THE CHURCH IN THE GDR

German Life and Letters 39:l October I985 0016-8777 $2.00

THE CHURCH IN THE GDR

ROLAND SMITH

The situation in 1945

The part of Germany taken over by the Red Army in 1945 was precisely the region which was most staunchly Protestant of all, some fifteen million of the original 16.5 million population being members of the Evangelical Churches’ and the majority of the rest Roman Catholics, with some ‘Freikirchen’ and ‘Sekten’.* At the end of the War there was still no central organisation for the Protestant Churches in Germany as a whole, but negotiations were soon under way among the ‘Landeskirchen’, eight of which were located in the Soviet Zone, and in 1948 the ‘Evangelische Kirche Deutschlands’ (EKD) came into being as an umbrella association for the nation.

What was iridisputable was human need. There is a dictum of Kurt Tucholsky’s that mankind has two basic attitudes, one when things are going well and the other when they go badly; the second one he calls ‘religion’. By this criterion there was plenty of need for the ministrations of the Church in East Germany in 1945, for, as well as the huge numbers of dead and missing, the devastated state of the towns and cities, the hunger and exhaustion of the inhabitants and the problems brought by the constantly growing numbers of refugees, all of which were common to all parts of the country, the Soviet Zone had special horrors which were all its own. The fierce initial onslaught of the Red Army had been followed by a brief but traumatic orgy of looting and raping - it was estimated by doctors in the summer of 1945 that half the female population of Berlin between the ages of sixteen and sixty had been raped at least once3 - while mass arrests and wholesale confiscation of property continued until well into 1946. The consequence was a deep-rooted sense of insecurity and depression which brought about a wave of suicides and which was a prime factor in impelling many more to go over to the West, a problem which has continued to dog East Germany right up to the present day.

In all this the Church was of key importance since it was the place to which people turned naturally in their distress and where they could find the fellowship and understanding of others who had been through the same experiences. There is a graphic description in Walter Kempowski’s Urn geht’s j u noch gold of the scene in the local church on the first Sunday after the cessation of hostilities, in this case the badly damaged Marienkirche in Rostock, when the congregation sing away at their last hymn, hoping it might never end, but, when the service is over, come together to hear who has been killed, who has been raped and who has been taken away by the occupation forces, before stumbling out to face an unbearable world.4

Such a situation must have been common all over East Germany and

THE CHURCH IN THE GDR 77

initially this role of the Church as a comforter seems to have been looked upon with favour in official circles. The KPD manifesto, issued on the 11 June 1945, seemed concerned to cherish the German way of life, while the CDU, which was founded on the 26 June, had as one of its objects the representation of Christians in public affairs and the protection of their interests, and the Church was specifically exempted from the land reform which was carried out in 1945-6 and which broke up the large estates and distributed them among s m a l l farmers. The Church was also invited to join in the all-party talks which were being held with a view to establishing a single, non-partisan youth movement, under the chairmanship of Erich H ~ n e c k e r . ~

Burgeoning conJZict between Church and State

This is not to say that life was easy for the clergy. Added to the material hardship and deprivation which were the lot of all in the Soviet Zone, save only for the party select, there were the problems of finding buildings for worship and of getting hold of enough paper to communicate even the most basic items of information, let alone to publish books, journals or church magazines, difficulties which were to prove perennial in the GDR. In addition there were the restrictions imposed by the authorities, such as the obligation to apply for permission for any gathering of people not coming together exclusively for the purpose of worship, and the harassment of those travelling to and from the Western Zones, something which affected particularly the delegates to the various conferences and working parties involved in setting up the EKD.

More serious than this was the conflict over education. After their experience with the Nazis there were many who wished to revert to an earlier German tradition and found their own schools. This was rendered impossible by the ‘Gesetz zur Demokratisierung der deutschen Schule’, decreed in 1946, which forbade the setting-up of any kind of educational establishment apart from that provided by the state. Religious education within the schools became pro- gressively more difficult as both Christian teachers and pupils were increasingly discriminated against, and in 195 1 the study of Marxism-Leninism under the title of ‘Gesellschaftswissenschaft’ was first introduced and then made compulsory. By the end of 1952 virtually all religious education at school had ceased.

