ABSTRACT
As East Germans and East German Christians adjusted to a new way of life, many of them fell silent, unable to say exactly who they were and where they fit in a new Germany.
These quotations suggest something of the contrast between the roles that religion has played in the cases of Poland and East Germany since the ‘Great Transformation’: the collapse of communist regimes across the region in the autumn and winter of 1989-90, and in their place the emergence, in most cases, of fledgling democracies and market economies (Ramet, 1995). While Catholicism, as the first quotation suggests, has been supported by some of Poland’s post communist governments as central to the identity of the Polish nation at the highest level, the second quotation reflects the German churches’ experience of disorientation. Furthermore, Poland has the highest rate of church attendance in post-communist Europe, East Germany amongst the lowest.1 1
However, in spite of these differences there are also parallels and similarities both in the history and contemporary situation of the Christian churches in each country. First, for both, World War II marked a change from a relatively plural religious situation to one in which a single church became dominant. Thus, although historically Poland had a large Jewish population and straddled the border between Eastern Christianity (Orthodoxy) and Western Christianity (Catholicism and Protestantism), after World War II border changes and the destruction of Poland’s Jews, Poland was left with a 95 per cent Roman Catholic population, with only small Greek Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish and Muslim minorities. Germany, the home of the European Reformation, also straddles a division between mostly Catholic southern Europe and predominantly Protestant northern Europe. However, the division of Germany following World War II created an East German state (German Democratic Republic, GDR) in which approximately 90 per cent of the popu lation was nominally Protestant, with most belonging to the Lutheran dominated Evangelical Church (Evangelische K irche D eutsche, EKD), leaving a Catholic minority of fewer than ten per cent. Second, in both countries Christian institutions (Catholic and Protestant respectively) share a similar legacy from the communist period, including communist hostility to and attempts to exclude religion from public life. Third, in both societies religion played a significant role in the transition from communist to democratic regimes, which we shall examine in further detail below. Fourth, in the post-communist period, the major church institutions have struggled to face up to the challenge of a dramatically altered role, from being the principal institutional channel of opposition to communist regimes, and hence a focus for national unity, to becoming one group among many competing for this role in the more open civil and political societies of a democracy. Symptomati cally, in both cases coalitions of interest groups united through the churches fell apart almost as soon as the communist regimes collapsed. Complexities for religion’s role in post-communist society in each case also arise from the fact that adjustment is occurring not just on a national level, but as part of the increasing integration of these societies, economies, and polities into regional (e.g. European) and global systems. Reunification has made eastern Germany part of the German federal system and the European Community (EC), while Poland has joined NATO and also seeks EC membership.
