Conscience in East Germany

For 18 years, the Evangelical of East Germany have been to coexist with Communism. They have, for example, accepted the annual springtime Jugendweihe, a pagan parody of confirmation at which East German youths are enrolled as loyal children of the state. Now these Luther an and Calvinist churches, to which nearly all East Germans belong, are staking out a claim to freedom with a ten-point declaration of independence approved by their bishops at a closed-door synod meeting in Weissensee, a district of East Berlin. This policy statement is being compared to the scathing Barmen declaration of 1934, which was signed by 278 clerical leaders in protest against Nazi attempts to take over the Protestant church structure.

The Barmen declaration was a blunt answer to a crude attempt at conquest. Since the East German Communists' strategy seems aimed at taming the churches rather than openly destroying them, the Weissensee declaration carefully specifies situations in which Christians must resist totalitarianism. They fail their responsibility, the Weissensee declaration points out, if they "remain silent about the sins of our times." The churches are equally unfaithful to their calling if they submit "to the absolute claim of an ideology" or agree to an atheist morality "in which man without God is made the goal of education and culture." The declaration states that the churches must be willing to share in the suffering of those "who have been deprived of their rights," and that "we act in disobedience if we remain silent when power is abused and we are not prepared to obey God more than humans."

Walter Ulbricht's government has reacted to the declaration with growing distress. Last week a deputy chairman of his state council charged that the declaration was prepared in West Berlin for "cold war purposes." But the Evangelical churches clearly intend to live by these principles. At a recent administrative session, the churchmen elected as their chairman and deputy chairman bishops who are known to favor a policy of noncooperation with the state. In retaliation, the government formally barred leaders of the Evangelical churches in West Germany from entering East Germany, thereby severing the already frail links between the west and east branches of German Protestantism.

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