Holy Disorder

The end ... or the beginning?

2010-10-03T18:36:00.002+02:00

Today marks the 20th anniversary of German unity in 1990, and maybe the opportunity for a penultimate post on Holy Disorder. Just 361 days after the GDR marked its 40th anniversary, the GDR had become history - no longer a place, but an era. The 361 days between 7 October 1989 and 3 October 1990 marked not only the disappearance of the German communist half-state but reshaped Europe and the world. Did the unification of Germany mark the "end" of the autumn revolution of 1989? In summer 1990 I sat in a small church near the Polish-German border at which the pastor recalled the biblical story of Moses leading the Israelites out of the captivity of Egypt, and how they waited 40 years before arriving in the promised land of milk and honey. Many people, he said, saw the 40 years of the GDR as the lost time of the desert from which they were now being released into the promised land. But what, he said, if the events of 1989 and 1990 did not mark the arrival in the promised land, but rather only the flight from the captivity of Egypt that would be followed by 40 years in the desert? What do we say today, 20 years after the unification of Germany as a European state?

This blog began as a set of reflections on the Holy Disorder campaign of the Protestant Church in Central Germany. One of the first posts came from Leipzig, the scene of the "turning point" on 9 October when thousands of people took to the street to demand change, many of them coming from prayers for peace in the city's churches. It coincided with the 20th anniversary of the conclusion of the Ecumenical Assembly for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation, and which made unprecedented demands for change. To mark the 20th anniversary of German unity, we are posting the English (provisional) translation of an address by Heino Falcke, one of those at the forefront of the Ecumenical Assembly. The address was about how the Central Germany Kirchentag (a church congress that was part of the Holy Disorder campaign) in autumn 2009 should remember the events 20 years earlier. Were they events of the past to be discussed with historical distance, or are they events which still have a significance today?

1. How does a Kirchentag remember autumn 1989? There is one great difficulty about making a historical date the theme of a Kirchentag. A Kirchentag is part of the general remembrance of an event, but remembrance is always also fashioned by contemporary interests, that a Kirchentag needs to examine critically. But this is of interest only to a very limited proportion of potential participants. A Kirchentag is always focussed on contemporary challenges, issues, fears and hopes. If it addresses these issues, then the autumn revolution of 1989 appear more or less only a backdrop. There needs to be consideration therefore not only about the content of the sessions, but also their style. Against this background, the Kirchentag needs also to be certain that it has specific viewpoint through which the Christian community sees its history: It sees the events of 20 years ago as an event in our dealings with God and in the light of the biblical witness, looks back to discover what God has to say through these events to us today. Such a perspective therefore links yesterday, today and tomorrow. It avoids subjective-individualistic historical amnesia as well as an instrumentalization of history for self-legitimisation.

2. The political upheaval in the GDR and Eastern Europe is first of all a reason for gratitude and praise to God. Seen historically, autumn 1989 was a revolution, implosion and improvisation. The surprising nature of the events for all those who were involved (the "Wow!" factor), is a sign and a pointer (of course, not a proof) that we do not hold history in our hands and execute its laws (such as in "historical materialism "), but that our history is in the hands of God. The prayers for peace - as they were organized and understood by participants - were themselves a testimony to this truth of faith. This perspective does not prevents self-glory, a dispute of vanities and the instrumentalisation of the event for political interests. It also raises the question of how we as Christians and churches deal with history. We have to avoid subjectivist and individualistic historical amnesia as well as a presumption that we can sit "in judgement" over the globalized world.

3. What gratitude means is different for the individual, for our people and for the church. We can all offer gratitude:
- that the highly risky East-West conflict came to an end without violence, and that the revolutions in Eastern Europe mostly took place non-violently;
- that after the division that resulted from the war, we Germans were granted unification with the consent of all those nations that had been deeply affected by the German war guilt.
- that despite the failures of churches and Christians, and despite all tribulation and temptation, God's Spirit was active in the church, God's Spirit aroused faith, proved to be strength, guidance and consolation, and encouraged brave and faithful witness of life, true life in the midst of false - not only among Christians - and that it so became possible for Christian groups and communities to be part of the self-emancipation of the people in autumn 1989 from the very beginning.

4. In the Judeo-Christian perspective, gratitude includes accepting and confessing one's own failure. It is more difficult for us to be as one in this perspective than it is for us to be as one in our gratitude, but both are indispensable for the future of the church. So discussions about this issue are particularly important at the Kirchentag. We need to remember, for example, the conflicts between the socially-critical-groups and the church leadership, especially but not only in Thuringia, and over the East German experience of the process of accession to the Federal Republic, whose assessment ranges from "the meltdown of German unity" (Uwe Müller) to the apologetics of success (Richard Schroeder) .

It is important to consider what types of events at the Kirchentag are most appropriate for gratitude and for confessing sin and guilt. Should not it be forms of liturgy, that give space to recounting and lamentation, reconciliation of memories, celebrations of the liberation, Gloria and Kyrie? Remembering with gratitude and self-critical understanding before God sheds light on our path today.

5. How do we see the path the church is taking today against the background of autumn 1989? Are we, after the shock of realising that we are a minority, on the way to becoming a church that not only promotes mission, but is mission, as the churches in the GDR in the 1960s once learned from the ecumenical movement? Through its public witness the church became the focus of political life in autumn 1989, when it was a question of the wellbeing and woes of human beings. Where is the church today when it comes to the welfare and woes of the people, now that it has the possibility of exercising all sorts of public witness? How does the church, which once understood itself as a "church within socialism", and in the meantime has debated what was true and false about that idea, now live out its presence in the society of the united Germany.

What does the "critical solidarity" that the churches in the GDR tried to live out, mean for a church that sees itself as a "Church of Freedom"? How do Christians and churches that come from the "unitary society " of the "Socialist Unity Party" learn to live in a pluralistic, multicultural and multireligious society?

6. The autumn revolution of 1989 was - at least in its early stages - shaped by the self-emancipation of the people. The people shifted from being an object of politics to its subject. People overcame the division of their lives into a public, assimilated, part, and a private oppositional existence. They became whole people in their active participation, "We are the people!" was the first slogan of the eastern European citizens spring (T.G. Ash), and marked the burgeoning of the East European democracy out of civil society. This memory needs to provoke a discussion at the Kirchentag on the democratic culture of our society today and about which how to find an impetus to strengthen it in the "Citizens 'spring'" of autumn 1989.

7. The substance and objectives of the freedom unleashed in and through the initiatives and groups in the early autumn of 1989 corresponded to the themes of the groups: peace, environment, more democracy in the GDR and greater justice for the third world. The civic freedoms, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and of demonstrations were freedoms that we appropriated and that became controversial, they were not the substance over which one disputed.

After the political upheaval, the peace, environment and third world groups were subsumed under the term of "civil rights activists" and so caught in the opposition that placed "freedom versus socialism". The substantive policy objectives were repressed, or dismissed as politically irrelevant illusions or utopianism.

The way in which the Kirchentag remembers autumn 1989 must go back further and ask about the substance and objectives of the awakening of freedom. This is not only for historical but also for contemporary reasons. Freedom becomes a reality in life itself and as a socio-political reality as a freedom-from and freedom-for, and thus as a freedom which is linked to values, ethical standards, human criteria, political objectives.

8. The starting point for the Christian and church-motivated protagonists of the autumn revolution, who gathered in the "Ecumenical Assembly of Churches for Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation" was a scenario of global crisis. The escalation of weapon systems, economic injustice and environmental degradation intensified into a crisis syndrome, which the Christian oikoumene answered in 1983 through the "Conciliar Process for Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation".

The Christian oikoumene in the GDR, together with the socially-critical groups, confronted the brake on reforms in the GDR that increased in the 1980s, and placed this in the context of global problems and from this perspective formulated a programme for social change in the GDR. Those at the forefront of this programme were already aware of globalization as the context of political action. But this awareness was related only in an asynchronous fashion to the majority awareness of the GDR population. In the process of German unification, it was forced into the background, first by the happiness and still more by the stress of everyday life in unification. Only through the events of recent years, has public consciousness become aware of globalization as an issue that affects and challenges us:

-World peace - through international terrorism and the foreign missions of the Bundeswehr.

-The world economy - through increasing poverty even in rich countries, unemployment, crisis of the international financial market.

-The world environmental problem - through climate change and resource depletion.

The point of departure of the autumn revolution of 1989 had a more global perspective than the debate about unification that followed. The dispute between those who see the autumn revolution fulfilled in the status quo of German unification, and those who idealise the status quo ante in "socialist provincialism", falls short of the impetus of autumn 1989, which catapulted us into the globalized world with its great dangers and gave us the immense task of trying to shape it. For this task the three preferential options for the poor, for non-violence and for the preservation of creation, which were expressed the Ecumenical Assembly and were received by all East German churches are still of primary relevance.

It's not about some people saying self-righteously: we knew all that and said so at the time. Nor about others saying: what we have is not what we intended or wanted, it was so pleasant in socialist provincialism behind the Wall, let's try and go back to that.

Rather that the first group says. Now we understand the responsibility that we have now grown into through our own self-emancipation. When we cried, "We are the people", this included without us realising it, "We are citizens of the world." And the other group says: It's a good thing that we have the unity that we then wanted to postpone so that we could change the system instead of simply exchanging one system for another. A change of system is not possible in a dictatorship, but only in a democracy with free debate and discussion. A third group: Yes, unity had to come quickly, but we slid into neo-liberal globalization practices and other deficiencies. Can we in this way reconcile the memories of the those who then argued with each other?

9. There is one feature of the autumn revolution that is generally held up as an example: its non-violence. We now know that this was also made possible by the implosion and weakness of the SED regime. Nevertheless, alongside the examples of August 1968 in Prague and the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 it is a clear signal whose contemporary significance needs to be remembered today. The Kirchentag needs to set up a working group to examine the experiences, conditions and opportunities for non-violence, in which the memory of autumn 1989 can be linked to contemporary information and exercises.

10. One of the most relevant and urgent questions for the Kirchentag is the "preferential option for the poor." The Kirchentag must face the basic question that many people are now asking with increasing urgency: did the autumn revolution of 1989 remove socialism as an economic concept and a political force in order ultimately to help globalized capital come to power? Is the modern history of freedom, whose capitalist deformation the socialist movement was an attempt to correct, in danger of falling back behind these corrections?

A Kirchentag, which addresses the memory of the autumn revolution of 1989, has to take a clear position on this question. The demand of "Fare shares instead of social division" is aimed at the Ecumenical Kirchentag in 2010, states, "We want an Ecumenical Kirchentag, that openly discusses clear demands for greater justice between rich and poor and for the integrity of creation - without a false regard for political and social balance, and the power structures of the church."

The democratic GDR

2010-03-19T21:49:00.002+01:00

The democratic GDR that followed the Volkskammer election on 18 March lasted just six months, following the mass demonstrations in autumn 1989, the loss of power of the SED. To mark the anniversary the Federal Centre for Political Education has published a special edition of "Politics and Contemporary History". The issue (in German) can be downloaded here. The individual essays are listed below:


	Editorial (Hans-Georg Golz)

	The unhappy demise of the GDR - Essay (Wolfgang Templin)

	The forgotten "third way" (Martin Sabrow)

	A democratic East Germany? The project "Modern Socialism" (Rainer Land)

	Double democratization and German Unity (Michael Richter)

	The democratic GDR in the international arena (Jennifer A. Yoder)

	The failure of economic reform in the GDR 1989/1990 (Wolfgang Seibel)

	Farewell to West Berlin (Wilfried Rott)

Photo: Bundesarchiv

Election 1990 - Strangers in a foreign country

2010-03-18T15:50:00.003+01:00

Today (18 march) marks the 20th anniversary of the first free elections in East Germany, less than six months after the mass demonstrations that undermined the communist state, and less than five months after the opening of the Berlin Wal l. It was a curious mixture of old and new (the picture shows one of the ballot papers used in the election). The alliance of newly-founded citizens' movements and parties that had originally pledged to fight free elections on a common platform has fractured under the pressure of events: the Social Democratic Party of the GDR (founded by opposition activists) has joined forces with its opposite number in the Federal Republic. Helmut Kohl's (West German) Christian Democratic Union, looking for a partner of its own, has signed up with the East German CDU, for four decades a satellite of the communist SED. with revolutionary legitimacy provided through an "Alliance for Germany" with the Demokratischer Aufbruch, and the small German Social Union. Neues Forum, once the rallying cry of the peaceful revolution has become part of the Bundnis 90 grouping, along with Demokratie jetzt, and the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights. The election has become a battle between the proponents of a rapid and a less-rapid union with the Federal Republic.

It is election day, and Jane is preaching in Greppin, the small parish hall is packed on this Sunday:

Dear Sisters and Brothers in Greppin

As I prepared for my year in the GDR I never thought that I would experience free and open elections here. Maybe I should say that I grew up with politics, my father has been for many years either the mayor or the opposition leader in our town. When the elections took place, the children of course wanted to help, it was just something we took for granted. I can still remember that last year I thought that this at least was something I would not be doing in the GDR. But now there are free elections, a wonderful thing to be happening. Yet in many of the discussions I have had, I have noticed that the closer that election day comes, the greater the uncertainty about "what comes after". It's difficult to live with uncertainty, but it was also much more difficult when we knew exactly what would happen next. Our text today (Hebrews 11:8-10) is about Abraham and how he was ready to live with uncertainty:

8 By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. 9 By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

... I don't know about you, but I would not like to spend my life in a tent. Living in tents is a dangerous business. But how can we learn to live in tents in this time of anxiety before the election. How do we learn to live with uncertainty. There's no easy answer, no promise that things will get better. But one thing is sure, God does not want us to build walls to cut ourselves off. A tent is sensitive to wind and to rain. We must be sensitive, sensitive to other people, talk about our fears.

After the service, Stephen and I go for a walk in the nearby countryside, the Dübner Heide. The GDR seems to have got used to this election, everywhere there are posters put up, torn down, posted over other posters. Then we drive to Leipzig to watch the election results with friends. the results come in. General astonishment when the results are declared: the CDU (which a year earlier had been part of the so-called "Democratic Bloc" with the SED) gets more than 40 percent, the SPD just over half that. 16 per cent for the Party of Democratic Socialism, which used to be the SED. Just 2.9 percent for the civic rights activists in Bündnis 90. Before the election, many commentators had treated an SPD victory as a foregone conclusion. I'm disappointed too, but I hadn't expected it to be different.

Selling Stasi documents in East Berlin

2010-03-17T13:55:00.005+01:00

17 March 1990 - Tomorrow is election day in the GDR. Today, Stephen arrived back in Berlin from Seoul where he had been working at the World Convocation on Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation. I go to meet him at the airport. Hiring a car (and getting his first ever GDR parking ticket for stopping to ask where he could park), we stopped off at the Gendarmenmarkt in East Berlin. Here the synods of the previously-divided Berlin-Brandenburg Protestant church were having their first joint session. Less than 100 metres away from the Französische Friedrichstadtkirche where the synod is taking place there is a queue outside an unprepossessing building, now called the House of Democracy, and home to the various civic and human rights groups. They are selling a printed volume of Stasi documents, showing how the state security ministry has systematically tried to undermine and subvert opposition activity in the GDR (second hand copies are still available on Amazon). People around the church where the synods are meeting are flicking through the slim volume - some of them to see whether they were the targets of the Stasi. Later on we head back down to Greppin, in the middle of the Bitterfeld chemical works. I'm preaching tomorrow - election day.

A day of anniversaries

2010-03-11T20:17:00.001+01:00

11 March 2010 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the GDR dissident Robert Havemann and the 25th anniversary of the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to power as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. According to the German Resistance Memorial Centre, Havemann, born in Munich in 1910, became involved during the Nazi period in the socialist resistance group Neu Beginnen. Together with Georg Groscurth, Robert Havemann, Paul Rentsch, and Herbert Richter, Havemann tried abortive attempts to make contacts with the Allies, and in the summer of 1943, Havemann, Groscurth, Richter and Rentsch wrote a number of programmatic texts, naming their group Europäische Union (European Union). Havemann was sentenced to death in Nazi Germany, but the sentence was not carried out because as a scientist he was judged to be undertaking important work for the war effort. One of his fellow prisoners in Brandenburg prison was Erich Honecker, who would take a leading role in the GDR after the Second World War and head the SED from 1971 to 1989.

Havemann was arrested on September 5, 1943 for his involvement in aiding victims of persecution and as the leading mind of the Europäische Union. He was sentenced to death on December 16, 1943. As his research work appeared indispensable for the Nazi arms industry, he received a stay of execution. Havemann was liberated from Brandenburg-Görden penitentiary by the Red Army in 1945. After the war, he joined the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED), but became critical of the regime in the wake of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. Expelled from the SED in 1964, Havemann lost his post in 1965. He was placed under house arrest from 1976 to 1978. Havemann was one of the most vocal critics of the German Democratic Republic up to his death in 1982.

Havemann had been sentenced to death in Nazi Germany, but the sentence was not carried out because as a scientist he was judged to be undertaking important work for the war effort. In 1982 he and Rainer Eppelmann were influential in launching the "Berlin Appeal". The text, which helped mobilise a peace movement transcending the East West divide, called for the Allies to withdraw from the two German states, to guarantee non interference in the affairs of the two states, and for the creation of a nuclear weapon free zone. Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg has a tribute here.

On 11 March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected general secretary of the CPSU. Within5 years, the Soviet Union ended its involvement in Afghanistan, and East Germany stood on the brink of free elections. Back in 2009, I posted on the "Gorbachev factor" (Archie Brown), noting how according to Brown (no relation), reform was not forced upon Gorbachev by pressure from outside or the dire economic situation inside the Soviet Union - ascribing a voluntarism to Gorbachev and a small circle of top policy makers:

As a result, decisions in Moscow not only played the decisive role in the spread of communism in Eastern Europe in the 1940s, they were just as crucial in facilitating the end of communist rule in Europe 40 years later.

Living next to the chemical works at Bitterfeld ....

2010-03-11T14:59:00.003+01:00

From Jane's diary: 11 March 1990, 2am

It's two o'clock in the morning. I am supposed to preach in the morning, and I can't sleep.

The time at Wittenberg came to an end in February. Stephen finally managed to be given a visa and has visited a couple of times. The prayers for renewal are continuing but with far fewer people as in the autumn. The atmosphere is very different now. The election campaign has started, posters are being put up everywhere, even in the shops. I make a speech on behalf of the SPD, the social democrats. It was quite fun, though I have to say even I am not quite convinced that they would get my vote in this situation.

One by one the other students left Wittenberg and went back to their parishes and congregations. It was strange to say goodbye and to know that this part of my life here had come to an end.

I am doing an internship with Axel and Gisela Noack in Wolfen (known for its photographic film factory ORWO, for Original Wolfen. It used to be Agfa until the Second World War). I've moved into the empty manse in Greppin, a small industrial village half way between Wolfen and Bitterfeld. On three sides the village is surrounded by the Bitterfeld Chemical Works. The people of Wolfen and Bitterfeld argue as to who has the most polluted town, but the people of Greppin don't have to argue, they just know that it very rarely doesn't stink here.

From my window I can look over the cemetery to a wonderful view of the factory chimneys. The one that's closest to us has a permanent plume of smoke. It's 2 o'clock in the morning, and I have to hold my first sermon in the morning, and I can't sleep. The air is terrible. The factory seems to pump out even more filth at night than during the days. The noise just carries on. Sometimes in the middle of the night I am a sit up, bolt awake, when the sirens go. I can't get the nightmare out of my mind - what would happen if the chemical works went up in smoke?

(The picture shows the manse in Greppin, from April 2009. The chemical works have gone now. More pictures from this disappeared past can be found here.)

Looking to transcend capitalism and communism in Seoul

2010-03-05T13:38:00.005+01:00

Today - 5 March 2010 - marks the 20th anniversary of the opening of the World Convocation on Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation (JPIC) . Planned as the culmination of the JPIC process - better known in the then two German states as the "Conciliar Process" - delegates from all parts of the world converged for a week's deliberations in the South Korean capital of Seoul. It was intended to express "the urgent call for authoritative witness by the churches" in the face of injustice, hunger and poverty; war and violence; and destruction of the environment, stemming from an initative at the WCC's 1983 assembly in Vancouver, which, in large part due to efforts of the delegates from the German Democratic Republic, called on the WCC "to engage member churches in a conciliar process of mutual commitment to justice, peace and the integrity of creation".

Here, a key role had been played by the GDR theologian Heino Falcke, both in the run-up to the Vancouver assembly and in subsequent elaboration of the Conciliar Process in the GDR and at the global level.

In the GDR, the high point of this conciliar process was an Ecumenical Assembly of Churches and Christians which met in three sessions in 1988 and 1989, and which, not least because of the involvement of peace, environmental and human rights groups, made unprecedented demands for the reform of the GDR and influenced the citizens' movements and political parties formed at the time of the peaceful revolution of autumn 1989. According to Heino Falcke:

The ecumenical assembly raised the floodgates enough to release the log-jam of change. It gave an ecumenical inspiration to the dynamic for change, which also in a way gave it legitimacy; and above all, it gave it a direction that was set by the gospel.

An ecumenical gathering was held in 1988 in the Federal Republic of Germany, and in May 1989, the first European Ecumenical Assembly, "Peace with Justice", took place in the Swiss city of Basel. By the time the Convocation met in Seoul, however, the world had experienced a change of momentous dimensions. The epochal shift can be seen not least in the chronology of the GDR itself. The Basel assembly took place just after the widespread rigging of already undemocratic municipal elections in the GDR that was one of the triggers for the "peaceful revolution" of autumn 1989. The world convocation the following year took place immediately before the elections of March 1990 in the GDR that led to the first freely-elected Volkskammer, the GDR parliament. Many of those - like Falcke - involved in the events that led to the "peaceful revolution" considered that they had taken part in a movement for liberation and a new more just, peaceful and sustainable world order.

Yet, for many of those in Seoul from the Global South, the events in Europe at the end of the 1980s were being regarded with suspicion. Certainly, in his address to the Seoul convocation, Frank Chikane, then general secretary of the South African Council of Churches - from a country where the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the African National Congress was also experiencing an epochal shift - described the changes in Europe as an opportunity to leave behind old models based on capitalism and communism and to replace them with new models "aimed at moving towards the Kingdom of God". However, he warned also that if the "First and Second World come together on the basis of the old system ... the remaining two-thirds of the world will be in trouble".

At the same time, the voices of Christians from the two German states (and especially the GDR), who had in many ways provided the motor for the conciliar process, were muted in Seoul. The specific conditions within the GDR which had given such force to the conciliar process disappeared with the autumn revolution. The conciliar process, whose origins lay in an initiative at a time of heightened East-West tension, was being overshadowed by the process of German unification. By the time the world convocation took place in Seoul, immediately before the GDR's free elections of March 1990, the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the accelerating process towards German unification had fundamentally shifted the terms of the debate.

In a recent paper, Falcke noted how East Germans themselves had little time after the opening of the Berlin wall on 9 November 1989 to reflect on the significance of the epoch-changing events. Instead, they were fully consumed by the "breathtaking processes" in their own country that led to the unification of Germany, 11 months later, in October 1990.

Falcke said that travelling to Seoul for the World Convocation had allowed him to gain a different perspective:

While I was there. I was often greeted with the joyful words, "The wall has been broken down!", but was made to feel very clear just how this process was seen from the perspective of other problems in the world and especially about the hopes and fears in Central America and Asia about the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War.

[The photo shows the closing worship at the Seoul convocation. Souce: http://www.wcc-coe.org/wcc/what/jpc/hist-e.html]

Peace prayers still needed in Dresden

2010-02-13T08:44:00.003+01:00

Today marks the 65th anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden in the closing months of the Second World War. In the years that followed Dresden became a symbol of the horrors of war, but also a sign of reconciliation through its links with Coventry in Britain. In the 1980s in the GDR, the anniversary of the fire bombings became a focus for independent peace activists, with a tradition of peace prayers that began, at the time of the Swords into Ploughshares patch and the call for a civilian alternative to military service. In 1982, a group of peace activists called for a silent march through Dresden to mark the anniversary. Fearing trouble with the authorities, the Protestant church organized a peace forum at the Kreuzkirche, a once barock decorated church that was rebuilt after 1945 with no attempt to hide the scars of the bombing. More than 5000 people packed the church for the forum of and then walked to the ruins of the Frauenkirche to place burning candles amid the rubble of the destoryed church. In the years that followed, 13 February became a fixed date for peace prayers. In 1984, while a student in Berlin I attended the peace prayers which were addressed by Colin Semper, the then provost of Coventry Cathedral. Two years later, the anniversary of the fire bombing was the occasion for the Dresden ecumenical groups, the Stadtökumenekreis, to launch the idea of an Ecumenical Assembly for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation. The first session of the assembly took place in Dresden to coincide with the anniversary at which more than 10000 submissions were received from throughout the GDR on issues of justice, peace and creation. The assembly culminated in April 1988 in Dresden with a series of 12 texts calling for changes in the GDR and at the global level.

In recent years, however, the 13 February anniversary in Dresden has become known for other - and less happy - reasons through Neo Nazi demonstrations. East German bishops have called for people to join peace prayers and a human chain in Dresden to counter right-wing extremism. Yesterday a German-wide association "Church for democracy and against rightwing extremism" was founded stating that "racist, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic standpoints are not reconciliable with Christian faith".

Normal service will soon be resumed

2010-02-12T14:44:00.001+01:00

Holy Disorder has had an enforced break for a few weeks but normal service should soon be resumed.