Still more dramatic was the treatment meted out to the ‘Junge Gemeinde’, comprising the younger members of the Church, which was looked upon in official quarters as a separate organisation and denounced as a rival and threat to the state youth movement, the ‘Freie Deutsche Jugend’ (FDJ). As time wore on its members came increasingly under verbal and even physical attack: accused of being the agents or dupes of Anglo-American imperialism, they were rendered liable to expulsion from school or college and even imprisonment, while meetings were frequently disrupted by the FDJ, a fate also shared by the Christian groups at university.

So bad had things got by the early fifties indeed, with the blitz on young

78 THE CHURCH IN THE GDR

people’s organisations, the confiscation of church property, interference with pastoral work in homes and hospitals and the localised disruption of church services, that it seemed as if a full scale Kulturkampf might be in course of preparation. Stalin’s death in March 1953, the ‘Neuer Kurd and the uprising of the 17 June of that year eventually brought about a relaxation of tension all round. The point also has to be made that in this, as in other respects, things were never as bad as they were in some of the other socialist countries, notably Hungary and Czechoslovakia, presumably because of the ‘open frontier’ in Berlin and the disastrous impact there might be on a situation where thousands of people were already fleeing to the West every year.

The later j i 9 i e s

The advent of Khrushchev and particularly the de-Stalinisation speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 brought the hope of a new orientation for Eastern Europe as a whole. For the GDR however this period saw the mast acute crisis yet in Church-State relations, brought to a head by the two separate issues of ‘Jugendweihe’ and the ‘Militarseelsorgervertrag‘.

‘Jugendweihe’ is, as its name suggests, an initiation rite, a secular equivalent to confirmation for fourteen-year-olds, which had a certain pedigree in the history of the German ‘Arbeiterbewegung‘. In its new form the participant makes an affirmation to the State, to socialism, to friendship with the USSR, and pledges himself to give of his best both in school and outside. It was launched in 1954, together with an appeal by two senior members of the cultural establishment, J. R. Becher and Anna Seghers.

The Church objected, not so much to the actual ‘Jugendweihe’ ceremony itself as to the crudely atheistic nature of the ten-hour preparation course, and decided to make a stand on principle. It declared that no-one who went to such classes would be admitted to confirmation class, whereupon the State countered with the charge that ‘Jugendweihe’ was simply a private arrangement and that the Church was in fact infringing the provisions of the constitution. This was a particularly brazen allegation in view of the fact that at this time more and more pressure was being put upon people to make them send their children to the ceremony, so much so that from 1958 on it had become virtually obligatory for every schoolchild, and has remained so ever since.

The Church maintained its stand as long as it could, but the number of confirmations began to drop sharply and it became clear that if the veto persisted the supply of new members would simply dry up in the foreseeable future. The embargo of ‘Jugendweihe’ was therefore quietly dropped and since the early seventies this ceremony has been undergone by some 97% of young people.6

Perhaps more than any other single issue, the ‘Jugendweihe’ affair showed clearly the limits of the Church’s power. It was, after all, fought on the ground of the latter’s own choosing; moreover, the clergy themselves presented a reasonably united front, and this should have led to a complete rout of the enemy. When it came to the crunch however, most of the troops deserted,


largely because they were not willing to risk their own prospects and careers, not to mention those of their children, for a matter of principle. We can perhaps also see another factor involved here with which the Church has had increasingly to come to terms in our era, the sheer pressure of secularisation. By the later fifties the GDR economy was beginning to show what it could do once the burden of reparations to the Soviet Union had been lifted, and, although the consumer was well down the list, it was increasingly apparent that for those who had careers and were willing to apply themselves there were considerable rewards to be had. Such considerations inevitably had their effect on the attitude of people to the Church and the Church‘s relevance.

