Werner Krätschell

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Werner Ernst Krätschell (born February 16, 1940 in Berlin ) is a German Protestant theologian. He was a representative of the church peace movement in the GDR .

Life

Werner Krätschell is the sixth of eight children of the Berlin-Heinersdorfer pastor Eberhard Krätschell (1900–1995) and his wife Elisabeth, b. from Haller. After four years of war in the Heinersdorfer rectory, he came to his maternal grandmother in Bad Salzschlirf and later to Lienen in Westphalia. After the end of the war he returned to Berlin, attended the Heinersdorfer elementary school and later a grammar school in Berlin-Wedding , where he successfully completed his Abitur in 1960. In 1961 he studied theology at the East Berlin College of Theology, which he later continued with his friend Heinrich Hamel in Naumburg / Saale , because his father ( Johannes Hamel ) was a lecturer at the local catechetical college .

Krätschell is married, has four grown children and lives in Berlin.

Act

From 1969 to 1979 Krätschell was pastor in Berlin-Buchholz and from 1979 to 1996 superintendent and pastor in Berlin-Pankow . From 1981 he took part in the Pankower Peace Circle . At the end of the 1980s, while Krätschell was superintendent in charge of 24 Protestant parishes in the north of East Berlin, opposition artists and intellectuals such as Reiner Kunze and Adolf Dresen , church people such as Ruth , met in the rectory on Breiten Straße (south of the village church in Pankow ) and Hans Misselwitz . The house became a meeting place for the democratic opposition and the Peaceful Revolution and was monitored by the State Security . During the fall of the Berlin Wall, Krätschell sat as a moderator at the Pankower round table and as one of the moderators at the Berlin round table in the Red City Hall .

In 1997 he followed a request from Bishop Wolfgang Huber and took on the task of building up the military chaplaincy in the so-called "new federal states". He carried out this mandate with proxy until 2005. Using his diary entries from the last years of the GDR, he remembers and comments from today's perspective on the eventful time of the Peaceful Revolution in East Berlin in lectures and publications.

Honors

His achievements have been recognized by honorary doctorates from the University of Birmingham and Furman University in South Carolina in Greenville. The latter educational institution awarded him a visiting professorship in 2006.

Works

  • as publisher: What was and what remains: Fireside chats of former leading German military from East and West. 2nd edition, MGFA, Potsdam 2008, ISBN 978-3-9808882-9-5
  • My memories of Heinersdorf. In: Naniel Becke and Sandra Caspers: Berlin-Heinersdorf, searching for traces . Future workshop Heinersdorf e. V., Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-00-048148-2 .
  • The power of candles, memories of the Peaceful Revolution. With an essay by Timothy Garton Ash , Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-96289-046-9 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Krätschell, Werner
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Krätschell, Werner Ernst (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant clergyman, Peace Circle Pankow
DATE OF BIRTH February 16, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin