Undeterred by the risk of becoming second-class citizens, young people are turning to the Church for the answers and human warmth that Marxism fails to provide
IN DRESDEN, a schoolteacher beat her 18-year-old daughter for secretly attending church meetings.
In Potsdam, an army officer had his son expelled from school for attending church-run Bible classes.
In Leipzig, a once-brilliant student works as a grave-digger. The young man was denied higher education because his father is a Lutheran clergyman.
Such cases are by no means rare in the German Democratic Republic, where atheism is a kind of state religion. Officially, the East German regime professes tolerance towards religious communities. The churches are permitted to remain autonomous, maintain their own hierarchical structure and own property. The catch is that people who maintain religious affiliations are considered to be outsiders.The young in particular must choose between the Church and the communist state. Those who retain religious ties may become neither army officers nor teachers. If they are admitted to higher education at all, they cannot hope for top positions in government or industry. Children of clergymen are generally barred from university.
Fear of jeopardizing their own careers, or those of their children, has caused a growing number of parents to cut ail religious ties. Since 1950, the number of Evangelical Christians in this largely Protestant part of Germany has decreased from 14.6 to 8.5 million, fewer than half of East Germany’s population of almost 17 million. Church officials had come to believe that within 20 years religion would be dead in East Germany.
Then something unexpected happened. In rising numbers young people began turning to religion with a fervour that causes surprised theologians to speak of a new revival. Religious centres have sprung up where thousands of young people gather at weekends for communal singing, praying and discussion.
Place of Worship. One centre is at Gross Hartmannsdorf in Saxony, a village of 2,00o that boasts a charming church with a world-famous Silbermann organ. One weekend a month, as many as 1,70o young people congregate here for religious services. There are no “diversions” : the state requires that official permission—seldom granted — be obtained for all church socials that include more than praying, communal singing and Bible classes.
Careful not to antagonize the authorities, the organizers of youth weekends have banned alcohol, smoking, dancing and amateur dramatics. And the weekends are not advertised. News of the gatherings is spread by the “Christian grapevine,” a method which functions so well that participants come from as far away as Rostock and Stralsund on the Baltic Sea.
What, then, attracts young people to these meetings? “Our joy in our faith needs no other inducement,” says Pastor Christoph Richter, 49, of the Saxony Synod. He started the youth weekends, which have met with similar enthusiasm in Leipzig, Dresden, Görlitz, Crimmitschau, Ilmenau and Potsdam.
Only about one in five of the young people who regularly fill Pastor Richter’s church come from families with a Christian background, and few are familiar with religious rites. Nearly all have received the jugendweahe, the communist equivalent of confirmation. Most belong to the communist FDJ (Free German Youth) and many are members of the paramilitary Sports and Technology Society, an organization for the defence of socialism.
At school, and often at home, young people are told that religion is superstition and “opium for the people.” Until recently they never questioned this.
“Then it began to dawn on me that there’s something sadly lacking in materialism,” a young convert told me. “You see people suffering, how they get old, how they die, and you begin to ask yourself perhaps the most important questions in life. Marxism doesn’t answer them.”
The convert — the teacher’s
daughter who had been beaten for attending religious meetings — said that she had brooded for hours about sin, conscience, love and the meaning of life itself. But she had no one who cared — or dared — to discuss these vital matters with her.
Then she began to notice a serenely happy young couple in a neighbouring flat. “They’re weird, they go to church,” her mother sneered. But one evening the girl knocked on their door. “They were very kind, listened to my problems and asked me to join them at a religious gathering,” she said. “I found myself in a new world. The free and open conversation, the wonderful sense of human warmth made me aware for the first time of the coldness of the society in which I had grown up.”
“This story,” said a pastor who is engaged in research on the religious revival in East Germany, “is typical of many young people who come to us. The Church’s rites, language and ways of communicating create an atmosphere that differs radically from the humdrum socialist world. Youth is attracted by this, as it is also attracted by being able to discuss with the pastor or deacon matters that are still largely taboo—sex, for example.”
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Sarkoy Unsesi
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