Religion and the Secular in Eastern Germany, 1945 to the present

Peperkamp, Esther; Rajtar, Małgorzata

doi:10.1163/ej.9789004184671.i-224

Cited by 37 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…For a start, in the socialist worldview religion was a vestige of superstition which had no place in a 'developed socialist society'. 36 Moreover, until the Lutheran Church in East Germany was reorganized into a Federation of Evangelical Churches (Bund der Evangelischen Kirchen in der DDR) in 1969, the Church operated as a single institution in East and West Germany, and its ties with West Germany were viewed as deeply problematic. Crucially, by rejecting Marxism-Leninism, the Church constituted an alternative centre of moral authority, a 'subculture' which did not primarily answer to the regime and threatened to undermine the citizens' loyalty to it.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Conflicted Afterlives: Managing Wehrmacht Fallen Soldiers in the Soviet Occupation Zone and GDR

Tradii

2023

Journal of Contemporary History

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the last months of the Second World War, as the Red Army approached Berlin, the Wehrmacht suffered catastrophic losses, resulting in thousands of war graves on East German soil. In the aftermath of the war, the Soviet Occupation Zone (1945–9) and the German Democratic Republic (1949–90) committed to a socialist ‘politics of history’ which centred on the liberation of Germany by the Red Army, disowning the German fallen. This article, based on my PhD research and current British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, outlines how the central authorities of the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR managed the thousands of German Wehrmacht war burials on East German territory. I focus, in particular, on how Wehrmacht war burials came to constitute political and ideological liabilities, prompting concerns about their appropriations by the German Lutheran Church and West Germany. In doing so, I uncover a little-known yet highly significant dimension of the transition between the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%