The shock waves of Berlin

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."

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The Berlin Wall and the Ecumenical Movement

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?

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?

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

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 !

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

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.