1989 - Global Stories

2010-01-18T14:20:00.004+01:00

1989 - Global stories is the title of a publication linked to a series of events in Berlin's House of the Cultures of the World to mark 1989, that tried to see that year as one of global significance beyond Germany and Europe:

1989 was a key year in the history of the 20th Century. Not only did the fall of the Berlin Wall became a turning point with global consequences - on all continents there were unpredictable upheavals whose effects reverberate to this day. Two decades later the House of World Cultures, founded in March 1989, is pointing to the global significance of these events and developments. The massacre at Tianan'men Square in China, the death of Khomeini in Iran, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan and its repercussions across Central Asia, the end of the dictators and the enforcement of neoliberalism in Latin America, the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola the independence of Namibia and the end of apartheid in South Africa ... all these are events of 1989. The focus is also the consequence are of the end of the Wall for migrants and their children in East or West Germany. With six studies the house of cultures turns the attention from the centre of Europe and traces the linkages of events beyond national borders. The program invites you to hear the stories of 1989 in many different voices of those whose lives are inextricably linked to them: actors, dissidents, artists, writers, scientists.

There is a review (in German) here:

... historians may profit from the contributions that offer the first sketches of a global history of "1989" and after, and that are worth following up with academic research: globalization as the thrust of the early 1990s, the tension between a perceived triumphant American Modern and alternative perspectives for the future, the fundamental change in the regional and global migration flows, the emergence and problems of a global civil society, operating with Western normative concepts, the events of 1989 as moments that provided a sense of global community. More broadly, these are issues of global nature and global imagination in dynamic media systems. Taken together, the contributions create a catalog of several research desiderata that merit in-depth historical research.

On a similar note, Zed Books has its "Global history of the present" - a series of books dealing with 1989 and its consequences in various national and regional contexts:

In 1989, the United States declared victory in the Cold War and some commentators even predicted the ‘end of history’ as the world rushed to embrace American ideas and institutions. But in 2001, the September 11th attacks prompted American policymakers to embrace a rhetoric of global confrontation which seemed eerily reminiscent of the Cold War. Once again, a monolithic and evil force challenged freedom across the globe; and Americans had to confront ‘terror’ with all the resolve and resources they had previously directly against Communism. How did we move so suddenly from one global war to another? Does this essentially American view of the world cohere with the experience of countries beyond the United States?

In the Global History of the Present series, twelve historians respond to these questions by presenting the stories of a dozen countries or regions since 1989. These books explain how diverse nations have responded to the sweeping changes of the past two decades - including the fall of Soviet communism, the opportunities and pitfalls of globalization, and the ‘war on terror’. But the series also reveals the struggles and values that matter to ordinary people throughout the world, and suggests alternative ways of thinking about world history and the challenges of the present.

Which way for the church in one Germany?

2010-01-17T18:47:00.006+01:00

From 15 to 17 January, representatives of the (West German) Evangelical Church in Germany and the Federation of Evangelical Churches (BEK) in the GDR met at the Evangelical Academy ostensibly for a long-planned event to mark 20 years of the "special fellowship" between the Protestant churches in East and West. What had been intended as an opportunity to look back and forward since the founding of the BEK ended up taking place in the middle of the turbulance of the peaceful revolution and the aftermath of the opening of the borders on 9 November. On 17 January, the meeting published what became known as the Loccum Declaration - this called for convergence between the two German states within the context of an all-European process, and taking seriously the concerns of European neighbours. But it also stated that whatever the political developments in Europe those in Loccum wanted to give "the special fellowship of the whole of Evangelical Christendom in Germany an organizationally appropriate expression in one church". Ideas that this might mean the creation of a new organizational structure for German Protestantism proved as illusory as the suggestion that German unification would be achieved through the negotiation, by the two German states, of a new constitution for the unified Germany.

Coming when it did, this call was understood as an impulse towards German unity (and provoked overwhelmingly negative reactions from within the Federation of Protestant Churches). As a reaction to the Loccum Declaration, four of those most active within the Conciliar Process (Konrad Raiser and Ulrich Duchrow from the West, and Heino Falcke and Joachim Garstecki from the East) published in February a counter-statement entitled the "Berlin Declaration" strongly critical of the Loccum declaration and of attempts to promote the rapid unification of Germany, in which they explicitly invoked the conciliar process to plead for an alternative to both capitalism and state socialism:

We must resist the misleading alternative of either capitalism or socialism that increasingly dominates the German-German talks. In the conciliar process for Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation has become obvious that both systems are not in the position to provide answers to the question of the survival of humanity and the earth. The churches have the biblical mandate to be advocates of human beings and fellow creatures that have been sacrificed. The prising open of the encrusted German situation offers our churches and our societies the opportunity for a common "Umkehr" - repentance and renewal.

20 years since the end of the Stasi

2010-01-15T08:00:00.003+01:00

Twenty years ago today the power of the Stasi in East Germany finally came to an end when its headquarters in Berlin were stormed and occupied by demonstrators - even as the ruling SED was disintegrating the Stasi had been renamed the Office for National Security (AfNS). At the end of 1989 the GDR government under pressure from the Round Table agreed to dissolve the AfNS, but then proposed two new bodies an office for the protection of the constitution, and a foreign intelligence service, but on 13 January the Round Table rejected also these proposals. Meanwhile there was concern that the Stasi officers were continuing to destroy the records and files of their activities. On 15 January a large crowd gathered outside the Stasi headquarters in Berlin-Lichtenberg and then stormed the building. There is an article (in German) on the evangelisch.de Web site about this. Much remains unclear about the events of that day, did the demonstrators include agents provocateurs, or Stasi personnel seeking to use the confusion to carry on their work of destruction, or even foreign intelligence agents seeking to grab the Stasi files for themselves? The occupation of the headquarters however marked the end of the Stasi as an institution, a process that began when its distruct headquarters in Erfurt were occupied in December. There now began a slow process of literally piecing together the files and documents that remained, and a political debate on what to do with the files. It was the first freely elected GDR parliament that agreed that the archives should be preserved and made available under certain conditions to victims of Stasi actions but also to researchers. So began a debate as to whether they should not be better kept under lock and key. Those in favour of access argued that only by having access to teh files would it be possible to deal openly and come to terms with the past. Martin Sabrow of the Institute for Contemporary History in Potsdam (now a professor at the Humboldt University), has written about the debate here.

Now off to Poland ...

2010-01-10T23:00:00.003+01:00

Jane's diary, 10 January 1990, Wroclaw, Poland
We Wittenberg students have travalled to Poland. Stephan Bickhardt organized the trip. It's his last week with the group, he will soon start work as the general secretary of Demokratie Jetzt (Democracy Now). It's my first visit to Poland, my grandmother was born in this city, when it was still the German city of Breslau. We are being hosted by the Catholic Intelligentsia Club (KIK). We have speant a lot of time talking with them and Solidarnosc about economic issues, but also increasing xenophobia between Germans and Poles. Our discussions have sometimes been very painful, and I realise just how I am affected when there are antisemitic remarks about Jews. But we have also experienced a wonderful and warm welcome. Today we went to Kreisau/Krzyżowa, known for the Kreisau Circle, the name the Gestapo gave to a group of dissidents around Helmuth Graf von Moltke who gathered in his estate at Kreisau. The KIK in Wroclaw is supporting attempts to make the estate a place for intercultural and international exchange and dialogue. As we are going there, I noticed just how poor the people on the land seem to be. The countryside and the mountains are wonderful but where we walked the little stream was a strange dark blue coulour and it smelled of chemicals. Yes, said the priest, today the nearby factory is dying jeans. We also met a wonderful Catholic priest who had a picture of Pope John XXIII in his office. Why John XXIII and not Pope John Paul II, we asked. He said, the church belongs to JohnPaul, but in his office he can chose the pope he wants!

A cycle ride along the Iron Curtain

2010-01-07T21:47:00.003+01:00

Paul Kaye (aka Curtainrider) has a blog here about his cycle ride along the path of the old Iron Curtain, starting in Lübeck on the Baltic Sea, to Trieste on the Adriatic. My more modest aim in 2009 had been to walk around the whole of the Berlin Wall from Staaken in the West to the Brandenburg Gate in the East and back to Staaken - starting on 13 August. Unfortunately other commitments stopped that happening, so perhaps I will have to wait until 2011 and the 50th anniversary of the Wall being built - I am therefore even more impressed at Paul's achievement. The BBC Web site had a photo gallery, there's also a Facebook page, and a book of the trip. Here's what the blurb says:

For forty years Europe was divided into two opposing ideological blocks, participants in a global Cold War between communist East and capitalist West. Where these political enemies met, the eastern regimes built an elaborate Iron Curtain, outwardly aimed at protecting themselves from western invasion but in reality to keep their dissatisfied populations captive. Twenty years after revolution removed the communist rulers, what remains of the barriers they erected along Europe’s political faultline? Journalist and photographer Paul Kaye cycled 3,600 kilometres along the route of the Iron Curtain, from the Baltic to the Adriatic and around Berlin, to record the physical remnants of the divide and the thoughts of those that lived along it.

Looking to a New Year

2010-01-07T08:29:00.003+01:00

For the GDR, 1990 began as though the country had a massive collective hangover after the events of the previous autumn. Looking back three months it seemed scarcely possible to assimilate the changes that had taken place. On 1 October, Honecker was still in power preparing for GDR anniversary celebrations to reinforce the message that policies would not change. The GDR had been leaking people to the West via Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and citizens were beginning to take to the streets not knowing whether the state's rulers would react with the Chinese solution. From there event followed event, each one more unimaginable and seemingly far fetched than the other. The amazement at the opening of the borders on 9 November. (BBC journalist Kurt Barling's account of being dispatched to Berlin the day after to film a documentary on the role of the Protestant church captures something of the crazy, almost dreamlike state in which not only the GDR but seasoned journalists in a berlin hotel bar found themselves, Charles Wheeler, Brian Hanrahan, Olenka Frenkiel among them exchanging stories of the bizarre things that had happened over the previous 48 hours.) The legalisation of new political parties was followed by the Round Table discussions to prepare the transition and free elections. Jane's diary from autumn 1989 has captured something of that topsy-turvy world that moved from fear to hope and back again - and in reverse.

The mood in January had changed, now it was a question of looking to the future and trying to make sense of what would happen next: would the old SED be able to reinvent itself and put itself at the vanguard of changes? Though in many districts the Stasi headquarters had been occupied, in Berlin the agency under the new name of the Office for National Security was continuing its work? What role would West Germany play? And what perspective would there be for convergence and eventual unity between the two German states? Would the GDR suffer an economic collapse, spurring even more people to cross the now open border to the West? Who would assume responsibility and how .... And what about Eastern Europe? From Warsaw and Berlin to Prague and Budapest, Bucharest and even Sofia, the eastern part of the continent had been reshaped. Was this an opportunity to find a new world order bringing in the Soviet Union, or would Moscow find pushed to the edge as the eastern part of the continent "came home" to Europe?

The first three months of 1990 were to prove decisive for the shaping of Europe and the new world order, and in this decisions taken in the GDR would play a key role.

Is justice only for those who deserve mercy?

2009-12-26T15:04:00.005+01:00

One of the strongest images I remember from the revolutions that swept Eastern Europe 20 years ago was the television pictures of the bloodstained bodies of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife Elena after they were gunned down following a so-called trial in which they were sentenced to death. They were told they had 12 days to appeal but that the sentence would be carried out immediately. Of course they themsleves were responsible one way or another for the deaths of countless Romanians, but is this a reason for such a process devoid of humanity or justice? It was certainly a jolt back to reality after the dreams of the peaceful revoution in East Germany and the velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia.

Over on the BBC Web site, Nick Thorpe, a long-standing Budapest-based eastern Europe watcher has an interview with General Victor Stanculescu who says the executions were both "just and necessary": "If we had left it to the people of Bucharest, they would have lynched them in the street." Still 20 years later much remains unexplained about the events in Romania, one of the indicators being that the general himself has recently begun a 15-year prison sentence for aggravated manslaughter - charges he has always denied - after being found guilty of ordering troops to open fire on the crowds in the western Romanian city of Timisoara earlier in December and which was one of the events that led to the revolution later that month.

The TimesOnline has an interview with one of the soldiers who carried out the killing of the Ceauşescus, but be warned, it makes for very grisly and unpleasant reading. The TimesOnline article also quotes the prosecutor against the Ceauşescus as saying: "I have been one of those who, as a lawyer, would have liked to oppose the death sentence, because it is inhuman. But we are not talking about people."

Towards post-Cold War Europe

2009-12-19T06:17:00.002+01:00

On 19 and 20 December 1989, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl visited Dresden in East Germany, where he was greeted by tens of thousands of East Germans, chanting "Helmut, Helmut". Three weeks before, on 28 November in a speech to the Bundestag, Kohl had proposed what was billed as a "ten-point plan to German unity". Looking at the text, however, unification itself was less the driving force than an ultimate aspiration, and the specific proposals for a "contractual community" between the two German states, its vision of a pan-European process, and placing the idea of confederation at the centre of the German unification discourse, in fact appeared to draw on ideas from Gorbachev and alternative security commissions (and evidence has emerged that like other developments from autumn 1989, the 10 point plan emerged as the result of a communication misunderstanding between Moscow and Bonn). Irrespective of what the fine print said, however, the 10 point plan was in fact widely perceived as Bonn placing unification on the political agenda.

On the other side of the damaged, but still existing Berlin Wall, an appeal published by intellectuals, artists and civic rights activists, "For our country", urged support for the continued independent existence of the GDR, as a "socialist alternative" to the Federal Republic. the appeal is reported to have been signed by more than a million GDR citizens. Though initiated by civic rights activists, the propagating of the appeal by Egon Krenz and the SED fatallytaintedthe document, while by the beginning of December, the document's moral appeal for alternative ethical values based on the GDR was fatally undermined by the revelations at the beginning of December not only of widespread corruption but even more so by an apparently secret arms trade.

Kohl's visit to Dresden in December marked a turning point. The reason for the hastily arranged visit appears to have had less to do with solidarity with East Germans than the fact that French President Francois Mitterrand had announced a state visit to the GDR for 20 December (the first state visit by one of the three Western powers responsible for Germany). Kohl avoided East Berlin for protocol reasons, instead visiting GDR Prime Minister Hans Modrow's power base of Dresden. For Kohl, his reception in Dresden appears to have convinced him to dump his step-by-step ten-point-plan and instead increase the pressure for unification.

For its part, Mitterrand's state visit to the GDR has often been interpreted as an attempt to block unification by shoring up the GDR, but it's real purpose seems to have been more to try and influence the shape that German unity would take, while also serving as a reminder that the two German states were not sovereign in this regard. Taken together the visits of Kohl and Mitterrand also marked the turning point: no longer were they mere observers of what was happening in the GDR, but the time had come for the autumn revolution of the GDR to be subsumed into a wider struggle for the future of post-Cold War Europe.

Coming home ...

2009-12-17T10:05:00.001+01:00

Jane's diary, 17 December 1989, dateline Brussels
The train was late leaving Cologne and arriving in Brussels, but Steve was there, we went back to his flat in St Josse, drank Champagne and went to bed. In the morning we woke up to hear that Andrei Sakharov had died, suddenly. Amazingly, things seem to be starting in Romania but what will happen ... unbelievable to think that a change might take place there too.

In the evening we went to the Brussels Labour Party Christmas Party, very yummy food, and "terribly" nice and civilised. Full of journalists. It was strange to step back into middle-class British (Euro) culture. Steve in his Guardian sweatshirt was not dressed for the occasion, but it was fun. Then I gave him my diary to read and we stayed up talking about all that had happened in the GDR over the last three months while I was there.

And finally the next day ... he baked me pizza, as I knew he would, it was good and very much a coming home feel. We sat and chatted to his landlord, Jean Pierre and his partner Brigitte. It was hard to speak French, very hard work for me. After three months caught up in a whirl of change, it is strange to think that being here in Brussels is a reality as well.

The End of Holy Disorder?

2009-12-16T22:00:00.003+01:00

The Evangelical Church in Central Germany has officially closed its 20th anniverary year Holy Disorder to mark the peaceful revolution of 1989, with the statement below. But this blog will continue:

The Protestant Church in East Germany still has a reason to be grateful for the peaceful revolution of autumn 1989 in the GDR. It is a sign of the workings of God's Spirit and about which we were surprised - surpassing all human reason and probability.

In the autumn of 1989 people were drawn from the churches into the streets and squares. The prayers for peace contributed to make the revolution non-violent. Many people - Christians and non-Christians - saw a church that was alive. It created an open space. People were able to speak up and demand changes for their country.

In many congregations and grassroots groups and individual Christians were engaged in the decade before the revolution and in the autumn of 1989 encouraged and organized prayers for peace. They stood up in an ecumenical community for justice, peace and the integrity of creation. They had to be prepared to be persecuted by the state,and many were persecuted. However, many did not allow themselves to be intimidated and deliberately violated state regulations. They drew attention to the dictatorial conditions.

The Protestant Church in Central Germany praises the brave and consistent action by people in parishes and grassroots groups. This commitment invigorated both society and the church.

This remembrance and gratitude means that we in our Protestant Church also critically reflect on our own role.

On several occasions grassroots groups in the church has to confront church leaders. We recognise today that they were not always considered as a natural part of our church. At the same time we thank those in the church who supported these groups. The arguments about openness and political interference of the church repeatedly helped to determine the relationship of the church to the GDR state.

In the Protestant church, in the synod, the ecumenical assemblies and grassroots groups, people realised that they were citizens. They lived out democracy. After autumn 1989, these experiences helped develop a democratic culture in state and society.

We encourage all Christians and citizens even today to work for justice, peace and integrity of creation. The issues of life and survival today require a bold and consistent commitment. The experiences from autumn 1989 help this.

We need to continue our critical reflection about autumn 1989 and the two decades that follows even after the anniversary year and the campaign 1989-2009 Holy Disorder. Before us is the path of our church in the conciliar process. We see many people inside and outside our church with unresolved frustrations and unanswered expectations. We hope that we can make a contribution that can lead to an open and healing discussion. From this can grown an encouragement to our commitment now.

Helplessness and resignation?

2009-12-14T09:23:00.002+01:00

Jane's diary, 14 December 1989, written in the train from Cologne to Brussels

What a crazy few days, writing Christmas post, washing, buying, packing ... 10 December was international human rights day, Friedrich Schorlemmer received the Ossietzky prize on behalf of Demokratischer Aufbruch. In Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party is now in a minority in the new government, Husak's final act as president was to swear in the new ministers, some who have been in jail until as little as a fortnight ago. Change seems even faster there than here in the GDR. Dubcek or Havel for president? All the shops were open in Wittenberg this afternoon, a Sunday, the 2nd advent, a cold clear day with yellow winter sunshine and a Father Christmas being driven in a horse and trap along the main street throwing out sweets to children.

I was full of cold for my last few days in Wittenberg. On the Sunday I made it to church. The church was cold and the sermon somehow missed the mark but the BBC Radio 4 service was coming from the United States and I was back in time to hear Barbara Harris finishing her sermon and then celebrating the Eucharist, the first woman to be elected a bishop in the US Epsicopal Church. That was special.

I got an exit visa in Wittenberg but when I got to the border in Berlin the border guards couldn't tell me whether or not my new entry visa was there. I crossed into the West with two of the other students who like me were in Berlin for a meeting with students from our sister seminary from West Germany, Soest. The other two went off to get their church Begrüssungsgeld from West Berlin (hard currencyto which otherwise East Germans had no legal access). The people there wanted to give me some too - quite seriously. Very odd!!! Then we set off on the 54 Bus for Spandau, which I knew very well from the gap year that I had spent working in a church-run children's home at the Johannesstift there. It was strange seeing the Christmas market in Spandau gain, just as it had been eight years ago, and the kitsch almost worse then the stuff in Wittenberg. Then out to an evening with the Soest lot at a Pizzeria at Savignyplatz in West Berlin where red wine was consumed. I stayed over in West Berlin.

The next morning back to the border, where, amazingly a visa was waiting for me - and free of charge!! But the Polish visa office in East Berlin was closed - I needed to a get Polish visa for a trip our group was to make to Poland in the New Year. Then to the church headquarters in Augustrasse still a little worse for wear from the night before. I managed to make it back to the Soest meeting at the Auferstehungsgemeinde. I found myself in one group suddenly feeling like an easterner in a strange sort of way, chafing against the wishy-washy western liberalism. The crux of the question is not whether the we feel the "experiment" of socialism in the GDR should go on, but what are we willing to give up, we privileged Westerners and the answer is, "not a lot".

Earlier in the day at the foreigner's registration office at the police in East Berlin, I interpreted for a very sweet but rather clueless Australian who kept trying to pay in the wrong currency. This then led the overworked woman behind the counter to extend my residence permit until June 1989 - in my hungover state I didn't notice, but later in the evening the border guards didn't seem to mind too much, "just make sure that you get round to registering properly"!

Berlin was so wet and disgusting that I simply wanted out and away. On the train I thought back again to the German question, our sense of helplessness and resignation, no new ideas in the face of its inevitability and the lure of the Deutschmark. Whatever happened to "We're staying here!" On the train the guard noticed my ticket had been bought in GDR Marks in East Berlin and didn't ask me to pay the supplement for the InterCity train, it's strange being a token GDR citizen.

Ten years before the changes ..

2009-12-12T07:32:00.003+01:00

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the decision at the NATO meeting at which the western Alliance agreed its "dual track decision" which threatened the deployment of additional nuclear arms from 1983 onwards in the event that the stationing of SS-20 missiles had not stopped by that time. This was both a symptom and a cause of the tension between East and West. In the GDR this was reflected in the militarisation of education and that would find another episode later in December 1979 with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to prop up an unpopular government having difficulties in stemming an insurgency. To mark the anniversary, a conference has been held in Rome on “The Euromissiles Crisis and the End of the Cold War". Among other things, the conference has attempted to:

explore the impact of the crisis on the evolution of the Cold War as a whole, and possibly on its winding down. Did the deployment of the missiles, as the so-called Reagan victory school has been arguing, really contribute to the Soviet strategic defeat and to the Western “victory”, thanks to its superior economic, political, and strategic cohesion? Did it facilitate the emergence of those factors which would help overcome the East-West division throughout all European societies, by promoting a new level of civic awareness, raising a new consciousness across Europe of the dangers of the Cold War, and indirectly linking for the first time Western peace activists with Eastern dissent? Or did it actually prolong the Cold War, as some other historians have argued, by forcing upon an already dying bipolar international system a new round of rearmament and military expenditures that actually helped –at least for a few years– the survival of the Soviet system by offering the Soviet leaders a pretext to mobilize its last resources and call its public opinion to arms to defend the motherland against this renewed imperialist challenge?

In other words, the Euromissiles crisis has to be seen in the wider context of the militarisation of East-West relations that followed the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. In the German Democratic Republic, this was reflected in an increasing internal militarisation of society through which the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) sought to reinforce control over public life, witnessed for example in the 1978 decision on pre-military education in schools. At the same time, the SED used the discourse of peace (understood as opposition to Western military policies such as the US plans for a Neutron Bomb) as an ideological justification for such internal militarisation.

The effect of the twin-track decision of December 1979 could be seen, at one level, as creating a new justification for this dialectic of peace rhetoric and internal militarisation. Equally, if not more important, however, was that the decision spawned a new type of transnational social protest. This helped to promote a collective movement identity both ‘temporally’, by allowing individual protest events to be perceived as components of a longer lasting action, and ‘transversally’, by helping those who were engaged to feel linked ‘by ties of solidarity and ideal communion with protagonists of other analogous mobilisations’ (Della Porta/Diani 1999: 8). This transnational social protest transcended narrowly political opposition to previous political campaigns for disarmament, reaching out to previously unmobilised sectors of society.

In the GDR, opposition to the internal militarisation of society had come not least from within churches, and not least because of the existence of a cadre of Protestant pastors with a strong anti-militarist attitude due to their personal refusal to carry arms in the National People's Army. The transnational social protest movement created by the 1979 "twin track" decision offered a wider framework within which campaigns against militarisation of GDR society could be placed, and for more thoroughgoing political demands. At the same time, this mobilisation represented an ideological challenge to the SED's use of the discourse of peace, and created a basis for links between opposition to militarisation and other forms of dissent. An important factor in this development of political dissent was the attempt by activists in the GDR to build links with movements in other European countries, both to the West, as with the "personal peace treaties" between GDR and Dutch peace activists, and to the East, as in the contacts between GDR peace activists and political dissent in Czechoslovakia.

Far from the 1987 Treaty of Washington marking an end in the GDR of the political crisis unleashed by the twin-track decision, the period from January 1988 to October 1989 was marked by a new stage in political mobilisation in the GDR and attempts by the SED not seen in previous years to suppress such dissent. This culminated in the 1989 "peaceful revolution" which drew both on the protest repertoires developed in opposition to the militarisation f society and the political demands that grew out of the transnational social protest movement unleashed by the Euromissiles decision.

Reference: Della Porta, D. and M. Diani 1999, Social Movements, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford.

A new broom for Gregor Gysi ...

