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Christian Friedrich Ernst Führer (born March 5, 1943 in Leipzig ; † June 30, 2014 there ) was a German Evangelical Lutheran pastor . From October 13, 1980, he was the 122nd parish priest of Leipzig's Nikolaikirche since the Reformation.

Christian Leader (2009)

Life

Führer came from a pastor's family. His father was pastor in Langenleuba-Oberhain for 40 years , where Christian grew up with two older sisters. He attended the old-language branch of the Ernst Abbe High School in Eisenach . From 1961 to 1966, Führer studied Protestant theology at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig . After ordination in 1968 he was pastor in Lastau and at the same time in Colditz . During this time the four children of the Führer couple were born. In 1980 Christian Führer was appointed pastor at the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig.

Prayers for peace

As part of the Peace Decade , which arose in 1980 as a joint protest action by the Protestant youth ministers in East and West, Führer made it possible for the Liebertwolkwitzer deacon Günter Johannsen to pray for peace against the arms race in East and West every Monday since September 20, 1982 in the Nikolaikirche. From 1986, the prayers for peace were coordinated by Christoph Wonneberger , the pastor of the Lukas parish .

In 1986 Christian Führer had signs with the inscription Nikolaikirche - open for everyone put up , one of which is still today (as of 2020) at the main entrance of the Nikolaikirche. In 1987 he organized a pilgrimage as part of the Olof Palme Peace March and a discussion group on hope for those wishing to leave the country . In 1988 he moderated the prayers for those arrested on the occasion of the Liebknecht-Luxemburg-Demonstration in Berlin. With the lecture Living and Staying in the GDR he addressed those wishing to leave the country .

In September 1988 he subsequently agreed to the decision of Friedrich Magirius , the superintendent for Leipzig-East, to take over responsibility for the design of the prayers for peace. B. was also with Leipzig civil rights groups to place in the hands of the church council of the Nikolaikirchgemeinde. It was only after several months of intense protests that Christoph Wonneberger and the organized Leipzig opposition - such as the Human Rights Working Group , the Leipzig Working Group on Justice , the Life Initiative Group, the Environmental Protection Working Group, Women for Peace - were able to reach a compromise that would allow the groups to organize peace prayers under the leadership and responsibility each made possible by a pastor. In addition to Christoph Wonneberger, the groups were then supported by pastors Klaus Kaden and Rolf-Michael Turek as well as by priest Hans-Friedrich Fischer .

The GDR state organs continued to exert pressure to stop prayers for peace. Since the spring of 1989 the situation came to a head, access roads were checked and suspects were “brought in”. On June 26, 1989, in a prayer for peace, Christian Führer read out "a letter of protest from 30 people to the Chinese embassy to protest against the executions in China."

On October 9th there was a large contingent of members of the NVA , working class combat groups , police and employees of the Ministry of State Security in civilian clothes. About 1000 SED members had been ordered into the Nikolaikirche, of whom about 600 filled the nave at around 2 p.m. Starting at noon, the “appeal” for non-violence by three subversive Leipzig groups ( Human Rights Working Group , Working Group Gerechtigkeit Leipzig and Working Group Environmental Protection) was distributed as an illegally printed leaflet and read out in the inner city churches in the afternoon. Shortly before the end of the peace prayer in the Nikolaikirche, before the blessing of the bishop, there was an "appeal" from the Gewandhauskapellmeister Kurt Masur , the cabaret artist Bernd-Lutz Lange , the theologian Peter Zimmermann and three secretaries of the SED district leadership (the so-called "appeal of the Leipzig Six ” ), which also called for non-violence. In fact, the following demonstration with over 70,000 participants (some sources speak of up to 100,000) took place without any use of force.

After the Peaceful Revolution

After 1989, Führer campaigned particularly for the unemployed; the church unemployment initiative Leipzig was created , in 1993 the coordination group church unemployment initiatives Saxony .

At the end of October 1989, Christoph Wonneberger suffered a stroke, and so the nominal host of the Nikolaikirche also took over the coordination of the prayers for peace. In 1999 he got involved with Christian Wolff against the Kosovo war in the former Yugoslavia.

In December 2001, Führer was the only Leipzig citizen to sign the appeal from the former GDR opposition "We're fed up with it ..." , which the other Leipzigers rejected because of the former organized resistance because of its content, which was fed exclusively out of frustration.

In March 2002, together with Wolfgang Tiefensee , Führer registered the phrase “We are the people” as a trademark (class 35: advertising) in order to prevent misuse of the sentence.

Since the beginning of the Monday demonstrations against " Hartz IV " in Leipzig, he had again invited to prayers for peace before the demonstrations in the Nikolaikirche. After initially participating in these demonstrations against "Hartz IV", Christian Führer spoke out in favor of "Hartz IV" as the "finally initiated beginning of necessary reforms of our welfare state" than the day before, on August 29, 2004, the " Declaration by members of former GDR opposition groups: We protest against Hartz IV ”had appeared.

