LEIPZIG LETTER:Twenty years ago, a candlelit procession took the first steps towards liberation
LITTLE CHANGES within the walls of Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche, the 12th-century Romanesque church of St Nicholas.
The walls here remember Johann Sebastian Bach’s premiere of the Johannes Passion on Good Friday in 1724 – and they remember the night 20 years ago when 2,000 people, excited and terrified, gathered here to do something extraordinary.
After 40 years in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a four-decade lock-in of daily humiliations and falsified elections, they refused to be intimidated any longer.
Clutching their courage in their candles, they filed out of the church and began to march. It started a chain reaction that, exactly one month later, toppled the hated Berlin Wall.
“Without October 9th in Leipzig, there would not have been a November 9th in Berlin, I’m sure of that,” says Bettina Schuster, a 40-something woman with long brown hair and kind eyes, sitting calmly in the church where it all began 20 years ago.
“I had a young son, I was a teacher, I really shouldn’t have come here but I just felt I had to.
“It felt so great to finally speak openly about our frustrations, to listen to others. There was a feeling of security and peace here, even though there were police outside allowed to shoot if necessary.”
The long road to 1989 began in 1981 as peace prayer evenings organised by the Nikolaikirche’s pastor Christian Führer in 1981 in response to Cold War arms race.
The group had connections to Vaclav Havel in Prague and Solidarity in Gdansk, but was crippled by public apathy. Five years in, the Monday night gatherings were attracting just four people.
“I was ready to give up but one of the people attending said, ‘If we give up, then there is no hope any more’,” remembers Pastor Führer, then as now a lively, spiky-haired man, instantly recognisable in his jeans and denim waistcoat.
“Then I remembered the parable of the mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds that can still grow to provide shelter for many.”
He carried on into what had become the era of perestroika in the Soviet Union. In East Berlin, the elderly Politburo was in denial about the need for reforms. In Leipzig, the pastor could sense the longing for change.
People wanted to talk about free elections, their longing to travel freely, and his church became the safe haven for their discussion.
“The people had been silenced, by fear and the secret police, we provided a space for them to discuss taboo topics,” says Pastor Führer.
In 1988, he watched attendance at his Monday prayer meetings grow – eight, 80, 100.
The meetings got a shot in the arm on September 4th when a group of young people emerged from the Monday meeting to hold up a banner reading: “For an open life with free people.”
A West German television camera outside filmed the scene, including how a Stasi agent ran forward to snatch the banner. For the first time Germans, east and west, saw pictures from Leipzig. A week later, the Nikolaikirche was full.
Pastor Führer was jubilant but nervous: would the meetings remain calm as the pressure continued to build?
“I reminded people of the Sermon on the Mount – love your enemy – and hoped they would take this message of non-violence with them from the church.”
The critical turning point came on October 7th, 1989. In East Berlin, GDR leader Erich Honecker welcomed Mikhail Gorbachev for the 40th anniversary of the GDR, a last hurrah for the ailing Politburo chief and his regime.
In Leipzig, meanwhile, nervous policemen broke up the official anniversary events in the main shopping street with a baton charge.
“They surrounded us, moving in to hit us and drag people away,” remembers a tearful local woman Birgit Scheffel.
“Old people and children were trampled. Things were really on a knife-edge. We all wondered whether the next Monday demo would stay peaceful or turn bloody.”
By the evening of Monday, October 9th, nearly all churches in Leipzig had joined the demonstrations. Outside, the atmosphere was charged.
Stasi officers had been sent in as agents provocateurs to stir up trouble and justify a police intervention. Pastor Führer knew none of this but feared the worst as he emerged from the Nikolaikirche.
With an extraordinary 70,000 people behind him, the nervous pastor led the march around the Leipzig ring road.
Faces illuminated in candlelight, they chanted for freedom: “Freiheit! Freiheit! Freiheit!” To their amazement, they completed a circuit and returned, unhindered, to the Nikolaikirche.
“I was so overwhelmed that I was incapable of thinking anything except that, because the police had not intervened, the GDR was no longer the same as it had been,” remembers Pastor Führer.
Today, he has his own theories about why things remained peaceful.
The police were prepared for everything, a police officer told him later, but not for candles and prayers. Frantic calls from Leipzig to Berlin seeking permission to intervene went unanswered.
Two decades on, Pastor Führer has retired from the Nikolaikirche. As the official anniversary machine grinds into life in Berlin, he is happy to retell the other story of 1989: about the revolution that came from his church in Leipzig.
“For most of these people, after the Nazis and the communists, Jesus never existed,” he said. “It’s nothing short of a miracle that they understood perfectly his message of peace.”
