Keine Gewalt! No Violence!: How the Church Gave Birth to Germany’s Only Peaceful Revolution

Keine Gewalt! No Violence!

How the Church Gave Birth to Germany’s Only Peaceful Revolution

Roger J. Newell

KEINE GEWALT! No Violence!

How the Church Gave Birth to Germany’s Only Peaceful Revolution

Copyright © 2017 Roger J. Newell. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1282-4

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ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-1283-1

Manufactured in the U.S.A. January 24, 2018

Cover photo: The Ring Road, Leipzig, Germany, October 9, 1989.From left to right: Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christian Führer, Albrecht Schönherr, Martin Niemöller, Heino Falcke

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter 1: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Chapter 2: Martin Niemöller

Chapter 3: Against the Stream

Chapter 4: Barth beyond Barmen

Chapter 5: Guilt, Forgiveness and Foreign Policy

Chapter 6: The Church and the Cold War

Chapter 7: The Wilderness Era

Chapter 8: From the Sanctuary to the Street

Epilogue

Appendix I: Theological Declaration of Barmen, May 1934

Appendix II: The Stuttgart Declaration

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

To my brother, Clifford Sturges Newell, whose love of history has always been an inspiration.

The church is only a church if it is there for everyone.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Introduction

Candles and Prayers: Theological Weapons at the End of the Cold War

In May of 2007 my wife and I organized a study tour for students from our university to visit sites of special significance in European church history. We would start in Rome and conclude our tour in Berlin. In planning for Germany, I naturally wanted to include a stay in Martin Luther’s Wittenberg as a Reformation sight not to be missed. As I studied maps and booked accommodation, I seemed to recall stories about a church in nearby Leipzig that had played a special role in the year of miracles when the East German State (the German Democratic Republic or GDR) collapsed and all of Germany reunited after forty years of postwar division.

Questions began to race through my mind. How was it possible that a marginalized church in the middle of East Germany could play any role, let alone a decisive one, in the transformation of modern Europe? For that matter, there was the larger question of how it was possible that Germany, divided for forty years by the bitterest of ideological divides, had come to be reunited before the astonished eyes of Western society. As far as I knew, no scholar or journalist saw it coming. Why had such a major revolution come so unexpectedly? Perhaps a visit to this church might offer some local knowledge to help us gain perspective. Perhaps we could talk with someone who actually knew something about these strange happenings now nearly two decades past.

With a mustard seed of hope, I googled Leipzig, and the name of the church: Nikolaikirche. I was pleased to find that the church had a website; however, it was mostly in German. With the help of my German-speaking daughter, I dashed off an email auf Deutsch to inquire about a possible visit while we were in the area. Within a week, I received a reply from the wife of one of the pastoral staff. In English she wrote that her husband would be happy to meet with us on the proposed day. But my elation turned to anxiety when she requested that we bring along a translator because "Mein Mann hat kein Englisch (my husband does not speak English). Since my German was basically at an advanced kindergarten level, I was puzzled. How, from the Pacific Northwest of America, could I arrange for a German translator to meet us in the middle of the former East Germany? As I pondered this so close but so far situation, I seemed to recall an alumnus who had moved back to Germany (his father was German, his mother American). This was a good five years ago at least and even then I had not known him well. In checking with our alumni relations staff, a name was recovered: Tim Buechsel. Yes, now I remembered. Apparently, Tim was living somewhere in this country of eighty million people, but alas the alumni office had no forwarding address. I googled" again. I found a Tim Buechsel who played on a semi-pro basketball team and worked as a youth pastor in the city of Weimar. There was even a team picture and he looked vaguely familiar. Yes, that might be the Tim Buechsel I knew, since Tim had played on our college team. It was worth sending an email inquiry, reintroduce myself and ask: would he be able to join us for a day and translate for us? In just a few days I received an email from Tim, saying yes, he remembered me; that he lived about an hour’s drive from Leipzig and would be delighted to meet us at the church and act as our translator! It had all fallen together in less than a week.

Now all our group had to do was show up on time and meet these two Germans at the city center church in Leipzig. Four months, an all-night train ride from Zurich, and a confusing episode regarding our booking at a youth hostel later, twenty of us were walking from the train station along the Nikolaistrasse toward the Nikolaikirche. At the front of the church I spied what must be our tall translator introducing himself to someone dressed in modest, but distinctly un-clerical garb who had grey, short, spiky hair and wore the multi-pocketed blue denim vest so popular among German men. It was indeed one of the pastors, with the unlikeliest of names, Christian Führer, the same person in fact who had written the church’s website material about the events of 1989. He would shortly be telling us a story we would not forget.

