Reconciliation in Berlin
My flight into Berlin, Germany, landed at Tegel Airport, which might sound oddly familiar to fans of Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the martyrs of the Second World War. Bonhoeffer was held at the Tegel military prison for a year and a half, and it was there that he wrote his famous Letters and Papers from Prison, smuggled out of the prison by sympathetic guards. He was then condemned to death by the Nazis and executed at a concentration camp, just three weeks before the Soviet capture of Berlin.
So despite the fact that Berlin is a bustling 21st-century city, the scars of the past can be seen all around. Out my hotel window is the spire of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, badly damaged in an Allied bombing raid in 1943 and left in partial ruins as a reminder of the war. A shack stands in the middle of the road near the Koch Street subway station, to mark the location of Checkpoint Charlie, the most well-known crossing in the Berlin Wall during the Cold War.
And a span of the Berlin Wall still stands across the street from the office of a remarkable congregation that has recently built The Chapel of Reconciliation in the Death Strip that used to separate East Berlin from West Berlin. This is a city that cries out for reconciliation.
The morning after my arrival, I take a cab to Bernauer Street for a meeting with a Lutheran pastor named Manfred, who has served the congregation called Reconciliation Parish since 1975. I arrive a few minutes early, and walk along a section of the wall built by the East German government to seal off West Berlin. The Berlin Wall was actually two walls that paralleled one another and were separated by the heavily patrolled Death Strip, designed to keep residents of East Germany from fleeing to the West. The path walked by East German guards is still in place, but it now leads to The Chapel of Reconciliation, an elegantly simple structure that sits at Ground Zero of the Cold War struggle between Soviet Communism and Western Democracy.
I cross the street and enter the parish house that has been the gathering place for Reconciliation Parish since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. You see, there once was a red brick Reconciliation Church building, constructed in 1894 in the Neogothic style, with a tall steeple and large nave that could hold 1000 people. But when the Berlin Wall was built by the Communists, the Reconciliation Church building ended up in the Soviet sector with about 100 of its parishioners, while more than 900 members of the church lived on the other side of the wall, in the French sector.
For more than 20 years, the church building stood in the Death Strip between East and West, unable to be used by this congregation divided by the wall. Then the East German government took an action that they said was designed “to increase safety, order and cleanliness on the border of West Berlin.” They blew up the church building — first the nave, and then the steeple. But as images of the collapsing steeple were broadcast around the world, it was clear that the destruction of the church had nothing to do with safety, and everything to do with politics. The East German government, which had divided the city with a wall, simply could not tolerate a church called Reconciliation.
I sit down with Manfred in his office, and he tells me that when he began to pastor the Reconciliation Parish in 1975, he saw that there was a deep wound in the community, but, he says, “it was no longer bleeding.” The Berlin Wall had been in place for over a decade at that point, and no one wanted to do anything about it. The wall actually gave the residents of West Berlin a sense of security — they had been afraid of losing their city, so the existence of the wall helped them to feel protected against Communist attack. Manfred says that he did not want to play world politics as a pastor, so he did what he could to help people.
He began by doing what Jesus always did: He looked and he listened. He looked up and down Bernauer Street, and actually made a film of the street to capture what was there. He listened to stories of the parish, and learned that the Reconciliation Church had been built in 1894, in a historic and famous workers’ district, to reconcile people to their king — a king who was unpopular with many of the area’s workers. But the world began to change, and soon there was no more king. Democracy came to the church in the 1920s. Then Hitler rose to power, and divided the parish. Then the Soviets invaded, and after the war the city was divided. Manfred realized that there had been many upheavals, restarts, and disasters in the life of the church — one about every 10 years. So the building of the Berlin Wall was not the first challenge for the congregation.
Manfred discovered that the church needed to be trained to “stand up again” after disasters, and so he began to bring people together. He invited older people to tell stories to younger people, because he believes that “knowledge about how to live is not taught in schools, it is taught in community.” Through the 1970s and 80s he gathered people and asked the questions, “What are we proud of?” and “What do we hope for?” They also gathered for worship in the parish house, since the church building was on the other side of the wall. Manfred arranged chairs in concentric circles for worship, and they gathered around a Bible which was suspended in the middle.
