An Interview with Pastor Michael Kanig
Before his first sip of strong morning coffee in his airy Dresden kitchen, Pastor Michael Kanig always reads the daily “watchword” (German: Losung). This Saxony tradition originates in the 1720s with renowned Protestant revivalist Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf. It consists of two brief Old and New Testament verses, the latter either confirming or refining the first. (When the editor of the East-West Church Report met Pastor Kanig, for example, these were Hosea 12:6, “So you, by the help of your God, return; Observe mercy and justice, and wait on your God continually,” and James 1:21, “Therefore lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.” See www.losungen.de/die-losungen/).
A fourth-generation Lutheran pastor, Kanig was born in 1938 in Etzdorf, a village between Dresden and Leipzig in Saxony. For the major part of his life, this region belonged to the Communist G.D.R. (German Democratic Republic). Now retired, Pastor Kanig led the Zion Church in central Dresden from 1964 until 2001. While able to worship, his congregation of approximately 2,000 was under constant pressure to conform to government dictates, as Pastor Kanig described to the Report in late October 2019. The original conversation took place in German.
Given your family background, did you always think that you would become a pastor?
No. When I took my Abitur [school-leaving exams] in 1956, I had to decide whether I would become a teacher of ancient languages—I studied Latin and Greek—or whether I should study theology. I reasoned that it was important for there to be pastors in the G.D.R., whereas Latin and Greek were not so important. That was why I studied theology.
Having Latin and Greek was a great advantage, though. There were a handful of high schools in the G.D.R. that taught Latin and Greek. Ours in Dresden was the Holy Cross School [German: Kreuzschule], which had one of two significant boys’ choirs in the G.D.R. In a choir each person also has to sing in such a way that his voice does not stand out. There must be unity, so each chorister has to listen to the others and adapt to them. That lesson remained with me for the rest of my life.
This was not long after the Stalinist period. Did you experience anti-religious hostility from the state?
The situation was always tricky. The state doctrine was of course dialectical materialism, including atheism. However, the G.D.R. was in a particular situation, in that we had the Federal Republic of Germany [i.e. West Germany] next door. The G.D.R. also wanted to play a certain role on the international level. That meant that everything that happened in the G.D.R. had this aspect: How did West Germany, or the United Nations, view it? There were times when the G.D.R. said, “Our allegiance is to the Soviet Union, our big brother, and nothing else interests us.” Those were bad times for the church. But from around the mid-1960s, the G.D.R. tried to participate in the international arena, which meant that the authorities had to demonstrate some democracy and human rights. They could not be as severe as in the Soviet Union—for instance, there were five theological faculties in our state universities: Berlin, Greifswald, Halle, Jena, and Leipzig. I studied theology in Leipzig, at the Karl Marx University! (Laughs.)
Naturally, these state faculties were closely watched. We were not timid, but we knew there was no point in appearing so provocative that we would end up in prison. There were people who did that, but we held back. It all began in school. We listened to what we were told, while what we thought was something quite different.
We did listen to programs broadcast from West Germany. We knew what was happening over there. Sometimes, we knew more than West Germans—for example, about literature, which was very important to us. Back then, we devoured [Max] Frisch, [Friedrich] Dürrenmatt—and Heinrich Böll, obviously—while people in the West read crime novels, perhaps. (Grins.) Whenever anyone came over from the West, they generally expressed surprise at how informed we were, and at how we tried to strengthen one another with what we were really thinking. The G.D.R. authorities knew all this, but foreign policy was also important to them. They were dependent upon Western loans and wanted to sell G.D.R. goods—some, like cameras, were quite sought after. This state of tension provided a corridor in which the church could operate—more than in neighboring Czechoslovakia, for example, where the situation was really bad.
So on the one hand, the G.D.R. was more hardline ideologically, but on the other hand, it was like a Westernfacing display window for the whole Communist bloc.
How did this dual policy affect your Zion Church here in Dresden?
The old Zion Church was burned out in the Allied bombing raid of 1945. There was nothing there but ruins after the War. Then, in 1956, a barrack-style building was built nearby, and we were able to hold services there. That lasted until 1979, when the regional church office asked if we would consider having a church built by the Swedes! Of course, we did not say no. This again happened for foreign policy reasons: Swedish Lutherans had made an offer to come and build a wooden church here in Saxony. It was consecrated in 1982.
So you were able to maintain contact with Western Christians?
Yes. Many East German congregations also had contacts with West German congregations. We were lucky in that the pastor of our partner church, St. Martin’s in Braunschweig, originally came from Leipzig and was interested in maintaining contact. He visited us, as did the deacon and choir of St. Martin’s. Of course, this all had to be one-sided [most East Germans not being permitted to travel to the West], but they stubbornly kept at it.
Were the legal restrictions otherwise similar to those in other ommunist states?
Yes. The state was divided into regions that were further subdivided, and every local administration had one consultant for church affairs. The local level was responsible for ensuring compliance with the law. They were particularly focused on a couple of points. The first was the congregational bulletin, our bi-monthly four-page church newsletter. We always had to get it approved in advance. The second was a display case on the street outside our church.
