Katharina Kunter. Erfüllte Hoffnungen und zerbrochene Träume: Evangelische Kirchen in Deutschland im Spannungsfeld von Demokratie und Sozialismus (1980-1993). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. 346 S. EUR 59.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-525-55745-7.
Anke Silomon. Anspruch und Wirklichkeit der "besonderen Gemeinschaft": Der Ost-West-Dialog der deutschen evangelischen Kirchen 1969-1991. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. 764 S. EUR 99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-525-55747-1.
Reviewed by Benjamin C. Pearson (Department of History, Tusculum College)
Published on H-German (July, 2008)
German Protestants between East and West
Between 1945 and 1989 the Protestant state churches enjoyed a unique position in German politics, society, and culture. As the German nation was divided into competing Cold War camps, churches remained among the most important bridges between the two Germanys. Until the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Protestant state churches in the FRG and the GDR maintained close institutional ties as common members of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD). Indeed, even as the Berlin Wall made it more difficult to maintain personal and institutional contacts, they maintained formal unity in the EKD until 1969, when the East German churches split off to form the Bund der Evangelischen Kirchen in der DDR (BEK). Throughout this period of formal unity, the Protestant churches and their affiliated organizations played a leading role in maintaining inter-German dialogue and contact, and in giving expression to the desire of many Germans for political reunification. At the same time, the churches in East and West also developed in different directions, responding to their contrasting social and political circumstances. The creation of the BEK in 1969 offered the East German churches new leeway to reinvent themselves as a "church within socialism," while West German Protestants were also forced to come to terms with the seeming permanence of both ecclesiastical and political German division. Yet, even after 1969, the Protestant churches in the two German states still claimed to be united in a form of "special community," maintaining a variety of formal and informal contacts. Both of the books examined in this review deal with the nature of this "special community," with the important bonds and the significant differences between Protestants in the West and East German states.
Anke Silomon focuses on the formal relations between the EKD and the BEK at highest levels of church leadership. Following a lengthy assessment of the scholarly literature, the book's extended introductory section surveys developments in the churches between 1945 and 1969, paying particular attention to the process of formal institutional division that led to the creation of the BEK. The remainder of the book addresses two attempts by the leaders of the EKD and BEK to maintain some form of high-level contact, first in a Beratergruppe and from 1980 to 1991 in the work of the smaller and more specialized Konsultationsgruppe, which focused on the churches' mutual responsibility to foster world peace.
In both of these sections, Silomon maintains a relatively close textual focus on the discussions between group members, with a primary interest in what these interactions can tell us about the nature of the "special community" between the EKD and BEK. She concludes that the Beratergruppe was successful in maintaining the ideal of contact and communication between the West and East German churches, but that it fell short of achieving fully the claims of "special community" between the churches. The group was hindered in these pursuits by the lack of a stable membership over time--exacerbated by the restrictions facing West German church leaders on visiting the GDR--and by the failure of the EKD and BEK to invest their members with greater authority. It remained a useful sounding board for both churches, allowing them to share ideas and experiences with "brothers and sisters" on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but it failed to take on any greater significance. The Konsultationsgruppe, in contrast, developed into a more fruitful forum for discussion and common action. Founded in 1980, in the wake of the churches' common statement commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the onset of war, this group was a smaller, more narrowly focused forum where members of both churches could find common ground in exploring the theme of world peace. The proceedings of this group also demonstrated the gulf between the experiences and beliefs of West and East Germans. However, the members were able to engage in much more extensive and fruitful deliberations about basic theological, political, and social ideas.
An extremely well-footnoted and dense reconstruction of the work of the Beratergruppe and the Konsultationsgruppe, Silomon's study provides an invaluable reference to others pursuing work in closely related fields. However, this high level of detail, accompanied by a reluctance to engage in broader contextualization and analysis, limits the book's usefulness to the general reader. One cannot help but wish that Silomon had engaged more extensively with the influence of these deliberations on the world outside of the churches, or, indeed, even on the lives and beliefs of ordinary church members.
In contrast, Katharina Kunter's Erfüllte Hoffnungen und zerbrochene Träume targets these groups explicitly. Kunter focuses not on the church hierarchy of the EKD and BEK, but on a dense, decentralized network of pastors, theologians, and lay people working in the ecumenical "Conciliar Process for Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation" in the 1980s and early 1990s. In her complex, multilayered analysis, Kunter details the origins of this ecumenical process, examines the separate and common work of the East and West German churches, and--most importantly--explores the ways in which the ideas and basic assumptions of German participants in this movement were strongly shaped by their different religious and political experiences in the two German states.