After brief introductions, the pastor, followed by Tim, led us straight into the church, past a few curious visitors, right to the main altar. There, with Tim as a most competent translator, he briefly introduced us to the history of the church, its tradition of music (including the link with J. S. Bach’s Thomaskirche a ten-minute walk away) and one or two highlights of its various architectural renovations. Before leading us into a little room just off to the side of the altar, Tim later reminded me that Führer made an odd remark about how where we were now standing, for centuries past, only priests were allowed access. Out of all the things he had said thus far, this one made Führer’s eyes light up.

We settled into the former priests’ room and after everyone had found somewhere to sit, the pastor asked us each to introduce ourselves by name and field of study. Then he began to tell us his story. Pastor Führer now spoke in the first person about his time as pastor here, beginning in the early 1980s. He reminded us that it was a time of increasing tension between East and West. NATO and Soviet missile warheads had been stationed to face each other right where the Cold War’s trench cut Germany in half. On both sides of the Berlin Wall, Germans grew increasingly anxious that Germany could become the battleground for Europe’s third war in the same century, except this one would be of unthinkable nuclear proportions. People grew very afraid as they listened to politicians on both sides of the divide prefer the rhetoric of strident accusation to calm negotiation. (As I listened, I could recall President Reagan’s famous rebuke of the Soviet Union as the evil empire. I learned later that Erich Honecker, the East German head of state, spoke regularly about NATO’s imperialist aspirations). But in a one-party state like the German Democratic Republic, where could people discuss their worries? To even voice such concerns over foreign or domestic policies in public was tantamount to disloyalty and charges of sedition.

This was the brooding climate in which Pastor Führer opened the doors of the church to young people who were anxious to discuss such things. Gradually as we listened, it dawned on me that Führer was not narrating to us the events he had been told about by others. He was describing things with the unique details of an eyewitness and primary organizer, taking us through to the events which would culminate in the nonviolent revolution of November 1989.

From the notes I intensively scribbled that day, certain key points stood out. First there was an initial gathering way back in 1981, in which he invited people with concerns about peace and the arms race to meet at the church. My notes said Führer arranged it for around 10 o’clock at night. (Why so late I wondered? To avoid unwanted Stasi attention?) He expected maybe ten or so people to come and let off some steam. But to his astonishment, by word of mouth, ten times that number showed up. They were mostly young, many of them dissidents who were not getting along with the governing SED (Socialist Unity party of Germany) in East Germany, which of course was a one-party state.

Führer next described how he brought everyone right to the central altar where he brought us, sat them on the center floor of the church surrounded by the choir stalls. In other words, he hadn’t stuck them in some sterile classroom building somewhere marginal. After introductory words and a greeting, he laid a large rough wooden cross on the floor in the middle of where everyone was seated. To facilitate some order in the discussion, he invited anyone who wished to express a frustration or concern to take a candle, light it, and speak the concern aloud as they placed their candle on or around the cross. As I listened, it struck me that Pastor Führer had with great simplicity transfigured a potentially angry political discussion into a prayer meeting with the cross of the crucified Jesus at the center of the conversation. If the dissidents were surprised to find themselves at a prayer meeting, it was now Pastor Führer’s turn for surprise as every single person lit a candle, and shared a concern in what turned out to be the most significant prayer meeting in the forty-year history of the GDR. As the sharing continued past midnight, the bare wooden cross gradually transformed into a glowing cross beaming with light. It was a harbinger of a future transformation which no one sitting there would have dared imagine.

Later I mused further how Führer had seamlessly joined political discussion to Christ-centered prayer. We in the West are more comfortable with a clean separation of church and state. Of course, even in the home of this separation, the United States, the Baptist pastor Martin Luther King Jr. had joined together the Christian gospel in a civil rights movement that had permanently changed the segregated ways of American society. But Dr. King was assassinated twenty-five years before and the GDR was an officially communist-atheist state. This was the context in which these young people, who were alienated from a state which had taught and trained them in an atheistic worldview, now sat with Pastor Führer around a cross filled with light from a hundred candles. The collective mood was so full of openness, freedom and acceptance no one wanted to leave.

There was one more unlikely connection Führer mentioned. At the beginning of his introduction to the Nikolaikirche, Führer noted that before the Reformation came to Leipzig, only priests could enter the altar area where we were seated. As I have mentioned already, Tim our translator later reminded me that Führer’s eyes had twinkled when he made the comment about the exclusivity of this room for the clergy, because he opined that for long centuries the church had put itself in charge of controlling access to God. Instead of opening paths for the masses to meet God, the leaders created barriers, giving themselves special privileges reinforced by liturgical solemnity, intimidating building structures, surrounded by inward-focused gatherings divorced from the city streets and civic affairs. All this would change. As I read later in the Nikolai brochure:

When we open up the church to everyone who has been forced to keep silent, has been slandered or maybe even imprisoned, then no one can ever think of a church again as being simply a kind of religious museum or a temple for art aesthetics. On the contrary, Jesus is then really present in the church because we are trying to do what he did and what he wants us to do today. This is the hour of the birth of Nikolai church—Open for everyone, also for protest groups and those living on the margin of society.

