Hans Simon (pastor)

Hans Simon (born September 24, 1935 in Kayna , Zeitz district ) is a retired Protestant pastor and former civil rights activist in the GDR. During his tenure in the East Berlin Zion Church at the time of the GDR was the Zionskirche to a center of the independent environmental and peace movement and to the forum of many marginalized by the government in East Berlin artists and a center of protests that 1989 turning and the case the Berlin Wall .

For his work as a civil rights activist, Simon was awarded the Order of Merit of the State of Berlin and the Federal Cross of Merit.

life and work

Because of its commitment to religious freedom in the GDR and its activities in the Youth Community was Simon in 1953 by the Extended Secondary School Droyßig relegated . In 1957 he made up his Abitur in Potsdam-Hermannswerder and then studied Protestant theology at the Church University of Berlin in Berlin-Zehlendorf. After his ordination as a pastor, he first worked as a pastor in Göllingen am Kyffhäuser, then in Brielow near Brandenburg .

In 1984 Simon was appointed pastor of the Zion Church in Berlin-Mitte ; until 1990 he was also chairman of the Zion Church Council . Dietrich Bonhoeffer , whose work and theology Simon felt obliged to do since his time in the Young Congregation, had worked as city synodal vicar in the Zion Church in 1931. The memory of Bonhoeffer was present among older parishioners as well as in the leadership of the Berlin-Brandenburg Church , to which the Zion congregation belonged. The bishop of the Evangelical Church in Berlin Brandenburg , Albrecht Schönherr , had been a student at the Finkenwalde seminary in 1934 , which was headed by Bonhoeffer. Bishop Gottfried Forck , who has been in office since 1981 , with whom Simon and Albrecht Schönherr exchanged views and with whom he worked, also felt obliged to Bonhoeffer's claim that the church must be “church for others”. Simon saw the church for others in the context of community work in Berlin-Mitte as a call to stand up for the socially excluded (so-called asocials) and to give religious and political seekers or those persecuted by the state places of refuge and freedom for uncensored discussion.

From 1986 Simon made it possible for environmentalists to set up an independent environmental library in the rooms of the Zion Church. Among the founders of the library were u. a. Carlo Jordan , Oliver Kämper,  Wolfgang Rüddenklau  and  Christian Halbrock . The library, which was unique in the GDR in terms of both scope and equipment, also contained literature by both Eastern and Western European authors that was not wanted or censored by the SED state. The environmental library quickly became a supraregional center of ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical protests against the destruction of creation and the environment through planned economic overexploitation and the use of environmentally hazardous technologies in the GDR and other parts of Europe. Even before the Chernobyl disaster, resistance against the energy and military use of atomic energy in the Eastern Bloc was formed in the environmental groups of the Zion Church . The samizdat magazine ' Umweltblätter ' (later ' Telegraph '), which became one of the most important publications of the GDR opposition , was also produced in the premises of the environmental  library . Because of the environmental library, there were repeated arguments between the council of the Berlin-Mitte district and Simon. The district council collaborated closely with the Stasi , which Simon had been spying on since he was a student of theology.

Under Simon the Zion congregation also became an important center of the peace movement in the Berlin and Brandenburg area. Inspired by Jesus' Sermon on the Mount , Simon argued theologically against the rearmament and militarization of society during the Cold War . He was an active designer of the peace decades in the Zion Church and stood protectively in front of the bearers of the swords-to-plowshares symbol. Simon provided a forum for their ideas for non-religious groups of pacifists and conscientious objectors in the Zion congregation . In addition, Simon and members of the Zion Church got involved in pacifist church work to support the 'Third World'. This commitment also met with rejection from representatives of the SED's foreign policy who advocated a Leninist theory of imperialism .

Simon opened the Zionskirche and the parish hall to artists who had no chance to perform in the state-organized cultural landscape of East Berlin. These were mostly young dissident authors and songwriters. Simon also allowed art forms that did not correspond to socialist realism to have a forum in the church. An incident occurred on October 17, 1987 after a performance by the East Berlin punk band ' Die Firma ' and the West Berlin band ' Element of Crime ' in the Zion Church, which was packed with 2,000 people. After the concert, around 400 guests who had stayed in the church were physically attacked by skinheads shouting neo-Nazi slogans . Some concert goers were beaten up. The Stasi people and police officers who were present in large numbers in and in front of the church watched without taking any action. Pastor Simon protested the following day at the police headquarters in East Berlin.

