ABSTRACT
Following the shutdown of the Chair of Scientific Atheism at the University of Jena in 1968, new and promising opportunities to re-establish the discipline in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) opened up in 1972–1973. Olof Klohr and his former student Hans Lutter founded new research centres in Warnemünde-Wustrow and Güstrow in the north of the GDR and set up a new GDR-wide organisation with regular scientific events and two specialised journals. The discipline underwent a decade of great ambitions to train specialists and establish itself in all higher education establishments throughout the GDR. A third major centre, created at the Academy of Social Sciences in Berlin in 1977 under Wolfgang Kliem’s authority, and in 1981 a new “Problem Council” on “world-view problems in the cooperation between communists and believers”, suggest that the party took back control of scientific atheism in its last decade. Nevertheless, scientific atheism diverged with new groups and individual researchers at Berlin’s Humboldt University and various places throughout the country. However, the importance of scientific atheism was not unanimously acknowledged by university decision-makers, and the planned retirement of Klohr and Lutter created serious difficulties in making the field survive in the 1990s.
