Watching and Praying in Gethsemane

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."

Prayers for Peace

If there's one thing that Leipzig is known for in recent times it is the mass demonstrations in October 1989 where the city's citizens defied the threat of a massacre by government forces and went on the streets to call for change.
The weekly demonstrations had a regular rhythm - every Monday at 5pm, because they followed the weekly prayers for peace at Leipzig's Nikolaikirche - in early 1989 it was a couple of dozen people who went out on the street after the service to demand change, then it was a few hundred, then a few thousand - until a reputed 70000 people went onto the streets on 9 October, despite official warnings that reserve brigades were being called up, and doctors saying that the hospitals had been told to clear the wards and to make sure they were ready to deal with bullet wounds.
If there was however one reason why the church became the focal point for protest in Leipzig it was the weekly prayers for peace that began on 20 September 1982. They started at a time when Europe faced the deployment of nuclear missiles in West and in East and the growth of an independent peace movement in East Germany. They have been held on Mondays ever since. Today the prayers were led by Leipzig's Pax Christi, which developed out of a grassroots Catholic group that existed already before the peaceful revolution. Today they were remembering the Ecumenical Assembly of 1989, a gathering unique in the history of the GDR that brought together Protestants and Catholics, but also Orthodox, Methodists, Seventh-day Adventists, Quakers and others, and people from church hierarchies and grassroots groups and that made unprecedented demands for change in the German Democratic Republic - and about which more very soon.
Unlike 20 years ago, when the Nikolaikirche was so full that other churches had to be opened as an overflow, today there were "only" about 50 or 60 people at the prayers. Yet the unbroken weekly rhythm means that the people who were praying today are not only joined in prayer with those at the service itself but all those who have come before and who will come afterwards.

The book cover is from,"Nikolaikirche, montags um fünf. Die politischen Gottesdienste der Wendezeit in Leipzig" ("Mondays, 5 p.m. at the Nikolaikirche: Political worship in Leipzig during the changes") by Hermann Geyer, and published by WBG.