In 1985, the East German government blew up the Reconciliation Church building, and this strengthened the resolution of the congregation to survive. “The church is not the building,” Manfred says to me. “The picture of the falling church would not be the last picture of this church.” A year after the church building was destroyed, Manfred gathered the congregation and introduced a service of dance and music directed against the Berlin Wall with the words, “We can do something, and if we trust in symbolic actions, we are aware of the silent power of symbols to change the impossible into possibilities.”
There truly is power in symbols, and the church is an important cultural force. By the summer of 1989, it became clear that a huge revolution was going on underground, in the East. By November of that year, the wall had been torn down — something that no one would have predicted when the Reconciliation Church building was demolished. “There is a bigger power in the world than human beings,” says Manfred. The powerful East Germans destroyed the Reconciliation Church in 1985, and four years later they were gone. Manfred now sees that his job is to “try to find the footsteps of God’s power.”
One way to trace these footsteps is to protect a piece of history. He tells me that understanding needs something to touch (in fact, in German, understanding and touching are the same word). Manfred fought for four years to have a portion of the Berlin Wall preserved, and it is now a historical site. It is a stone marker, as is seen so often at important sites in the Old Testament.
Since the fall of the wall, Reconciliation Parish has opened itself for community discussions, and has become a place for discussing the significance of the wall. They have hosted conversations between former members of the East German Secret Police (Stasi) and their victims. The church has offered exhibitions aimed at releasing emotions in a controlled and productive way. Manfred has found that “victims are keen to forgive, and willing.” But first there needs to be an open word, such as “I am sorry. I acted in a wrong way.” He says that in East Germany, people were punished for speaking openly, and they are still suffering from speaking out — they lost education and jobs. So speaking openly, and admitting that there was a problem, is very difficult for many who did wrong. He saw this same problem with the Second World War generation that did not want to discuss their history under Hitler.
Manfred’s work around the wall has formed a new kind of parish, one which has a shrinking kernel but a growing fruit. Sadly, the kernel of active parish members is shrinking, but the fruitfulness of the congregation is growing. They have had 500,000 visitors in the past two years, and the number is always growing.
Why is this? People are drawn to reconciliation, and Manfred’s parish is the protector of a holy place. “There is a spiritual well in every parish,” Manfred says to me. “You have to work to find it. It comes from God’s grace.”
The spiritual well in this congregation is the Chapel of Reconciliation, which was started in the mid-1990s and completed in the year 2000. It is built in the former Death Strip to mark a place where God spoke, and something significant happened with the fall of the wall. “This is a special place to pray, to say thank you for what happened here,” says Manfred. “There is no other place in Germany to say thank you.” The parish members were determined to build the chapel themselves, making it as big as necessary but also as small as possible. They wanted to make it a seed — small and relevant.
They decided right away not to reconstruct the old church. But at the same time they did not want to build something new and electronic, because they did not want to forget their history. So they decided to make a chapel that was cheap, sustainable, and easy to maintain. The inner structure is made of clay walls, because earth is strong and it lasts. Into the clay the builders — including many students — mixed the broken stones of the old church. The outer structure is made of wood slats, which allows the building to breathe. As you look through these slats, says Manfred, “what you see is dependent on where you stand.”
Everything works by hand in the Chapel of Reconciliation, including the bells from the old church, rung by hand. Manfred says that it is “a seed of another life in a high-tech German city.” There is prayer in the chapel every day, and the reading of a biography of one of the victims of the Berlin Wall. With no heat or air conditioning, it is not a comfortable living room — instead, it is a sacred room, a room that is truly living. When you worship in the chapel, you are truly in touch with nature, and get a sense of the reconciliation that we are now challenged to pursue with the natural world.
It is appropriate that this chapel stands in Berlin’s Death Strip, on the foundation of a church building that was destroyed by a secular government. It points clearly to Jesus Christ, who was killed on a cross by a secular government, and who continues to reconcile us to God and to one another. The chapel reminds us that we all — in every time and place — need reconciliation.