After two engineers working in Iraq were kidnapped from Leipzig on January 24, 2006 , the pastor mobilized hundreds of people to vigil in the tradition of Monday prayers . During the marches of the Hamburg right-wing extremist Christian Worch , which took place again and again in Leipzig (as most recently on October 3, 2006), Führer was one of the initiators of the peaceful counter-demonstrations based on the model of 1989.

On March 30, 2008, Führer held his farewell service in the Nikolaikirche and went into retirement. At a sermon in the Ansgarkirche in Kiel at the end of a networking meeting of ecumenical peace groups on September 2, 2012, Führer called for active support for the abolition of the capitalist economic system, since global capitalism is not sustainable. He destroys the environment and people. Instead, a form of sharing economy must be developed.

The German Patent and Trademark Office decided on February 6, 2013 to delete the word mark “Wir sind das Volk” applied for by Führer in 2002 due to a lack of commercial use. The civil rights activist Angelika Kanitz had requested the deletion, because the sentence should remain as free as it was formulated in 1989.

Christian Führer died on June 30, 2014 at the age of 71 in the Leipzig University Hospital of the consequences of pulmonary fibrosis . He was buried after a memorial service in the Nikolaikirche in the family grave in Langenleuba-Oberhain, a district of Penig .

honors and awards

Fonts

  • Christian Führer: And we were there. The revolution that came out of the church. The pastor of the Nikolaikirche tells his life. Ullstein, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-550-08746-2 .
  • Christian Führer: Naughty - pious - free. Words that made history. With a foreword by Margot Käßmann . Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2013, ISBN 978-3-374-03743-8 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Christian Leader  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christoph Wonneberger - The forgotten hero . MDR. 2009. Retrieved October 6, 2016.
  2. ↑ Christian Führer: And we were there . 6th edition. Ullstein, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-550-08746-2 , pp. 192 .
  3. ↑ Christian Dietrich, Case Study Leipzig 1987–1989. The politically alternative groups in Leipzig before the revolution. Commission of Inquiry “Processing the History and Consequences of the SED Dictatorship in Germany” Volume VII / 1, 1995, Friends and Enemies: Documents on the prayers for peace in Leipzig between 1981 and October 9, 1989, edited by Christian Dietrich and Uwe Schwabe im Commissioned by the Archive Citizens Movement eV Leipzig, Leipzig 1994 and Peter Wensierski: Act instead of pray. in: Der Spiegel, No. 43, October 19, 2009, pp. 42–46.
  4. ↑ Human Rights Working Group / Justice Working Group (ed.): Leipziger Chronik (Part 4) from June 4 to September 4, 1989 , in: East-West Discussion Forum. No. 10, February 1990, pp. 18-20.
  5. ^ Appeal of the organized resistance to nonviolence on October 9, 1989
  6. ↑ See Leipziger Menschenrechtegruppen 1989 (sheet 9/1999): October 9, 1989 - day of the decision
  7. ↑ Christian Wolff and Christian Führer: Thoughts on the Kosovo War
  8. ↑ Call for "We are fed up with it ..." (PDF; 20 kB) from December 13, 2001 (also published as a supplement to the taz).
  9. ↑ Entry at the German Patent and Trademark Office
  10. ^ Call for the resumption of the Monday demonstrations from April 19, 2004 in Leipzig
  11. ↑ Christian Führer in an interview on August 30, 2004
  12. ^ Declaration by members of former GDR opposition groups: We protest against Hartz IV of August 29, 2004
  13. ↑ Stefan Klotz: The Preacher on the Mount of Sankt Nikolai , faz.net of March 31, 2008
  14. ↑ Christian Führer calls for an “economic form of sharing”. Northern Church: Evangelical Lutheran Church in Northern Germany, accessed on July 1, 2014 .
  15. ↑ Christians should abolish capitalism. Our church: Evangelical newspaper for Westphalia and Lippe, accessed on July 1, 2014 .
  16. ^ Peter Schilder: Leipzig. The people are us. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 22, 2013
  17. ↑ Dominic Welters: Christian Führer is dead - Leipzig's former Nikolai Church pastor died on Monday morning. ( Memento from October 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Obituary in the online edition of the Leipziger Volkszeitung from June 30, 2014, accessed on June 30, 2014.
  18. ↑ knerger.de: The grave of Christian Führer is in his place of birth
  19. ↑ Ex-Pastor Führer receives Hans Böckler Medal , ddp report from May 5, 2008 on derNewsticker.de, accessed on May 5, 2008
  20. ↑ Mitteldeutscher Presseclub des Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, November 21, 2008 , accessed on February 10, 2014
  21. ^ German National Prize 2014 for the Leipzig Monday Demonstrations . The German National Foundation. 2014. Accessed March 12, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Führer, Christian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Leader, Christian Friedrich Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant pastor, organizer of Monday demonstrations in Leipzig
DATE OF BIRTH March 5, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH June 30, 2014
Place of death Leipzig