Throw open the church doors! The open wings of a church door are like the wide open arms of Jesus: Come to me, everyone who is troubled and burdened, I will relieve you! And they came and they come! The threshold is low, for atheists and those in wheelchairs."¹

From this first gathering Führer would eventually arrange what he called peace prayers (Friedensgebet) to meet every Monday evening at 5 p.m. to pray for peace in both local and international situations of conflict. Years later, the prayers were sometimes followed by the people walking into the streets, carrying candles to witness for peace and for freedom, including permission for visas for foreign travel, permission to express ecological concerns and putting pressure on the government for increasing openness and democratic reforms. In contrast to the other demonstrations in the GDR, the gatherings in Leipzig were by far the largest and also the most peaceful.

Führer telescoped the years down to a moment of tension which followed a fraudulent local election in May 1989, in which the party reported that it had received 98 percent of the votes cast. The public was outraged by such a flagrant deception. Calls for reform grew louder. People were tired of always waiting for travel visas; some were fleeing to the West by way of Hungary. Pastor Führer summed up the next few decisive events as follows.

In early May, the police blocked all driveways to the church, seeking to shut down the Monday prayer meetings, which they had determined had become a cover for political insurrection. Nevertheless the crowds only increased.

On October 7, Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev, the author of the movement for openness, Perestroika, arrived in Berlin to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the GDR. The government did not want this occasion to be used for any kind of public expression of discontent. In Leipzig, for ten long hours police battered and bullied defenseless demonstrators who made no attempt to fight back as they were carted away in trucks.

In this heightened atmosphere, just two days later, Monday, October 9, the peace prayers were scheduled. The government warned protestors that any further demonstrations would not be tolerated. All day long the police and military tried to intimidate the populace with a brutal show of force. During the day, the military and Stasi shut down schools and shops early in the city and built roadblocks. The police carried guns loaded with live ammunition. Soldiers with tanks were mobilized and surrounded the central area. Rumors circulated that the government intended to use the Chinese Solution as it was called, to solve the problem of ongoing public dissent. It was reported to Führer that extra hospital beds and blood plasma had been assembled in the Leipzig hospitals. As I listened to the mention of Chinese Solution I only later realized that Führer was alluding to the massacre that had taken place but a few months earlier, in June 1989, on the Square of Heavenly peace (Tiananmen) in Beijing, China, where an estimated one thousand unarmed protesters had been massacred by government forces.

To neutralize and perhaps disrupt the prayer meeting, one thousand SED party members and Stasi went early to the church; six hundred had filled up the nave by two o’clock. As Führer describes it in the brochure:

They had a job to perform, like the Stasi personnel who were on hand regularly at the peace prayers. What has not been considered was the fact, that these people were exposed to the word, the gospel and its impact! I always appreciated that the Stasi members heard the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount every Monday. Where else would they hear these?²

So the stage was set, the actors assembled for the climactic Monday evening prayer service. Despite all the threats, all the attempts to minimize any public display of dissent, the early closing of the schools and businesses, huge numbers had come to the peace prayers, not only at Nikolaikirche but at churches throughout the city which had agreed to be open as well. That evening the atmosphere and the prayers for peace were serenely calm. As he concluded the service and prepared to send the people out with a blessing, Pastor Führer made a final plea for the people to refrain from any form of violence or provocation, to break the chain of violence just like Jesus had taught in the Sermon on the Mount. Once again the Sermon on the Mount was read aloud to the people (including the ever present Stasi). A specially moving paraphrase is set in italics in the church pamphlet:

Then with Jesus there was One,

Who said: Bless the poor!

And not: Money makes you happy.

Finally there was One Who said: Love your enemies!

And not: Down with the opposition!

Finally there was One Who said:

The first will be the last!

And not: The status quo will remain untouched.

Finally there was One Who said:

He who risks his life and loses it, he will triumph!

And not: Be cautious!

Finally there was One Who said: You are the salt!

And not: You are the cream.