2009-12-11T07:51:00.004+01:00

This is the front page from 11 December 1989 of Neues Deutschland - the central organ of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) - except that the special party congress has just decided that the party should not be called the SED any more. The new broom is for the newly-elected party chair Gregor Gysi to clean up what the newspaper calls the party's "Stalinist ideas and structures". The front page articles summarises Gregor Gysi, lawyer and son of the former GDR state secretary for church affairs - as appealing for hard work to save "our country and our party". The special congress was called as the collapse of the GDR continued amid ever new revelations of corruption. Gysi was elected by 95.32 percent of votes from delegates (a pretty respectable score for a "post-Stalinist" politician) who then continued to debate whether the as yet-without-a-name party should continue to exist or be dissolved. ND reports:

Opposing resolutions proposing the continuance or the dissolution of the party led to the debates being suspended, meetings of the district delegations and the acting presidium, and then to the next session of the party congress being beld in closed session. In this fateful hour Hans Modrow [the GDR prime minister] appeals for the parts'y capacity to act to be maintained. Then - according to delegates - there were several votes ... The "Report about the discussion on the first days of the extraordinary party congress" was presented on behalf of the drafting committee by Lothar Bisky. In this document to be presented for discussion at the basis of the party, delegates stated it is their duty "in the name of the party to apologise profoundly to the people that the former leadership of the SED has brough out country to this crisis that threatens its very existence".

The party congress was adjourned for a week to meet again in Berlin. But today's Die Linke party is a direct descendant of that fateful decision in Berlin. Today Gregor Gysi is the chairperson of the parliamentary group of Die Linke, and Lothar Bisky is chairperson of the party.

Watergate in the GDR ...

2009-12-09T10:41:00.002+01:00

Jane's diary, dateline Wittenberg, 9 December 1989
So much is happening, it's almost impossible to keep up. Honecker's under arrest, among many others. Krenz has gone - it was very obvious in Modrow's visit to Moscow and Gorbi - "oh yes, I almost forgot, I've brought the head of state with me". Stasi buildings all over the GDR are being stormed, most things seem to have been burned, shredded or otherwise disposed of.

Schorlemmer was heckled for the first time at the prayers for renewal, speaking on the theme of the "Vaterland". In front of the masses it's almost impossible to speak of Zweistaatlichkeit, a two-state-solution. Friedrich ended with the Olof Palme idea of a demilitarised independent Germany. Unity not reunification. The consensus now seems to be that reunification will come, the major problem being the timetable.

The SED extraordinary general party congress has decided to change the party's name and have elected Gregor Gysi as leader. No new name as yet, just not the old one. From 1 January, visa regulations and exchange regulations for West Germans and West Berliners are to be lifted - some are pushing for this to come into force from 23 December in time for Christmas.

More and more corruption is coming to light. Schalk-Golodkowsi has given himself up in West Berlin. His lawyer Vogel has also been arrested but (I think) set free. Some seem to think he knows far too much to be prosecuted - he could cause other heads to roll and not just on this side of the border. It's like living through a much more lively version of Watergate.

The round table that was square ...

2009-12-07T08:37:00.000+01:00

On 7 December representatives of the new citizens' movements and political parties - and the SED, the former block parties, and societal organizations converged on the Dietrich Bonhoeffer House for the first meeting of the GDR Round Table. An example of the implosion faced by the GDR was the resignation the previous day of Egon Krenz as chairperson of the Council of State of the GDR.

In the meditation room of the Moravian community in Berlin, the representatives of the new and of the old political forces gathered around a set of square tables for a meeting being convened by representatives of the Federation of Protestant Churches, the Roman Catholic Church and the Council of Christian Churches (AGCK) - the impetus for such a round table however had come from the citizens' movements, especially from Demokratie Jetzt, which had maintained strong contacts to Poland and had observed how the Round Rable there had led to the first semi-free elections. The first meeting of the GDR Round Table called for new elections, a new constitution and the disbandment of the Ministry of State Security - the Stasi - renamed "Amt für Nationale Sicherheit" (or "Office for National Security"). Civic Rights activist Konrad Weiss notes:

The idea for a round table came from the citizens' movement Democracy Now some of whose founders had long-standing contact with the Polish Solidarity. Ludwig Mehlhorn and Stefan Bickhardt knew of their concept of the round table and analysed it. Their proposal, to attempt something similar in the GDR, was picked up and accepted by Democracy Now and soon after by the other citizens' movements. The SED, that in the face of mass demonstrations and the increasing self-assurance of the East Germans had to accept that its power was waning, also accepted the proposal and was read to talk. Neues Deutschland tried to suggest to its readers that the "leading" party until then had also proposed the Round Table. But no one believed the "Central Organ" any more.

When the Round Table met for the first time, despite the polite tone, it was basically bitter political rivals that were sitting opposite each other. On the one side, the comrades from the SED and from the allied block parties and organizations, which were increasingly seeking to distance themselves from the "leading" force. On the other side sat the civil rights activists and dissidents, and the newly formed Social Democratic Party. The round table was moderated by representatives of the churches. The motives why people took part may have been very different. But we were all united in wanting to avoid the process of change leading to bloodshed.

Alongside the Central Round Table there were round tables set up at local and district level, often playing an important role in the transfer of power. The Central Round Table played a central role in preparing for the first democratic elections, that took place in March 1990, and in pressing for the dismantling of the Stasi. The idea of drawing up a new constitution for adoption by the GDR got overtaken by the moves after the March election for the rapid incorporation of the GDR into the Federal Republic. Nevertheless, the construction of the Round Table meant that the new political forces were not negotiating directly with the government or the parliament, but only indirectly. Weiss notes:

Our willingness to engage in dialogue - probably the most used and abused slogan of those days - led also to a number of serious mistakes ... Our all-important power, non-violence, was also our weakness. While we were at the round table struggling for reforms and the democratization of the GDR, the cadres with long experience out of site built up their new organizations, channeled money into safe places and formed enterprises with other comrades that now feeds their war chest. Particularly sensitive areas, such as the media were simply infiltrated. While we built up our organizations and our parties at the kitchen table, sometimes without a single phone, the PDS had all the access they needed to lines and computers. Many problems with which we wrestle in the reunified Germany, result from our former timidity.

Nevertheless, the Round Table in Berlin and the many other round tables throughout the GDR achieved much:

They were genuine schools of democracy, as has often been said. People who until then had been told they should not express themselves and who had been punished for any democratic initiative, now took over responsibility and made suggestions for numerous ideas and proposals. For three monnths, the Round Table was both legislature and executive. It prepared many things that were then implemented as laws by the freely-elected Volkskammer. For example, in an amazingly short period of time a media law and an environmental protection law were drawn up. That was only possible because in the previous years opposition groups in the underground had envisioned and discussed many of these things.

The German Broadcasting Archive has an extract from the press conference after the forst meeting of the Round Table. More here from the House of German History.

[Photo from http://www.jugendopposition.de/index.php?id=215]

Dismantling the Stasi ...

2009-12-04T10:55:00.005+01:00

Today marks the 20th anniversary in Erfurt of the first occupation of a regional Stasi headquarters in the GDR. To mark the anniversary there is a time of remembrance at the former headquarters, a commemoration in the regional parliament, an academic symposium and a service of worship, under the theme, " ... and the truth shall set you free".

In his new book, Wo bleibt die Freiheit, Heino Falcke, then the Protestant dean of Erfirt, remembers the events of that day:

My wife belonged to the group, "Women for Change". The chair of the group, a doctor, phoned us on the morning of the 4 December, "There are containers being driven away from the Stasi on the Andreasstrasse and the chimney is pumping out black smoke. They are getting rid of the files. Get together who you can and block the gates." We phoned around and drove with our Wartburg to the Stasi. I blocked the entrance with the car and my wife went to the main door, where a number of women had already gathered. The group that quickly got bigger decided they should stop each of the cars. My wife, who had quickly been elected to be the spokesperson, managed to push her way through to the head of the Stasi, Major Josef Schwarz. She demanded that he end the destruction of the files. Meanwhile more and more people were pushing their way into the Stasi offices. The major demanded that my wife put a stop to this so that his people could carry on with their work. "But that's exactly what we want to stop," she replied. In the meantime the chair of the group, who had phoned us in the morning, arrived with three military attorneys , occupied the building under their supervision, and sealed the archives. This was the first occupation of a Stasi HQ and the risks were difficult to calculate ...

I had in the meantime gone to a meeting, from which I thought that I should on no account be absent. Soon after our arrival at the Stasi offices a big truck from the city council had driven past, and the driver had asked me what we were doing. When I told him he said, "Move your car away, I can block the gates better than you." I walked over to my wife and asked her if she thought she would be alright. She said of course, so I drove on to my meeting. She was right, but I still shake my head when I think about what I did. This episode casts a light on the character of the revolution. One of the protagonists described it as a "revolution in free time" or a "after-work revolution", because business just carried on as usual.

Things keep moving on ...

2009-12-03T08:43:00.000+01:00

Jane's diary, Wittenberg, 3 December 1989
Last night we "celebrated" Advent. Suddenly Christmas is around the corner. The candlelit living room and appalling singing, and then a reading of Schleiermacher's Weihnachtsgeschichte. All rather German.
Meanwhile things are moving on apapce. Mittag, Tisch and Müller (from Erfurt) have all been arrested. The central committee and the Politbüro have both resigned - Krenz is still Staatschef but everyone is waiting for him to be toppled, arrested or something. Let's hope Hans Modrow can continue to walk home each night and carry some kind of trust with him. Honecker, Tisch, Mielke et al have all been expelled from the SED. Meanwhile Schalck-Golodkowski has disappeaed to another country (unknown) and let this be known via his lawyer Wolfgang Vogel.
All kinds of shady and immoral deals are coming to light - an arms cache has been found near Rostock, deals with South America and no doubt all kinds of currency scandals. It's incredible. In Czechoslovakia the Kampfgruppen - the worker's "defence" units - have been dissolved.

The father of the Ampelmann dies ...

2009-12-02T22:05:00.006+01:00

News reached Dr B today of the death of Karl Peglau, the designer of the East German red and green traffic light people, which have now become a symbol of united Berlin. Here's the story:

Peglau was asked by an East Berlin traffic commission to come up with a new concept for traffic lights in an effort to stem the growing number of accidents on the city's streets ... Peglau believed that traffic could be better managed if pedestrian and vehicle traffic were controlled by different signals, and set about creating the little human stop and go figures now known as the Ampelmännchen. Although they did not receive much attention at the time, the figures became cult objects over the years, primarily for their cuteness. Their friendly quality was no accident; Peglau gave them a stocky build, button noses, perky hats, and jaunty poses so that they would radiate what Peglau called "an aura of cosiness and human warmth" that would resonate emotionally with pedestrians. Peglau's design also took practical considerations into account. The sturdy figures' large surface area made them easily discernible in low visibility conditions, and the red Ampelmännchen's outstretched arms resemble a horizontal barricade while his green partner's wide stride suggests an arrow.

After unification, the continued existence of the Ampelmännchen was threatened by being replaced by the ubiquitous Euromann the new style trafiic light figure from the West:

As authorities began replacing defective East-Ampelmännchen, designer Markus Heckhausen began collecting the discarded glass signals and turning them into lamps, which became a hotly desired fashion accessory and garnered the movement to save the Ampelmännchen substantial media coverage.

In an essay in German Politics (3/1997) Mark Duckenfield and Noel Calhoun explore how the eastern Ampelmann came to be saved from being wound down like other east German relics. It was initially the CDU economics minister in Saxony who recommended the continued use of the eastern Ampelmann in 1995, as, "the use of these figures helps us maintain a Saxony identity". The factory that produced the traffic lights - in GDR times called VEB Signaltechnik - was also located in saxony as it happened. Saxony-Anhalt then followed suit as eventually did Berlin, despite inital resistance, following a campaign by the Committee to Save the Ampelmännchen, which as Duckenfield and Calhoun point out, was an unusual organization; "it is more of an advertising campaign than a political group". The Berlin traffic bureaucracy was initally puzzle by the end of the "one Berlin, one traffic light policy" - although this policy has since been reborn with the eastern Ampelmann becoming standard issue across the city, East and West. At the same time, the continued existence of the Ampelmann, accorring to the article's authors, also serves to act as a positive sign of integration of the east:

... entirely untainted by the negative aspects of GDR life[, d]esigned for children, the short and stocky Ampelmann evokes an uncontroverisal, apolitical affection. It is not associated with the erros, crimes and disasterous public policies of the GDR. [It] serves both as a pleasant reminder of a less complicated past and a symbol of resistance to mindless western standardisation.

Credits: photos from http://www.germany.info/Vertretung/usa/en/__PR/GIC/2009/12/01__Peglau__PM.html.
Mark Duckenfield and Noel Calhoun, 'Invasion of the Western Ampelmännchen', German Politics 6: 3, December 1997, pp.54-69. The full article can be found here in pdf format.

December is Advent ...

2009-12-02T08:39:00.003+01:00

Jane's diary, Wittenberg, 2 December 1989
What an amazing first day of Advent. The GDR sent official apologies to Czechoslovakia for the part it played in the 1968 invasion. The Volkskammer got rid of the article 1 of the constitution - no more "leading role" for the SED. Gorbachev went to the Vatican and had an audience with the Pope; and Wolf Biermann played his first concert in 13 years in the GDR- amazing!! He was utterly magice, had us in creases of laughter and then near to tears with his lyrics and talk.

Back to Reformation in Wittenberg ...

2009-11-30T08:10:00.001+01:00

October ended on this blog with the first extract from Jane's diary of Reformation and Revolution in Wittenberg on the anniversary of Martin Luther's posting of the 95 Theses. In the meantime the site of the New York Times is carrying an article - In Wittenberg, cries for new Reformation on date of old one - written from Wittenberg on 31 October 1989 by Serge Schmemann.

It was difficult to imagine what Martin Luther, lying in his tomb under the cold stone floor, might have thought of the throng that packed every medieval inch of the castle church on the anniversary of the day in 1517 when he tacked his 95 theses to the door and so began the Reformation.
That the church was packed on Reformation Day was actually something of a coincidence, although it was briefly noted by the pastor and some participants. It was also Tuesday evening, and for the last three weeks the people of Wittenberg have gathered in the castle church in rapidly growing numbers to take part in the new grass-roots movement for change.

More than 3,000 jammed into the church on this drizzly evening, and an equal number stood on the cobbled court outside to listen on loudspeakers to the demands, announcements and prayers that have become the daily fare of the latest Eastern European land swept up by the winds of change.

Schmemann has written his own book-length account of the collapse of communism here.

The quiet before the storm ?

2009-11-29T23:25:00.003+01:00

Jane's diary, Wittenberg, 29 November 1989
It is cold. Last night, the church was full for the prayers for renewal but not as full as we have become used to. Afterwards they went "on a walk" to the local headquarters of the Stasi, now renamed National Security or something. This morning Frau. B talked of ministers clearing their desks and whether they come across decisions they would rather un-take. Perhaps this pre-Christmas calm is just the stillness before the next round of wild events. Meanwhile things move on apace in Czechoslovakia - a petition is being planned here if the GDR government does send official apologies to the Czechs and the Slovaks for the happenings of 1968 ...

Meanwhile, of course the theory that there are only 25 people in the world rools on. Daniel Cattau, for whom I was interpreting a few days ago, and Stephen worked together on the press desk at the Lutheran World Federation assembly in Budapest in 1984.

Dealing with the past, looking to the future ...

2009-11-28T16:40:00.002+01:00

Twenty years ago today in Brussels I bought a copy of the Frankfurter Rundschau, and turning to the back of the first section found the whole page taken up with a paper by Heino Falcke. It was an address given by Falcke at the opening of the Friedensdekade in Erfurt in November 1989. It's difficult to explain now just how exciting it was to read the paper in which Falcke was already looking at how to deal with the past in order to reach the future. In the turbulent times since the previous month, Falcke's voice had not been heard outside the GDR. Here he returned to the themes of his 1972 address to the synod of the Protestant church federation - "Christ liberates - therefore the church for others" - but reinterprets and applies them to the new situation facing the GDR.

By the middle of November 1989 it was clear that the landscape in East Germany and indeed in eastern Europe as a whole was facing fundamental change. The first non-communist government had taken power in Poland, in Hungary the ruling Hungarian Social Workers Party was reinventing itself as being in the vanguard of change which had seen new political parties being founded, in Czechoslovakia the Communist Party had imploded, and in East Germany the opening of the borders was beginning to change the parameters of political debate. The new prime minister Hans Modrow spoke of forming a "contractual community" with the Federal Republic while the SED was still elaborating plans on how to regain the political initiative.

What is striking about Falcke's text from November 1989 - reprinted in his recent book "Wo bleibt die Freiheit?" (see picture) is how the starting point for his address is the insight of Latin American liberation theology:

In Latin American and South American Christianity the Bible has been re-discovered as the book of the liberation of the people through God. There, there is a theology of liberation. We need a theology of liberation for our situation, to tell is who Christ is actually is for us in today's struggle of our country for freedom.

Against this background, Falcke uses the central perspective of his 1972 address to elaborate the need for a new "socialism from below" and for "an alternative to capitalism that advocates more just structures in the world".

Falcke sketches out the alternative facing the GDR. On the one hand there is the SED's attempt to "preserve the status quo through reforms". On the one hand, the need for "reforms linked to a forward strategy" to deal with a fundamental conflict in society, the "birth defect" of socialism in the GDR, that it was implemented from above without support from society:

This birth defect led to the chronic distrust of the government towards the people, the spying by the Stasi, total control through the apparatus, political and ideological domination, the paralysis of free initiative and the suffocation of all spontaneity [...]. The forward strategy draws from this analysis support the conclusion that the birth defect of socialism can be resolved only through a democratic rebirth that comes from the people. Only if this rebirth comes from the people, can "socialism from above and from outside" become a "socialism from below and our own socialism": only then can socialism become socialism, for socialism from above is a contradiction in terms.

Only through democratic renewal from below "can socialism start to really exist in the GDR". The SED could have a leading role, asserted Falcke, only by receiving democratic legitimation through multi party elections. "When GDR citizens can say, 'You in the Federal Republic recieved democracy as a gift, we have had to struggle for ours', then there would be a genuine political basis for the GDR to remain as a state which can tolerate open borders."

The choices that face the GDR also face the world as a whole. The freedom provided by Christ - an echo of Falcke's 1972 address - sets out four tasks for the future: dealing openly and freely with the guilt and responsibility of the past; dealing with power freely, critically and in a way that sets limits; non-voiolent changes; and sustainable lifestyles.

In this last section, Falcke picks up the issue of the need for socialism to offer an alternative to the "capitalist affluence", criticising the new action programme of the SED which calls for consumer goods of high value and processed foods:

We really need an alternative to capitalism that will defend more just structures in the world. That's a difficult thing to do because we need ecinomic help from the West. But we have to make an attempt, at least to maintain a certain independence and self-reliance vis-a-vis the western economic powers.

If socialism means anything, Falcke asserted, then it is ‘certainly a society in which people seek to act not without each other and against each other, for with another and for one another:

Will this received majority support in the GDR? Since we want a democratic socialism we have to ask what has majority support. Can we generate a majority for genuine solidarity with the Third World in the GDR's foreign trade? For higher investments in technologies that protect the environment? I'm not sure. Are we not still in the grip of idols called economic effectiveness and and the increase of consumption? Then the self-liberation of the people will not be a genuine liberation, but only a move from an uncomfortable cell into a rather more comfortable cell in the same prison.

The word "socialism" has fallen into such discredit that it may be better not to use it, Falcke said. Nevertheless, "We need to keep the word 'Socialism' - to which I know no alternative - open and mutable for new forms and content. Socialism is not a description of a system, it is a description ot a path to follow."

How long will rebuilding trust take?

2009-11-27T10:56:00.002+01:00

Jane's diary: 27 November 1989, Wittenberg
A quiet and peaceful day. I sat at my desk most of the day sorting out post and trying to get a grip on all the preparations before going home in a fortnight. The other students are coming back to Wittenberg for the next 10 day module. The Berliners are late. Four of us have sat here and discussed the world while feasting on salad, bread, curry and fried rice. Four women trying to sort out the problem of dealing with the past of the last 40 years. The way all the power structures encourage people to abuse power over the people below them in the hierarchy and how you become aware of this as soon as you go to school.

All seemed to agree that so much has gone on in the past 40 years it could easily take another to deal with it all. We talked about the 1956 revolution in Hungary and the show trials there. Here people like Walter Janka were tried in secret, the role of people like Mielke, Hager and co. was then very important. Questions about what went on really couldn't been forgotten, it would be all too easy to do that said Frau B. The layers of corruption really need to be peeled back so that the structures which were operating then can be seen.

We compared the fragmented opposition here to that in Czechoslovakia where Charter 77 had been around for such a long time. Here there are no Vaclav Havels or Dubceks and already the power playing in and between the various groups is emerging and it doesn't bode well for the future. Frau B's brother in law has just sent in his resignation from New Forum, another one of us has been considering doing likewise for over a month.

This is all now "normality": the past 40 years beforehand were what was "unreal" yet they too were everyday life and reality. All the new citizens' movements have at least had the positive effect of breaking people out of their lethargy.

Thinking about those who have gone before

2009-11-26T23:00:00.000+01:00

Jane's diary, dateline 26 November 1989, Wittenberg (Totensonntag)
Today is Totensonntag, the Sunday to commemorate those who have died. Outside is is snowing, blowing up quite a blizzard. Strange to think that at the beginning of the month I was still walking around bare-legged. Mild autumn has changed to a bitter winter as quickly as the political changes.

Wittenberg looks pretty in the snow, even more mediaeval than it is. At the last demonstration at the Marktplatz it was so foggy you couldn't see from side to the other, Luther's and Melanchthon's statutes were lit up and the loudspeakers were on as usual - it seemed as though the statues themselves were speaking. With all the fog, the icy weather and the voices seemingly speaking out of nowhere, Birgit said she falt as though she was living through a Shakespeare play. They discussed making Friedrich Schorlemmer an honourary citizen of the town.

Apparently on the television the other night (the first live talk show broadcast on GDR television!) Schorlemmer said, "I have been turned from an enemy of the state to a partner". It was interesting to interpret for his interview with Daniel Cattau today, I'm not sure about the picture he likes to paint of himself - certainly he is very literary and well-read and heavily influenced by Tillich, Brecht and so on, but it all seems so very slightly pretentious. One of seven children who needs a crowd! I feel he painted a rather rosy picture of the role of the church in the future and how it will be able to continue its prophetic role.

It's been a time of coincidences for me - first bumping into Keith Forecast last week who had been at Mansfield just the previous evening. And then turning round in the restaurant in West Berlin and seeing our family friends, Theo and Sigrid. Yesterday Daniel arrived in Wittenberg, writing for a US Lutheran paper, a few years ago he interviewed Jan Womer at Mansfield.

I've got used to the idea I was in West Berlin last weekend. But that clear sunshine and fast pace of life seems a time away from the muffled snowy streets of Wittenberg today. I thought about Steve, I wanted to sort out the existential questions to do with getting married and living together, he was preoccupied with the great political happenings. Of course we sat down and tried to sort it all out but there was so little time and so much to say. I have this need for certinty and Steve is so much more sanguine. In just over a fortnight I shall be packing to go home for Christmas. Time is really racing by.

Briefly today I thought of my dead ancestors - rumbustious Stanley Hawley, impeccably turned out, a man who in middle age (he never really seemed "old" to me) showed great patience and love to his two grandchildren. He died carefully and tidily, all his affairs sorted out, his house clean and tidy, during one week's holiday three years ago. I miss him dearly, his love of life, his palpable enjoyment of parties and celebrations, his ability to get on with different generations. It was right that his funeral was a party in the garden on a late summer day.

He and my grandmother Elsie Bennett played a big role in babysitting us and being around in our lives. They had already made a mark on the town we lived in through their involvement in music and shows. My grandmother's wide and very pretty simile, her competitive spirit playing cribbage - even beating my dad at scrabble - but most of all her beautiful soprano voice, rich soaring and so easy on the ears - "the gentle, the gentle sounding lute". I was 16 when she died, the early morning 'phone call came and I felt relief for her and for us all, as well as loss. It had taken a long time.

Martin Stranz my German grandfather was born in 1890, a completely different world. His death shocked me, and shook me early on Saturday morning. I wept in my father's arms and felt gult, "but I had only just begun to love him". He represents all that is intellectual but also a love of the good things in life - his brother-in-law in his will left him red wine to pour into his soup! Part of the money I have used to come here came from the money he gave us, his proud socialism and pacifism came from real experience. I wish I had been able to hold an adult conversation with him. Perhaps my interest in Germany comes as a result of dealing with his death. He was 85 when he died and had lived through two world wars. Despite his age, all of us where unprepared for his death, suddenly on holiday in Cromer after a good meal with friends, Probably he insisted on paying the bill. He only allowed us to celebrate his 85th birthday if he could pay.

Kate Guttmann his wife I only knew from a picture where I am sitting on her bed, she lived to see her first grandchild. She was very unkindly referred to as the Schlange - the snake - or the Hexe - the witch - by her children. From my other grandmother's one meeting with her it sounds as if she was the quiet one in a family of extroverts. The weeks that my grandfather was in Sachsenhausen concentration camp must have been difficult for her. She worried about illegally smuggling her wedding ring out of Germany when they left. Probably she found the move to Britain more difficult that the others. A sensitive, artistic woman. Perhaps we may call a daughter Kate.

I think of you as I write this Stave. Tears are streaming down my face as I do my Trauerarbeit, my mourning, as the Germans like to call it. Death has treated me more kindly than you and not taking my family away from me unexpectedly. I shall stop now and sort out my ever untidy desk - it seems to travel from country to country with me.

A Mighty Fortress Indeed ...

2009-11-26T22:21:00.004+01:00

On 26 November, Jane was interpreting for Daniel Cattau, a US journalist, in Wittenberg. This article from the Los Angeles Times was one of the articles he wrote about his visit:

A Mighty Fortress Indeed - East Germany: As pariahs in a communist society, churches developed an independent niche--and nurtured a civil reformation.

