Gunnar Hasselblatt

Gunnar Hasselblatt (born August 19, 1928 in Reval ; † July 12, 1997 in Berlin-Dahlem ) was a German Lutheran clergyman, most recently commissioner for church development aid for the Berlin-Brandenburg Evangelical Church . He campaigned against political persecution by the socialist military dictatorship in Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s .

Life

Hasselblatt came from a German Baltic pastor family. After the turmoil of World War II, he lived in Northern Germany; he attended the Carl Hunnius boarding school in Wyk auf Föhr and schools in Lübeck and Stade . From 1949 he studied theology and philosophy in Bethel , Tübingen and Göttingen . After graduating in 1954, he embarked on a career as a pastor, was ordained in 1957 and was then from 1958 pastor in St. Johannis in Stade. From 1963 he was a pastor in Gladebeck , but at the same time studied comparative religious studies and Arabic studies in Göttingen with the aim of going into missionary service. In 1966 he studied in Cairo and in 1969 he received his doctorate in Göttingen. From 1969 to 1975 he was a lecturer (professor) at the theological seminar of the evangelical Mekane Yesus Church (EECMY) in Ethiopia and consultant in the dialogue between Muslims and Christians (head of the ecumenical Islam in Africa project). From 1975 until his retirement in 1993 he was the representative of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg for the church development service and responsible for Ethiopia at the Berlin Mission . Since 1984 he has been an honorary professor at the Church University of Berlin .

Hasselblatt reported in newspaper articles and books about state persecution in Ethiopia such as the Oromo people in the south of the country under the then ruling socialist military regime under Mengistu Haile Mariam . He was one of the first to report on the Red Terror in Ethiopia, from 1977 under a pseudonym in the Times and the FAZ . The Ethiopian secret service planned an assassination attempt on Hasselblatt, but the letter bomb exploded during production in 1982 in a hotel in West Berlin, where one of the assassins died and the seriously injured survivor testified. As a result, the relationship between the Berlin Brandenburg Church and the EECMY, which Hasselblatt helped to establish, was temporarily broken off due to political pressure on the EECMY.

Gunnar Hasselblatt died in 1997 at the age of 68 in Berlin-Dahlem. He found his final resting place in the Dahlem cemetery (field 005-33).

One of his sons is the mathematician Boris Hasselblatt .

Fonts

• Ethiopia on the edge of peace. Radius Verlag, Stuttgart 1995.
• The idyll of the despots. Research trip to a country without grief. Burundi: Katyn in the heart of Africa. Radius Verlag, Stuttgart 1991.
• The secret laugh in the bamboo forest. From the Oromo freedom struggle in Ethiopia. Radius Verlag, Stuttgart 1990.
• Ethiopia - people, churches and cultures. Radius Verlag, Stuttgart 1985.

Web links

• Biography [broken link]

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wilhelm Neander: Lexicon of German Baltic Theologians since 1920. Hannover-Döhren 1967. P. 59
2. ^ Gerhard Brugmann (Ed.): Misdroy, Wyk, Hemmelmark. Three Christian conservative boarding schools. Chronosverlag, Berlin 2001. No. 109.
3. ^ Franz Maier: Contributions to the history of the southern Lower Saxony village of Gladebeck . Gladebeck, Göttingen 1970, p. 300
4. ↑ A name used by the military regime itself. Spiegel report on the terror of the military regime in Ethiopia in 1978
5. ↑ as Hans Eerik
6. ↑ History of the EECMY partnership with the Berliner Missionswerk, pdf  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
7. ^ The then Secretary General of EECMY Gudina Tumsa was murdered in 1979 by the Ethiopian regime
8. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende: Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 569.