Weißensee working group
The Weißenseer Arbeitskreis (Church Brotherhood in Berlin) was a group of Protestant theologians in the GDR that came into being in 1958. They advocated constructive cooperation with the state and are described by opponents as loyal to the SED. He was promoted and influenced by the GDR State Security . The reason for the establishment as a free internal church association was a fraternal council context of various people who saw no way out in the frontal opposition of the Berlin-Brandenburg bishop Otto Dibelius against the SED. Among the founders were the theologians and unofficial employees of the State Security Gerhard Bassarak and Hanfried Müller .
The members of the Weißensee working group tied in theologically with Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer . They emphasized the critical stance against the church as an institution and the rejection of the traditional connection of the church with secular power. Instead, the individual Christian is called to be politically active. Hanfried Müller formulated a criticism of traditional "religiosity", which he opposed a cosmopolitan "belief in Christ". The working group emerged with a few public statements in which he u. a. questioned the predominance of infant baptism, established the compatibility of confirmation and youth consecration , and advocated the independence of the Evangelical Churches of the GDR from West Germany. The guiding principle was the view that the church should serve (also non-Christian) society, not make claims to power.
When the Conference of Evangelical Regional Churches within the GDR in 1961, in agreement with the EKD, stated that Christians should not submit to the absolute claim of an ideology, the Weißensee working group formulated a different position. His “Seven Sentences of the Church's Freedom to Serve” from 1963 recommended that evangelical Christians work together to fulfill the tasks of the political order of society.
The attitude of the Weißensee people close to the state and their distancing from the activities of opposition clergy was welcomed by the SED on the one hand, and on the other hand their intellectual independence also aroused distrust. Since the SED principally assessed religion as a backward relic, the offensive advocacy of theologians for socialist society, combined with the sovereign intellectual appropriation of Marxist theory, had an irritating effect. In addition, the Weißensee group had a tense relationship with the CDU block party . In the 1980s, the number of members of the organization decreased because in the course of the crisis in the GDR, even left-wing theologians lost confidence in the state.
From 1982 to 2006, the Weißenseer working group published the magazine Weißenseer Blätter (WBl) at irregular intervals .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rainer Eckert : Structures, surrounding organizations and historical picture of the PDS ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Horch und Guck , issue 15/1995
- ^ Gerhard Besier : Church, Politics and Society in the 20th Century , De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2000, ISBN 978-3-486-70191-3 , p. 80
- ↑ A servant of the Lord - and a messenger for the Stasi. In: welt.de. July 5, 2007 .
- ↑ Cornelia von Ruthendorf-Przewoski: The Prague Spring and the Protestant Churches in the GDR. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-525-55775-4 , p. 149.
- ↑ Richard Herzinger: The early years of Angela Merkel. A new book raises doubts that the Chancellor was completely unaffected by indoctrination in the GDR. But in her early years one rediscovers the familiar traits of the pragmatist. May 12, 2013. Retrieved June 23, 2018 .
- ↑ M. Leiner / M. Trowitzsch, Karl Barth's Theology as a European Event, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-525-56964-1 , pp. 114–115.