By DANIEL CATTAU,

Daniel Cattau, former director of the Lutheran Council News Bureau in New York, was recently in East Germany. (Los Angeles Times, December 16, 1989)

The Castle Church in Lutherstadt Wittenberg, where Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses in 1517, was refurbished in 1983, the 500th anniversary of the reformer's birth. Near the top of the tall, white church tower is now a gold band inscribed, Ein Feste Berg ist Unsere Gott-- the first words to the battle hymn of the Reformation, "A Mighty Fortress is Our God."

When the local leaders of the Socialist Unity (Communist) Party saw this impressive statement of faith, they asked church leaders what words from Luther might be appropriate for their building. The church leaders suggested the beginning of the hymn's second stanza: "No strength of ours can match His might."

This story accurately depicts the role of the East German Protestant churches in socialism: quiet opposition with a clear distinction between what belongs to the church and what to the state.

For the most part, the church's role in toppling the monolithic Communist rule has been ignored in the litany of other factors: Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost , Hungary's decision to open its border, the great numbers of East Germans fleeing to the West, the opening of the Berlin Wall and the country's woeful economic, educational and ecological situation.

But in talks I've had with dozens of East Germans, it was clear that the church played--and continues to play--a critical role in the reformation of society. In an interview at the Luther House in Wittenberg, Friedrich Schorlemmer, a theologian and leading spokesman for the Democratic Awakening, drew a parallel between the Reformation and the current upheaval.

"Luther said the church is only the church when it always reforms itself, and lets itself be reformed," said Schorlemmer, who has already been transformed from an enemy of the state into a media star. "Socialism is only socialism if it's capable of being renewed."

After World War II and the division of Germany, church membership in heavily Protestant East Germany declined from more than 80% of the population to about 30% today. The government thought it had dealt a fatal blow by enforcing strict church-state separation, eliminating state funding and teaching only Marxism and Leninism in schools. Added to that was a heavy dose of oppression.

The severing of church-state ties, however, was a blessing for the three territorial Lutheran and five united Lutheran and Reformed churches that comprise a loose, 5-million-member Federation of Evangelical Churches.

Until the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961, the East German churches had close ties with the wealthier, state-supported churches in the Federal Republic. In 1968, these formal ties were severed and the East German churches, after a long period of confrontation, moved toward being a church in socialism--but, as its leaders point out, not a church of socialism.

Remarkably, the church had found a niche in society by the late 1970s that was to grow into a full-scale spiritual and political movement a decade later: It was a "free room," as the Germans say, where church and non-church people could discuss issues rarely brought up outside the home.

It began with peace groups discussing East-West tensions and the redeployment of missiles in the two Germanys, and grew to discussions of human rights and social justice, the environment, military service, freedom of travel, press freedom and free elections. The church also played a key role in uncovering vote-rigging in last May's local elections, encouraging people to stay in East Germany and spawning many of the leaders of the opposition parties and groups.

In 1982 the Nicholas Church and later the Thomas Church in Leipzig began what looked, at first, to be innocuous Monday-night prayer services; it was after these services that 200,000 took to the street in October. These prayer services and demonstrations were soon replicated throughout the land of Luther, Bach, Schiller and Goethe.

"There was no other free room in society," for opposition groups, said Gerhard Thomas, editor of The Church, a newspaper of the Berlin-Brandenburg Evangelical Church. "The revolution was so peaceful from the side of the demonstrators--that was the spirit of the church. The spirit of the revolution was the spirit of the church."

In Wittenberg, a small university town in Luther's day but now a quasi-industrial city of 50,000 people, townspeople complained in the local paper that the demonstrators had left a mess in the Market Place in front of Luther's statue: Wax from prayer vigil candles covered the stones on the street.

Albrecht Steinwachs, a local pastor, gave perhaps the best testimony to the role of the church when he wrote in response, "I would rather see 1,000 drops of candle wax on the Market Place than one drop of blood."

What's happening in Czechoslovakia and Romania ..?

2009-11-25T09:38:00.004+01:00

Jane's diary
Dateline: Saturday 25 November 1989
Time is racing past. Our ten days module at the Predigerseminar is over. It began with everyone piling into our room and swapping stories of crossing the border or wall. The best story was the friend of one of the students who came out of the Berliner Ensemble bar fairly drunk and heard that the borders were open and decided to go to the Wall to argue with people and get them to go back, only to find himself swept along with everyone else and so completely gobsmacked that he spent most of the weekend pi**ed. For Berliners the open border adds a dimension which should always have been there but wasn't. As Karsten says, every says "here" but no one seems to know where "here" is. East or West? or East and West.
For our friends in West Berlin where he is a West German and she an East German the whole thing has been completely exhausting as well as totally exhilarating. Their flat was full of visitors from the East, all of us piled in for that first night - completely crazy.

Meanwhile events in Czechoslovakia have looked very ominous over the past 10 days but last night the central committee resigned en bloc and today half a million demonstrators in Prague. Dubcek spoke and was introduced as the county's future president - 20 years too late. Vaclav Havel will speak on television tonight, uncensored. It's all utterly amazing and wonderful, so sad and tragic that state brutality preceeded it to such an extent. Dissidents are being released and a coalition government proposed.

Back here Krenz is saying that free elections are not likely until the end of next year. I think it would be crazy to have parliamentary elections next May, much better to re-run the local elections of this year so that at least the new groups get experience at the municipal level.

Events in Romania seem still to be well behind those elesewhere in the Eastern bloc. It's awful to think of the culture that has been wiped out and this will continue if change doesn't come. All we can do is pray and hope the change will spread there too in this November of revolution and "Wende". Back here one of the students discovered swastikas on his wall in Görlitz and now that the press is "free" more and more reports of Poles being stopped at the border smuggling food. There's a real hatred of Russians and Poles developing here. We discussed this as we prepare to go to Poland in January. In a fortnight at a meeting with our counterparts from West Germany we will talk about Neo-Nazi tendencies in young people.

Putting Berlin back together again ...

2009-11-25T09:08:00.003+01:00

Between November 1989 and October 1990 Berlin shifted gear from being a divided city on the front line of the East-West divide to becoming again a city in which people could move freely between the eastern and western sectors. Jane is blogging about about how even in November 1989, Berliners no longer knew what they meant when they said "here" - West Berlin? East Berlin? or the one Berlin? A latent disorientation that persists even 20 years later. But politics and culture is one thing, but what of the real work of restitching the city together - the water pipes, telephone lines, underground trains.

On BBC radio, Rosie Goldsmith has tried to do more than scratch the surface of the upheaval Berlin faced. She has gone underground, searching out the men and women involved in reunifying the city below street level, examining how the tubes, telephone, water and electricity systems of east and west were reconnected after the fall of the Wall.

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the world saw images of ecstatic Berliners celebrating a new freedom of movement across their city. But after the jubilation had died down, council chiefs were faced with a task without precedent in any city in the world. Public transport in the two halves of the city was in chaos and the main arteries of Berlin became clogged with polluting Trabants; using the telephone was an infuriating experience; utility companies faced similar problems trying to bring together two systems which had developed completely separately.

The programme is available as a stream here until 30 November.

Over the Wall and back again

2009-11-20T08:30:00.000+01:00

Jane's diary: Wittenberg, 20.11.1989
What a weekend! I was so tense on Thursday, the train to Berlin was late and I had to work hard to keep calm. Then to the foreigners' registration office at Alexanderplatz in East Berlin. Finally after a bit of to-do the man at the office gave me an exit and re-entry visa meaning I could go to West Berlin and come back to the GDR. I tried to phone West Berlin and it just wouldn't work. All lines engaged. It's been like that for days I reckon.

Walking along Friedrichstrasse towards Checkpoint Charlie I bumped into Christa Gengel (ecumenical officer of the Evangelical Church of the Union) and Keith Forecast (moderator of the United Reformed Church general assembly). Quite a ridiculous coincidence, the previous evening he had been preaching in Mansfield Chapel (in Oxford where I did my theology studies) and they had said, 'Of course you won't see Jane but if you do, tell her we miss her and give her our love'. Suddenly I felt a pang of homesickness for them all, miles away from German Sachlichkeit.

It was interesting to speak about the current situation with Christa Grengel. The woman who works with Christa looks well and relaxed, opening the borders really has opened people up. But Christa Grengel seems rather pessimistic about the way ahead - things are going too quickly, the church had proposed the gradual opening of the border and not the current free for all.

Were there any native Berliners in East Berlin at all? Everyone I tried to ask the way was Polish or Russian or from outside Berlin. Very odd.

Finally, after my interrupted evening I crossed at Friedrichstrasse, much quieter than earlier. So strange, the whole atmosphere was so different, much more friendly. It was so incredible to be on the S Bahn to Bahnhof Zoo in West Berlin. Then on to our friend Horst's where Stephen had arrived as well as other visitors from the GDR.

West Berlin was like I have never known it - but then it's never been like this. What an incredible atmosphere. All along the Wall people have their hammers and chisels and are making holes in it, taking chunks away to sell to the Americans - now the West Berlin police are doing their best to protect the wall. At Potsdamer Platz - what used to be the heart of an undivided Berlin, a new crossing point has been made, the Wall simply torn down. Nearby British solidiers are doling out free tea and coffee (a very British form of deterrence), with the East German border guards looking on.

A truly amazing weekend but at the end I had to walk back into East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie by myself. Stephen came with me to the border and went through first but the border guards still wouldn't let him into the GDR. He came back out and said they had been much more friendly than the last time he had been refused entry but their records still said that he was "unwanted" in East Germany. So through the dark streets of East Berlin with tears on my cheeks to take the train back to Wittenberg.

Swords into ploughshares and 30 years of the Friedensdekade

2009-11-18T21:03:00.005+01:00

Today is the peculiarly German Protestant festival called the day of repentance and prayer, at the same time it marks the end and culmination of the Friedensdekade, the churches' Ten days for Peace campaign, and the 30th year in which the campaign has taken place. The Friedensdekade deserves a place on the Holy Disorder blog in that it played a significant role in generating an indepedent peace movement in the GDR not least through the slogan "Swords into Ploughshares", which became one of the elements that fed into the "peaceful revolution".

The history of the Friedensdekade goes back to October 1979 when the Swedish Christian youth council proposed at a meeting of the Ecumenical Youth Council in Europe in Hirschluch in the GDR, that a day for peace should be organized by European churches. Picked up Berlin-Brandenburg and particularly by the Saxony youth pastor Harald Bretschneider this idea led to the first Friedensdekade being marked in the GDR from 9 to 19 November 1980, under the theme "Frieden schaffen ohne Waffen" (Make peace without weapons). The symbol of the event was a picture of the sculpture outside the United Nations in New York of a sword being hammered into a ploughshare that had been donated by the Soviet Union. The 10 days was also intended to coincide with similiar actions in the Federal Republic. In 1981, fabric bookmarks and a fabric patch with the "swords into ploughshares" motif were produced by the church (fabric production did not require special permission from the state), which led to the symbol being quickly adopted as a sign for independent peace activities, much to to displeasure of the state, which harrassed young people wearing the patch. Despite official church advice after such confrontations that young people should forego wearing the patch, the sculpture remained a smbol of the movement, as when in 1983 at the Wittenberg Kirchentag, Friedrich Schorlemmer organised a blacksmith to turn a swords into a ploughshare (as shown here in a panel from the exhibition in berlin about the peaceful revolution). The Friedensdekade remained one of the most important catalysts for the peace movement in the GDR, which itself contributed to the prayers for peace that became a focus during the peaceful revolution.

(Acknowledgements to Anke Silomon for her book Schwerter zu Pflugscharen und die DDR In English see the book by John Sandford, The Sword and the Ploughshare.)

A new East German government in office

2009-11-17T23:49:00.002+01:00

Twenty years ago today, the new GDR prime minister Hans Modrow (SED) presented his cabinet to the Volkskammer. In his governmental declaration he announced reform of the political system, the economy, education and administration. The aim is a "new socialist society". He proposes developing relations with West Germany to form a "contractual community" (Vertragsgemeinschaft) while rejecting unification of the two German states. Meanwhile the GDR interior ministry announced the registration os 154 new political groups. Meanwhile in more than 25 towns and cities there are demonstrations againsgt the SED's monopoly of power, a sign that the peaceful revolution is still continuing. (Source: epd)

'Europe in the year 2000'

2009-11-17T21:43:00.005+01:00

No, the title's right but before you ask if I have gone into reverse gear, this is the headline from a feature in The Independent by Robert Cottrell published on 30 October 1989 - after the protests had started in the GDR but before the opening of the Berlin Wall.

Cottrell tried to imagine how the changes of 1989 would look ten years later, and the result is the somewhat indistinct map at the top of this post. At the centre of the map is a united "Confederation of Germany". The Baltic States are independent and together with Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, a federation of Croatia and Slovenia, "Greater Serbia" and Turkey are associate European Community members (all but Greater Serbia and Turkey with their currencies pegged to the DM). The Soviet Union has disappeared, to be replaced in Europe by Russia and Ukraine. In western Europe, the Nordic countries and Austria joined the EC in the mid-1990s, after the "Delors Convention" moved the currencies of European Monetary System onto fixed parities supervised by a European System of Central Banks (in effect, national currencies have become non-decimal divisions of a single European currency) leaving only Switzerland "truly immune to the charms of monetary union, and [which] prospered mightily as Europe's sole remaining tax haven". Belgian has more or less ceased to be a unitary state and instead is a federation of Flanders and Wallonia.

Cottrell's imagination - from before the opening of the Berlin Wall - saw a revolution in Romania, and the flight of the Ceausescus; a move to a German Confederation in 1995 (still a hopelessly ambitious timetable according to some of Cottrell's contemporaries from 1989); the break up of Yugoslavia into a federation of Croatia and Slovenia, and a Greater Serbia; and - even - the restitution of Transylvania to Hungary. The Baltic states become "miracle economies", flooded with foreign investment and technology, akin to the "Asian tigers"; Poland is a source for cheap labour; while the biggest loser is "Russia" itself, the exhaustion of whose Communist Party led to an apparently unsuccessful military coup, with a United Front government surviving on aid from the West terrified by its arsenal of military weapons (remember this was envisioning Europe in 2000 and Cottrell might not have been so far of the mark). Germany's "armed neutrality" and the withdrawal of US troops (presumably the Soviet troops have also been pulled back) effectively end NATO's battlefield role, though NATO provides nonetheless "a useful diplomatic forum".

True, he does not predict the break up of Czechoslovakia, nor the wars that accompanied the break up of Yugoslavia, but from the fictional perspective of 2000, Cottrell writes:

LONDON - 31 December 1999. The end of a momentous decade. The commentators who spoke of the "death of history" in the 1990s had to concede its resurrection in the 1990s: not as a struggle between ideologies, but as a struggle for identity. Atavism re-entered the mainstream of Europe's politics.

Behind all this "futurology"Cottrell's point is that it is the European Community that would be the true magnet of the reshaping of Europe and the central point of a post-1989 settlement:

Can we fix upon an event, a date at which the "old" Europe began subverting the new? It might, for instance, have been the birth 20 years ago [in 1980] of Polish Solidarity, later to mount the first successful challenge to a Soviet satellite government; or the demands for independence by the Baltic states; or the visit of Mikhail Gorbachev to East Berlin in 1989, the spark which set the fire under the old guard of the Socialist Unity Party and thus cleared the way towards the German Confederation. But these were the punctuation marks rather than the message itself. It would be truer, if less picturesque, to see the weaknesses of the post-war settlement as having been inherent in its creation ... To the extent that the European Community was conceived as a yoke around the German neck, pulling it into line with its more placid neighbours, it failed: the relationship has been almost precisely reversed. But in other ways the EC has proved a much greater success than its founding six might have imagined.

Cottrell's article was published just as I was involved in preparations for a seminar in late November 1989 on the future of European security, the parameters of which were shifting as each day passed. It's a reminder of the need to think of the wider political picture as well as the internal protests and revolts in that hot autumn of 1989.

Was 1989 good for humanity?

2009-11-16T22:24:00.003+01:00

Over on the Guardian Comment is Free/Belief site, Ulrich Duchrow has posted an answer to the question, "Was 1989 good for humanity?" He notes how the prayers for peace in East German churches were also linked to the Conciliar Process for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation launched by the World Council of Churches. It was good, Duchrow writes, for people to experience that self-liberation is possible when a system has lost its legitimacy. However, the people lost control in the process of transformation. In East Germany, capital and the West German political institutions took over. His conclusion:

So 1989 can only be seen as good for humanity in the future if the people of the world learn from the "peaceful revolution" that they have the power of self-liberation from an oppressive and destructive system. If they interpret this year as the victory of the west they allow capitalism to continue to destroy humanity, the earth and eventually itself. There are signs of that learning. One of them is the World Social Forum and its sub-events at regional, national and local levels. Here people train to develop a co-operative solidarity economy (geared at satisfying real needs of people instead of the greed of property owners), models for money as public good and co-operative banks, serving the real economy instead of speculative accumulation, as well as direct and participatory in addition to representative democracy. The World Council of Churches, its member churches (unfortunately, less so in Europe) and the grassroots ecumenical movement form part of this process by working for AGAPE (Alternative Globalisation Addressing People and Earth) and just peace.

He ends by quoting Heino Falcke: "The art of Christian hope is to work persistently for making possible the necessary."

Trying to find a way into the future

2009-11-16T08:05:00.000+01:00

Jane's diary: Wittenberg, 16 November 1989

I'm completely wound up. I am waiting to travel to Berlin. I'm waiting for a phone call at midday from Steve. For two days I've been like this, moods swinging back and forth. I've had to completely reorganize everything to get to Berlin. I was at the police station this morning. I can get out of the GDR, but, unlike the East Germans, I can't get back in again, because I only have a single-entry visa. Steve: what are we going to do if we can't meet? I really think I shall crack. It's three months since we got engaged. Dear God, I hope this madcap plan works out ...

So much has happened but I feel in such a whirl - totally emotionalised. I want to laugh and cry and scream. The atmosphere is changing a bit. I'm not quite sure if all these groups are going to keep up the momentum, now the wall is down, at least psychologically. The prayers for renewal on Tuesday were still full at both churches - suddenly now that the crisis point is for the time being over, people are are suddenly able to pray, not just for themselves as has been the case in past weeks.

Suddenly we remembered that Romania exists. We lit a candle for the person facing the death penalty there. We sent a telegram to the Embassy. People prayed for the schools, for the environment, for not too much greed for western money. One of the students had found swastikas sprayed on the walls in Görlitz - we prayed for the fascists. The emotion was really very different at the service, not so tense or brittle. In some ways that was a shame, the tears didn't prickle behind my eyes, my voice didn't break with emotion. Perhaps a certain amount of normalisation would be good. A time to reassess, think hard, give thanks for all that has happened and try and see a way into the future.

The Bürgermeister has resigned, at the demonstration later in the square they gave his deputy a hard time. The new Bürgermeister will be elected today. As a result of standing up for so long in very cold churches and then sitting in a Trabant for over an hour my back is in all sorts of mess. Very painful. I drank a glass of wine with two of the women in Wittenberg. We listened to Mahler's 4th symphony and tried to sort out our feelings and worries about the incredible almost miraculous events of the weekend. When will the price reform come? Feelings are very ambivalent. Everyone wants to be able to exchange GDR money for western money but will it still be possible to afford bread at home? Things are going to get worse before they get better, that's for sure. Oh dear, that sounds so Thatcherite and smug.

Thorns in the side

2009-11-15T18:33:00.000+01:00

Posted by Jane (from the Stranzblog) :

I first heard the passage below being read aloud in the chapel in the Predigerseminar in 1989. In the midst of the huge political upheaval of East Germany's peaceful revolution, Gabriele who led that morning's "Andacht" simply let the text speak for itself.

I was surprised and pleased to find it again the other day at the beginning to Stephen Cottrell's splendid little book "Hit the Ground Kneeling". I'm not sure I've come across it in any of our Sunday lectionaries, which is a shame. I have used it in some youth work and training sessions with elders though.

Reading it through again now I wonder about whether bramble or thorn bush would be my favoured translation and I must go and check whether the Hebrew word is the same as the bush which burned and was not consumed in Exodus and whether the Septuagint translation for thornbush is then picked up in the gospel term for crown of thorns. This is how linguists think I suppose - even when they have a bus to catch and must write fast!

None of the other trees wanted to give anything up in order to sway over the other trees - not the olive its oil, not the fig its sweet fruit, not the vine its glorious juice and wine. So the thorn bush, the bramble, accepts. The thornbush is an uncomfortable symbol of humility in the Bible, it is about a different kind of leadership. Today reading this text I was struck rather by the way the supposedly greater trees don't want to take up office, they want to hold onto their current roles and riches and place in the scheme of things and not chance the risk or humility of leadership. Them holding on to their power and riches and roles makes the leadership role of the brambly thorn bush yet more difficult. Easier to be a celebrity than a leader? Easier to hold on to riches than follow vocation?
A fascinating and powerful parable which is deeply prophetic.

The parable and prophecy of the trees in Judges 9
The trees once went out
to anoint a king over themselves.
So they said to the olive tree,
“Reign over us.”
The olive tree answered them,
“Shall I stop producing my rich oil
by which gods and mortals are honoured,
and go to sway over the trees?”
Then the trees said to the fig tree,
“You come and reign over us.”
But the fig tree answered them,
“Shall I stop producing my sweetness
and my delicious fruit,
and go to sway over the trees?”
Then the trees said to the vine,
“You come and reign over us.”
But the vine said to them,
“Shall I stop producing my wine
that cheers gods and mortals,
and go to sway over the trees?”
So all the trees said to the bramble,
“You come and reign over us.”
And the bramble said to the trees,
“If in good faith you are anointing me king over you,
then come and take refuge in my shade;
but if not, let fire come out of the bramble
and devour the cedars of Lebanon.”

Into the promised land or into the desert?

2009-11-13T15:47:00.002+01:00

This is a crosspost from the Stranzblog
As I think back to the end of the GDR 20 years ago a theme I return to is that of the promised land or the desert. In large part this is because of an encounter with a lecture by Jürgen Ebach early in my time in Wittenberg. About a week before the GDR was due to celebrate its 40th anniversary in early October, Ebach was on a tour of some churches in the GDR, speaking in particular to ministers, theology students and church workers. He spoke passionately about developing a theology that takes failure seriously - sometimes those who fail are the greater heroes (I remember being rather surprised at the time that he mentioned Scott of the Antarctic in this respect - probably because I assumed it was a story not much known outside Britain). Moses who receives the promise of the promised land never actually gets to live there and only glimpses it from afar before death.

It is only now though that I realise how very carefully thought out Ebach's lectures were and also how deeply pastoral. It would not have occurred to him or to any of us that the Berlin wall would no longer be there 6 weeks later. So underpinning what he was saying was a deep commitment to using the biblical texts about the 40 years in the desert leading to the promised land as a resource for reflection and resistance for the context of the churches in the GDR - perhaps for the next forty years. Are you so sure that you have been in the desert for 40 years? Are you sure that you are not only now leaving Egypt?
I can see now that he was trying to encourage the leaders of the church in local situations to continue to dialogue with biblical texts and let them speak to their situations. In a way he was saying, your struggle is going to go on, how are you going to help the faithful wrestle with the fact that after 40 years there was no promised land - and although I have often thought about and returned to his lectures it is only now that I can sense this layer in the insights he was sharing.
So was the opening of the wall the promised land? I can remember being a bystander as people voted for the first time in March 1990 and then again twice more that same year - the enthusiasm already beginning to wane.
So I wonder ... if Jürgen Ebach revisited his lectures today what would he try to say to the tiny minority churches in the former GDR? Are we all in the promised land or are we in the desert? Is state communism more or less of a desert than social market economies? Is capitalism the only promised land available? Where is the wicked Pharaoh we are fleeing from - even though we also yearn to be back in those fleshpots of the past when faced with the rigors of desert living?
Meanwhile I can't help thinking how very clever the CDU was with its horrible election slogan of Wohlstand für Alle - it really tapped in to desires for the future and offered quite a greedy promise. Of course the biblical land of promise is not one where all have good incomes but rather one in which the basic necessities of all can potentially be met. A land in which there will be pasture enough for you to milk the sheep and pollen enough for you to harvest honey. God won't be raining the manna and quails down from heaven. It's actually the promise of a semi-nomadic lifestyle in a slightly less difficult environment rather than a completely nomadic existence in a mainly hostile environment! Trying to sell that in your political programme may be rather dififcult.
Posted by Jane

Retribution or accountability?

2009-11-12T12:09:00.004+01:00

Jane's diary, dateline 12 November 1989:

Three SED district officials committed suicide yesterday. I worry about Schadenfreude. Hunting down the guilty ones as if none of the rest of us are guilty - have the CDU, LDPD, NDPD (the block parties linked to the SED) done nothing over these years. Are they going to get away without having to confess? I wonder how many people would not have been involved in corruption in some form or another.

Two of the new central committee members have already had to resign - Cottbus and Halle in SED districts voted them out of office at their respective local levels and they've had to go. The reasons aren't all that clear but Boehme (district SED secretary in Halle) may have been voted out because of the appalling violence in Halle on 9 October. It still isn't out in the open whether he or the Stasi chief gave the order "to clear the centre" ( very euphemistic expression). People are now saying the Stasi should be sent to the factories. All that listening in to, watching and frightening people doesn't bear thinking about.

