Church & State
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
I have never knowingly heard the Reverend Paul Ostreicher speak. Our social and professional paths haven't crossed and I have never, as it happens, been in a church when he was preaching. So it was that when I turned on the radio the other day and found myself listening to a talk on relations between the Lutheran Church and the East German State I imagined the unfamiliar voice explaining that 'Freedom of religious belief is written into the constitution of the GDR' to be that of the Reverend Paul.
It was not. Mr Ostreicher remains one of the great comic figures of our age, immortalised, if in no other way, as Peter Simple's 'Reverend Peter Nordwestdeutscher', Chaplain to the Bishop of Bevindon; not to mention another and highly libellous appearance which he makes in — ah — well, in a novel by someone. But the performance which I happened to hear was not his: the speaker turned out to be Mr Keith Clements, a tutor at Bristol Baptist College. His talk, 'What Luther says to Marx', was published in the Listener of 21 June.
To be absolutely fair (what is happening to this column?) Mr Clements was not as grotesque as my incomplete listening had suggested. Certainly he talks, apparently without irony, of the 'soaring height of the television tower' in East Berlin 'proclaiming the brave forward movement of socialism'. But he has some interesting things to say besides. It is the case that the 'German Democratic Republic' is the heartland of Lutheran Germany and contains the shrines associated with Luther's life: Eisleben, where he was born, Erfurt where he became a monk, Wittenberg where he nailed his theses, Eisenach where he translated the Bible.
It is also true, and relevant, that the Lutheran Church has always preached the absolute supremacy of the individual conscience within, at the same time as complete obedience to the State without. That is a legacy from Luther's terrified reaction to the Peasants' Revolt of 1525, when he placed himself under the protection of the Princes. Mr Clements says that in East Germany 'religious belief means something personal, private and inward'; he might have observed that this was a reflection of a 450-year-old tradition.
Indeed, he might have gone further. One may perfectly well combine (though some anti-Communist polemicists do not see this) an abhorrence of the East European regimes with an attempt to understand them in historical perspective. It is not to excuse the tyranny of the East German government to see in it a clear continuity from previous social arrangements in Bran_ denburg and Saxony. I remember walking once through the outskirts of Zanzibar and coming across a courtyard behind a wire fence where a dozen young men were playing handball. These tall, lean youths with cropped blond hair and expressionless faces were 'military advisers' from East Germany to Tanzania. I looked at them and thought . where and in what uniforms one might formerly have seen them. It is well known that many East German state officials are former members of the National Socialist party. An assiduous scholar might discover now many senior members of the Socialist Unity party, as the ruling party in East Germany calls itself, are from old Junker families.
But although Mr Clements makes several points well enough, my initial impression wasn't far wrong. A couple of (1 trust untendentious) quotations give the flavour. 'They accept their position as Christians in a socialist society, and do not wish to be anywhere else.' How does he know? 'Before we shake our heads over the apparently blinkered attitude of Marxist dogmaticians, it is as well to remember that even here in the West little public recognition is afforded to Christian critiques of society which move beyond platitudes about declining moral standards.'
Here we see the familiar sleight-ofargument which runs: things may not be very pretty in the East, but then the West has its own faults; we are all guilty; who are we to criticise others? To which the answer is that the faults of liberal democracies are not in the same class as those of totalitarian regimes (of Left or Right), and that even if they were it would be neither here nor there as far as the East was concerned.
Ah well. It would have been too much to expect Mr Clements to say this: that the Lutheran tradition of quietist obedience — to Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Hitler or Ulbricht — has been as lamentable in its political results as the Russian Orthodox tradition of Erastianism; that Lutheran Prussia's finest hour came in July 1944 when it briefly abandoned that obedient tradition (and when as a result the best elements of Prussian society perished at the hands of Hitler's executioners); that if Christianity has a great historical role — in spite of all the horrors perpetrated in its name — it is to represent the supremancy of individual conscience in all things, inward and outward alike; that the true Christian tradition in social life is that of Thomas More rather than of the Vicar of Bray — or even of Dr Adenauer.
Mr Clements's East German of the Year may be the leader (whatever he is called) of the Christian Democratic Union, one of the smaller East German parties which, as Mr Clements meiotically puts it, 'don't differ significantly, as far as policy is concerned, from the Socialist Unity Party'. Mine is Nico Hiibner, who is serving a five-year prison sentence for conscientious objection: he if anyone does represents the best hope for his country.
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