On the night of November 24th to 25th, 1987, Simon was arrested along with other opposition members from the environmental library in the course of the Stasi action 'Trap'. The nightly arrest of a pastor and peaceful opposition activist in Bonhoeffer's former place of work sparked international media coverage. There were spontaneous vigils for those arrested in the Zion community and in other communities in Berlin . Also through ecumenical church protests, u. a. from Scandinavia and the Netherlands, as well as through the advocacy of Amnesty International and the West German working group for east-west issues of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Simon and the other imprisoned civil rights activists were released after a few days. Simon, as the protector of the environmental library, and many other civil rights activists from around it, were then increasingly monitored by the Stasi, u. a. in the course of operational identity checks and ' decomposition measures '.

Like his pastor colleagues at other East Berlin churches with a strong commitment to civil rights (e.g. Rainer Eppelmann ), Simon himself did not always share the opinions of those who gathered in the shelter of his church. He was sometimes criticized by conservative community and church officials as too daring and political, by expectant protesters from below as too hesitant and too theological. It was important to Simon to always enable a dialogue between different social and religious positions.

In autumn 1989 the Zionskirche became an important meeting place for peaceful demonstrators who advocated freedom of movement and a fundamental reform of the GDR and / or political reunification with the Federal Republic of Germany. Vigils and protest marches were formed in the Zionskirche and the occupation of round tables was discussed (Carlo Jordan became a representative of the central round table). In 1990, after a hunger strike with the participation of prominent community and library members, the Stasi records law was  enforced with Simon's support  .

In 1991 Simon received the Order of Merit of the State of Berlin and the Federal Cross of Merit . In 1997 he retired. As a theologian trained in ancient philology, Simon works on models of exegesis that interpret the social message and the kerygma of Jesus in the contexts of rabbinic theology at the time of the Second Temple .

literature

• Reinhard Höppner: Stay where God has put us. Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2004,  ISBN 978-3-374-02207-6
• Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk: Endgame. The 1989 revolution in the GDR. Beck, Munich 2009,  ISBN 978-3-406-58357-5
• Katherina Kunter: Fulfilled hopes and broken dreams. Evangelical churches in Germany in the field of tension between democracy and socialism. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006,  ISBN 3-525-55745-0
• Rudolf Mau: Protestantism in Eastern Germany (1945–1990). (Church history in individual representations IV / 3) Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2005,  ISBN 3-374-02319-3 .
• Thomas Rudolph, Oliver Kloss, Rainer Müller, Christoph Wonneberger (ed. On behalf of the IFM-Archivs eV): Way in the uprising. Chronicle of opposition and resistance in the GDR from August 1987 to December 1989. Vol. 1, Leipzig, Araki, 2014,  ISBN 978-3-941848-17-7
• Christian Sachse: Giving people a voice. Bishop Gottfried Forck and the opposition in the GDR. Wichern Verlag, Berlin 2009,  ISBN 978-3-88981-268-1 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans Simon, on jugendopposition.de
2. ↑ Remembrance becomes the power of the present , on zionskirche-berlin.de, accessed on August 3, 2020
3. ^ Church resistance 1989 - vigil with hymn book. Retrieved on August 9, 2020 (German). 
4. ↑ On the birthday of the Zionskirche, the renovation of the surroundings begins , at berliner-woche.de, accessed on August 3, 2020
5. ↑ Peter von Becker (Tagesspiegel, Berlin): 1987 attack in the Zionskirche. August 3, 2020, accessed on August 3, 2020 . 
6. ^ Stasi and GDR opposition Zoff um Zion , on spiegel.de, accessed on August 3, 2020
7. ↑ Hans Simon: That's sacred to me, interview. In: THE TIME. August 2, 2020, accessed August 2, 2020 .