Liberation was found in churches

Peter Matheson reflects on the part played in the fall of the Berlin Wall by the Church's public worship and theology in East Germany.

Writing from hindsight, we forget how impregnable the communist states looked, with their propaganda networks, secret police, armies, and career-seekers.

We forget, too, that 1989 was not only the year the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, but was that of the pompous celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic, communist East Germany.

On top of that, the 500th anniversary of the unofficial patron saint of the GDR, Thomas Müntzer, was being celebrated.

Every second tractor collective or factory in the "Workers and Peasants Republic" seemed to be named after him.

Müntzer was a contemporary of Martin Luther, and a leader in the Peasants War of 1524-5.

Traditional Marxists hailed him as the "people's reformer" in the early bourgeois revolution, as opposed to Luther, denounced as the tool of the princes.

I'd been working on Müntzer for years.

He's a fascinating figure: a mystic, a hymn-writer, an innovative interpreter of the Bible, as well as a champion of ordinary people.

So in the spring of 1989 I went over to Halle for an impressive State-organised conference about Müntzer.

Folk were already leaking out of East Germany through Hungary and Czechoslovakia when I arrived, but none of us had a clue that the whole balloon was about to go up.

Rather, the ominous portent of the Tiananmen Square massacre hung in the air; in Protestant church porches discreet, worried references to it hung on the walls.

At the conference itself, the new openness of Marxist historians to the religious motivations of Müntzer was evident.

This had political implications, as it meant the historical Erbe, or heritage, of the Workers and Peasants State was under review.

Siegfried Bräuer and Helmar Junghans, as church historians, and Adolf Laube, Günter Vogler, Gerhard Brendler on the Marxist side, were mutually respectful.

They were an impressive lot, all of them.

To my considerable surprise, my own English translation of Müntzer, just out, was also warmly received.

For a decade or so, my contacts with communist East Germany had run along three channels.

Apart from the Thomas Müntzer connection, contacts with the youth department of the Evangelical Church took me to people and places I could never have seen otherwise.

Even more important were the links between the Peace Movement in Scotland and the Netherlands, on the one hand, and the Lutheran Church's peace networks in East Germany.

For decades, the latter produced a flow of crudely hectographed educational, biblical and theological material on peace and justice issues, and provided a haven for dissenting and ecological groups which could not gather elsewhere.

It also trained a whole generation in imaginative non-violence techniques.

In a police state like East Germany, the Church was one of the few places where critical voices could be heard.

Young people concerned about nuclear weapons or ecology clustered together under the umbrella of the Church in a context of prayer and bible study.

There were dangers in all this.

The Stasi, the secret police, had informers within the Church.

One needed a nose for them.

I vividly remember a very private conversation I had with a young communist functionary who attended the Halle conference who openly expressed her fears for the survival of what she called "our little republic".

So on the one hand, though I was as surprised as anyone else when the massive power of party, army and police disintegrated as "the people" took to the streets, on the other hand, I was not taken aback totally.

After all, it was out of the packed churches the crowds had initially poured, on to the streets.

Slogans such as Keine Gewalt (no violence) and the symbolism of candle-lit vigils; flowers and the focus on rational argument and non-provocative gestures had been prefigured and adumbrated by 10 years of patient group work in the churches.

Ironically, and perhaps tragically, it was the sober and positive focus on a more human face of socialism which helped make the bloodless revolution of 1989 possible.

For most people, the chief motivator in the protests was raising their living standards, and the almighty West German mark was soon to dominate the landscape.

The interlude in which the Church's public worship and theology provided leadership, with support from a bevy of brave literary figures, intellectuals, and reformist communists, proved short.

The churches were soon empty again.

Some of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's pragmatism and concern for ecology, however, may still faintly mirror it.

She, after all, was a child of a Lutheran manse.

Peter Matheson is a fellow of the Dept of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Otago.