The second great issue of the later 1950s was that of the ‘Militarseelsorger- vertrag‘. This arose out of the agreement signed in West Germany between, on the one hand, Adenauer and StrauB, representing the Federal Government, and, on the other, Otto Dibelius, representing the EKD, to provide military chaplains for the West German armed forces. Since the Protestant Churches in the GDR were themselves constituent members of the EKD, this provoked an immediate outcry in East Berlin and the insistence that the churches in the GDR should formally and collectively disassociate themselves from the ‘NATO Church’of West Germany. When this was not complied with, ail official contacts between the state and the EKD were broken off, pressure was put on the separate ‘Landeskirchen’ and on individual ministers to sign declarations disassociating themselves from the parent body, and an attempt was made to encourage the formation of a breakaway group.’ The Church yet again managed to preserve a united front and even dared to make a counter-proposal to Walter Ulbricht, that it was willing to ensure complete even-handedness by supplying chaplains also to the armed forces of the GDR. Needless to say, the offer was never taken up.

A separate Church for the GDR

When the final break between the Protestant churches of East and West Germany did come it was done without bitterness, at a time of the Church‘s own choosing, and satisfied at least the Marxist criterion of freedom, that of the recognition of necessity.

The background was that the EKD, as an all-German body, was increasingly finding itself obliged to deal with two quite separate and steadily diverging situations in the two German states. The problem became even more acute with the building of the Wall in 1961, since it was now physically impossible for the Church to meet as one body, so the synod was split into two parts, one East and one West, each having equal authority but meeting separately. This was an inherently unsatisfactory state of affairs and, as the sixties progressed and it became ever more apparent that re-unification would not take place in the foreseeable future, the decision was taken to form the ‘Bund der evangelischen Kirchen in der DDR’ (BEK), comprising all the eight ‘Landeskirchen’, in 1969.

It must be emphasized that this was not the result either of a disagreement


between the wings of the Church nor the immediate consequence of pressure by the State, but a decision from within, albeit very reluctantly arrived at, since it meant that the last institutional tie between the two Germanies was now broken. Curiously enough, for all the emphasis on ‘Abgrenzung‘ that was now beginning to appear, the East German government did not immediately welcome the move, presumably because it would now not be possible to use the Church as a lever on Bonn, and it was to take some two years before official recognition of the new body followed.

Viewed in perspective, it can be seen that this development was not simply a change of name but marked also a re-orientation that was taking place within the Church itself. By the time the BEK split off from the EKD it was some twenty-five years after the War, and inevitably the former type of Protestant clergyman, rooted in the past and basically defensive, if not actively hostile to what was going on around him, was beginning to be replaced by a new generation, no less committed as Christians, but one which had matured under very different circumstances. Less dominated by the image of a united Germany, they saw their prime duty as being first towards their own parish, then towards the wider society of the GDR, with ‘Germany’ coming lower down in the order of priorities. Unencumbered with the baggage of past memories, they were often no less fiercely critical of the State than their predecessors had been, the difference being that they shared many of the former’s assumptions, not least that the GDR itself was here to stay. Their attitude is well summed up in the declaration by the synod of the BEK at Eisenach in 1971, which has since become a guiding principle for the Protestant Church in East Germany: ‘Wir wollen Kirche nicht neben, nicht gegen, sondern Kirche im Sozialismus sein’. 8

The implication here is that the Church is willing to play a positive and cooperative role within the overall political framework of the GDR, but it expects to be taken seriously as a partner. It now looked to the State for some appropriate response.

The meeting of the 6 March I978

Such a response was not quick to materialise, but when it did come it arrived with a bang which caused a stir far beyond the borders of the German Democratic Republic, for it seemed as if it might usher in a new era in Church- State relations all over Eastern Europe. It took the form of a meeting between the First Secretary of the Party and Head of State, Erich Honecker, together with the State Secretary for Church Affairs, Hans Seigewasser, on the one hand, and a delegation from the BEK, led by Bishop Albrecht Schonherr, on the other. After some discussion of the common ground between State and Church in respect of charitable work within the GDR, the humanitarian mission to the Third World and the search for peace, Honecker put forward a list of concessions the State was willing to make, as follows: the Church would be allowed to put up buildings in new towns and estates and receive financial assistance for the restoration of some memorials and the upkeep of cemeteries. The Church


would be given rent for the use of some 100,000 acres of its land by the State, and for the first time both clergy and church workers would be eligible for state pensions, while ministers would be allowed access to old people’s homes outside visiting hours and even have some access to prisons as part-time chaplains.9 Finally, more religious and theological publications from the Federal Republic would be admitted, and the churches would be allowed another programme on the radio once a month and even access to GDR television.10