This was always a game of cat and mouse, sometimes ridiculous. Once, for instance, my old choir classmates and I organized a concert—we had formed a men’s choir, and we sang Biedermeier-era music from the 1830s. Our graphic artist designed an advertisement for the display case illustrated with a joyful Pentecost ox [German: Pfingstochse, a Pentecost tradition in German-speaking rural areas in which cattle are paraded out to pasture for the first time in the spring; the leading “Pentecost ox” is adorned with flowers and ribbons]. The local state official responsible for monitoring us stood outside, issuing threats. I was summoned for interrogation: “You can’t do that! That is not a church event!” (Laughs.) “Why not?” I asked. “The church can be cheerful too, sometimes!” We did it, of course.
Then in the 1980s we had an artistically gifted choirmaster who was a bit of a rebel—a young guy fresh out of church music school. He also made a poster for the display case, with the slogan: “The Way is the Goal.” For Christians, this was obviously a reference to “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” [John 14:6]. But to the authorities, this was an affront to their slogan, “Our Goal is Communism.” “We have a goal before us set by the Party. We are moving towards it, and everyone must follow.” If someone now says that the Way is the goal, the next step is to develop something off their path, and that was not allowed. I guessed what would happen, but I said, “Let’s display the poster and see what happens.” Sure enough, I was summoned for interrogation a few days later. “What is this? What are you doing?” (Laughs.)
Could there be serious consequences in these situations?
I must say, I was lucky on many occasions. We had a mayor who was rather moderate—an economist who understood very well how unsustainable things were in the G.D.R. He had words with his people who were responsible for state security. Also, every district was supposed to have one official who liaised between church personnel and the state. For some reason, they did not appoint one for our district. So in Dresden we had a relatively reasonable relationship with the authorities. In nearby Leipzig and Chemnitz—then named Karl-Marx-Stadt—things were much more difficult.
Was there ever a time here when the authorities tried to close down churches?
It never went so far. But young people were fought over always. For us Lutherans, confirmation was essentially the moment when a young person said whether they chose the path of faith. That was exactly when the state intervened and said, “Everyone is to make a commitment to the Socialist state when they are 14 years old”—with the Jugendweihe [German: youth consecration]. At first, there were disputes. [Editor’s note: Notably, German Chancellor Angela Merkel—daughter of an East German Lutheran pastor— refused to attend the Communist Jugendweihe ceremony and opted only for confirmation. See Elisabeth Braw, God’s Spies: The Stasi’s Cold War Espionage Campaign inside the Church, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019, 50]. But then the church resolved not to victimize the children. We agreed that the Jugendweihe would be at 14, but also that young people would be able to maintain their contact with the church—perhaps intensify it—for one more year, so that confirmation would take place at 15. In practice, this meant that our workload giving confirmation lessons became a little lighter, as our youth work was spread out over a third year. I was glad even, because at 14, young people sometimes do not really know what they are doing, but their development has advanced somewhat by the time they are 15.
When the authorities understood that their attempts to influence young people were ineffective, however, they tried something new. [In the late 1970s] They introduced pre-military training [German: vormilitärische Ausbildung] into the senior high school grades. The reaction of many parents and young people was: “In 1946 you said, ‘No more war!’ and ‘No weapons!’ But now you are doing this?” Many refused to participate, and there were disputes once again—some pupils were expelled. The response from the church was rather skillful. Outside the United Nations’ building, there is a Soviet statue called, “Let Us Beat Our Swords into Plowshares” [echoing Micah 4:3 and Isaiah 2:4]. Some church members made cloth patches with this image and slogan on them, and young people loved to wear these. There were very fierce disputes over that, to the point that headteachers were summoned by the education authorities. But then church leaders weighed in. We warned the governmental Commission for Church Affairs that we would make such a fuss that they would have their ears boxed in the international arena. The school expulsions were then reversed.
So Protestants in East Germany held a particularly pacifist stance?
Yes. After 1945, Germany’s Lutherans were at first in a single church, the E.K.D. [German: Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland]. But after 1961 [when the Berlin Wall was built] this became unrealistic, so the G.D.R. received its own association made up of the churches in its different regions: Saxony, Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt, MecklenburgVorpommern, and Brandenburg. They were more strident on an ethical proposition that was not really adopted in the West: “According to God’s will, there should be no war.” [German: “Krieg soll es um Gottes Willen nicht sein.”] Of course, one might ask how peace-loving we really were! But the idea was that we were supposed to be peace-loving in our internal politics— When the authorities understood.
That was quite different from the stance of the Communist authorities.
Yes. And that meant that the church was, if not popular, then trusted. Many young people, students, and academics—it was mostly educated people—knew that on church premises they could speak openly with one another. And because of that, church premises—and especially the groups that gathered there—were taken particularly seriously by the Stasi secret police. These groups developed social theories and demands, which became ever more concrete during the 1980s.
For example, south of Leipzig we had brown coal fields and chemical plants— hideous polluters. One notorious coal factory was called Espenhain. An appeal started called “A Mark for Espenhain.” The idea was to raise funds for environmental protection measures, and so people each paid a single Mark [less than $1] into a particular bank account—within a couple of weeks this had crashed the G.D.R.’s banking system! Such things occurred through church circles.
