Gerhard Bassarak

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As a speaker at a meeting of the Christian Peace Conference in 1987

Gerhard Bassarak (born February 3, 1918 in Willenberg , East Prussia , † September 22, 2008 in Schildow ) was a German Protestant theologian and unofficial employee of the GDR State Security .

Life

Bassarak was born in 1918 as the son of a deacon . He had been a member of the Confessing Church since 1934 . From 1937 to 1945 he was in the German Wehrmacht .

Bassarak studied Protestant theology at the Martin Luther University in Halle from 1945 to 1950 . There the Protestant theologian Julius Schniewind had a lasting influence on his views. After the vicariate and ordination in 1953 he was travel secretary of the Evangelical student communities of the GDR and student pastor in Berlin until 1957 . From 1957 to 1966 he was director of studies at the Evangelical Academy in Berlin-Brandenburg.

Since 1958 he worked, meanwhile as an unofficial employee of the state security, as a co-founder in the management of the Weißensee working group , which among other things advocated the separation of the Protestant churches in the GDR from the Evangelical Church in Germany . From 1959 to 1989 he was a member of the editorial team of the church magazine The Signs of the Times . From 1959 he was a staff member, from 1963 international secretary and from 1978 until he left in 1990 one of the vice-presidents of the Christian Peace Conference . In 1967 he became professor of ecumenical theology at the Martin Luther University in Halle against the will of the faculty . In 1969, Bassarak and his professorship for ecumenism were transferred to the Humboldt University in Berlin and he stayed there until his retirement in 1983. In 1968 he justified the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring . Again and again Bassarak endeavored under the guise of ecumenism to find a theological justification for the communist-totalitarian regimes in Europe and Latin America.

Bassark received the Patriotic Order of Merit several times , in 1988 in gold, and in 1978 the Star of Friendship of Nations .

Heinrich Fink gave the funeral sermon on November 1st, 2008 about the password of the day of death from Deuteronomy 8.5.

State Security employee and censor

Bassarak was considered a state-loyal theologian who was promoted by the government agencies of the GDR. He worked as an unofficial employee at the MfS under the code name "IM Buss" under the registration number XV / 1005/69.

From 1968 to 1990 he wrote almost 500 censorship reports on book projects of the Evangelical publishing house on behalf of the central GDR censorship authority, the main administration of the publishing and book trade of the Ministry of Culture . He received up to 700 GDR marks per report.

Fonts

  • Uppsala 1968. 1968.
  • Diagnosis and prognosis. Union Verlag, 1969.
  • The risen crucified one. EVA, 1969.
  • Prayer for the world. EVA, 1969.
  • Theology of the genitive? Against wrong ways of service to the word. Berlin 1975.
  • Luther and Lutheranism in Eastern Europe. Berlin 1983.
  • Language of peace. Prague 1987.

literature

  • Jens Bulisch: Evangelical press in the GDR. “The signs of the times” (1947–1990). Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006 ( work on contemporary church history. Series B, Volume 43).
  • Ulrich Hollop: Silence is golden? On the death of Gerhard Bassarak. In: The Church. Evangelical weekly newspaper , November 16, 2008, p. 6.
  • Clemens Vollnhals , Siegfried Bräuer (ed.): There is no censorship in the GDR. Evang. Publishing house, Leipzig 1995.
  • Ehrhart Neubert:  Bassarak, Gerhard . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  • Ingrid Ehrler, Constanze Kraft, Christian Stappenbeck, Rudolf Weckerling (eds.): Gerhard Bassarak - With the head start of a historical epoch GNN-Verlag : Schkeuditz 2010, ISBN 978-3-89819-348-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Gerhard Bassarak ( Memento from May 3, 2008 in the Internet Archive ). Website of the Catalogus professorum halensis . Retrieved January 7, 2011.
  2. ↑ Jens Bulisch: Evangelical Press in the GDR. “The signs of the times” (1947–1990). Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006 ( work on contemporary church history. Series B, Volume 43).
  3. ↑ Anke Silomon: Claim and Reality of the "Special Community". Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006, ISBN 9783525557471 , p. 710. limited preview in Google book search
  4. ^ New Germany , April 30th / April 1st. May 1988, p. 3
  5. ↑ Berliner Zeitung , 25./26. February 1978, p. 4
  6. ^ Clemens Vollnhals: The church political department of the Ministry for State Security. In the S. (Ed.): The Church Policy of the SED and State Security. An interim balance. 2nd Edition. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 1997, p. 115 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  7. ↑ The gates wide . In: Der Spiegel . No. 3 , 1996 ( online ).
  8. ↑ Matthias Gretzschel: Bible verses as longsellers in millions of copies. In: Abendblatt.de . December 30, 2004, accessed December 31, 2014 .
personal data
SURNAME Bassarak, Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant theologian, unofficial employee of the GDR State Security
DATE OF BIRTH February 3, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Willenberg , East Prussia
DATE OF DEATH September 22, 2008
Place of death Schildow