Yesterday I was in Jüterbog to interpret for two Americans from the United Church of Christ. Jüterbog is small has four very enormous and very beautiful old churches, one now converted into a library. It was an old Handelstadt and has similar architecture to my beloved Hansastädte. This area of Brandenburg is called Fläming - rolling countryside and woods. The name and the architecture indicating the Dutch connection. I'm extremely cross I have allowed myself to be talked into this although it has been interesting in all kinds of ways ...

More amazing pictures from Berlin. The West Berlin police and the East German Grenztruppen working together. More jubilation and of course all the litter and rubbish, bottles, paper plates.

In Jütterbog as all overt the GDR the State Bank and the police were open all day on Saturday and Sunday to cope with the queues of people. The Reichsbahn has laid on extra trains, in Leipzig they ran out of tickets for people travelling to Berlin. Each year GDR people can change 5 Marks at 1 to 1 for 15 DM. This is nothing. Can the government really afford to make the currency convertible, rampant inflation is sure to follow. The new economic proposals seem to suggest some kind of price reform. When? How quickly the next change.

On AK2 (the East German television news) the strange sight of the head of the police advising people to leave their cars on the edge of Berlin and to try to avoid the overcrowded crossing points. "Unless you have to go over now, then don't. Please believe me this new law will last so try to be patient". Wierd! Then an interview - a real interview - with Krenz about reunification. Basically he said this is Herr Kohl's problem and not mine, The GDR constitution is very clear on this issue. Whether Kohl should consider sorting out the Basic law is another matter and on which I cannot decide and which is not a GDR matter.

Interpreting for the Americans again this morning in small village churches. Thankfully a fairly straightforward sermon in easy language - I was surprised at how easily it all went. I was very thankful for the French onion soup at lunchtime, I got very cold in the first church where we preached. Winter has finally arrived, frost this morning and a real November mist, damp cold getting through to your bones. Somehow it had seemed as though the summer would last for ever but maybe the greenhouse effect isn't bad enough yet for that.

My feminist anger is dying down a bit now but if I get called "Fräulein" once again I might just boil over.

Did the wall fall because of the churches?

2009-11-11T13:40:00.000+01:00

That's the question posed in this article by Emiel Hakkenes in the Dutch newspaper, Trouw. After a set of events at which churches have pointed to their role in the peaceful revolution a justified question to ask. Hakkenes notes how Leipzig pastor Christian Führer from the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig had in a recent television documentary called, "The revolution that came from the churches", had noted the protests in leipzig on 9 October. Said Führer, "Without 9 October there would have been no 9 November".

The church was praying for peace, justice and safeguarding creation, and not only in Leipzig. Under the name "conciliar process" they were also an offical aim of the World Council of Churches ... One of the creators of this conciliar process was the East German theologian Heino Falcke, who would become one of the loudest religious voices against communism. In 1972 he delivered a speech in which he called the church under communism not to abandon society. "We will work there, hoping for a socialism that is open to improvement," he said in his speech.
The conciliar process was picked up mainly in the Netherlands and East Germany, said Herman Noordegraaf, diaconate professor and authority on the history of progressive Christianity. "In East Germany, the church acted as umbrella for various groups and movements in the areas of poverty, environment and peace. They made a substantial contribution to the fall of the regime." ...
Theologian and peace activist Laurens Hogebrink in a recent article said the "concuiliar process was a breeding ground the growing opposition that led to the Wende. The conciliar process in the GDR was a crucial peace process for Europe."

On the other hand, Hakkenes quotes Hans Renner, professor of Central and Eastern European history at the University of Groningen as saying that "in great events, each person or group that is affected wants to point to their role. In the run up to 1989 churches and theologians certainly played a role. There was such a theological movement in Charter 77 in the Netherlands. But it goes too far to say that the role of the churches was decisive."

Read the rest of the article here.

From East Germany to South Africa

2009-11-11T08:43:00.003+01:00

It was not only in East Germany that weighty events were taking place in the latter months of 1989. In South Africa, too, the End Gam e had begun. In September 1989, the South African theologian John de Gruchy had been in New York where - together with a Marxist professor from the GDR - he watched the growing popular protests in the GDR and in his home county, an experience he described in 1997 at the Leipzig Kirchentag:

Redeeming the past in South Africa:
The force of truth, forgiveness and hope in the search for justice and reconciliation

In September 1989 my wife and I spent a sabbatical semester at Union Theological Seminary in New York. For a few days we were host to the director of the Marxist-Leninist Institute in Rostock. He belonged to a group of theologians and philosophers from the German Democratic Republic, which was visiting the United States. It was highly ironic that in this way a Marxist professor from East Germany and a white, Christian theologian from the anti-communist, apartheid-ruled South Africa should meet in the United States of America! Nevertheless, we were bound together during this week in a way that neither of us would have been able to foresee. For this was the week of weighty, world-changing events, both in East Germany and in South Africa.

As we sat together, the East Germans and South Africans, we watched the events together on American television!Among the reports shown that week there were two that were boradcast immediately after one another. The first showed television footage of protest meetings in Leipzig and the of East German citizens fleeing over the border into Czechoslovakia, and the second was the escalation of the protest marches against apartheid in Cape Town, my hometown. Whatever the reaction may have been of our East German guest we knew that this meant the beginning of the end of apartheid. On top of that, we felt that the dramatic events in Eastern Europe were taking place in the same historical context as the events in our country. And that should come true. For without the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was unlikely that change would have taken place in South Africa at that time.

For good reason, the reunification of Germany and the transition to democracy in South Africa have been characterised as two of the main events in the formation of world politics in the late 20the century. Some even claimed that these events were the prelude to a new world order. Even if we are somewhat sceptical of this claim today, these events have undoubtedly changed the course of history, no matter how we evaluate them. Events of weighty importance took place in Germany and in South Africa, radically transforming our lives and the lives of many others throughout the world.

Anyone who has watched television reports about the pro-democracy protests in Leipzig or Cape Town, would have seen the presence of priests, pastors and even bishops - at least in Cape Town! - among the leaders. There were many others among the crowds that were there from Christian conviction and commitment. Yes, Christians, and some church leaders and groups have played a key role in those important events of the transition, just as they had been committed as the precursors of these changes.But we should be reminded that the contribution of the churches to the struggle against apartheid was far from clear, it was hesitant and ambiguous. Some churches even provided the theological justification of apartheid. Even those churches that were against apartheid, have hands that are unclean.

The churches have much to confess about guilt and failure. In the majority of cases, the Christian opposition to apartheid was left to prophetic loners, charismatic leaders, ecumenical bodies and quasi-religious organizations. Too often the churches hid behind such brave testimonies, prophetic, instead of getting involved prophetically in the struggle for justice and liberation.(Provisional translation from the German)

In his book Christianity and Democracy, de Gruchy has written about the parallels (and differences) between the transition in the two countries.

'What lies ahead of us?'

2009-11-10T20:30:00.002+01:00

Jane's diary: 10 November 1989 later in the day

Today the SED declared itself in favour of an electoral law with free and fair elections and secret ballots. How many more rabbits can be pulled out of the hat this week. Perhaps Krenz has won himself a little breathing space with these measures over the past two days. It looks as if the whole episode yesterday wasn't intended as freedom of movement - the new travel law was supposed to come into force on 1 December in time for Christmas. Schabowski actually said those wanting to leave the GDR could do so via the GDR border instead of via Czechoslovakia. But the people took the ruling into their own hands and basically flooded the wall. Utterly sensational.

For each day people spend in the west (currently 30) they are allowed to change 1 GDR Mark into 1 DM but otherwise the GDR currency is not convertible. That alone may persuade people to leave. Who knows. Racketeering is likely to grow particularly if there is a price reform. Who knows? Earlier in the week I felt instinctively that a price reform must come but surely not until after Christmas. Political suicide to do it before things are moving so fast who knows what will happen next.

Of course all this has caught the West utterly on the hop (the Russians too, I reckon). It was interesting that as the interviews progressed during the day people tried to be more sanguine and reflective. Not succeeding a lot mind you. There is appalling ignorance in Britain of the GDR political system and structure summed up by Sue McGregor's question (a British radio journalist) to Pfr. Seidel in Leipzig this morning, "Has your party - the LDPD - been legalised yet?". reply - "Yes since 1947". Similarly the woman on the "Any Questions" radio programme pronouncing, "East Germany doesn't have an opposition party". Still she is only a high ranking civil servant.

The assumption in all the reunification debate is that the problem is East Germany becoming part of NATO. The problem is of course the thousands of Soviet troops in the GDR (of course there are the western troops in the Federal Republic). Then to cap it all Manfred Woerner of NATO says of course NATO's existence isn't threatened by these changes. It has contributed to the stability and without it this change wouldn't have taken place. What nonsense!

10 November 1989, 23:30

The central committee has in fact today announced economic reform - more consumer goods, gradual removal of subsidies. But the financial news tonight is spreading doom and gloom - hyperinflation and problems of quality and motivation of workers looks more and more likely - quite apart from crisis in public health and transport. Is it all going to go BONG?? Dear God, what lies ahead of us ...???

I went to talk to Friedrich (Schorlemmer) when I knew the BBC were going to interview me. He's ill and looked pretty ropey. Bloody RIAS phoned him at 5am this morning 'unangemeldet' - without notice. We spoke of the whole guilt question. Suddenly everyone's pointing the finger at SED leaders as if no one else contributed to all the problems here, as if most of the population hadn't gone to the polls and voted for the SED lists last May.

And the role of the church now? Balance? Keeping the peace? Besonnenheit - trying to get people to stay calm? Friedrich spoke of the need for Klage and Anklage- I'm not quite sure I understand this - lamentation in Biblical terms from the depths of our hearts - like in Psalms? Also accusation coupled with Besonnenheit.

Also he's very concerned that the church should confront the whole Zweistaatlichkeit question (the issue of there being two German states). What Germany? Very important for the church to give a lead. However I reckon there are lots of different tendencies within the church and that there are going to be all sorts of people coming out of the woodwork. We'll see.

Kohl say Germany is now free - our free German fatherland - I find talk like this very disturbing.

Let's wait and see: the central committee proposes electoral reform, a new media law, freedom of assembly, and bringing the state under parliamentary control.

If the wall really goes maybe reunification will be the only way that this country will survive. My heart is with all this historical day stuff. What really lies ahead? Will we still be able to afford food in February? Now Thatcher is saying, "It's a great day for freedom". What an overused and abused word freedom is.

To Brussels without a map ...

2009-11-10T18:46:00.003+01:00

I'm writing this on the InterCityExpress from Berlin to Brussels, and it's true, I'm travelling without a map. But the map I am lacking is not the street plan of the Belgian capital, as what I am referring to is a slogan coined by a friend about the missing blueprint in Brussels for European security policy after the opening of the Berlin Wall and the changes in central and eastern Europe.

In any case, maybe I don't need a map for where I am going, for this train ride is also a journey into the past, even though it's scheduled to take only 7 hours instead of the 12 or 13 hours it would have taken back in 1989.

To explain: 20 years ago I was in Brussels where I was working with a think tank on European affairs, sketching out possibilities for autonomous European Community action on issues such as security, economic, industrial policy and so on. On the evening of 9 November, after a day of discussions about the project, we moved on to the Amarcord, the project's Stammcafé in Ixelles, where conversation turned to what was happening in East Germany. What options did Krenz have we considered? Maybe, someone said, he could try and regain the initiatives by opening the borders to the West. Little did we know that even as we were biting into our pizzas the crowds were gathering on the Bornholmer Strasse in East Berlin ... only when I got back to my attic flat and turned on Deutschlandfunk did I realise just what was happening.

The opening of the borders in Germany was not an unmitigated blessing for the research projects, however, as the parameters seemed to keep changing, and changing quickly. The maps that had been used until then were no longer relevant.

Read more

At the beginning of 1989 the idea had been to commission two researchers to draw up separate reports on changes in US and Soviet security policy and to use that as a basis to explore an autonomous European role in security policy (of course, back in those days "Europe" was seen as largely synonymous with the Europe of "The Twelve", the members of the European Community).

The first report - about changing US security policy - was delivered in September 1989. This highlighted the fall in the economic predominance of the USA. something that was not inevitable but also providing economic support to countries which would become its competitors, and the costs of its global military reach. Conclusion: "For the USA to remain a superpower, retaining its strategic pre-eminence is vital. Yet its capacity to do that is under threat ... The looming presence of the Federal deficit, even if no decisive action is taken to cut it, exerts a sharp downward pressure on military spending."

There was just a hint, though, of a new factor in the equation: the effects of prestroika and Gorbachev's diplomacy, and a passing reference to the remarks of President George Bush Sr following the Nato summit in May 1989, when he called for "self-determination for all of Germany", and said, "The Cold War began with the division of Europe. It can only end when Europe is whole", remarks taken by some observers to mean not only and end to the East-West division in Europe but also German re-unification. The report commented: "That would be a major watershed in US policy since the 1940s and a profound innovation".

The second report - on changes in Soviet security policy - arrived at the beginning of November 1989 but before the opening of the Berlin Wall. But it already shows evidence of events on the ground leading to a revision of previous judgements. The final chapter is headed, "Rebirth of the German Question". Already under Gorbachev, the researcher noted, there emerged in the international relations institutes a lobby arguing in favour of German unification. However, "Before November 1989, proposing the unification of Germany would have seemed an active initiative on the part of the USSR, something of a foreign-policy adventure with largely unpredictable consequences that on balance might - but might not - further long-term Soviet strategy in Europe ... I now have to revise the prognosis. The dramatic events in East Germany force considerations of political stability in Central Europe at the forefront of Soviet calculations. For the Soviet Union, it is no longer a matter of choosing whether or not to take the initiative on the German question, but rather one of deciding how to respond to a rapidly changing situation. Many of the Soviet traditionalists who would still prefer to preserve the status quo in Europe will have to recognise that further change is now inevitable and that the task of Soviet foreign policy has shifted from blocking change to channelling it in the safest possible direction."

All this was put on the table at a consultation in Brussels over the weekend of 21 to 23 November. The report of that meeting shows how researchers were still grappling with the implications of the events in Germany. This noted how the new GDR government under Hans Modrow appeared to want a closer relationship with the Federal Republic, and how in his first governmental statement had raised the idea of a "contractual community" (Vertragsgemeinschaft) between the two German states and how his advisors had even spoken of a GDR application to join the European Community. This, the report speculated, might help to avoid the Federal Republic having to play off support for increased integration in western Europe against a desire for eventual German unification.

[In fact Helmut Kohl's much derided 10-point-plan published just after this consultation did go significantly in this direction, setting the formal political unification of Germany as a remote goal, and beginning with steps to develop a contractual community of the sport spoken of by Modrow. the report noted however that Kohl had said that financial support for the GDR would be dependent not only on political change but also the introduction of a market economy.]

The territory was beginning to shift and maps were needing to be constantly redrawn. The final chapter of the report from this Brussels consultation was more ominous: "Can Gorbachev survive?" And re-reading the report today after almost 20 years I was startled to see Islam listed in a footnote at the end of the report about emerging issues that needed still to be addressed. Well, 20 years later, does Brussels now have a map - or is it still to be found?

... but the peaceful revolution continues

2009-11-10T11:00:00.000+01:00

One of the most long standing misconceptiuons about the events of 1989 is that it was the opening of the Berlin Wall brought freedom to the people of East Germany, when it was the people of East Germany demanding and seizing freedom for themsleves. The other is that once the Berlin Wall was opened the peaceful revolution was over. Yet it was still the SED that held the levers of (state) power in the GDR, the Stasi had not been disbanded, political parties had not been allowed, there was no independent judiciary and there was no mechanism for freee and fair elections. Nor was it clear that all sections of the apparatus would still give up their power. This poster is for the founding assembly of New Forum in Prenzlauer Berg in east Berlin on 10 November - at the Gethsemane church as it happens. Throughout the autumn the new political parties and citizens' movements began to take shape. The Round Table that was to become the instance for the transfer of power from the SED to society was to meet for the first time only in December. the peaceful revolution continued.

The Berlin Wall is open ...

2009-11-10T01:15:00.004+01:00

Jane's diary: 1.15 am, 10 November 1989

The Berlin Wall is open!! Yesterday's new Politburo opened it this evening. The Iron Curtain too. I can't believe it. I had been interpreting all day for some American journalists in Wittenberg and fell asleep at 6 p.m. exhausted. I woke up at midnight and tried to get back to sleep. At 1 a.m. I switched on the radio. This is amazing. Soon East Germans will have more freedom of movement than I do, since I'm here with a single-entry visa. The other students had already gone home today for the long weekend back in their local churches. One of them is in Berlin. I wonder if he's going to go to West Berlin for the day. It's really strange.

17.00

The atmosphere is amazing. People's faces in the street even look different.

22.30

Crazy, things are moving so fast that it's impossible to settle down. There's an intense need to be with people to experience it together. People don't know whether to laugh or cry. It's like a strange fairy tale. I spent most of this afternoon waiting for a phone call from the BBC for an interview. Stephen phoned and we had a happy conversation early this morning. Amazing. It was brilliant to be able to share our stunned amazement.

Have just been watching the pictures on television. East and West German police working together to sort out the chaos, despite new "holes" in the wall there's total blockage because of the human traffic in both directions. People climbing over the wall, being helped by police with ladders. It seem like some kind of surreal sci-fi story. And then the pictures of Willy Brandt at the border, incredibly moving. What must he have been thinking as the people in the east hugged and greeted him. Mayor of West Berlin when the wall was built, did he think he would live to see this day., Tears rolled down my cheeks.

Behind all this celebration is very real uncertainty. What is going to happen?

Yesterday was a historic day - the Berlin Wall was opened. Fifty one years ago, my Berlin grandfather was arrested and taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp following the Kristallnacht of 9 November 1938, the "night of broken glass" of the attacks against synagogues, Jewish Germans and their property. It is strange to think that these two events will share an anniversary.

Posted by Jane.

"Ich bin ein Berliner" - as seen by Plantu

2009-11-10T01:00:00.000+01:00

This is the cartoon that featured on the front page of Le Monde of 10 November 1989 (dated 11 November) by its resident cartoonist, Plantu.

Berlin remembers 20 years

2009-11-09T23:55:00.001+01:00

A very cold and wet Berlin has just finished a day of celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall (though will someone please tell Kate Connelly that when she writes about "priests" she probably means "pastors"). The most ironic part of the day is that "security measures" meant that once the festivites had finished, the one place where it was impossible to cross from East to West (or the other way round) was the Brandenburg Gate. A small group of people gathered in front of the police barriers and started shouting "The Wall must Go!", as a television commentator appeared on a giant TV screen to tell revellers that all the other "border crossings" were still open for people to cross. The "security measures" in question were that the VIPs were on one side of the Brandenburg Gate and the people on the other. At one point it looked as though the Berlin police were doing a reconstruction of 1989.

Similar thoughts at the Gethsemane church where at the start of the day in this case both pastors and priests gathered for an ecumenical service to mark the anniversary. The Gethsemane church was a focus for the opposition in GDR days, and became a refuge for demonstrators taking refuge from police brutality on 7 October. Police then sealed off the church and the srrounding streets, and some of the GDR's civic rights activists thought they had almost come to a reconstruction of the events 20 years ago as the streets were again swarming the streets (this time thought to protect the represetatives of Germany's "constitutional organs" - president, chancellor and so on. Ecumenical News International has a report of the service here:

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, officials have returned to a church in what was East Berlin, where protests of candlelit prayers helped bring down communism in East Germany. Germany's political and church leaders marked the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall on 9 November with an ecumenical service at the Protestant church in eastern Berlin, named after the garden where the Bible records Jesus spending his last hours.

"Today we look back at the fall of the wall 20 years ago," said Roman Catholic Archbishop Robert Zollitsch in his sermon at the Gethsemane church, only a few hundred metres from where the fortified concrete wall divided the city's eastern and western sectors from 1961 to 1989.

"We still feel today the gratitude and joyful amazement for this happening. What even only shortly before had seemed unthinkable became a reality," said Zollitsch, the chairperson of the German (Catholic) Bishops' Conference.

Still, Archbishop Zollitsch and Berlin's Protestant bishop, Wolfgang Huber, noted in their addresses at the Gethsemane church how joy at the opening of the wall in 1989 had been followed by soul searching about the effects of reunification between East and West Germany.

What the Ecumenical News International article did not have space to mention however was the explicit reference to the Conciliar Process for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation (and the GDR Ecumenical Assembly for JPIC) as one of the starting points for the peaceful revolution. The intercessions were made up of extracts from the final texts of the GDR Ecumenical Assembly and introduced by Berlin's Cardinal Georg Sterzinsky-

Breaking bread on the morning of 9 November

2009-11-09T18:00:00.002+01:00

Jane: On the morning of 9th November 1989 I was one of the twenty or so ministry students at the Predigerseminar in Wittenberg. We had 10 day modules allowing for a four day weekend beginning after lunch on the Thursday. The Thursday mornings were for our "Auswertungsrunde". Believe me you cannot really understand the groan that this even now inspires in me unless you have been through this kind of evaluation with German theologians who are all direct and critical of the methodologies and content of what and how they are learning ... it is quite indescribable. Of the 25 of us sitting around the evaluation table that morning four people were founding members of three of the different new political parties in the GDR, several had taken part in the big Berlin demonstration on October 7th, one of our lecturers had been a speaker at the huge demonstration in Berlin on November 4th. These were some of the biggish fish in the small GDR pond.
Everyone around the table knew someone who had been imprisoned, several had seen the violence first hand. Together we had begun the prayers for renewal in Wittenberg, experienced and led Reformation Day and Buss und Bettag, learned about liturgy and preaching.
We were young but adults, full of hope, getting ready to have that hope dashed, cynicism was there under the surface. During the previous week we had begun to receive reports of the police brutality towards thos imprisoned in Berlin and Halle at the beginning of October. We had read some of those reports out at our morning prayers and wept and raged. Our emotions were elemental, we were living through a revolution yet everyone was away from home and would rather have been at home with their own peace and church groups, going on the demonstrations with their friends and family - apart from me ...
I had suggested - ever the liturgist - that we should end each 10 day module with a communion service. So after two hours of telling each other what we thought of one another in no uncertain terms, we moved from the painful evaluation table not to the upper but to the lower room where a simple round table is set with bread and wine.
I clearly remember Friedrich Schorlemmer bringing flowers to the table at the last moment and my being deeply moved by that. In my memory they were pinkish snapdragons, but perhaps my memory fails me - surely they could not have survived so far into the season, that must have been on a previous occasion, one eucharist speaks of and reminds one of another. I remember the flowers though, from one of those eucharists and I remember Friedrich's face and body as he place this offering of beauty on the table. (Dr B has my diary and we will see whether my memory was wrong.)
I presided at our round table eucharist and I spoke of remembrance, of my Grandfather being arrested in the Kristallnacht raids and taken away to Sachsenhausen concentration camp 61 years earlier. And so with stories of brokenness, pain and hope all around us, having shared hard and gentler words with each other, we broke bread and drank wine in memory of the one who was broken and shed for us.
Next to me as we prayed and felt the bread and wine in our mouths, my friend U began to sob, tears rolling down his face. He is not ashamed of his grief and emotion. As I think back to that morning my hand remembers the feel of his jeans as I placed my hand on his leg in an attempt not to quiet him but simply to offer comfort and in some strange way to say yes this is what it has been like.
Twelve hours later U and many of the others were spending the night at the impromptu street party on both sides of the wall. The feast of memory became the party of liberation.

Crosspost from the StranzBlog

Liturgy at the Berlin Wall

2009-11-09T12:13:00.002+01:00

At lunchtime on 9 November, staff and others at the Ecumenical Centre met at the pieces of the Berlin wall in the garden of the ecumenical centre for prayers. The slabs of the Berlin Wall (one of which is shown in the picture) were a gift from the first freely elected government of the German Democratic Republic to the Conference of European Churches in recognition of the role played by churches in the peaceful revolution.

A visitor from outside the house asked "so which side was in the east and which in the west?" I explained that it would not have been possible to paint the eastern side with gaffitti. This led me to say during our prayers that we were lighting the candles on the wrong side - it was not Helmut Kohl who brought the wall down but people with ca ndles and courage on the other side! Even though the sun had come out I also said that the weather reminded me of an Iona peace liturgy for a rainy day - choose a symbol that will work on a wet day - not a candle! The wind did manage to blow out alot of candles - and the rain managed to deal with the rest later in the day.
I shamelssly plagiarised what Stephen has been writing on Holy Disorder to put together the simple liturgy. Using also my own diary extracts from that extraordinary year in the GDR - that's where the idea for using Psalm 126 came from. I also remember Friedrich Schorlemmer at the end of a particularly difficult day simply saying to us in Wittenberg, let's close this session by singing the Luther peace hymn which is why I chose Verleih uns Frieden gnädiglich to end with. I can remember being very moved by its wonderful minor melodies and the fact that everyone apart from me knew the words.
I also love the footnote at the bottom of The love of God is broad like beach and meadow - saying that the GDR government was concerned that the words of the hymn were criticising the state using religious language! It was good to sing one of Fred Kaan's hymns in translation after listening to a tribute to him on the radio last night.
So for 20 minutes at lunchtime we celebrated the spirituality of civil society that changed the world. coming home this evening I have heard a story of women walking together today across the peace line in Northern Ireland and of people trying to remove the wall in Palestine ... it seems right to use this anniversary as a starting point to overcome the barriers and divisions of our own times.

Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then it was said among the nations,
‘The Lord has done great things for them.’
The Lord has done great things for us,
and we rejoiced. (Ps. 126)

Liturgy is here.

Posted by Jane Stranz.

