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East German regime failed to ‘reckon on candles and prayers’

East Germany’s secret police had plans to crush every threat to the communist regime “but it didn’t reckon on candles and prayers.”

The saying, by the head of the secret police in Leipzig is fictional and taken from a novel. But given how often it comes up in speeches and historical accounts it might as well be fact.

The revolution “which went off peacefully started in the church,” says Christian Fuehrer, 66, who retired last year after 28 years as pastor of Leipzig’s Protestant Nikolai Church.

A leading figure in the “Monday demonstrations” which helped bring down the communist regime, Fuehrer was among the first to open his church to the “peace prayer meetings” which later snowballed into mass rallies.

He first held “peace prayer meetings” in 1982 to protest the arms race. Then only half a dozen turned up. By 1988, he had invited small groups advocating political reform to hold public discussions at the church.

On Sept. 25, 1989, 7,000 turned up for a “no violence” vigil as the regime threatened to clamp down on growing protests.

By Oct. 9, 70,000 converged on the square outside the church for a rally at which demonstrators first took up the chant: “We are the people,” in a direct rebuke to leaders of the “people’s republic.”

The protest triggered a chain reaction which ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9 and the subsequent fall of the regime.

“For me, the church was obviously political, it deals with mankind. Jesus never hid away, he reached out to man,” Fuehrer says.

“Look to the Bible ... God frees the Israelites from their Babylonian exile ... The church ‘welcomes those who are persecuted,’” he says.

For Rainer Eppelmann, a former pastor of the East Berlin’s Samaritan church, who was later elected to parliament and who now heads a foundation researching East Germany’s dictatorship: “Prayer wasn’t enough, you had to get involved in politics.”

The reason for the success of the church meetings was that in East Germany every get-together had to be approved by the authorities, except for church services, he said.

Protestant churches, to which most East German Christians belonged, offered a haven for public discussions as Protestant pastors, unlike their Catholic brethren, did not need approval from church leaders on how to run their parishes.

“One speaks of a protestant revolution. It’s a little far-fetched but ... ,” says Eppelmann with a smile.

For Fuehrer, “a head-on collision with those in power was unavoidable. Dictatorship wants 100 percent of man, so logically it can’t tolerate God.”

Since reunification, Fuehrer has spent his time looking after the unemployed and leading other protests, against nuclear power and genetically modified crops.

“The rosy future promised by Kohl hasn’t come about, so there’s been plenty to do,” he says.

His church congretation has shrunk.

“But as a church, you don’t look for reward,” he says.
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