So despite the fact that Berlin is a bustling 21st-century city, the scars of the past can be seen all around. Out my hotel window is the spire of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, badly damaged in an Allied bombing raid in 1943 and left in partial ruins as a reminder of the war. A shack stands in the middle of the road near the Koch Street subway station, to mark the location of Checkpoint Charlie, the most well-known crossing in the Berlin Wall during the Cold War.
And a span of the Berlin Wall still stands across the street from the office of a remarkable congregation that has recently built The Chapel of Reconciliation in the Death Strip that used to separate East Berlin from West Berlin. This is a city that cries out for reconciliation.
The morning after my arrival, I take a cab to Bernauer Street for a meeting with a Lutheran pastor named Manfred, who has served the congregation called Reconciliation Parish since 1975. I arrive a few minutes early, and walk along a section of the wall built by the East German government to seal off West Berlin. The Berlin Wall was actually two walls that paralleled one another and were separated by the heavily patrolled Death Strip, designed to keep residents of East Germany from fleeing to the West. The path walked by East German guards is still in place, but it now leads to The Chapel of Reconciliation, an elegantly simple structure that sits at Ground Zero of the Cold War struggle between Soviet Communism and Western Democracy.
I cross the street and enter the parish house that has been the gathering place for Reconciliation Parish since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. You see, there once was a red brick Reconciliation Church building, constructed in 1894 in the Neogothic style, with a tall steeple and large nave that could hold 1000 people. But when the Berlin Wall was built by the Communists, the Reconciliation Church building ended up in the Soviet sector with about 100 of its parishioners, while more than 900 members of the church lived on the other side of the wall, in the French sector.
For more than 20 years, the church building stood in the Death Strip between East and West, unable to be used by this congregation divided by the wall. Then the East German government took an action that they said was designed “to increase safety, order and cleanliness on the border of West Berlin.” They blew up the church building — first the nave, and then the steeple. But as images of the collapsing steeple were broadcast around the world, it was clear that the destruction of the church had nothing to do with safety, and everything to do with politics. The East German government, which had divided the city with a wall, simply could not tolerate a church called Reconciliation.
I sit down with Manfred in his office, and he tells me that when he began to pastor the Reconciliation Parish in 1975, he saw that there was a deep wound in the community, but, he says, “it was no longer bleeding.” The Berlin Wall had been in place for over a decade at that point, and no one wanted to do anything about it. The wall actually gave the residents of West Berlin a sense of security — they had been afraid of losing their city, so the existence of the wall helped them to feel protected against Communist attack. Manfred says that he did not want to play world politics as a pastor, so he did what he could to help people.
He began by doing what Jesus always did: He looked and he listened. He looked up and down Bernauer Street, and actually made a film of the street to capture what was there. He listened to stories of the parish, and learned that the Reconciliation Church had been built in 1894, in a historic and famous workers’ district, to reconcile people to their king — a king who was unpopular with many of the area’s workers. But the world began to change, and soon there was no more king. Democracy came to the church in the 1920s. Then Hitler rose to power, and divided the parish. Then the Soviets invaded, and after the war the city was divided. Manfred realized that there had been many upheavals, restarts, and disasters in the life of the church — one about every 10 years. So the building of the Berlin Wall was not the first challenge for the congregation.
Manfred discovered that the church needed to be trained to “stand up again” after disasters, and so he began to bring people together. He invited older people to tell stories to younger people, because he believes that “knowledge about how to live is not taught in schools, it is taught in community.” Through the 1970s and 80s he gathered people and asked the questions, “What are we proud of?” and “What do we hope for?” They also gathered for worship in the parish house, since the church building was on the other side of the wall. Manfred arranged chairs in concentric circles for worship, and they gathered around a Bible which was suspended in the middle.