Observing a revolution

2009-11-09T07:00:00.001+01:00

This blog includes diary entries written by Jane Stranz while she was a student in the GDR from 1989 to 1990, first in Wittenberg at a theological seminary, and then in Wolfen near Bitterfeld as a student minister. Over on the Stranzblog, Jane has written about her arrival in the GDR-

Watching and Praying in Gethsemane

2009-11-08T09:33:00.010+01:00

For most of the five years that I lived in Brussels (from 1989 to 1994) I had stuck on my wall a cutting from the front page of The Independent newspaper from 9 October and the whole of the back page from the issues of 14 October. With the high quality black and white photogtraphy for which The Independent was then famous the pictures showed how the Gethsemane church in East Berlin had become a place of refuge and spiritual support for opposition to the SED. The title of the article on the back page was, "Where East Germans coonquer fear".

On 2 October 1989, the Gethsemane church, under its truly Christian pastor, Bernd Albani, had started a vigil for people who had been unjustly imprsioned after demonstrations calling for change. A month later, on 7 October 1989, as the SED celebrated 40 years of the GDR, demonstrators gathered on the Alexanderplatz and started marching towards the Palace of the Republic where the festivities were taking place. Ranks of police beat them back, arresting and beating demonstrators indiscriminately - the scene portrayed at the beginning of the film "Goodbye Lenin". Many demonstrators then made a U-turn towards the Gethsemane church, about 2 kilometres away, where they took shelter inside the church while the police sealed off the area around the church. For two days there was an uneasy standoff, those who had taken shelter couldn't leave but the police were not prepared to storm the church. The journalist Andrew Brown recorded the experience of Angela Kunze who began a fast on 4 October for the unjustly persecuted (he has also recently blogged about 1989). Her manifesto read:

I am fasting to cleanse myself of fear and hopelessness, hate and violence, impatience and the lust for novelty. I am fasting because I see no other way to express my protest against the ways in which our politicians brazenly keep us appearances and celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the state as their victory. I am fasting because, unlike our state media, I am worried about the great number of people who have left our country. I am fasting to live in solidarity with all who suffer and are persecuted because they have committed themselves to social justice. I am fasting in the hope that others will take part, for an hour or for days, and that we will show our personal commitment to this country by limiting our material needs.

"Watch and pray" - this is how the Bible records Jesus' injunction to his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane as he prepared for his arrest. It is also a chant from the Taize community much sung at the Gethsemane church as those who had taken shelter from the police waited for their fate. It was not until 9 October, as the huge march in Leipzig passed off peacefully, that the police moved back from the church.

"Watch and pray" - this is the motto for the series of events that has been taking place this autumn in the Gethsemane church to mark 20 years of the peaceful revolution and the felling of the Berlin Wall. On 9 November, the Gethsemane church will be the location in the morning for the central ecumenical service for state and religious leaders to mark the 20th anniversary of the opening of the wall, just a kilometre or so away from where the church is located.

On the evening of 9 November, however, the church is holding another service of public remembrance. The 9 November marks not only the 20 years since the opening of the walls, but the anniversary of the "Kristallnacht" - the night of broken glass or the state pogrom night - when throughout Germany, Jewish Germans and their houses of worship and property were attacked by the Nazis.

"The festivals of the Jewish and of the Christian religion are almost all festivals of remembrance" the brochure announcing the service states, "of the events of the history of the Jewish people or the life of Jesus. This ancient religious practice of remembering now has its modern forms when a date for the community has taken on such significance as the 9 November for Germans. In the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall the joy of the unexpected opening of the borders in autumn 1989 is linked irrevocably with the painful remembrance of the 'Reichsprogrommnacht' in 1938. A day such as this enjoins us to think ourselves about the forms and history of our remembrance."

There are walls that keep us all divided

2009-11-07T22:31:00.005+01:00

In his statement to mark the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall, World Council of Churches general secretary Sam Kobia said tthat the message that Christian faith can inspire a resistance movement against fatalism and despair is as important today as it was then:

There are still many walls separating humankind: the "Demilitarized Zone" between North and South Korea, the "Security Wall" on the occupied territory in Palestine, but also the walls of injustice, racism and prejudice that separate rich and poor, stigmatize persons suffering from HIV and AIDS and destroy the lives of many people.

The BBC (hat tip to Ian Alexander) has put together a page depicting the walls and barriers around the world which are still standing - or have been put up - since 1989.: West Bank, Northern Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Ceuta and Melilla, Cyprus, Pakistan-Iran, Rio de Janeiro, US-Mexico, Korean Border, Western Sahara, Botswana-Zimbabwe.

The title of this post comes from a verse from the hymn, "The Love of God is broad like beach and meadow":

We long for freedom where our truest being
is given hope and courage to unfold.
We seek in freedom space and scope for dreaming,
and look for ground where trees and plants can grow.
The Love of God is broad ...
But there are walls that keep us all divided;
we fence each other in with hate and war.
Fear is the bricks and mortar of our prison,
our pride of self the prison coat we wear.

In the archives of the GDR State Secretary for Church Affairs there is a paper that expresses concern about this hymn and states that it must not be published in the GDR, describing the text as a means of trying to discredit the state using religious language.

Diary of a revolution

2009-11-07T18:01:00.001+01:00

Wittenberg, GDR, Jane's diary dateline 7 November 1989 (Tuesday):

The official GDR news agency ADN is reporting that 23000 people left over the weekend. The Politburo meets on 10 November - many new members will have been elected. The situation at the top is drastic. Krenz is unlikely to hold onto his position for much longer. There's just no trust in him, but if he goes the chaos at the top will become even more obvious. But it seems difficult to think that he should stay just for the sake of stability.

Of course people like Otto Graf Lambsdorff (the leader of West Germany's Free Democratic Party) really don't help by telling the GDR to pull down the Berlin Wall. What utter nonsense, surely he realises that would be economic catastrophe. Of course in some way the Federal Republic is going to buy up the GDR anyway. Even before the Wende there were rumours of all sorts of entrepreneurs gambling on unification and buying up land. Of course it is very cheap here.

One of the other students led a meditation on Psalm 126 this morning. Very movingly she spoke of the almost dreamlike existence we all feel we are in at the moment, the changes, the unreality of this situation. But dreaming and dreams are important. Dreams are the roots of growing trees, the water and sap of our life.

...

Tonight it was the prayers for renewal again. It's strange. It seems normal to be in a church bursting at the seams. Tonight the phone rang three times. The caretaker came out and said, "The government has resigned!". Of course it doesn't mean that Krenz has gone, just that Willi Stoph and co. have stepped down. Tears came to my eyes as we sang, "Watch and pray". What is going to happen to this country? Who is going to take responsibility?

The justice commission of the central committee?, the Volkskammer? is going to look at the travel law again. As Gregor Gysi said yesterday, to be allowed to travel 30 days a year is not exactly a human right. People are not happy about it at all.

Things are moving so fast. A new electoral law might quieten things down but who knows? Maybe the leaders of the SED should wear sackcloth and ashes, as a symbol of what they have done wrong - how often will they have to say sorry?

Meanwhile the Trabbis are queuing up to leave into Czechoslovakia. Last night they crossed over at a rate of 500 an hour, today 200 an hour. How many more are going to go? How many will come back?

The synod of our regional church, the Church Province of Saxony, came up with some very thoughtful resolutions at its meeting, They sound a bit like the Barmen Declaration. I'm sure I can detect the hand of Heino Falcke behind them.

Is there a gap in what we remember?

2009-11-07T11:10:00.002+01:00

Over on Faith World, Reuters religion editor Tom Heneghan has a post entitled, "Some east Germans feel overlooked as Wall recalled":

As Germany celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, some Protestants feel the crucial role their church played in shepharding the democracy movement to success is quietly being overlooked. This seems strange to someone like myself who reported on those events back then. Any reporter in Berlin in the tense weeks before Nov. 9, 1989 knew the Protestant (mostly Lutheran) churches sheltered dissidents and was working for reform. But the idea that this was fading from public view came up during my recent visit to Leipzig when, at an organ recital in Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Thomas Church (Thomaskirche), the pastor mentioned the point in a sermon.When I later went up to Berlin, I ran the idea past a leading east German Protestant theologian and a pastor and two parish council members from the Gethsemane Church (Gethsemanekirche). That church in eastern Berlin was one of the most active centres of protest in the tense months before demonstrators forced open the Wall on Nov. 9, 1989. They all agreed ...

At the organ recital, Rev. Christian Wolff illustrated the point by mentioning a recent commemoration in Leipzig attended by German President Horst Köhler, Chancellor Angela Merkel and other dignitaries. “At the ceremony, Werner Schulz spoke of the role of the churches — nobody else did,” he noted, referring to a former East German dissident who is now a European Parliament deputy. Köhler didn’t go into it in his speech, the main address of the day. While the Protestant churches didn’t claim all the credit for the success of the protests, Wolff said, “it wasn’t just a quirk of history that Christians took leading roles in the late 1980s.” They acted out of their religious convictions that each person had God-given dignity and rights that the communists were denying them.

The shock waves of Berlin

2009-11-06T13:00:00.000+01:00

The political and social shock waves caused by weeks of pro-democracy protests in East Germany and then the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, were felt around the world.

The South African theologian John de Gruchy recalls how, while spending a sabbatical semester at Union Theological Seminary in New York that year, he had been asked to play host for a few days to the director of an East German institute for Marxist-Leninist studies.

The irony of a Marxist professor from East Germany being hosted by a white Christian theologian from apartheid-ruled South Africa was not lost on de Gruchy, who for many years was active as a theologian in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

Sitting together in New York watching the news on television, the East German and the South African saw reports of the growing crisis in East Germany and of the simultaneous escalation of protests against apartheid in Cape Town, de Gruchy's home town.

I knew that "meant the beginning of the end of apartheid. […] For without the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was unlikely that change would have taken place in South Africa," de Gruchy said a few years later in a speech in the eastern German city of Leipzig, one of the centres of the democracy protests in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that followed prayer services in churches.

"Some even claimed that these events were the prelude to a new world order," noted de Gruchy in his speech in Leipzig. "Even if we are somewhat sceptical of this claim today, these events have undoubtedly changed the course of history, no matter how we evaluate them."

The Berlin Wall and the Ecumenical Movement

2009-11-06T11:12:00.000+01:00

By Konrad Raiser (*)
The opening or fall of the Berlin Wall was an unexpected event for the people most directly affected, but even more so for the world at large. The ecumenical movement was no exception. However, the events in 1989 East Germany were to have a wide and long lasting impact on it that can still be felt today.

To be sure, large numbers of people from the former German Democratic Republic had left the country since the opening of the border between Hungary and Austria in the summer of 1989. Also, a growing network of civic groups, struggling for fundamental social and political change in the country, had emerged. They had benefited from the protection by the churches and were inspired by the ecumenical assemblies earlier in the year at Magdeburg and Dresden as part of the conciliar process on Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation.

Similar groups and movements had been operating in neighbouring countries already for some time. All of this had created a dynamic pushing for change, especially after the large, explicitly non-violent demonstration in Leipzig on Monday, 9 October 1989. But even then, few people expected that the wall would come down so soon, preparing the way for the end of communist rule not only in East Germany but in the entire region of central and eastern Europe and eventually overcoming the division of Germany and of Europe.

The series of events taking place in Europe from the summer of 1989 continuing well into the year 1990 and complemented by radical changes in South Africa and in other parts of the world had profound implications for the ecumenical movement. During the four decades following the First Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Amsterdam 1948, ecumenical efforts for justice and peace had been conditioned by the antagonism of the two major power-blocks and its consequences for countries in the southern hemisphere.

Ecumenical organizations, especially the WCC and the Conference of European Churches had tried to maintain links with the churches in the countries under Communist rule. Their witness for peace under the threat of nuclear confrontation had finally borne fruit. The 1990 Paris Charter for a "new Europe" appeared to herald in a new world order of peace and justice and a process of genuine disarmament began to take shape.

But the transformations in Europe and in other parts of the world had come so suddenly that neither governments nor the churches were sufficiently prepared for the new situation. The countries and churches, liberated from oppressive ideological and political constraints, had to find a new identity. In many instances this led to sharp internal struggles, especially between those involved in or complicit with the former system and those who had struggled for liberty, justice and human rights.

Ecumenical organizations came under scrutiny as well in view of their relationships with representatives of the former system and their lack of effective support for the struggles of dissident movements. In some cases, "ecumenism" even became a term to be avoided. Internal tensions developed particularly in many of the Orthodox churches leading to the withdrawal of the Orthodox churches in Georgia and Bulgaria from membership in the WCC.

Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall the second Gulf war in 1991, the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia as well the rapid progression of the process of globalization presented the ecumenical witness for justice and peace with unprecedented new challenges. The fragile order of the "cold war" years had been replaced by a new "world disorder".

In recognition of the important, and in some cases decisive ways in which the churches had contributed to the peaceful revolution in central and eastern Europe as well as to the ending of the apartheid regime in southern Africa, the ecumenical movement accepted the challenge to overcome violence as its special vocation. That the Decade to Overcome Violence should have been officially inaugurated in February 2001 in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was therefore a symbolic tribute to the peaceful revolution that brought down the Berlin Wall.

* The Rev. Dr Konrad Raiser, a Lutheran theologian from Germany, is a former WCC general secretary (1993-2003). This contribution first appeared on oikoumene.org:

http://www.oikoumene.org/en/news/news-management/eng/a/article/1634/the-fall-of-the-berlin-wa.html

Where were you on 9 November, Frau Kässmann?

2009-11-06T07:06:00.001+01:00

I was in Geneva where I was taking part in preparations for the World Council of Churches' World Convocation on Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation. I was overwhelmed with joy and though: what a miracle that this process has had such an effect. It was one of the reasons why the protests in the GDR remained peaceful. Three days later I returned to my country parish in Hessen where we we looking after people from the GDR, people who had escaped via Hungary and the Embassy in Prague who had been lodged in a vacation home nearby.

Bishop Margot Kässmann, newly elected chairperson of the council of the Evangelical Church in Germany

- From a questionnaire of public figures asking where they were when the wall was opened, published in the Rheinischer Merkur.

Where were you 20 years ago?

2009-11-05T23:59:00.000+01:00

Our friend Hannelore Schmid who works at the Ecumencal Centre has contributed her memories of 4 and 5 November after reading Jane's blogpost on the 4 November demonstration:

I know exactly where I was on 3 and 4 November 20 years ago. On Friday, 3 November, I had as usually on a Friday afternoon been working at the Bahnhofsmission at the Stuttgart railway station where we were confronted with the arrival of more and more GDR citizens who somehow had made their way to the West via Hungary or Czechoslovakia. Some wanted to stay in the Stuttgart area and we tried to find shelter for them in one of the hostels or even with private persons who had started to offer accommodation in a quite spontaneous way. Some wanted to travel on and we gave them something to drink and to eat and somehow tried to find the money to pay for their train ticket.
Then I took a night train from Stuttgart to Berlin where I arrived early in the morning of Saturday, 4 November. I made my way to a couple living in West Berlin whom I had known in August and September 1989 when I participated in an international peace walk along the Oder-Neisse border to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the attack on Poland and the beginning of the 2nd World War. It was during this peace walk that I had "discovered" the GDR as I had never been to this country before except for a day's visit to East Berlin during a Berlin trip of our school class.
The couple, both were former GDR citizens who had left their country in the 1970s, had informed me about a big demonstration which was planned to take place this Saturday around Alexanderplatz in East Berlin. We had agreed that I would travel to Berlin and that we would try together to get to East Berlin as day tourists and then see whether we would be able to join the demonstration. On the last moment, the husband decided not to come with us. He was too afraid that there would be violence, that he and his wife would not be allowed to come back again. But his wife wasn't. So Ingrid and I went alone.
At the border, we were astonished how easy it was to get our permission to leave the West and to enter East Berlin. No questions about where we intended to go etc.
Our meeting point was an apartment in Prenzlauer Berg where we would meet with some of the participants from the GDR of the peace walk and then together go to the "Alex".
It was amazing how the atmosphere had changed within a few weeks time. During our peace walk end of August in Forst, a small town close to the Polish border, a handful of people had tried to make use of the presence of an international group to demonstrate for more freedom and had been put to jail. And now, here we were again and this time we would make sure that something like this could not happen again.
As we were about to leave the apartment, Thorsten from Dresden arrived. He was very agitated and said that he was too afraid to come to the demonstration. Some days before, he had been released from prison in Dresden. Ingrid and I decided to stay with him and to listen to his story: how the police had beaten him up just because he had had the bad luck to be close to the Dresden railway station when a train with "Republikflüchtlingen" from Czechoslovakia was passing through. Later he was brought to the Stasi, interrogated and arrested. While we were talking, a neighbour rang and told that we could watch the demonstration life on GDR television. We couldn't believe this, but when we switched on the TV set we could see a huge crowd of people on the Alex listening to Stefan Heym ...
When our friends were back from the demonstration - excited, so happy, proud, optimistic - we had coffee and tea together and made plans on how both our countries would evolve and develop, how the two states could influence each other in a positive way, which parts of these two systems of society would be worthwhile to be kept, what needed to be changed in both countries. We certainly didn't think about a united Germany.
When we went back to West Berlin that evening, I heard an elderly lady in the waiting queue behind us whisper "They have certainly been to this demonstration!". No, finally we hadn't participated in what proved to be the biggest, non state organized demonstration of the GDR. But we were sure that we had lived a historic moment.

Candles - church - controversy

2009-11-05T07:51:00.003+01:00

I am off to Erfurt today for a conference on writing the history of the churches in the GDR: "Candles - church - controversy". Twenty years after the events of 1989, the meeting is to ask whether the history of the churches in the GDR has now been " ausgeforscht" - fully researched. In the immediate years after 1989 there was an explosion of interest in the role of the churches in the GDR, seen as being a motor for the changes of 1989. Then came the time of the opening of the Stasi archives, when the Protestant church, at least its leaders, far from being seen as the heors of the revolution, were portrayed as more or less willing accomplices of the ruling Socialist Unity Party, and its "sword and shield", the Stasi.

"After the peaceful revolution, the was a huge wave of contemporary historical studies, which were able to have access to an extraordinary extent of archival material," said Michael Haspel, co-organizer of the meeting and director of the Protestant Academy in Thüringen. "Since then the historical debate about the role of the Protestant church has quietened down. The symposium has to answer the question about the significance and problems of the issues after twenty years of intensive historical research."

The event is part of the "Gesegnete Unruhe" (Holy Disorder) campaign of the Evangelical Church in Central Germany which inspired this blog, and which was launched in Erfurt in April. My blogging began with a trip through eastern Germany on the trail of the 20th anniversary of the Ecumenical Assembly of 1989. Since then I have been following in real time the six months that followed the final session of the Ecumenical Assembly through the popular protests of autumn 1989. Such a short period of time - a sign that change does not happen only in an incremental linear fashion.

1989 !

2009-11-04T23:02:00.002+01:00

Timothy Garten Ash has a long review essay in the New York Review of Books on writing about 1989. Here's his conclusion (though there is also to be a second part next week):

The year 1989 was one of the best in European history. Indeed, I am hard pushed to think of a better one. It was also a year in which the world looked to Europe—specifically to Central Europe, and, at the pivotal moment, to Berlin. World history—using the term in a quasi-Hegelian sense—was made in the heart of the old continent, just down the road from Hegel's old university, now called the Humboldt University. Twenty years later, I am tempted to speculate (while continuing to work with other Europeans in an endeavor to prove this hunch wrong) that this may also have been the last occasion—at least for a very long time—when world history was made in Europe. Today, world history is being made elsewhere. There is now a Café Weltgeist at the Humboldt University, but the Weltgeist itself has moved on. Of Europe's long, starring role on the world stage, future generations may yet say: nothing became her like the leaving of it.
In any case, the longer-term consequences of 1989 are only now beginning to emerge. They, too, belong in the synthetic global history of 1989 that, partly for this reason, could not have been written sooner. But after two decades, the time has come for a brilliant young historian—at home in many languages; capable of empathizing both with powerholders and with so-called ordinary people; a writer of distinction; tenured, but with few teaching obligations; well-funded for extensive research on several continents; Stakhanovite in work habits; monastic in private life—to start writing this necessary, almost impossible masterpiece: a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk of modern history. With luck, he or she should have it ready for the thirtieth anniversary, in 2019.

4 November 1989 - from Jane's diary

2009-11-04T09:12:00.001+01:00

Dateline 5 November

Yesterday a huge demo in Berlin on the Alexanderplatz. Friedrich (Schorlemmer) spoke, it was strange to see him on televion. We crowded into the smokey room at midday and in the typical way of students laughed at our lecturer. He wasn't as bad as we wanted him to be, but it was obvious he was nervous and not as in control as he encourages us to be in our homiletic classes. He had written his speech and spoke it for the applause, not consciously I'm sure, but it's easy to know what will please people, what they want to hear at moments like the current "Aufbruch". He spoke of dealing with guilt according to the law, and not becoming like oppressers and going down the road of retaliation.

He was followed by Christa Wolf, she left pauses for applause but didn't orinetate her speech so much in that direction. She spoke beautifully, she has such a way with words, and wonderful images. Towards the end she said, " just imagine, it's socialism and no one goes away" - a wonderful reworking of "Imagine it is war, and no one joins up". I saw the tears springing in the eyes of one of my fellow students and felt my own body prickling with emotion. Sitting in this smelly and uncomfortable room watching history being broadcast live on GDR television. Quite amazing, and so difficult to believe. Can this really be happening?

The most amazing woman, Steffi Spierer, came on at the end - utterly spellbinding. She had three words for her great-grandchildren - no more have to swear on the flag, no more blue shirts of the Free German Youth, and that on the 1st of May the people can stand on the tribune as the party marches past.

4 November 1989

2009-11-04T08:06:00.001+01:00

From Denkzeichen

On the morning of 4 November 1989, approximately 500,000 demonstrators (sometimes the number is even said to have been nearly a million) made their way through East Berlin's center, past the East German Parliament and the Staatstrat Building. At the end a rally was held on Alexanderplatz at which numerous speakers took the floor.

The demonstration, with its concluding rally, is a highlight of the democracy movement in the GDR. The idea came about in the New Forum (an oppositional alliance founded in September 1989); Berlin's creative artists took over the implementation and organization. [1]

The organizers registered the event officially, in order to take legal proceedings for the recovery of the basic right to the freedoms of assembly, of expression and of the press, which were anchored in the constitution of the GDR, but never actually granted by the state. A security partnership was agreed upon with the police, who hardly made an appearance. Actors with green and yellow sashes and the inscription »No Violence« acted as supervisors.

»Never before had Berlin experienced so much shared determination, spontaneous imagination and, despite all radicalism, circumspection.« [2] Many demonstrators voiced their annoyance and demands with original, witty banners. Radical reforms were also demanded in the speeches given on Alexanderplatz. »The structures of this society must be changed, if they are to become democratic and socialist. ... Let us create a democratic society, on a legal foundation, which is liable!« (Christoph Hein) [3]

Henning Schaller, one of the organizers, described later: »Even beforehand, there were solid arguments and discrepancies as to who one... should let speak. Speakers like Markus Wolf, Günther Schabowski and Manfred Gerlach were criticized by many. But my opinion was that the spectrum of speakers should be as broad as that which the whole collapsing GDR had to offer ... But then again and again we had to demand the crowd, who flared up at the hard-liners, to let them talk and to listen carefully, because often enough these speakers exposed themselves.« [4]

For the first time, a demonstration for the democracy movement was broadcast live by GDR television, during which one of the commentator's statements was: »The people have overcome their speechlessness«. On the same day, there were large protest rallies in many other cities of the GDR.

»The 4th of November will become a landmark. From now on, the Socialist leadership can no longer side-step the demands of the masses; there's no going back to the old ruling practices.« [5]

Annotations:

[1] Jutta Seidel, founding member of the New Forum. In: Bilderchronik der Wende, ed. by Hannes Bahrmann and Christoph Links, Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 1999, page 36

[2] Hannes Bahrmann, Christoph Links: Chronik der Wende, Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 1994, page 79

[3] Christoph Hein in his speech on 4.11.1989. Website of the German Historical Museum, Berlin

[4] Quoted from: Bilderchronik der Wende, ed. by Hannes Bahrmann and Christoph Links, Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 1999, page 36

[5] Hannes Bahrmann, Christoph Links: Chronik der Wende, Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 1999, page 64

Quotations

Stefan Heym:
»... it is as if one pushed open the window after all the years of stagnation --spiritual, economic, and political-- the years of dullness and mustiness, of phrasemongering and bureaucratic arbitrariness, of official blindness and deafness.« ... »Someone wrote me - and the man is right: In the past weeks we have overcome our speechlessness, and we are now in the process of learning to walk upright.«
Stefan Heym, website of the German Historical Museum, Berlin

Christa Wolf:
»The 'people of the state of the GDR' have hit the street in order to identify themselves as a 'people'. And for me, this is the most important sentence of these past weeks - the thousandfold cry: We - are - the - people! A simple statement. We don't want to forget it.«
Christa Wolf, website of the German Historical Museum, Berlin

Speakers
in order of their appearance:
(professional activity in November 1989)

Marion van de Kamp (actress)

Johanna Schall (actress)

Ulrich Mühe (actor)

Jan Josef Liefers (actor)

Gregor Gysi (lawyer)

Marianne Birthler (catechist, Initiative for Feedom and Human Rights)

Kurt Demmler (singer, sang the song »Irgendwer ist immer dabei«)

Markus Wolf (colonel-general retd. of the Ministry for State Security of the GDR)

Jens Reich (molecular biologist, founding member of the New Forum)

Manfred Gerlach (chairman of the Liberal-Democratic Party in Germany)

Ekkehard Schall (actor)

Günter Schabowski (first secretary of the District Management of the (East) German United Socialist Party, member of the Politburo)

Stefan Heym (writer)

Friedrich Schorlemmer (theologian)

Christa Wolf (writer)

Tobias Langhoff (actor)

Annekathrin Bürger (actress, sang »Words from a Political Prisoner to Stalin«)

Joachim Tschirner (director of documentary films)

Klaus Baschleben (journalist)

Heiner Müller (writer)

Lothar Bisky (cultural studies scholar, Rector of the Potsdam-Babelsberg Film Academy)

Roland Freitag (student, Humboldt-University Berlin)

Christoph Hein (writer)

Robert Juhoras (student, University Budapest)

Konrad Elmer (lecturer)

Steffi Spira (actress)

What's the tipping point for revolution?

