'The Signs of the Times'

The German Protestant monthly Zeitzeichen has published a special issue on the East German church, 20 years after the peaceful revolution - some of the articles are on free access, others are for subscribers only. I'll be coming back to some of the articles in future posts, but for the moment it's worth noting that Zeitzeichen itself is a product of an East - West fusion. Its roots go back to 1947 when the magazine Die Zeichen der Zeit ("The Signs of the Times") was started in the then Soviet Zone of Occupation as a journal for church workers. Jens Bulisch has written a history of the journal from its founding in 1947 to German unification in 1990 within the context of GDR policy towards Protestant media. In fact ZdZ managed to survive German unification for several years before merging with the West German periodical, Lutherische Monatshefte, and then with the Evangelische Kommentare - the original idea to call the product of these mergers "Zeichen der Zeit" floundered on the fact that the Jehovah's Witnesses already had a publication with this title ... hence Zeitzeichen.