Obviously some of these concessions are more important than others, but they all add up to a sizeable package. At the time it was hailed both within the GDR and outside as a breakthrough, providing a model of what relations should be between Church and State in a socialist country. It was undeniably the most harmonious meeting between the head of state and the leaders of a national church that had taken place anywhere on Eastern Europe since 1945, and it came so unexpectedly that the observer feels impelled to ask why the state should have taken such an initiative at that particular moment.

Part of the answer is to be found in a consideration of some of the events which had been taking place inside the GDR. Among these were the furore over the Biermann affair of November 1976, which had unleashed an unparalleled storm of protest among literary people and which had shaken the cultural establishment of the GDR to its foundations. In 1977 the dissident, Rudolf Bahro, had been arrested for publishing his critique of ‘der reale Sozialismus’, an analysis with which many thinking people in the GDR were in agreement. Finally, there was the memory of Pastor Briisewitz, who, in 1976, had carried out a public act of self-immolation in the market place of Zeitz in Saxony by pouring petrol over himself and igniting himself, as a protest against the State’s treatment of the Church.’* it may well have been the general prevailing air of uncertainty which prompted Honecker to seek stability on at least one front by coming to an understanding with the Church.

Another factor was, however, that just as the Church had slowly come to accept that the ‘phenomenon G D R was here to stay, so the State, for its part, had come round to accepting that the Church was not simply another undesirable relic of capitalism but would be here for the foreseeable future, and that crude atheistic propaganda and direct frontal attacks were counter- productive. If this were the case then some concessions would have to be made on both sides to arrive at a modus vivendi.

The Catholic Church in the GDR

Before the War the territory now making up the GDR was one where Roman Catholics were less well represented among the population at large than in any area of comparable size in the German-speaking world, with no more than 1.2 million out of a total of some 16.5 million. In 1945-6 there was a sudden influx of Catholic refugees, mainly from Silesia and the Sudetenland, to bring the numbers up to over the two million mark.

The initial difficulty was one of accommodation: given the condition of buildings generally and the total lack of new construction work, all that could


be done was the patching up of existing churches and their intensive use. In areas where no Catholic church was to be found the local Protestant church would frequently offer hospitality. Still more intractable was the problem caused by the shortage of priests: as there were no Catholic colleges or seminaries situated anywhere in the Soviet Zone, all aspiring candidates for the priesthood had to be sent for training to Fulda, Paderborn or Osnabriick in West Germany. After 1951 the situation became quite impossible because the GDR government refused to allow them back in. Strong representations were made by the Church and finally permission was given to set up a seminary in Erfurt, and this has remained the main source of new recruits ever since.

Apart from such episodes and a number of relatively minor incidents, the new regime showed itself wary of tangling with the Catholic Church; the closed religious orders for women were allowed to continue as before, and there was no attempt to encourage groups to split off from the main body, as happened in Czechoslovakia. Communications between the highest authority in the country, the ‘Berliner Bischofskonferenz’, and the Vatican were not tampered with. For its part the Church seemed willing to keep out of public affairs for the most part, restricting itself to the spiritual care of its flock and ‘making a considerable pastoral contribution to social and health work, just as the Evangelical Church does, but viewing with some scepticism the willingness of the latter to rush into dialogue, and remaining deeply suspicious of the whole notion of ‘die Kirche im Sozialismus’.

The major area of dispute between State and the Church had to do with the ecclesiastical boundaries of the latter, which, it was officially argued, took no account of the political frontiers of the new state and thus offended suscept- ibilities. This was a somewhat arcane argument, since it concerned essentially matters of ecclesiastical law and in practice the Roman Catholic Church, which has always displayed an admirable sense of the pragmatic, kept well within the bounds of the system, but it led to charges that the Church was in league with the ‘revanchists’ and unable to adjust to the new situation in Eastern Europe. Attempts by the bishops and clergy of Poland and of both parts of Germany to seek mutual reconciliation were also viewed by the State with deep suspicion, as being attempts to undermine the prerogative of government to determine foreign policy. Once the 1970 treaty between West Germany and Poland had been signed and the East-West German ‘Grundlagenvertrag‘ ratified in 1973 the Church proved willing enough to give virtually full recognition of the new boundaries.