2009-11-03T09:00:00.000+01:00

Elizabeth Pond over on the Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article about the similarities – and differences – between East Germany in 1989 and Iran in 2009:

In both cases a robust civil society and middle class that habitually guarded their private sphere by eschewing politics suddenly turned political and challenged an authoritarian power structure. In both cases a mobilizing spark was the insult to citizens in apparent official falsification of formal elections that offered little genuine choice anyway. In both cases the social contract snapped; a wide range of businessmen, technocrats, and young mothers spontaneously joined the protest of elite student malcontents.
Furthermore, both framed their demands in religious terms – calling on the moral authority of the Protestant church in then East Germany, chanting "Allahu Akbar" (God is great) nightly in Tehran.

Yet in neither case were the powerful religious or nationalist motives that drive many revolutions a major factor. In Iran both the ruling hierarchy and the demonstrators spoke as Muslims. And nationalism was neutralized as an issue by President Obama's refusal to cheer on the protesters and thus expose them to branding as traitors in service of the Great Satan.

Mikhail Gorbachev meets Egon Krenz

2009-11-02T23:22:00.005+01:00

From: The Making the History of 1989 site

Soviet Record of Conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and Egon Krenz

The new General Secretary of the SED, Egon Krenz, traveled to Moscow on November 1, 1989 to meet in person with Gorbachev and assess the situation in East Germany and discuss possible paths forward. Throughout the lengthy meeting, Krenz and Gorbachev spoke openly about the challenges that now faced the GDR. Gorbachev, for the most part, remained hopeful that the new GDR leadership could instigate the necessary reforms that would save the GDR from complete collapse. Here, it is quite interesting to note just how steadfast Gorbachev remained in 1989 to the ideals of socialism and the necessity to defend those ideals against the magnetic appeal of capitalism. Also interesting is the personal nature of Gorgachev's observations about leaders in the East and West.

Egon Krenz was also straightforward in his assessment of the situation in the GDR. Like Gorbachev, Krenz remained optimistic that the GDR could withstand the hardships brought about by reform and emerge from the crisis in a better position. One might note that the German notes from this meeting are far longer and richer in detail than the Soviet notes and that these notes focus more on Gorbachev than Krenz. more here >>

See also the East German notes from this same meeting here.

History from above

2009-11-01T19:05:00.004+01:00

I have just finished listening to a BBC progamme How the Wall Fell, in which John Tusa brought together key protagonists of the moves towards the opening of the Berlin Wall and German unity for a reunion discussion about the decisions that led to the 9 November 1989 ... except that there was no one from the GDR there - US, Soviet, British and West German diplomats and politicians got in on the act, but the only person really to mention the role that the people of the GDR themselves had in the events was the British ambassador, who referred to the demonstration in Berlin on 7 October and who said the East German people had played an amazing role in ensuring that the events passed off peacefully (and also who noted that given the state violence in October it was by no means clear whether there would be a peaceful outcome to the events). No one, but no one from the GDR there - neither from the SED side (Schabowski comes to mind, though there are others) nor from the opposition - Markus Meckel who was a co founder of the Social Democratic Party in the GDR and then the foreign minister who was in the 2+4 talks from the GDR side. ... maybe it was just a "technical" problem in that their English wasn't good enough.

A people rise up, and are air brushed out of history ...

Reformation and Revolution in Wittenberg

2009-10-31T09:14:00.008+01:00

Today marks the 492nd anniversary of Martin Luther's 95 Theses, which he is reputed to have nailed to the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg, thus setting in train what has been described as the Protestant revolution. 20 years ago in this town about 90 kilometres south of Berlin, Christians organized the fourth of their "prayers for renewal" ("Gebet um Erneuerung") calling for civic rights and reform in East Germany. For the first time, the service since the "prayers for renewal" began, was followed by a "demonstrative procession" from the Schlosskirche to the Marktplatz, where 7 theses were stuck onto the door of the Town Hall. Jane was then studying at Wittenberg and she wrote in her diary:

The Gebet um Erneuerung in the evening was preceded by a certain amount of tension - what if there was violence, how would we cope? ... It went well. Over an hour before the start, the church was full and the courtyard outside was packed. Hans Treu, the dean of Wittenberg, had written a very good meditation and hand led the intercessions so there was no clapping of speechifying. As we sang the Kyrie, suddenly he atmosphere changed and in the gallery, people started lighting their candles. It was very moving. The demonstration was terribly orderly. I was one of two people carrying a banner reading, "You can't fill a hungry soul with prosperity". We were very near the back. I felt rather uncomfortable that I and not a GDR person was carrying something. Our candles dribbles wax everywhere, of course, making weird and wonderful sculptures on our hands.

In the distance it looked as if a small group of police were watching the demonstration from the corner, but as we got closer it turned out to be a group of Soviet soldiers who had turned up to watch us. Someone had even handed one of them a candles. One of the students greeted them in Russian and they returned the greeting with a smile. It was a small sign of the kingdom of God.

The market place was full, the local council had supplied (spontaneously) a proper P.A. system. It was all a bit calm, still a church service really. People no doubt expected a bit more. Some shouting at the town hall, "Come out". We sang a bit more, things were read about Luther and Melanchthon. Demokratischer Aufbruch and Demokratie Jetzt read their programmes out. DA sees socialism as the dominant force in the GDR. DJ sees no role for socialism except with a (modern) democratic set-up. DA is like a left wing Social Democratic Party and DJ like a left wing Dree Democratic Party. It's all really weird. No doubt they will all start splitting rather than merging in the coming years. There's supposedly a meeting of the United Left coming off soon, which really of course means a meeting of the Un-United Left. Once everyone had finished talking and it was agreed that we'd meet again next week and invite the Burgermeister as well. The market place was covered in candles, really very pretty. Many were on the steps of the Rathaus where the 7 Theses (thank goodness not 95!) had been attached to the door as a reminder of Luther.

It was stressed throughout the evening that this was not a church/state conflict but a people/state conflict. Quite an important difference but for how much longer can the church speak for the people, will it be able to give up that role? ...

Discussion over supper indicates that the local newspaper carried pictures and a full article about yesterday's demonstration, over 8000 people they reckon. In Prague many arrests have been made in the past fortnight. Havel is in jail again. If the world markets are about to go through a sticks patch then it's really worrying to think what the effect on Glasnost and Perestroika might be.

The German theologian Kay-Ulrich Bronk has written about the Gebete um Erneuerung in Wittenberg in autumn 1989 in his book, "The flight of the dove and the fall of the Wall", in which he quotes from Propst Treu's meditation:

Martin Luther did not discuss his theses with a small group of his students and colleagues but published them on 31 October 1517 so that they would be known to all and so bring renewal to church and society. We want to reconstruct this move to the outside world. We want to take renewal from the church through the streets of our town to the market place and from their to our homes and families, to where we work and - especially importantly - into the schools of our town (applause) ... This is the way we are going, creating conditions that have been renewedl relationships through people who have been renewed ... I want to mention something that has been mentioned in the previous three Tuesday evenings ... We have been brought to our current crisis and plight because a single party has claims the monopoly of power and truth, that must be changed (long protracted applause, stamping of feet) Dear friends, the Bible says: only people who have been renewed have the power to create conditions that have been renewed.

Bronk then continues himself:

The prayers for renewal ... were oriented towards specific issues like the political worship of the 1968 generation and inductive like the ecumenical assemblies of the conciliar process ... Before the people leave the church and move through the streets of Wittenberg in a "demonstrative procession", the final hymn of the prayers for renewal is sung, "Bewahre uns Gott" ("La paz del Señor"). I have already noted how this song had the character of a a song for sending out. But on no other evening did it have this character as on this occasion. Many of the participants probaby understood the refrain, "Sei um uns auf unsern Wegen", was probably understood by many of the participants as a direct reference to the march through the streets to the Marktplatz in front of the Rathaus. Then although the walk had been agreed with the town bosses, it was without any precedent ..,The demonstrations in other towns that had passed off peacefully could serve as an encouragement, but the first step from the protective space of the church had to be done anew in each town, and as such was accompanied by uncertainty ... As the people left the Schlosskirche and the Stadkirche the bells of both churches were rung. This had not only a liturgical but also a psychological function: a psychological in that this helped to overcome inner anxiety, a liturgical function in that it signalled that the move out of the church was not simply a political affair, but was a consequence of what had happened inside the church. Noah's dove had found dry land. The people left the Ark.

This year the Reformation celebration is going to be marked by a tree planting ceremony in Wittenberg, as the first trees are planted for the Luther Garden, in which churches worldwide are to be encouraged to adopt one of the 500 trees that are planned for the Luther Garden and also to plant a tree themselves to denote a link with the birthplace of the Reformation.

Meanwhile, over on the StranzBlog, Jane is blogging about the prayers for renewal being a spirituality of civil society.

(Photo is from Friedrich Schorlemmer's book, "Die Wende in Wittenberg")

Church calls for DDR Reform

2009-10-28T05:58:00.002+01:00

This is an article published in the Ecumenical Press Service from 31 October 1989. Ironically that issue of EPS was dated 1-9 November, a period during which the perspectives for the future of the GDR would change yet again.

Ecumenical Press Service

ECUVIEW: 'Church Calls for DDR Reform' (by Stephen Brown)

EPS 89.11.46 ::: As one of his first official engagements, Egon Krenz, new leader of the ruling communist party (SED) in the DDR (East Germany), met leaders of the Federation of Evangelical Churches (BEK) in the DDR (19 October). And in his first speech to the nation on DDR tv, Krenz told 'all religious citizens' that 'socialist society needs and wants your contribution. More unites us than divides us.'

About half the 17 million people in the DDR are counted as Christians, and most of them belong to one of the eight Landeskirchen (regional churches).
Krenz was elected SED general secretary (18 October) in succession to Erich Honecker, 78. Citing 'health grounds', he stepped down after thousands of DDR citizens left the country illegally for the BRD (West Germany), and tens of thousands more demonstrated in the streets calling for political change.

It is the most serious crisis in the history of the DDR, which recently marked (7 October) the 40th anniversary of its existence. The presence of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev only encouraged protesters calling for Soviet-style reforms in the DDR as well. He indirectly criticised his hosts by saying 'life will punish those who react too late'.

Evangelical churches all over the DDR have been the focus for demonstrations and protest meetings. These have continued, and increased in size, since Krenz was chosen. Unlike those in previous years, the current protests are not limited to independent peace-and-human-rights activists, and they are no longer confined to the relatively safe protection of church buildings.
Nevertheless, churches still provide a focus for protests. Up to 300 000 people demonstrated in Leipzig (23 October), after the weekly 'prayers for peace1 in the Evangelical churches there, the largest mass demonstration ever seen in DDR history. Little more than a month before, a similar demonstration attracted only 300 people.

In Berlin, the red-brick Gethsemane church in the working class district of Prenzlauer Berg offered refuge to demonstrators being pursued by police after protests outside the parliament building on 7 October where Gorbachev was warning the SED politburo, then still led by Honecker, not to delay reforms.

According to the official DDR news agency ADN, the Krenz-Leich meeting was a 'free and open dialogue in a businesslike atmosphere’. They agreed to work for a 'new chapter of constructive cooperation' , and said it was in both their interests 'to promote changes in our society'. Leich said he urged Krenz to 'give quick and clear signals of a new beginning' - starting with 'open dialogue with the people'.

In Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin, and other cities, church representatives have played a key role in starting discussions between the authorities and protesters. But such talks have not silenced increasingly open criticism from DDR church leaders.

Three days after Krenz and Leich met, Lutheran Bishop Johannes Hempel of Saxony told a church synod of allegations of police brutality against protesters. Meanwhile, United Bishop Gottfried Forck of Berlin-Brandenburg, called on DDR Prime Minister Willi Stoph to condemn the 'brutal actions of the security organs' in suppressing pre-anniversary demonstrations.

For two decades, BEK leaders have characterised their situation as that of a 'church within socialism'. They have followed a path of 'critical solidarity', willing to support the humanitarian aims of socialism, but ready to speak out and criticise specific areas of state policy.

Well before Gorbachev, church people were promoting a sort of glasnost in the DDR, drawing attention to social and political problems the state ignored or tried to suppress. Leaders like Heino Falcke of Erfurt, made no secret of their demands for greater democratisation and participation within socialism.

The churches became, in effect, an umbrella for groups marginalised in official society - independent peace activists wanting to criticise Soviet, as well as US, nuclear weapons; human rights groups; ecologists and environmentalists; punks and rockers; even gay and lesbian groups. A result has sometimes been tension, if not conflict, between parishes and groups. But church synods have generally supported the demands the groups have been making.

Ironically, it was Honecker, who came to power in 1971, who gave the DDR church freedom to engage in these activities. At the time, such freedom could only be dreamed of in many other eastern European countries. He initiated the first summit meeting with BELK leaders in March 1978, and gave them permission to build new churches, and produce tv and radio programmes. The then state secretary for church affairs, Klaus Gysi, spoke of an 'historic experiment' between Christians and Marxists.

However, the Gorbachev reforms have long since overtaken the Honecker approach. For months, the DDR has been seething with discontent because of lack of reforms. DDR leaders distanced themselves increasingly stridently from the Soviet Union. As one DDR citizen quipped, 'Gorbachev now seems to be more popular within the churches than inside the communist party'.

A number of opposition groups have been founded in the DDR. New Forum is probably the best known. Others include the movements Democracy Now, and Democratic Breakthrough. There is even a new Social Democratic Party. In this, BELK pastors and other church workers often play key roles. A third of the members of the SDP Executive Committee are pastors; many leading figures in Democracy Now have been active previously in the church-related Aktion Siihnezeichen (Action Reconciliation).

Change has even come to the Christian Democratic Union, a heretofore loyal SED ally, which aims to win Christians for official DDR policies. Last September, some CDU members published an open letter urging change in the electoral system, more intra-CDU democracy, more possibilities to travel, and more media openness [EPS 89.10.18]. At the time, CDU leaders criticised the letter.

However, in recent weeks the CDU daily newspaper Neue Zeit has become increasingly outspoken in favour of reform. It ran an interview (13 October) with Manfred Stolpe, BELK deputy chair. In it, he urged 'genuine elections and secret ballots' and a 'strategy plan for the future cooperation of the Germans in two states in a Europe of détente’.. A number of CDU members of parliament even voted against Krenz when he was elected head of state, unprecedented for the DDR, where parliamentary votes are normally unanimous.
Future DDR developments are still uncertain. But if glasnost-style reforms take root, determined DDR church efforts will have played a big role. [EPS]

[Brown, a journalist based in Brussels, is the author of the chapter on the DDR in a book recently published by the British Council of Churches.]

East Germany Removes Honecker And His Protege Takes His Place

2009-10-19T20:50:00.001+02:00

From the New York Times, 19 October 1989

Confronted with increasing demands for change, the East German Communist Party today ousted Erich Honecker, its hard-line leader of 18 years, and named his 52-year-old protege to replace him. The new leader, Egon Krenz, had been the Politburo member charged with security and youth affairs. He was named to Mr. Honecker's three positions - party chief, head of state and chairman of the Defense Council -granting him the broad powers Mr. Honecker spent years accumulating. Though the youngest member of the Politburo, Mr. Krenz is generally regarded as a tough and conservative leader in Mr. Honecker's mold but 25 years younger, more sophisticated and probably better aware of the scope and sources of popular discontent. Mr. Honecker, in his message of resignation, said that his illness and gall-bladder surgery ''no longer allow me to devote the power and energy demanded today,'' and he proposed Mr. Krenz as his successor, describing him as ''able and decisive.' Mr. Krenz underscored his difference in style from Mr. Honecker, who usually restricted his public appearances to stiff, formal rituals, with an appearance on television shortly after his appointment. Smiling, Mr. Krenz said: ''My motto remains work, work, work and more work, but work that should be pleasant and serve all the people.'' 'A Great Loss of Blood'. More >>

Holy Disorder - Blog Action Day

2009-10-15T21:51:00.005+02:00

Today is Blog Action Day, when bloggers are asked to blog on Climate Change. To mark the day I am linking to this paper by Heino Falcke, part of which he read at the symposium in Utrecht where he received the ecumenical prize of the Council of Churches in the Netherlands. In the paper, Falcke is looking back at the Ecumenical Assembly in the GDR, which in many respects was a forerunner of the peaceful revolution of 1989. The assembly was challenged to face the global challenges of justice, peace and creation in the perspective of the GDR. The result was a catalogue of changes for the GDR and which provided a template for the demands of the citizens' movements and new political parties formed in mid-1989. But Heino Falcke points out now that the Ecumenical Assembly was not only directed at political changes in the GDR, but an "Umkehr", a turn to a preferential option for the poor, for non-violence and for the preservation and protection of life in the global context. Climate change was hardly known as a concept back in 1989, but this is what Falcke now has to say about the environment as seen through the texts of the Ecumenical Assembly of 1989:

The ecological situation was particularly dramatic in the GDR. Let me quote from text 11 "Energy for the Future": "The unprecedented high energy consumption in industrialized countries and energy scarcity in the Two Thirds World is leading to regional and global problems. Large-scale efficiency, combined with high risks of accidents and often cross-border pollution characterize the situation in the highly industrialized areas. The acute power shortage in the underdeveloped countries and the often very simple, inefficient burning of wood and dung contribute to desertification and other problems. Global deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels lead to dangerous changes in Earth's atmosphere. Technologies and strategies to meet energy demand have been developed only in the interests of industrialized countries. Factors such as their impact on humans and the environment and the availability in underdeveloped countries has hardly played a role. "Ot states later:" Energy use in the underdeveloped countries will increase significantly in coming decades. The absolute consumption of primary energy can and must be significantly reduced in industrialized countries during this period. This does not necessarily mean a loss of quality of life." At that time, the problem of" connectivity "of the technologies of developed countries to emerging economies had already been noted, something that is now seen as increasingly urgent with rapid economic growth in China and East Asia. These findings of the Ecumenical Assembly,of which I have quoted only examples, were almost completely displaced in the process of German reunification.

1989 in Global Perspective

2009-10-11T19:34:00.002+02:00

20 years ago, Leipzig became the place famous for demonstrations, which have been perceived as the decisive breakthrough to the end of the communist regime in East Germany. However, when looking back to the event, we become aware that 1989 is not only of local or national importance, but it also marks a global caesura. To mark the 20th anniversary, the Global and European Studies Institute of the University of Leipzig [I imagine it is not the KMU any longer] is organizing a conference from 14 to 16 October to examine the synchronisation of challenges to existing regimes and transformations happening all around the world, from China to South Africa, from Central America to the Soviet Union, and to discuss the causes of this coincidence which made 1989 the signature of epochal changes. The programme can be found here. For those who like me will unfortunately not be able to attend a number of the papers have already been posted to the Internet.

The conference is a salutary reminder that it was not only in Europe that epochal changes took place in 1989. Te ecumenical movement has always very strongly emphasised that the Cold War affected not only Europe but the world as a whole. The moderator of the World Council of Churches, Walter Altmann, alluded to this in his report to the WCC central committee this year:

From 1961 to 1989 a wall 154 kilometres long made out of fortified concrete divided Berlin in two. It came to symbolise the division of the world into two conflicting systems. There is a large piece of that wall here in the garden of the ecumenical centre. It was a gift from the first freely elected GDR government to CEC as a sign of recognition for the role the churches played in the peaceful changes in Eastern Europe. In that process the churches had the chance to bring their commitment to peace, justice and the integrity of creation, their commitment to democratic processes, their commitment to the inalienable dignity of human beings to bear on civil society and to do so in a peaceful way. We remember with gratitude those days and can still see in our mind’s eye the impressive pictures of the rejoicing people, climbing the wall and celebrating its end. Yet we do not forget either that many other walls, be they of concrete or of prejudices or of laws which discriminate foreigners, persist or are being raised, dividing peoples and causing great suffering, in many parts of the world. We also remember those who lost their lives in Tiananmen Square, in Beijing, China, 20 years ago. The late 1980s were marked also by the move to the end of apartheid in South Africa. In 1989 Namibia began its transition to independence that was sealed the following year, becoming the last country in Africa to leave behind colonialism. In Latin America the end of the Pinochet regime in Chile marked the symbolic end of military dictatorships on that continent. The recent military coup in Honduras has evoked sad memories of the past; let us hope that it will also pass into history books as an anachronistic episode which will not endanger in any way the strengthening of democracy in the region.

Churches also played a role in this transition, something examined in a recent book edited by Christine Lienemann-Perrin and Wolfgang Lienemann, Kirche und Öffentlichkeit in Transformationsgesellschaften (Church and the public space in societies of transition). Their case studies are from Asia, Africa and Latin America, but the general section also discusses eastern Europe.

Peaceful Revolution 'should have received the Nobel Prize'

2009-10-09T19:18:00.003+02:00

Barack Obama was today awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. However, over on evangelisch.de, Henrik Schmitz writes that it should have been the GDR's peaceful revolution
whose turning point was 20 years ago today that should have received the prize.

Wouldn't it have been a great symbol if on 9 October, the day that makred the turning point in Germany, if the acadmey had awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the people who actually managed to start a revolution to promote, and eventaully to accomplish, greater freedom, justice and peace - that is the people who were instrumental to ensure that the revolution in the GDR in 1989 was a peaceful revolution.

Der Spiegel is reporting in English about the peaceful revolution in Leipzig:

In the summer of 1989, East German politicians praised the Chinese decision to use violence against democracy activists camping in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. In September and early October, East German police had cracked down forcefully on protesters in Dresden, Berlin and Plauen. Protesters marching in Leipzig on Oct. 2 were beaten by police. "People had seen pictures from Beijing," Jens Schoene, a historian and author of "The Peaceful Revolution: Berlin 1989/90 -- The Path to German Unity," says. "It wasn't at all clear it would be peaceful. On Monday, Oct. 9, Fuehrer, Wonneberger and the others at the Nicolaikirche decided to go ahead with the scheduled protests. All of East Germany, it seemed, was holding its breath. "We were so worried they would come in and shoot everybody," said Dorothee Kern, then a graduate student in the nearby city of Halle. "We had goosebumps the whole day and the day before. Dissidents prepared for the worst. Couples with kids made sure one parent stayed home, in case there was a police crackdown. Rumors flew around the city: Hospitals had been stocked with extra blood and beds; stadiums were readied to hold masses of arrested demonstrators. On his way home from work at the opera house in the middle of town that day, Leipziger Hans Georg Kluge remembers seeing the city filling with soldiers and police. "Everyone had to reckon with the state suppressing any demonstration," he says. "Violently, if necessary."

And there is also a film on the "miricle of Leipzig"

The 'peaceful' revolution

2009-10-08T23:37:00.002+02:00

Speaking of a 'peaceful' revolution may give the idea of a soft, calm transition from an old regime to institutions based on the rule of law. Yet as this article from The New York Times in 1989 makes clear the autumn uprising in the GDR was a movement in which protesters and demonstrators had to be ready to take on the overt and covert violence of the state:

East Berlin ended its 40th anniversary celebrations tonight with clashes between demonstrators demanding change and police troops. Callers to Western news reporters told of other demonstrations, in Leipzig, Potsdam, Halle and other East German cities, but initial details were sketchy. The clashes in East Berlin began under a display of fireworks that lit up the night sky, underscoring the contrast between the state-ordered festivities and the crisis shaped by the flight of more than 45,000 citizens this summer. With the flight curtailed by the closing of the Czechoslovak border earlier this week, the focus of popular frustration seemed to shift to the streets. Large demonstrations and outbursts of violence were reported earlier this week in Leipzig and Dresden. In East Berlin, what began as a clutch of about 100 demonstrators mingling with crowd of holiday-makers at a fair set up on the vast Alexander Square turned into a march of thousands through the center of the city, first toward the Palace of the Republic, where President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the Soviet Union and other visiting Communist chiefs were attending a gala reception, and then through the dark, cobbled streets of the working-class Prenzlauerberg district. Thousands of police officers, plainclothes security forces and volunteer militia ringed the marchers, estimated at about 5,000, and drove them down the side streets of Prenzlauerberg, where the police periodically charged seized individual protesters.

The scene is immortalised at the beginning of the film Goodbye Lenin where Alex's mother, Christiane, who is on her way to the festivities to mark 40 years of the GDR suffers a near fatal heart attack as she sees her son being grabbed by police and taken away in a police lorry.

