Faith in Britain

Leipzig becoming the focal point for the continuing demonstrations. One banner hung above the altar of an East Berlin church summed up the sad truth of Eastern Europe, where many had propped up a system in which they had been both victim and, through their compliance, aggressor: 'I am Cain and Abel.'

By the time the Berlin Wall had collapsed - on November 9th, 1989, after twentyeight years of separating the two Germanies - East Germany was also heading for her first and last free elections. The Catholic West Germany Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and his Christian Democrats campaigned strongly for their new sister party in the elections held on March 18th, 1990. The scale of the victory took the commentators by surprise. The Christian Democrats and their allies ran away with nearly fifty per cent of the vote; and the interim government was led by Lothar de Maiziere of the CDU. The Social Democrats limped in with twenty-two per cent.

Reunification was finally completed on October 3rd, 1990 - a personal triumph for Kohl and his Foreign Secretary, Free Democrat, Hans Dietrich Genscher.

Vera Wollenberger became a Member of the Volkskammer (the East German Parliament) in the March elections. She is a Christian from the Kirche von Unten.

She says that the turning point in the role of the Lutheran Church was in the 1970s.

Throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s the Church steadily lost influence and by the end was playing hardly any role in East German society. The Church scrupulously avoided comment on the political issues of the day. Then in the early 1970s it opposed the introduction of defence studies into every school. The Church's stance brought it moral credit and its first increase in numbers. The independent peace movement - which concerned itself with living at peace with nature and concern for human rights as well as disarmament - was born.

Subsequently, Wollenberger says, the first independent newspapers were produced on church duplicating machines in parish rooms. It was also in the parish rooms that the first independent libraries appeared. The Church's influence became so decisive that three years before it fell, the Honecker government was unable to take any political decisions without first considering how they would be received by the Opposition and the Church.

Archbishop Schinherr, the retired Lutheran Bishop of Berlin-Brandenburg, told the Ampleforth Conference that the Church is now in a position of considerable authority in Germany because 'they were able to some degree to retain their integrity in a system that corrupted its own citizens on a massive scale'. Perhaps that is why, in the Volkskammer elections, twenty-four of those elected had theological qualifications and almost all of them were ordained ministers. Four Government Ministers in the interim government were also ordained ministers and the Prime Minister was, additionally, deputy presiding officer of the Synod of the Federation of Protestant Churches. Many others in the government were in Church service or closely associated with the Church.