In 1985, the East German government blew up the Reconciliation Church building, and this strengthened the resolution of the congregation to survive. “The church is not the building,” Manfred says to me. “The picture of the falling church would not be the last picture of this church.” A year after the church building was destroyed, Manfred gathered the congregation and introduced a service of dance and music directed against the Berlin Wall with the words, “We can do something, and if we trust in symbolic actions, we are aware of the silent power of symbols to change the impossible into possibilities.”
There truly is power in symbols, and the church is an important cultural force. By the summer of 1989, it became clear that a huge revolution was going on underground, in the East. By November of that year, the wall had been torn down — something that no one would have predicted when the Reconciliation Church building was demolished. “There is a bigger power in the world than human beings,” says Manfred. The powerful East Germans destroyed the Reconciliation Church in 1985, and four years later they were gone. Manfred now sees that his job is to “try to find the footsteps of God’s power.”
One way to trace these footsteps is to protect a piece of history. He tells me that understanding needs something to touch (in fact, in German, understanding and touching are the same word). Manfred fought for four years to have a portion of the Berlin Wall preserved, and it is now a historical site. It is a stone marker, as is seen so often at important sites in the Old Testament.
Since the fall of the wall, Reconciliation Parish has opened itself for community discussions, and has become a place for discussing the significance of the wall. They have hosted conversations between former members of the East German Secret Police (Stasi) and their victims. The church has offered exhibitions aimed at releasing emotions in a controlled and productive way. Manfred has found that “victims are keen to forgive, and willing.” But first there needs to be an open word, such as “I am sorry. I acted in a wrong way.” He says that in East Germany, people were punished for speaking openly, and they are still suffering from speaking out — they lost education and jobs. So speaking openly, and admitting that there was a problem, is very difficult for many who did wrong. He saw this same problem with the Second World War generation that did not want to discuss their history under Hitler.
Manfred’s work around the wall has formed a new kind of parish, one which has a shrinking kernel but a growing fruit. Sadly, the kernel of active parish members is shrinking, but the fruitfulness of the congregation is growing. They have had 500,000 visitors in the past two years, and the number is always growing.
Why is this? People are drawn to reconciliation, and Manfred’s parish is the protector of a holy place. “There is a spiritual well in every parish,” Manfred says to me. “You have to work to find it. It comes from God’s grace.”
The spiritual well in this congregation is the Chapel of Reconciliation, which was started in the mid-1990s and completed in the year 2000. It is built in the former Death Strip to mark a place where God spoke, and something significant happened with the fall of the wall. “This is a special place to pray, to say thank you for what happened here,” says Manfred. “There is no other place in Germany to say thank you.” The parish members were determined to build the chapel themselves, making it as big as necessary but also as small as possible. They wanted to make it a seed — small and relevant.
They decided right away not to reconstruct the old church. But at the same time they did not want to build something new and electronic, because they did not want to forget their history. So they decided to make a chapel that was cheap, sustainable, and easy to maintain. The inner structure is made of clay walls, because earth is strong and it lasts. Into the clay the builders — including many students — mixed the broken stones of the old church. The outer structure is made of wood slats, which allows the building to breathe. As you look through these slats, says Manfred, “what you see is dependent on where you stand.”
Everything works by hand in the Chapel of Reconciliation, including the bells from the old church, rung by hand. Manfred says that it is “a seed of another life in a high-tech German city.” There is prayer in the chapel every day, and the reading of a biography of one of the victims of the Berlin Wall. With no heat or air conditioning, it is not a comfortable living room — instead, it is a sacred room, a room that is truly living. When you worship in the chapel, you are truly in touch with nature, and get a sense of the reconciliation that we are now challenged to pursue with the natural world.
It is appropriate that this chapel stands in Berlin’s Death Strip, on the foundation of a church building that was destroyed by a secular government. It points clearly to Jesus Christ, who was killed on a cross by a secular government, and who continues to reconcile us to God and to one another. The chapel reminds us that we all — in every time and place — need reconciliation.
posted by Henry Brinton | 12:37 PM
1 Comments:
Thank you for sharing Henry. May we keep striving for FPC to become a "Parish of Reconciliation!"
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