The Turning Point

2009-10-08T19:16:00.003+02:00

A prayer service for peace in an historic Lutheran church in the East German city of Leipzig 20 years ago triggered the chain of events that exactly a month later led to the opening of the Berlin Wall, writes Anli Serfontein for Ecumenical News International. As people gathered after work on the afternoon of 9 October 1989 in the Nikolaikirche (St Nicholas' Church) and three other inner-city churches in Leipzig to pray for peace and democracy, the signs of potential violence were uppermost in most people's minds. Two days earlier, as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was in East Berlin for the 40th anniversary celebrations of the East German state, pro-democracy demonstrations there had been put down with force. Before the prayer service took place, however, ominous warnings had appeared in Leipzig's communist-run media suggesting that armed force would be used to suppress demonstrators. Rumours circulated of hospitals building up blood reserves and being put on alert to deal with bullet wounds. Read more here >>

Meanwhile the German Protestant magazine Chrismon has an article on 9 October 1989 as a "day of decision"

Photo: (c) LTM/Andreas Schmidt

60 years of the GDR

2009-10-07T23:34:00.002+02:00

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic, which was founded just a few days after the People's Republic of China. Yet while the PRC is a power that is getting ever more important, the GDR ceased to exost in 1990. I first visted the GDR in 1979, the year of its 30th anniversary. Part of an official delegation from the British Youth Council we were shown the forward looking optimistic side of the GDR. Five years later I was a student in East Berlin with friends who were active in peace and human rights groups. In 1989 I was banned from the GDR - even after the opening of the Berlin Wall - and in 2009 I had the great privilege to take part in a symposium with Heino Falcke, one of the precursors of the peaceful revolution. Christoph Dieckmann, a journalist coming from east Germany, once said, "The GDR is a time, not a place".

The 40th anniversary is largely remembered for the civic rights protests that marked the event (and which sets the stage for the opening of Goodbye, Lenin) and the phrase Mikhail Gorbacehv is supposed to have uttered to the leaders of the GDR, "Life punishes thosewho arrive too late".

This is an extract from Time magazine about the 1989 anniversary:

The timing of Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to East Germany could not have been more awkward. On the 40th anniversary of the country's founding as a separate socialist state, the government in East Berlin found itself utterly humiliated. Like storm-besieged dikes, the borders of the country had sprung one leak after another, and thousands of refugees were pouring out. The routine anniversary visit threatened to turn into another diplomatic nightmare for the Soviet President, fraught with the kind of tensions and prodemocracy demonstrations that marred his trip to China last spring. It was Gorbachev's message of change, after all, that had largely inspired the freedom flight.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,958775,00.html

Labyrinth of change

2009-10-06T22:58:00.002+02:00

The Marienkirche in Frankfurt an der Oder has inaugurated a "Labyrinth of Change" to mark the 20th anniversary of the peaceful revolution. Helmut Kohl promised people in the GDR a blossoming countryside landscapes - but this rarely emerged. Instead this vision represents dashed hopes. The action artist Richard Gigantikow aka Reinhard Zabka - together with international artists - has symbolised this ebb and flow of emotions in a walk-in art installation as a labyrinth of change in the nave of St. Mary's. Just as then nobody knew what the next day would bring, so surprises are awaiting visitors walking through the interactive labyrinth ... Reflect, remember and wonder in and through the labyrinth of change ... .

An anniversary in Berlin, or Brasilia on the Spree

2009-10-03T09:39:00.002+02:00

Today marks an anniversary in Berlin, no - not the 19th anniversary of German unity, but the inauguration of East Berlin's Fernsehturm (television tower) 20 years earlier in 1969 in time for the 20th anniversary of the GDR on 7 October 1969. Since then - and even more since unification- it has become as much a trademark of Berlin as the Brandenburg Gate. The Fernsehturm was part of an attempt by the GDR's rules, "secure" behind the Berlin Wall, to create a new "socialist" capital for the GDR and demonstrate the superiority of socialism over capitalism. However, as the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung reports, Horst Oehlrich one of the building engineers who made the tower possible was missing from the official reception given by state- and party leader Walter Ulbricht for the engineers, architects and construction workers on 3 October 1969. «I refused to serve in the army because of my Christian convictions», Oehlrich told the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung. «That was certainly the reason why I could not be present for the the reception with Ulbricht.»

The television tower was just one part of a much wider programme of building a new capital for the GDR which in some respects mirrors the attempts of Brazil to build itself a new capital at Brasilia. Like Brasilia the socialist capital of the GDR was a political statement as much as an architectural ensemble, but while the Brasilian capital was hewn out of the jungle, the socialist GDR capital - on a much smaller scale - was hewn out of the rubble and remains of the centre of Berlin. There is it seems increasing interest in the motifs of modernism in GDR architecture, a couple of books have coined the term Ostmoderne, for example, while a recent book sets out motifs of Brasilia's architect "Oskar Niemeyer -a legend of modernism" - to be found in East Berlin. On the other hand there are also apparently motifs from East Berlin architecture that Niemeyer placed in Brasilia.

For the German speakers among you here is a book on the theme:
Symbolsuche. Die Ost-Berliner Zentrumsplanung zwischen Repräsentation und Agitation
(The search for symbols: Planning and the East Berlin centre between representation and agitation)

The planning of East Berlin's city centre is is like no other construction project of the GDR shows the close links between politics, ideology, economics and architecture. The plans for the "socialist transformation" of the area between Alexanderplatz and Kupfergraben, especially the history of the monumental tower that the SED wanted to erect on "Marx-Engels-Platz as a demonstrazion of their power and prestige demonstrate in an exemplary fashion the possibilities and chasms of political iconography. It was precisely the historic centre of Berlin, which was for more than forty years, the political centre of the GDR, that became the setting for an explosive debate about style in which both 'conservative modernity' as well as the planned city of Brasilia were the inspiration for a socialist symbolic architecture. Selected examples show the the evolution of DDR-representation architecture as an expression of personal and intra-party power struggles that raged particularly between Hermann Henselmann and Gerhard Kosel, between the local level and the state.

For English speakers, there is an article in English by Peter Müller on "Counter-Architecture and Building Race: Cold War Architecture and the Two Berlins".

PS: The picture shows the Marienkirche in front of the Fernsehturm. Originally the Marienkirche was to be removed from this showcase of socialist planning but it remained, a symbol of the place of the church in the GDR.

How a BBC journalist remembers 1989

2009-10-01T07:33:00.000+02:00

Brian Hanrahan, who covered the 1989 events in eastern Europe for the BBC, has posted to the BBC News site an article of recollections from that time:

It was a baffling year - neither predictable nor inevitable. For those of us in the thick of it, there was a constant struggle to make sense of what we were seeing. Even those with the power to shape events were taken aback. The outcome was not what they had bargained for.

It was a year in which power was transferred away from repressive communist leaders who tolerated no questions or debate about their policies to mass movements which swept away governments and rewrote the map of Europe. Only China resisted the momentum of change by brutally suppressing demonstrations ... But at the beginning there was little to indicate that we were witnessing the collapse of communism, and the end of the Cold War. I have looked back through my notebooks and can find not a mention of the round table talks in Poland which began in February and would eventually lead to Eastern Europe's first non-communist government. Few thought it worth remarking on.

Hat tip to Anli Serfontein

East Germany - A Catholic Revolution?

2009-09-25T16:37:00.004+02:00

Academics and others have been disputing for almost 20 years whether the events in the GDR in autumn 1989 can be characterised a "Protestant Revolution". Now, in a speech to mark the 20th anniversary this year of the opening of the Berlin Wall, the leader of the German (Roman Catholic) Bishops' Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch has pointed to the role of the Catholic Church:

With the distance of 20 years, we can see that the various developments that came together on 9 November 1989 had begun much earlier. At a whole series of stages we encounter Pope John Paul II. Mikhail Gorbachev even wrote in his memoirs, "Everything that has happened in recent years in Eastern Europe would not have been possible without this Pope." Here I need only recall the first visit of Pope John Paul II in his Polish homeland in 1979, On the eve of Pentecost, he prayed: "Send forth your Spirit! And renew the face of the earth! This earth!“ Then, at the Victory Square in Warsaw, the Pope gave confidence to his compatriots, encouraged them to commit themselves to freedom and human rights, and with his prayer set in train a movement of "Solidarity" that could not be stopped even by violence and martial law.

Zollitsch is certainly right in this anniversary year with his reminder of the significance of the events in central and eastern Europe - particularly in Poland - for what happened in the GDR, events that are sometimes obscured by a focus on 9 November and the Berlin Wall. This was not just (or not even) a German-German affair. At a later point in his speech Zollitsch refers to the role of the churches in what he terms the "German Revolution":

It is correct to say that at its origins the German Revolution of 1989/90 was not a Christian revolution. But neither should one ignore that the churches opened their doors as the crisis of 1989 arrived, as the oppositional groups first were at the peace prayers in the church and then went onto the demonstrations on the streets
The Protestant church had the advantage of being the bigger sister, and being better able to offer appropriate rooms and was all in all more generous when it came to offers church premises for non-religious events. But it is indisputable that both churches offered space and protection as the opposition in the GDR needed institutional support and personal help. In their attempts to achieve freedom and civic rights, the opposition looked to the churches, the people sought the presence of the church and their hopes were not disappointed. The courageous examples were contagious. This explains why a surprisingly large number of GDR Catholics, who because of political abstinence reaching back decades were largely immune to such developments, seized the opportunity to get involved in promoting freedom and unity, and to take on political responsibility, beginning with moderating the Round Table to standing as candidates in the elections that soon followed.

So it wasn't a Catholic revolution after all, but what is interesting in the cautious attempt to deal with the role of the Catholic Church in the GDR, noting that its policy of "political abstinence" had meant that Catholics were less likely to get involved, and that the Catholic Church was less likely to offer premises to non-religious events, by which is meant political gatherings for civic rights activists. Its a far cry from the statements shortly after the political changes of 1989, when the Protestant church was being criticised as too cosy with the GDR authorities and the Catholic Church being presented as a model of resistance.

Here is an extract from the H-Net review of Herbert Heinecke's book. Konfession und Politik in der DDR: Das Wechselverhältnis von Kirche und Staat im Vergleich zwischen evangelischer und katholischer Kirche:

While both churches adopted initially confrontational postures toward the establishment of SED rule, differences in their own histories and traditions, social positions and self-understandings led them to respond very differently to changing circumstances in the GDR. These differences became especially clear after the mid-to-late-1950s, when the relaxation of state anti-church activities made room for more nuanced church-state relations. They culminated in the late 1980s in the central role played by the Protestant churches in the emergence of East German civil society at a time when the Catholic church was still only beginning to come to terms with its place in the GDR.

:: Hat tip to Anli Serfontein for the speech

What does a world without walls look like?

2009-09-24T08:06:00.001+02:00

That's the question posed by Rise&Fall, a mobile art installation and dance event commemorating the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall. The exhibition features modern digital artwork interpreting the theme 'bringing down walls/breaking down barriers' (both literally and symbolically) and music performed by Turkish-German DJ/Producer, DJ Ipek Ipekcioglu (www.djipek.com). Events take place from 4 November to 1 December in New York, Miami, Boston, Washington, DC and Los Angeles. There's still time until 30 September for artwork submissions. Art from 11 countries relating to the theme 'breaking down barriers' has already been submitted. Artists, from amateur to professional, are invited to submit digital versions of their art produced in a full range of mediums along with a short description of what 'bringing down walls' means to them - either as directly related to the Berlin Wall or on a more symbolic, personal, cultural or social level.

The picture here comes from the Rise&Fall Web site: http://www.rise-fall.com/news_post.php?id_art=54

The Trabbi is back ...

2009-09-23T16:32:00.005+02:00

The Trabant - the car that made a Skoda look like a luxury limousine - is back! 20 years after photos went round the world showing lines of Trabants queuing to get to the West, a former Volkswagen engineer is to unveil plans at the Frankfurt Motor Show to create a new eco-friendly Trabant. Actually it never went away as these photos taken this year in Jena and Budapest make clear.

Here's Chris Milton's report:

It’s being developed by an unlikely combination of specialist car manufacturer IndiKar, the former Volkswagen designer Nils Poschwatta and the leading miniatures manufacturer, Herpa.
But is there anything to differentiate the Trabant from its competitors?

Well, styling to start with. The Trabant has always had an uncanny resemblance to its western counterpart, the Mini and this new electric Trabant is far more pleasing on the eye that BMW’s take ... Then there’s the innovative solar roof. Many electric cars carry an additional 12V battery in order to power SatNav, heating and other low-voltage “necessities.” Not the Trabant. These will all be powered by its solar roof and, quite bluntly, if there isn’t enough sun then your air-con won’t work. Who needs air-con when it’s cloudy anyway?

Hm! Methinks the timing has something to do with the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall. Here's a photo of the new Trabant from the Web site of Indikar, one of the companies behind the project:

Strangely enough in this part of France we had a house up the road that used to have two Trabants in its front garden.

Photos of old Trabant (c) Stephen Brown.

P.S Here's a Wiki "Trabant" fact: In medieval German Trabant meant foot soldier or personal guard, ^[1] and here's one last photo of a Trabant this time from Jena in May 2009.

Opposition forms in East Germany

2009-09-21T20:23:00.004+02:00

Twenty years ago: The opposition group "New Forum" filed for official recognition in East Germany and a Synod of the Protestent Church in East Germany issued a resolution calling for democratic reforms including a multiparty system, freedom to travel and freedom of the press.

From The New York Times, 20 September 1989:

OPPOSITION FORMS IN EAST GERMANY
By SERGE SCHMEMANN, Special to The New York Times

The largest of several new groups formed to campaign for change in East Germany announced today that it had applied to field candidates in parliamentary elections next May as the first countrywide opposition organization.

Barbel Bohley, a founding member of the group, the New Forum, said it had filed formal applications to run candidates in 11 of 14 electoral districts. Miss Bohley said she was skeptical that the Government would even reply, ''but we have to do it.''

The Government has refused in the past to sanction independent groups, and the Communist authorities have shown little inclination in recent weeks to make any concessions to opponents at home or abroad. More

Hat Tip to Freedom without Walls

http://holy-disorder.blogspot.com/2009/09/opposition-forms-in-east-germany.html

"Ostzeit: Stories from a Vanished Country"

2009-09-21T12:34:00.003+02:00

The New Statesman (sic) reports on this photographic exhibition organized by the Sibylle Bergemann, Ute and Werner Mahler and Harald Hauswald, four of the most well known east German photographers, and founders of the OSTKREUZ agency, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin to lead into a review of the issues of memorialising German history. Writer Dave Rimmer notes in his article:

The latest memorial controversy concerns a monument to German unity intended for a site near the former Palast der Republik. The government promised €15m and an open competition was announced - but out of 400 designs submitted, not one has been deemed suitable. Now, as debate rages between greens and conservatives, Ossis and Wessis, there is to be a second, invitation-only competition. Berlin, it seems, is just not ready for a monument to unity. In fact, despite all the projects designed to bind it back together - such as the commercial cluster around Potsdamer Platz and the new central station - Berlin is still a divided city.

Details of the book to go with the exhbition are available here.

http://holy-disorder.blogspot.com/2009/09/ostzeit-stories-from-vanished-country.html

A new Wall to mark 20 years since the opening of the Berlin Wall

2009-09-19T17:10:00.004+02:00

The German Embassy in Washington has set up a special Facebook page to mark 1989:

The fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago marked the beginning of a new era in history. It was the end of the Cold War, the beginning of a fully united Europe and proof that peaceful change is possible, even in the moment when it seems most unlikely.

Among the usual Facebook type things it includes a discussion on the role of leaders in peaceful change, and a chronology on the Facebook "Wall" of the opening Berlin Wall in November 1989:
http://www.facebook.com/freedomwithoutwalls?v=wall

"My dear Christian friends in East Berlin"

2009-09-18T10:50:00.005+02:00

These were the words spoken by the US civil rights activist Martin Luther King when he preached in the Marienkirche when he visited East Berlin in 1964, on one of the most tense days in the divided city since the building of the Wall in 1961. Chrismon, the German Protestant monthly magazine, has an article on its Web site about how King arrived in an American limousine without notice at Checkpoint Charley, and was eventually let in after half an hour by a stunned border guard after he was able to prove his identity with an American Express card (his passport was being held by the US authorities in West Berlin to prevent him crossing into the East) was back at the hotel, presumably). Shortly before King's visit to East Berlin, East German police had exchanged fire at the wall with the West Berlin police and US military as a heavily wounded 21 year old reached the West. King who was in West Berlin to address a commemoration ceremony for the John F Kenndy at the Waldbühne had hurred to the scene of the event.

In East Berlin King addressed a Marienkirche full to overflowing - the doors were closed 2 hours before the start of the service, news of which had spread only by word of mouth. The crowds who couldn't squeeze in were urged to go to the nearby Sophienkirche were a second service was arranged at short notice. Georg Meusel, a peace activist in GDR times who now coordinates the Martin-Luther-King Centre in Werdau, recalls in Freitag how King spoke of the civil rights movement in the United States, Gandhi's philosophy of non-violent resistance that inspired the US activists, "who would prefer to go to jail with dignity than live with humiliation and without equality". King ended his sermon with the words, "In this faith we can hew a stone of hope from the mountain of despair ... In this faith we will work together, pray together, stand up together for freedom in the certainty that we will be free at last". Meusel commented:

Although neither Martin Luther King nor his audience imagined the events in the GDR in 1989, a minority in the peace and civic rights groups and in the churches in the following years internalised the message of non-violent conflict resolution.

King's visit to East Berlin was on 13 September 1964. 25 years later, a group of civic rights activists in the GDR met to announce the formation of "Demokratie Jetzt", just one of the actions of non-violent resistance during autumn 1989. An event to mark this anniversary was held on 13 September 2009.

Michael Haspel, the director of the Evangelical Academy in Thüringen, has produced a study that compares the role of the Protestant churches in the GDR and the black churches in the US civil rights movement: Politischer Protestantismus und gesellschaftliche Transformation. This is a summary of an article by Haspel in the Forschungsjournal Neue Soziale Bewegungen:

The Protestant churches in the German Democratic Republic and the Black churches in the civil rights movement in the United States are two among very few examples for non-fundamentalist Protestant churches which were decisively involved in processes of social transformation. In both cases it was paramount that the churches were developed institutions with substantial resources at hand in order to play an important role in the respective social movements. In order to explain why the churches were willing to commit their resources for the sake of the social movements, in this analysis it is argued that a decisive development in the mode of theological reflection took place. In both cases theological contextualisation in the given situation was the presupposition for the involvement of the churches in the social movements.

(Photo: Chrismon)

Honouring a forerunner of the peaceful revolution

2009-09-16T20:36:00.004+02:00

The Council of Churches in the Netherlands has awarded its ecumenical prize for 2009 to Heino Falcke (press release here), for many years the dean of Erfurt and a voice in the GDR churches urging change in the GDR, and one of the key initiators of the Conciliar Process forJustice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation. Falcke first came to wide prominence in 1972 with an address to the synod of the Federation of Protestant Churches in the GDR in which he said the church would be a "church for others" in that it would take the side of the oppressed and offer a space for critical debate and free speech. "In the promise of Christ," Falcke stated in a phrase that angered the Community authorities, "we will tirelessly remind our society of our committed hope for a socialism that can be changed for the better."

To mark the award there is a ceremony in Utrecht on 2 October that will fcous on the conciliar process as a precursor of the peaceful revolution: "Even after German unification, Falcke has reflected critically on the position of the Church. He was thus a source of inspiration for many, even in the Netherlands." More details here.

This is the link to an article about Falcke that I wrote in 1989 before the peaceful revolution. And this is a link to an article (in English) by Falcke about the Conciliar Process in the GDR.

French perspectives on 1989

2009-09-13T23:00:00.003+02:00

Over the past few days, here in Ferney Voltaire we've become aware of how the French media is looking towards the events of 1989. It started when Le Monde ran an article entitled "The Entente Cordial against History" drawing on declassified British government documents to show how Francois Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher shared a joint suspicion of German reunification in 1989. Then the local newspaper shop had copies of two magazine specials to mark the anniversary - Le Monde's own Liberté a l'Est and Télérama's Le mur de Berlin: 20 ans après. The format of the two magazines is similar and they both use Raymand Depardon's famous image (left) - Le Monde on the cover and Telerama as part of a photoessay. The content is different, however - Le Monde reprints many of its eye witness reports, while Telerama has new content, including profiles of Marianne Birthler (the guardian of the Stasi archives) and Vera Lengsfeld (peace activist now CDU member of parliament), and a counter-current review of Das Leben der Anderen. But what is common to both publications, as in athe article from Le Monde that opened this post, is what seems to be a distinctive French take on the events of autumn 1989. In Germany there is a continuing debate as to whether the key date is 9 October (when the massed forces of Leipzig citizens braved a possible "Chinese solution" to demand change) or 9 November, with the opening of the Berlin Wall as the key step towards German unity. There is no such agonizing with the French perspective in these publications - it is 9 November, but unlike in Germany, seen as an event of epochal geopolitical change, a perspective lacking from some German publications that have marked the anniversary. That's not to say that the reawakening of civil society in eastern Europe is ignored by the French publications, rather that 9 November 1989 is seen as the day when everything changed.* A third of Telerama is taken up with the "shock waves" created by the event: the brak up of the Balkans, "Sarajevo in a thousand pieces", and "Un bilan globalement mitigé" ... for the period 1989 to 2001 which it calls the "interwar period" (l'entre deux guerres) ...
*Hubert Vedrine who was then an advisor to Mitterrand and later a French foreign minister in his interview with Telerama asserts that the key date was not 9 November 1989 but the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 - "Fin du monde bipolar ... entrée dans un monde global". Much to argue about there ...

End Game

2009-09-12T11:04:00.004+02:00

The end of the second week of September 1989 marked the beginning of the end of the SED's hegemony in the GDR. The month had begun with the Monday prayers at the Nikolaikirche restarting, but this time with western journalists in Leipzig for the Trade Fair recording and capturing the demonstration that followed the prayers calling for freedom of assembly, freedom of association and freedom to express opinions. On 10 September, "Neues Forum", published its founding appeal, signed by 20 civic activists from throughout the GDR - Bärbel Bohley, Katja Havemann, Rolf Henrich, Sebastian Pflugbeil, Jens Reich and Hans-Jochen Tschiche. The same day, Hungary opened its borders to emigrants from the GDR. On 12 September another group, "Demokratie Jetzt", published its founding appeal, "Einmischung in die eigenen Angelegenheiten". This would be followed by the founding of other groups and parties such as Demokratischer Aufbruch and the Social Democratic Party, for which Markus Meckel, Martin Gutzeit, Arndt Noack and Manfred Böhme were now distributing flyers. The End Game had begun.

End Game is also the title of a book by historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk that charts the Revolution from 1989 in the GDR. Kowalczuk, who works for the Federal Commission for the archives of the State Security Ministry of the GDR, has certainly based his book on thorough historical research, but the result is not a book for researchers and experts but anyone who wants a readable account of the causes and consequences of autumn 1989 in the GDR. While stressing the role of factors such as Gorbachev's coming to power, Kowalczuck's focus is on East German society itself, the mismanagement of the SED and the resistance of social forces. Here is his passage about the founding appeal of "Demokratie Jetzt" on 12 September 1989:

The 12 signatories ... called for the formation of the "Citizen's Movement Democracy Now" ... This was the first reference to a "citizen's movement" (Bürgerbewegung), a concept that would influence the events that followed. The appended, "Theses for a democratic reconstruction in the GDR", were similar to those in the call to found the SDP, but were less radical and orientated more to basis than parliamentary democracy. Three points distinguished the appeal from that of New Forum: First, all the signatories came from Berlin or neighbouring Brandenburg; second, it spoke of the continuing the "socialist revolution" to make it viable for the future. That was liable to irritate given that the appeal and the theses were diametrically opposed to theht that of the GDR. Third, the signatories called upon, "the Germans in the Federal Republic to work for a reconstruction of their own society to make possible a new unity of the German people in the household of the European peoples. Both German states should be willing to reform themselves for the sake of unity."

Endspiel can be can be from Amazon Germany - €24.90 - or in a special edition from the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. for €6.00.

Nikolaikirche ... open for all

2009-09-06T20:48:00.002+02:00

On 4 September 1989 the "Monday Prayers" restarted at the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig after the summer break. Coindientally the Leipzig Fair was taking place and as was the custom western journalists found it relatively easy to gain accreditation and , more importantly, as per custom ,received permission to report from and to film anywhere in Leipzig. The role of the western media in directing attention on the GDR's second city in the hot autumn of 1989 has perhaps not received the attention that it deserves. About 1000 people took part in the peace pryaers and about 800 joined a demonstration with slogans such as "freedom of assembly, freedom of association", "for an open land with free people", which the Stasi rapidly tried to break up. All this was captured by western television. Another demonstration of would-be-emigrants gathered before Leipzig main station. afterwards towards the Leipzig main station. Two days later at a meeting to coincide with the Leipzig fair, Superintendent Christof Ziemer called for a process of renewal for society. The course was set for a snowball of protest that would culminate on 9 October, and one that was being observed far from Leipzig.

It was 20 years ago today ...

2009-08-26T07:47:00.001+02:00

Markus Meckel and Martin Gutzeit presented publicly on 26 August 1989 the initiative to found a Social Democratic Party ...

[1] Jutta Seidel, founding member of the New Forum. In: Bilderchronik der Wende, ed. by Hannes Bahrmann and Christoph Links, Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 1999, page 36

[2] Hannes Bahrmann, Christoph Links: Chronik der Wende, Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 1994, page 79

[3] Christoph Hein in his speech on 4.11.1989. Website of the German Historical Museum, Berlin

[4] Quoted from: Bilderchronik der Wende, ed. by Hannes Bahrmann and Christoph Links, Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 1999, page 36

[5] Hannes Bahrmann, Christoph Links: Chronik der Wende, Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 1999, page 64