Founded in the early 1980s, the Conciliar Process was a broad, decentralized ecumenical movement under the aegis of the World Council of Churches and European Council of Churches. Small groups of European Christians had been engaged in efforts to foster world peace and social justice since the 1960s and 1970s, and these efforts gained an especially public resonance in the protest movement against the deployment of American Pershing missiles in Europe of the early 1980s. With the failure of these efforts, a small circle of German theologians--most notably Heino Falcke in the East and Ulrich Duchrow in the West--hoped to channel the frustrations of anti-nuclear protestors into a form of positive engagement for world peace. Their joint effort came to fruition when the East German delegation to the 1983 assembly of the World Council of Churches in Vancouver issued a public call for the creation of an ecumenical peace council. This movement was given an additional boost in 1985 when--under the guidance of Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker--the German Protestant Kirchentag, the massive lay assembly of West German Protestants, chose the promotion of world peace as its overriding theme. Other large ecumenical conferences continued this work throughout the 1980s while, at the same time, countless smaller consultation and discussion groups emerged across Europe.
As Kunter persuasively argues, the activity of the Conciliar Process, especially at the local grassroots level, played an important role in energizing a generation of Protestant activists in both German states. In the West, several of these activists have since risen to prominent positions of church leadership. However, the effects of the movement were much more pronounced in the East, where ecumenical dialogue for the promotion of peace and social justice created a new, critical public space for East German Protestants. By the late 1980s this increasingly bold and public activity was broadening to include fundamental criticism of the injustice of the East German state itself. Turning their attention to the possibilities of a better, more democratic socialist system, members of Conciliar Process played a leading role in the emergence of East German civil society groups in 1989-90.
Yet, many of the members of these groups, frustrated when their efforts to theorize democratic socialism were overtaken by political events, came to see the collapse of the GDR and the reunification of Germany as a failure and a missed opportunity. In a similar way, figures on both sides were disappointed by declining interest in the movement following the events of 1989-90. Although their efforts had a lasting impact on the churches, in particular by opening up the hierarchy to new ideas and by grooming a new generation of leaders, Kunter argues that the movement failed to sustain a lasting impact on ordinary church members.
This disillusionment was compounded, especially among former East Germans, by their difficulty in finding a place for themselves and their experiences in the West German church. In one of the most interesting sections of her work, Kunter locates the origins of this disillusionment in the different religious and political experiences of Protestants in the two German states. She argues that East German Protestants were strongly shaped by their experiences as outsiders in the GDR. Their religious attitudes were rooted in family and congregational life, where they found a separate space for themselves in East German society. This pietistic, oppositional perspective in turn led many to embrace a utopian form of political theology that denigrated all forms of real existing politics. The religious attitudes of their West German counterparts, by contrast, were much more overtly political from the very beginning. In describing the evolution of their beliefs, the West German Protestants in Kunter's study only rarely referred to the influence of family and congregational life. Instead, most pointed to the formative role of a personal religious-political awaking in their teens or twenties that continued to influence their religious belief and identity as Protestant Christians. This underlying difference in religious identity formation has contributed to numerous misunderstandings within the churches since the early 1990s and remains an important factor in the mental gulf that continues to divide the reunited EKD.
Both of these books offer the reader insights into the complex relations between the Protestant churches in West and East Germany both during and after the Cold War. While Silomon's work will be of primary interest to church historians, Kunter's has the potential to appeal to a much wider audience. By situating her work within the worldwide ecumenical movement, broadening her research to include a wide spectrum of theologians and laity, and providing a densely layered and compelling analysis of the larger significance of her findings, Kunter has written a work of church history that should appeal to anyone interested in the intellectual and cultural underpinnings of recent German politics.
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Citation:
Benjamin C. Pearson. Review of Kunter, Katharina, Erfüllte Hoffnungen und zerbrochene Träume: Evangelische Kirchen in Deutschland im Spannungsfeld von Demokratie und Sozialismus (1980-1993) and
Silomon, Anke, Anspruch und Wirklichkeit der "besonderen Gemeinschaft": Der Ost-West-Dialog der deutschen evangelischen Kirchen 1969-1991.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14778
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