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Dealing with Guilt in the German Democratic Republic after 1989
Author(s) -
Falcke Heino
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
the ecumenical review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.104
H-Index - 7
eISSN - 1758-6623
pISSN - 0013-0796
DOI - 10.1111/j.1758-6623.2004.tb00499.x
Subject(s) - protestantism , confessional , communism , german , political science , law , democracy , context (archaeology) , nazism , socialism , nazi germany , sociology , history , politics , archaeology
After 1989, the churches in East Germany were initially hailed as having played a crucial role in the downfall of Communism, yet within a couple of years, accusations that they had collaborated with the Communist system returned, fanned by the publication of documents from the archive of the Ministry of State Security – the “Stasi”. In particular, the spotlight fell upon the Protestant church's self‐assigned role of being a “Church within Socialism”, which according to critics was at best an attempt to curry favour with the authorities, and at worst a denial of the church's confessional basis. This is an extract from a longer article 1 from 2002 in which Falcke places the issue of dealing with the past of the GDR in the context of the wider issue of the way in which the history of the Third Reich and the Holocaust was dealt with in East Germany. In this extract, Falcke reviews the debate of the 1990s, criticizing the fact that the issue of the integrity and guilt of the Protestant churches in the GDR was addressed too frequently in isolation, with little comparison with the wider ecumenical movement, and highlighting the lack of any critical debate about the process of German unification itself. Instead of a paradigm shift as demanded by the Conciliar Process for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation, there was simply a change of system, from socialism through privatization to neo‐liberalism, thus raising new questions about guilt and integrity.