Eastern Germany: the most godless place on Earth
They are sending missionaries to eastern Germany. A recent study called Beliefs About God Across Time and Countries
found that 52.1% of people asked whether they believed in God
identified themselves as atheists. This compared with only 10.3% in
western Germany. Indeed, the survey was unable to find a single person
under the age of 28 in eastern Germany who believed in God. Obviously
there are some – I think I may have even met some once – but the survey
was unable to find them. On the face of it this is an extraordinary
finding and it is something that needs some careful explanation.
Different reasons are adduced for the absence of religion in the east. The first one that is usually brought out is the fact that that area was run by the Communist party from 1945 to 1990 and that its explicit hostility to religion meant that it was largely stamped out. However, this is not entirely the case. In fact, after initial hostilities in the first years of the GDR, the SED came to a relatively comfortable accommodation with what was called the Church in Socialism. The churches in the GDR were given a high degree of autonomy by SED standards and indeed became the organisational focus of the dissident movement of the 1990s, which was to some extent led by Protestant pastors.
In addition to an accommodation with religion, the party also deliberately created alternative poles of integration for the population. Young people were brought up in a highly ideological atmosphere and were required to undergo a so-called Jugendweihe – a sort of atheist confirmation. Interestingly, this ceremony has survived the end of communism and many young people still voluntarily enter into it. Equally, especially under Eric Honecker in the 1970s and 80s, an attempt was made to create a sort of "GDR patriotism", in which figures from Prussian history such as Frederick the Great were put back on their plinths in East Berlin and integrated into the Communist narrative of the forward march of history. Martin Luther, Thomas Münzer and other figures from the Reformation were also recruited into the party.
Another factor is that religion in eastern Germany is also overwhelmingly Protestant, both historically and in contemporary terms. Of the 25% who do identify themselves as religious, 21% of them are Protestants. The other 4% is made up of a small number of Catholics as well as Muslims and adherents of other new evangelical groups, new-age sects or alternative religions. The Protestant church is in steep decline with twice as many people leaving it every year as joining.
If we were to follow the Weberian line on this, then a highly Protestant area undergoing rapid modernisation would almost automatically experience a process of radical secularisation going hand-in-hand with industrialisation, a process which was only speeded up by the communist obsession with heavy industry.
When we look at western Germany however, we see that there Catholics are in a majority and indeed, political power in West Germany has traditionally been built on western-orientated Catholic support for the Christian Democratic Union in the south and west. Indeed, the first chancellor of postwar West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, had been mayor of Cologne in the 1930s and even then was in favour of the division of Germany and a "Rhineland Alliance" as a sort of precursor of the European Union.
What all of this means is that rather than simply just being an area that was occupied by the Soviet Union and their satraps in the East German Communist party, the eastern part of Germany has an identity which – almost a quarter of a century on – continues to make unification more difficult than expected. Religious confession, or rather the lack of it, plays an important role in this. This has led some to talk of East German atheism as a form of continuing political and regional identification. For example, in 2000 the Catholic theologian Eberhard Tiefensee identified what he called an "East German folk atheism" which could be argued to constitute a substantial part of a regional identity against West German Catholic domination.
Secularisation processes are under way throughout the continent and the role of religion and the church in modernity are being questioned everywhere, from gay marriage to women priests to abortion and on to whether the EU should identify itself as a Christian entity. The question should perhaps be whether it is actually folk atheism that represents the future of Europe.
Different reasons are adduced for the absence of religion in the east. The first one that is usually brought out is the fact that that area was run by the Communist party from 1945 to 1990 and that its explicit hostility to religion meant that it was largely stamped out. However, this is not entirely the case. In fact, after initial hostilities in the first years of the GDR, the SED came to a relatively comfortable accommodation with what was called the Church in Socialism. The churches in the GDR were given a high degree of autonomy by SED standards and indeed became the organisational focus of the dissident movement of the 1990s, which was to some extent led by Protestant pastors.
In addition to an accommodation with religion, the party also deliberately created alternative poles of integration for the population. Young people were brought up in a highly ideological atmosphere and were required to undergo a so-called Jugendweihe – a sort of atheist confirmation. Interestingly, this ceremony has survived the end of communism and many young people still voluntarily enter into it. Equally, especially under Eric Honecker in the 1970s and 80s, an attempt was made to create a sort of "GDR patriotism", in which figures from Prussian history such as Frederick the Great were put back on their plinths in East Berlin and integrated into the Communist narrative of the forward march of history. Martin Luther, Thomas Münzer and other figures from the Reformation were also recruited into the party.
Another factor is that religion in eastern Germany is also overwhelmingly Protestant, both historically and in contemporary terms. Of the 25% who do identify themselves as religious, 21% of them are Protestants. The other 4% is made up of a small number of Catholics as well as Muslims and adherents of other new evangelical groups, new-age sects or alternative religions. The Protestant church is in steep decline with twice as many people leaving it every year as joining.
If we were to follow the Weberian line on this, then a highly Protestant area undergoing rapid modernisation would almost automatically experience a process of radical secularisation going hand-in-hand with industrialisation, a process which was only speeded up by the communist obsession with heavy industry.
When we look at western Germany however, we see that there Catholics are in a majority and indeed, political power in West Germany has traditionally been built on western-orientated Catholic support for the Christian Democratic Union in the south and west. Indeed, the first chancellor of postwar West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, had been mayor of Cologne in the 1930s and even then was in favour of the division of Germany and a "Rhineland Alliance" as a sort of precursor of the European Union.