The standard criticism that is often levelled against the Catholics in East Germany is that they have allowed themselves to become a ghetto church, completely absorbed in their own affairs, while the rest of life passes them by. There is undoubtedly some truth in this, though it is incidentally a comment that could fairly be made about considerable sections of the GDR population as a whole; but of recent years there have been signs of a stirring among the Roman Catholic community. It may well be that the new mood of self- confidence which Pope John Paul I1 has engendered in the Catholic Church world-wide has played a part in this process, as has no doubt an awareness


of events in Poland. Whatever the reason, it is the case that voices from the Church have begun to make themselves heard in the eighties to an extent previously unknown in the GDR, and nowhere is this more true than in respect of the peace issue.’2

The situation of the Churches todar

Yemelian Yaroslavsky, the first Chairman of the League of Militant Godless in the Soviet Union, is reported to have said once, ‘Religion is like a nail, the harder you hit the deeper it goes’,ls and certainly the situation of the Church in East Germany today, after some forty years of Communist rule, cannot but strike an observer as being surprisingly favourable. First and foremost, there has not been a dramatic change in the climate of opinion to bring about an aggressively atheistic way of life and thought. Whereas in the late 1940s some bold spirits were advocating the abolition of Christmas and its replacement by a new feast combining the winter solstice with the celebration of Stalin’s birthday on 22 December, l4 today Christmas is observed with just as much relish in the GDR as in West Germany. Militant godlessness is conspicuous by its absence, and the only professorial chair for the study of scientific atheism in East Germany was abolished in the seventies in accord with the generally revised perception of religion now prevailing.15 The Church is presented as part of that cultural heritage of Germany for which the GDR claims it is the custodian, a process which was much accelerated before and during the Luther quincentennial celebrations all over the country in 1983, and which was strikingly apparent in the extensive exhibition mounted in honour of the Reformer in the highly selective ‘Museum fur deutsche Geschichte’ in East Berlin in that year.

The Church in fact enjoys a uniquely privileged position. It is the one and only organisation allowed to exist independently of the Party and State, it is the only one not to be organised on the principle of democratic centralism, it does not have to affirm the leading role of the Party, and, finally, it is the only body outside the official ones to have the right of free assembly. It is a considerable landowner, to the extent of some 500,000 acres, the buildings it uses are its own, and it is allowed to put up new ones. It is allowed to collect its own tax (Kirchensteuer)lG and receives additionally a considerable amount of state aid in the form of upkeep for its buildings and churchyards; payment from the public funds is made to its employees in the health and social sectors, and its clergy and lay workers are now eligible for state pensions. The Protestant Church also benefits from having theological faculties at each of the six main universities, entirely paid for by the state, l7 and there is access to both radio and television.

The BEK continues to enjoy excellent relations with its sister organisation, the EKD in West Germany, and receives a considerable amount of financial assistance from that body, up to one third of its total income according to some estimates.’s It maintains close contact also with a number of churches in Eastern Europe and it is very active on the ecumenical scene, for instance in the World


Council of Churches, where it enjoys a reputation for being something of a spokesman for the socialist countries but much less subservient to its political masters than is its Russian Orthodox counterpart.

Last but not least, the Churches receive a good deal of public support and appreciation for the work they do at home, both the BEK and the Catholic Church providing and stafing a number of homes and hospitals as well as a network of day centres. In certain sectors indeed, notably the care of the old and decrepit, the physically and mentally handicapped, the emotionally disturbed, alcoholics and social drop-outs generally, they play such a major part that the state system would be very hard pressed to cope without them.