Finally there was One Who died as He lived!³

As the doors opened for people to depart, something unforgettable happened: the two thousand people leaving the sanctuary were welcomed by tens of thousands waiting outside with candles in their hands. That night an estimated seventy thousand people marched around the city loop. Though the police and the military were everywhere, Pastor Führer said: Our fear was not as big as our faith. . . . Two hands are necessary to carry a candle and to protect it from extinguishing so that you can not carry stones or clubs at the same time.⁴ Instead of shouting hostilities or throwing stones, people cradled their candle flames. As Führer wrote: There were thousands in the churches. Hundreds of thousands in the streets around the city center. But: Not a single shattered shop window. This was the incredible experience of the power of non-violence.⁵

It was, he said, as though Jesus’ spirit of nonviolence seized the masses and became a physical, peaceful force. Soldiers and police engaged in conversations with demonstrators. Then after a few hours, everyone withdrew.

It was an evening in the spirit of our Lord Jesus for there were no winners and no defeated, nobody triumphed over the other, nobody lost his face. There was just a tremendous feeling of relief.⁶

As Tim our translator relayed these words, a moment came when he was overcome with emotion, and began to quietly weep. Back in 1989 he had been only a boy. Now for the first time as an adult he was hearing an intimate eyewitness tell the story which had led to the nonviolent reunification of his country. How to describe it? Amid thousands of dissenters, military and armed police, and potential provocations from the Stasi or an angry youth, not one act of violence had broken out. Not a shop window, not a single pane of glass was broken.

Born of the people and not just preached but practiced in a consistent manner: an earth-shaking course of events, a miracle of Biblical proportions! When had we ever had a successful revolution before? And then, best of all, the very first time without any bloodshed. The unification of Germany this time without war and victory and the humiliation of other people and nations. That GOD held HIS protecting hand over all of us—Christians as well as non-Christians, people in grassroots groups and the police, regime critics and comrades, those who wanted to escape the Iron Curtain and those working for the Stasi (state security) those in the tanks and those protesting on the streets—and let us succeed in our peaceful revolution after so much brutal violence to which Germany in the

20

th century subjected other nations, in particular the nation in which JESUS was born into, can only be described with the word blessing: A blessing on this Church, on this city, on the whole of Germany.⁷

It was reported that Horst Sindermann, a key member of the Central Committee of the GDR, summed up both the extensive preparations of the authorities as well as their inability to know how to respond to the events of the evening. We had planned everything. We were prepared for everything. But not for candles and prayers.⁸

When Pastor Führer had finished his retelling of those special events, a time for question and answer followed. Then he thanked us for our visit and asked that God would bless our continued study. We gathered our coats and daypacks, everyone shook his hand, said our goodbyes and in silence walked out into the bustling streets of Leipzig.

I had not anticipated that a visit to Leipzig eighteen years after these unprecedented events would have stirred up such emotion. Perhaps the gravity of what we were hearing touched us through the witness of our translator Tim, when he paused to gather himself amid the emotion stirred by Führer’s firsthand report. A few weeks later back in Oregon, I began to read the student journals. Each had recorded their impressions of the visit to the Nikolaikirche. Each described something of the impact made as they heard firsthand about the events of 1989. The following quotations from journals give a taste of what we experienced that day.

This was an amazing experience; we have been touring these places in which history-making things happened four to six hundred years ago. At the Nikolaikirche, though, we were talking to the pastor who had been at the church when history had been made, where Christians and non-Christians alike had met for prayer meetings which eventually exploded out of the church into the streets: a completely peaceful protest which brought down the division created by the governments of East and West Germany.

I was expecting to hear a lecture about how the fall of communism affected Leipzig and how these peace prayers were a part of the fall. Instead we actually got to talk with one of the pastors that put all of this on. It was a very moving experience because I did not realize that those people that were involved in the prayers were risking their lives and that this pastor knew these people might die because they were resisting the government. This man told us that this did not happen because of him; it happened because of the Holy Spirit. Wow!

It was the most incredible hour and twenty minutes of my college career! Listening to his version of the peace movements, the prayer meetings, the people and God’s power, gave me chills. I felt as if I had stepped back into a time capsule stopped on October

9

,

1989

when communism fell. All I can say is that seeing Pastor Führer, talking to him and seeing first hand where everything took place, was one of the overwhelmingly powerful events that has and will make a lasting impression on me.

I had been thinking on this subject lately anyway: what is greatness? We so often see it in such human terms—Who impacted the most people? Who made the greatest mark in history? Whose statue, erected after their death, is the largest? It is so engrained within me to think of these things being great, it’s kind of scary to consider thinking otherwise. But I read once that God’s history book looks very different than our human one; I do believe that this is true. He does not desire that we impact others or history; we must do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God. And that is enough.

As I read their reflections, the church historian part of me began to think about the many tumultuous years of church struggles in Germany from Luther onward. I imagined Luther, on that October day in 1989, peering down from some celestial viewing station to watch the city where he once debated the redoubtable Dr. Eck. What would the father of the German Reformation have made