I am also overwhelmed by the amount of material on the subject in the German language while totally under-whelmed by the comparative lack of material in the English language in terms of books on the Church and the Revolution in East Germany.
There is a lack of collective memory in the USA and in other lands, where I have studied 20th Century history and culture over the past three decades. This needs to be improved--and quickly-- because many Americans and British peoples mis-learned from the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and 1990s.
This is one reason that the West continues to equate the endless war on terrorism with the endless cold-war—which I had grown up with as a child in America.
Many would-be historians and political economists in the USA and in the UK thought that Reagan’s nuclear arms build-up had forced the Soviet Union to cash in its chips.
Few analyses were made of what a strong peace movement in Eastern Europe meant for peace in our time.
Moreover, far-right free-market capitalists mistook the sign of the age to be that Keynesian and Marxist political-economic criticism no longer had anything to offer (or even much appeal in the modern world). The claim was made that there was no alternative between Chicago school style free market capitalism and any other political/economic -ISM.
The academics and well-paid think-tanks read their tea leaves and failed to investigate the growth of freedom following the Helsinki accords in the mid-1970s, as well as the historical tendency for Eastern and Central Europeans to always be on the look out for alternative paths and alternative solutions, of which Western Europe was only providing a glimpse in the 1980s and 1990s.
People in the 1980s were simply looking for a public space which would allow them to develop more freely. Citizens were not just looking to replace one dominant ideology of life and society with another one.
Increasingly numerous books have come out in these past few years in Germany on the role of church, church leadership, and church meeting places in relation to the East German state in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
During these decades, churches gave space to many marginalized voices throughout Eastern Europe.
Three recent books on the topic include:
--FROM PRAYER TO DEMO (Vom Gebet Zur Demo in German) by Arnd Brummer
click here brought out from Chrismon Verlag
,
--THE WALL IS GONE (Die Mauer ist Weg in German) by Wolfgang Huber click here
also published from Chrismon Verlag, and
--OUR REVOLUTION: THE HISTORY OF THE YEARs 1989-1990 (Unser Revolutions: Die geschichte der Jahre 1989/90 in German) by Ehrhart Neubert click here from Piper Verlag.
These books are just some of the more recent works on the Church and State in the East Germany Republic during the period from 1945 through 1990.
MEANWHILE