In his novel The Good Soldier Švejk, the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek brilliantly described this mindset of saying, “Yes, Sir, right away!”—of taking the authorities by their word to a degree that they did not want. Doing this showed us that there were far more of us than we initially thought. Groups began to network with one another in cities like Dresden and Magdeburg. There was a conciliar process whereby social issues like militarization, indoctrination, and press freedom were discussed in people’s free time. This spread wider and began to make an impact.
We followed truly democratic rules in these small circles. For a short time after 1989, people from these church groups moved effortlessly into politics. [Reinhard] Höppner, the first Minister President of Saxony-Anhalt, came from our student community, for example. [Wolfgang] Thierse, later president of the Bundestag [German national parliament], was a member of the Catholic student community in Berlin.
Did the young people who met under the church umbrella view Christianity as something positive simply because it was not part of the state, or were they really influenced by Christian principles?
That spectrum was very broad. Of course, there were people who said, “We are going to the church’s premises, but what the church itself has to say does not concern us.” But my experience was that when you talked to young people, and when young people talked to each other, the New Testament—especially the Beatitudes—was continually present. They were fighting without success, and then they encountered these formulae: “Love your enemies,” “Do good to those who hate you.” What they said may have sounded different: “If we mutually destroy one another, no one wins. It is much more sustainable if we regard other people as human beings like us, and ask, ‘Why do you think that way?’ and, ‘What do you actually want when you dictate to us how we should think?’”
There were some quite radical church movements in the G.D.R. that were popular with young people, such as the Church from Below [German: Die Kirche von Unten.]
Yes. The background is that, if a free opinion is not tolerated by a state, then it continues underground, festers, and breaks out somewhere—usually in the wrong place. But when you can speak freely with one another and also express your thoughts through writing or music, then they are debated and questioned. So that was the idea—that people should be able to speak freely with one another in church and feel that they are being taken seriously.
What happened was that young adults and teenagers became increasingly shaped by one objective during the 1980s: “We must put a stop to the sclerotic state of the G.D.R.; we must take it by its word and uphold its socially minded slogans. Whenever they stop us from doing that, we must stand up and say, ‘We cannot go on like this!’” There were some more radical people who said, “We must resist atheism and make our pacifist beliefs known publicly.” That often ended up going off on a different track.
Particularly in Berlin, the Church from Below was a shake-up to the church institutions, because they constantly feared that the state authorities would say, “That is not allowed, we are closing you down!” Both church leaders and junior pastors continually had to ensure that the Church from Below remained a church activity. So they said, “The church is there for everyone, but not for everything.”
Some church leaders and pastors were later found to have been informers for the Stasi secret police. Do you think the church has since done enough to deal with Stasi collaboration by church personnel? I think the church provided a list of all its pastors to the Gauck Authority very early in the 1990s. [Colloquially named after its first director and former pastor, Joachim Gauck, this is the Federal Commission for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former G.D.R.] That body checked to see whether any pastors were burdened by involvement with state security. I think there were only a few in Saxony, and they were suspended as a result. I know of one in Dresden, [HansRichard] Mosemann (d. 2017). These cases could often be tragic— Pastor Mosemann’s congregation was in the Blasewitz neighborhood of Dresden, near the River Elbe. One day his teenage son was playing with friends by the river, in shallow water, and he found a gun. I do not know if he told his father about it, but in any case his father was accused of not declaring this gun to the authorities. This was against the law on firearms, and he could have been imprisoned for it. He was told that he would not be charged if he collaborated [with the Stasi]. Mosemann was a good pastor, but on that point he caved. I do not know to what extent he reported on his colleagues.
Were you aware of being monitored by the Stasi?
I discovered only later that the janitor who took care of our church building in the 1980s was an informant. He was a Seventh-day Adventist and had been a construction soldier [German: Bausoldat, unarmed G.D.R. military serviceman]. He told the Stasi what was going on in our church—for example, the Swedes also gave us a Brother typewriter with a special kind of colored ribbon. After these ribbons were used, this janitor took them out of the waste paper basket and gave them to the Stasi! But I already suspected something of this sort, so I only wrote innocuous things on that typewriter. At some point prior to 1989 this janitor was so far from the role I had asked him to fulfill that he quit. I told him that he had to work in an orderly manner if he expected to receive payment. When the Stasi files were opened after 1989, they said that he “left this important post upon his own initiative.” I do not know if there were any other informants—I looked at the Stasi files very early on, when not everything was accessible.
I think that janitor did inform on members of our congregation, but either the state authorities were lenient— this being Dresden—or they saw us as relatively unimportant. No one was ever arrested. One of our confirmation candidates wore a “Swords Into Plowshares” patch and was nearly expelled from his high school, but he was able to join his class again on appeal. Once again, I can say that I was lucky.
So that is what it was like. You had to be cautious, and consider both what you were saying, and how you were saying it—all while not betraying the commission with which you were entrusted. You had to be “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” [Matt. 10:16].