What all of this means is that rather than simply just being an area that was occupied by the Soviet Union and their satraps in the East German Communist party, the eastern part of Germany has an identity which – almost a quarter of a century on – continues to make unification more difficult than expected. Religious confession, or rather the lack of it, plays an important role in this. This has led some to talk of East German atheism as a form of continuing political and regional identification. For example, in 2000 the Catholic theologian Eberhard Tiefensee identified what he called an "East German folk atheism" which could be argued to constitute a substantial part of a regional identity against West German Catholic domination.
Secularisation processes are under way throughout the continent and the role of religion and the church in modernity are being questioned everywhere, from gay marriage to women priests to abortion and on to whether the EU should identify itself as a Christian entity. The question should perhaps be whether it is actually folk atheism that represents the future of Europe.
Germany's reading list: crime, sex and economics
A venerable man of German industry is brutally murdered in a hotel room. The killer hands himself in to police but refuses to explain his crime. To the press and the courts it looks like the motiveless work of a psychopath – until an inexperienced defence lawyer Caspar Leinen discovers documents about the dead man's secret past in Nazi-occupied Italy.Lawyer Ferdinand von Schirach – a lawyer whose grandfather Baldur von Schirach led the Hitler Youth was reich youth leader of the Nazi party – established himself as an author with two collections of short stories in 2009 and 2010, Guilt and Crime. The Collini Case has not only been a bestseller since it was published in 2011, it has also ignited a debate about a 1968 law, the introductory act to administrative offences, that meant many accused of war crimes during the Nazi era could only be tried for manslaughter, not murder. In February this year, the justice ministry commissioned an investigation into criminal law changes of the 1950s and 1960s.
Germany's new role at the centre of Europe's political stage has led to soul searching at home and abroad: is the new generation done with atoning for the sins of its grandparents, finished with wartime guilt? Judging by the success of Von Schirach's novel, the process of historical self-examination is far from finished. In many ways The Collini Case is a step back from the last bestseller by a lawyer-novelist, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, published in 1995, which broke many taboos by portraying a Nazi criminal in a partly sympathetic light. Von Schirach's book stays resolutely on the victims' side.
Manfred Spitzer Digital Dementia
The famous neuroscientist argues that our growing reliance on search engines, satnavs and Wikipedia means we are failing to give our grey matter the kind of workout it needs. The unlikely heroes of Spitzer's study turn out to be a familiar species: London black-cab drivers. Thanks to a study of a taxi driver who had memorised "the knowledge" of the capital's streets, he writes, "we know that the brain is not only the most complicated, but the most dynamic organ in our body. It grows or shrinks according to usage."Wolfgang Herrndorf Tschick
Praised by critics as a "German Huckleberry Finn", Herrndorf's Spiegel bestseller tells the story of a teenager from a wealthy but dysfunctional family and his Russian-German classmate, who one summer holiday embark on a road trip around the former GDR in a stolen Lada. It's also an exploration of the real East Germany as the west still doesn't know it."The world is bad, and people are bad too. That's what my parents told me, my teachers told me and television tells me. But the strange thing was that on our journey Tschick and I almost exclusively met those few people who weren't bad at all." A few months before the novel appeared in 2010, 46-year-old Herrndorf was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer. He has been chronicling his daily struggles with the illness in an online journalsince.
Ann-Marlene Henning and Tina Bremer-Olszewski Make Love
A Joy of Sex for a generation growing up with internet porn, combining infographics, arthouse photography and practical advice. "The abundance of sex creates a false impression of familiarity: we've seen it all, we've done it all," the authors write in the introduction. "But the problem is: what the media presents as sexuality has little to do with the real thing." As a remedy, Henning and Bremer-Olszewski give us surprising facts (did you know that a full-on snog engages as many as 17 muscles?), a guide to rude words from around the world and a thorough deconstruction of modern porn cliches. Shifted more than 60,000 copies in the first 10 weeks after publication.Rolf Dobelli: The Art of Clear Thinking
In 52 short chapters Dobelli tries to put a finger on why CEOs, economists or just the average shopper makes mistakes: because we sometimes believe in stories rather than facts, because we fail to draw lessons from our own failures or because we think that an item chosen from a large selection is more valuable than one from a small one. Mixing management-speak and real science, Dobelli's bestseller (300,000 sales to date) follows in the wake of Naseem Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan and Daniel Kahnemann's Thinking Fast and Slow.Thilo Sarrazin Europe Doesn't Need the Euro
"If the euro fails, then Europe failed," Angela Merkel said in September last year, but former Bundesbank member Thilo Sarrazin doesn't buy it. Ditching the deutschmark, he says, was driven by "magical thinking", and those Germans now calling for eurobonds are "driven by that very German reflex, which says that we have only repented for the Holocaust and world war once all our belongings, including our money, has been handed into European ownership".Europe Doesn't Need the Euro has sold more than 200,000 copies, but critics have taken issues with some of Sarrazin's conclusions. The Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper asked why Sarrazin doesn't spell out what would have happened if Germany had stuck with the deutschmark. "Perhaps because a strong D-mark would have made German wares increasingly expensive?" As with his polemical 2010 book on Germany's migrant minorities, Germany Abolishes Itself, Sarrazin is quick to point the finger at potential problems but much slower to come up with constructive solutions.
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