This is not however to say that all is well. The apparently irreversible secular tide of modern industrial society has affected the Church in East Germany no less than in the West. It is notoriously difficult to quantify belief, as distinct from the activity of churchgoing, and in the GDR there is the special problem that the last census on this was taken in 1964. At that time some ten million people pronounced themselves Protestant and 1.2 million Catholic, but the pace of secularisation had not then perceptibly slowed and some observers would now put the respective figures at not more than half of these.19

Whatever the exact number, it seems clear that in this venerable home, the Lutheran heartland, the Christian faith is now professed by a minority, of whom the greater part is not active. The fact is that the Protestant Church in Europe has never been able to keep a hold on the working class in the way the Catholic Church has done, most notably of course in Poland, and this has given rise to a dismal litany of dwindling, ageing congregations, overworked clergy and an asymmetry of buildings and worshippers. It is a situation all too familiar in the West, but it is exacerbated in the GDR not merely by the intensive development of new towns and estates but also by the new patterns of settlement consequent upon agricultural collectivisation. The BEK will at some stage inevitably have to consider seriously whether it can continue as a ‘Volkskirche’, or national church, catering for the whole population through the parish structure, or whether it should concentrate its resources on the believers only and retire within the fastness of a minority church.

Undoubtedly such pressures, combined with the all-pervading material shortages, the generally claustrophobic mental atmosphere of the GDR, and the restricted access to books and personal contacts from outside, have all contributed to preventing the churches fiom playing anything like the role in the intellectual life of the country that they do in the Federal Republic. Protestant theology seems to limp along a good generation behind, Catholic thinkers have produced nothing to match the brilliant flowering we have seen in West Germany, nor has there been anything positive by way of Christian- Marxist dialogue, though this is hardly the fault of the Church.

A further disappointment has been the lack of progress in the area of church unity at home. In a society where all denominations have been so beleaguered, there has not taken place the coming together of Protestant and Catholic one might have expected in the present ecumenically-minded age. Even the discussions between the Lutheran and Reformed Churches have not yet issued


in full intercommunion: the BEK thus remains an association of churches and, in spite of interminable working parties, the goal of a fully integrated Vereinigte Evangelische Kirche’ seems as far away as ever.

When all is said and done, however, the greatest problem for the Church remains its relations with the State and the relentless pressure to conform the latter generates. This both discourages the individual from playing his full part in the life of the Church, since he knows this may have serious consequences for him and his career, and also has the effect of constantly squeezing the Church into a pre-determined spiritual-cum-pastoral role, with no say whatever in public life other than that of supplying the odd token minister for some state function. Were this not to be resisted, it would eventually make the Church into a ghetto, in which a few well-meaning but ineffectual souls huddle together for a little spiritual warmth and cheer, but which otherwise does nothing to address itself to the situation in which the great mass of people find themselves in contemporary East Germany.

The Church and the peace movement

What has effectively prevented this from happening has been the irruption on the scene of the unofficial peace movement, with which the Church has become closely involved, and which has stirred up attitudes and alignments in a way that could hardly have been foreseen even a few years ago.

In fact, the Church had long been concerned with the increasing militarisation of the country as a whole, which, in spite of unceasing ringing declarations for peace, has permeated every walk of life. Nowhere has this been more in evidence than at school, with explicit military exercises an integral part of physical education, manoeuvres for all pupils conducted by the FDJ, often in conjunction with the para-military ‘Gesellschaft fur Sport und Technik’ (GST), the use of warlike examples in a wide variety of school textbooks, and the con- stant pressure on male pupils to join the armed forces as volunteers.20

What particularly upset the Church was the introduction in 1978 of Wehr- kundeunterricht’, or defence studies, as a compulsory school subject for all children. It is taken by the ninth and tenth classes, i.e. by all fifteen- and sixteen- year-olds, and is divided into two parts, a theoretical period taken at school once a week by both boys and girls, and a practical one, done at camp, in the course of which the girls are instructed in First Aid and Civil Defence, and the boys are given small-arms training with real weapons and live ammunition.

It was this latter aspect which caused most concern, and the Church was not slow to voice its objections, insisting that it was not possible to accept as an integral and compulsory part of the school curriculum a subject which accustomed all pupils to divide people and countries into friend or foe categories and which taught fifteen-year-old boys to kill as part of their normal education. This was surely a practice to be found nowhere else in the world and it could not but undermine the credibility of the GDR as a peace-loving country.


