insults at those escaping, were themselves preparing to jump onto the trains from Prague as they went by. They saw this as a golden opportunity to escape with the miscreants on their way to the west.

Whole families, many with small children, were among the 3,000 people on the dangerously overcrowded platform, waiting for the trains to come. The tension was almost unbearable, so that when the police arrived with water cannons to drive them out of the station it was not surprising that people resisted. Those coming from Prague were in no submissive mood either. When their trains reached Dresden, shreds of their travel documents together with notes of the East German money they would never use again came fluttering out of the windows.

The next evening there was the first huge sit-in, ironically in a street named Prague Street, in front of the railway station, and it was then that the building was damaged. Windows were smashed, doors knocked down and paving stones ripped up from the forecourt. Everyone was shouting, ‘Freedom! We want out!’ There was a mood of desperation and uncontrollable rage. For the first time the police appeared in full riot gear with helmets, shields and batons. Having driven their armoured cars into the crowd, they got out pointing firearms at the people. No one was shot, but hundreds of arrests were made.

At the same time, three churches in Dresden had been occupied by yet more people who were hoping to use this as a means of putting pressure on the authorities to allow them to leave the GDR. Christof Ziemer, who was Superintendent of the church in Central Dresden at the time, was called to the station in the middle of the night. In the early hours of the morning he returned home with an unutterable feeling of dread in his heart. He had no idea what was going to happen in the following days. He was only clear that the church had to be present, alongside the people.

During the next three days, despite the government’s efforts to dissolve the protests by allowing many people both from the group at the station and from the churches to leave the country, the demonstrations grew bigger and bigger and more and more people were hauled off to prison. But there was a gradual change of tone. Already on the Thursday the demonstrators were sitting among the wreckage of the torn-up paving stones with candles in their hands, and little by little their calls of ‘We want out!’ began to change to ‘We are staying here! We want reforms!’ Then the focus of the protests changed too: instead of gathering at the station, people began to file through the city’s streets, braving constant attacks by the police.

Every day that week the historic Church of the Holy Cross [Kreuzkirche] in the city centre was filled with anxious people coming to ask for help in negotiating the release of their imprisoned sons, daughters, wives, husbands and friends. In the evenings huge crowds of up to 5,000 people gathered in the church for prayers and to listen to speakers who constantly called for no further violence. The city was in a state of turmoil. On 7 October the security forces finally dispersed the marchers. By then over 1,300 people had been thrown into prison or into army barracks where they were being subjected to severe excesses, having to run round the buildings being beaten as they went and being forced to stand for hours in unbearable positions.

The next day, Sunday 8 October, the protesters who remained – about 1,500 of them – made their way through the city streets back to the railway station where they sat down again, hemmed in by police all round them. It was in these seemingly inauspicious circumstances that the decisive turning-point occurred in Dresden. After two Catholic chaplains who were with the demonstrators had tried to talk to the police, a request arose from among demonstrators themselves for a dialogue with the city authorities. ‘We don’t want violence’, they said, and the police answered, ‘We don’t either’.

That evening, the protestors elected 20 people from their midst to engage in discussions the very next day with the Mayor of Dresden and other Party officials in the city. For the first time ever, representatives of the people had the opportunity peacefully to put forward their demands for measures such as the granting of freedom of thought and free elections. These discussions on Monday 9 October in Dresden can be seen as forerunners to the ‘round tables’ that were held all over the GDR later on that autumn.

On that same Monday, the day of the decisive demonstration in Leipzig, all four churches of Dresden’s city centre held services of celebration and thanksgiving for the peaceful outcome of the events of the previous week. The services were repeated so that the thousands of people who turned up could join in, but even the second time round the churches were still filled to overflowing. At the Church of the Holy Cross loudspeakers were put outside to relay the service to those unable to enter it, but when representatives from the church...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on People Interviewed
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Revolution by Candlelight
• 2 Early Challenges to the Church
• 3 ‘Church within Socialism’
• 4 Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Young
• 5 Daily Life
• 6 Seeds of the Revolution
• 7 Fall of the Berlin Wall and Hopes for the Future
• 8 Unification of Germany
• 9 Dealing with the Past
• References and Further Reading
• Index