Needless to say, such protests have so far had no effect, and ‘Wehrkun- deunterricht’ has remained on the school syllabus. The official line is that, although the subject is compulsory, no boy is ever forced to use weapons; he can always do Civil Defence with the girls. This presupposes firstly that fifteen- year-old boys will be able to resist the pressure to conform when making a choice, and secondly that there will be no serious consequences for them if they do, something on which past experience with the FDJ and the ‘Jugendweihe’ has been rather less than encouraging.

The second major issue on which Church and State have been at loggerheads is that of a social alternative to military service. This goes back to the year 1962, when military conscription for all males was first introduced. It was estimated then that some 3,300 young men had refused to serve, and in 1964, a special formation, with the title ‘Bausoldaten’, was set up as a safety valve. It is made up of unarmed auxiliaries, used mainly on construction work, but subject to military law and military discipline. *1

Very little publicity was given to them, the average conscript probably remained unaware of their existence, and their numbers initially remained quite small, at around 350 a year. Nevertheless, the concentration of these dissenters had its inevitable effect and such units tended to become active centres for the dissemination of information. The consequence was that not only did the number of such ‘Bausoldaten’ gradually increase in the 1970s, but the demand for their use on non-military projects only grew stronger. By the end of the decade it had hardened into a complete programme for a demilitarised peace corps, to be called ‘sozialer Friedensdienst’, modelled on the West German ‘Ersatzdienst’, and like the latter to be used exclusively for civilian undertakings.

The Church gave this movement its blessing (about half the ‘Bausoldaten’ claim religious motivation) and took the matter up with Klaus Gysi, the new Secretary of State for Church Affairs, in 1981, only to be informed that such a proposal could not seriously be entertained for three main reasons. The first is that it would undermine the principle of universal military service, which is the duty of all citizens, the second is that it would render the GDR unable to meet its commitment to its (Warsaw Pact) allies, their combined strength being the best guarantee of peace, and the third is that it would imply that service in the armed forces was either ‘unsocial’ or ‘non-peaceful’, either notion being quite unacceptable.

The Church has thus been brought up against the fact that it will not be easy to get the State to budge on this issue but it has nevertheless adopted the notion of ‘sozialer Friedensdienst’ and is determined to continue the dialogue on this. It has also considered the situation of those who totally reject any form of compulsory service at all (‘totale Kriegsdienstverweigerer’) and who at the moment go straight to prison, in the hope that it can do something for them.

It was partly as a result of these two issues coming to a head that the unoficial peace movement in the GDR began to gain momentum, but what probably provided the greatest stimulus was the sight of the massive peace marches and demonstrations in West Germany in 1982 and 1983, which were shown not


only in the Western channels but given great prominence on the GDR’s own network. The official intention was of course to provide maximum coverage of the protests against the installation of Cruise and Pershing missiles in the Federal Republic, with the aim of maximising support for like demonstrations in East Germany. What was perceived by the audience, however, was the special German dimension of the situation and the fact that any major conflict in Europe would inevitably engulf in the first place the two German states. This underlined their common interest in averting conflict and led to the realisation that those who demonstrate in Hamburg or Bonn are acting also on behalf of their cousins in Rostock and Magdeburg.

All this caught the imagination of the young and brought about a great upsurge of energy and enthusiasm, which found expression in gatherings and conferences, particularly in Berlin, Dresden and Jena, and in the wearing of the ‘Schwerter zu Pflugscharen’ badge all over the Republic. 22 Willy-nilly the Church was involved because, with no right of free assembly or of demonstra- tion, it was the only place where the movement could go, and of course many of the clergy and the laity were in any case already active. Some members of the Church, on the other hand, have had reservations because they see the issue as being not simply a protest against war but as one of opposition to the regime as a whole and they fear this could involve the Church in another, potentially damaging conflict.

Certainly the State has reacted negatively to the unofficial peace movement, finding especially objectionable the fact that the very words which had been oficially approved for decades were now being uttered with a conviction and enthusiasm which made them profoundly suspect. Eventually, in the autumn of 1982, those same badges which had originally been officially sponsored were removed from the anoraks and parkas of the young by those twin symbols of authority in the GDR, teachers and policemen. When challenged by the usual Church deputation on this, all Klaus Gysi could say was that it had been done on orders - ‘wegen MiiSbrauchs’.23

Thejkture of the Church

Undoubtedly the unofficial peace movement in the GDR is of great significance. For the first time, people from all walks of life and of all ages, but especially the young, have been actively and openly involved in discussing their situation and the shape their future should take. We have seen an approach to the state of affairs in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1980, when the country suddenly seems to have come alive and can be seen to be peopled not by greyfaced automata but by real human beings.

In all this the Church has played a vital part. It is important however, to remember that the Church and the peace movement can never merge into one, even though they will remain close allies; to imagine otherwise would be both to over-estimate the freedom of action of the Church and to misunderstand its role. It can never take over the function of a secular movement, however


good the cause; to do otherwise would be tantamount to abandoning its claim to be a spiritual body.

This is not to say it does not have a very important part to play in the physical world also. In a country where the emphasis is on the development of society along predetermined, immutable lines, it offers a place where people or groups who do not easily fit into official categories can get together. Still more, it provides a message of personal warmth and assurance and an insistence on the unique worth and absolute value of each and every individual. This is particularly important in a community which, for all its undoubted achievements in sport and the economy, does not come over as an especially happy one, whether we take as our criteria the statistics for divorce, suicide and alcoholism or the large number of those anxious to settle in the Federal Republic and for whom the exodus in 1984 was just the tip of the iceberg.

Thus, what the Church does for the great mass of people who remain is to provide not an opposition but an alternative. In a country where nothing is allowed to exist unless it has the stamp of official approval, and where no opinions may be ventured unless they are in accord with the received truth, so that in practice everyone talks with one voice in public and another in private, the Church represents a sanctuary where people can be honest with each other and with themselves. As long as the Church can continue to fulfil such a basic human need, there is no doubt that its future is assured.

NOTES

1 The word ‘evangelical’ is used throughout as synonymous with ‘Protestant’ and not as meaning

2 The official number of ‘Free Churches’ and ‘sects’ is given as eleven each, hut estimates of the a movement within the Church.

latter vary. See R. Henkys, Die euangelischcn Kirchcn in der DDR, Munich 1982, p. 197. W. Leonhad, Die Revolution mtIiJ3f inre Kinder, Cologne 1955, pp. 308-9.

+ W. Kernpowski, Uns geht’s j a noch gold, Munich 1975, pp. 48-52. For an account of this see H. Lippmann, Honeckn, Cologne 1971.

The breakaway group was called ‘Der Bund evangelischer Pfamr in der DDR’. It was founded in 1958 and dissolved in 1974. It never had a membership of more than 250, out of a possible 4,000. See H. Diihn, op. tit., pp. 190-1. 8 0. Luchterhandt, Die Ccgnwartslagcdcrcvangalischn Kirch in dcr DDR, Tiibingen 1982, pp. 59-60. 9 Chaplains are not however d o d access to State Security prisons, reformatories or interrogation

6 H. D a n , Konionfafion odn Kooperation?, Opladen 1982, pp. 123f.

centres. lo The Church could already broadcast radio services on Sundays. l 1 See D a n , p. 201 l2 For an overall account of the Catholic Church in the GDR see W. Knauft, Katholischc Kirchc in dn DDR, Mainz 1980. Is T. Beeston, Dircrction and Valour, London 1982, p. 100. W. Knauft, p. 31.


15 Otto Klohr, Professor ‘fur wissenschaftichen Atheismus’, had his Chair at Jena.

16 ‘Kirchensteuer’: unlike the Federal Republic, the GDR provides no help in the collection of this, nor access to tax files 1’ The Church does not however have any say in the appointment of staff to theological faculties. 18 See Henkys, p. 193. 19 Zbid., p. 196. 10 Volunteers for a longer term of service (‘Soldaten auf Zeit‘) haw certain advantages, e.g. preference for university places. *I Henkys, p. 362. *2 J. Sandford, The Swoni and the Ploughhare, London 1983, pp. 70-4. 23 Henkys, p. 390.

Documents

THE CHURCH IN THE GDR