Forschungsbericht Christen und Kirchen in der DDR 2014-2022 (Teil 1)

When Claudia Lepp sums up her 2016 research report by saying that the heyday of research on Christians and churches in the GDR has been over for several years, that only isolated monographs and anthologies were still being published on the subject of religious communities in the second German state and that memoir literature dominated (Lepp 2009, 48), it must be noted that this assessment is no longer true. There are numerous monographs and anthologies on the topic of churches in the GDR that have been published in the past nearly 10 years. Quantitatively, regionrelated publications - some with personal references - play the main role, followed by publications on the thematic complexes of church - state - society, church fields of work, and theological, religious-philosophical, and ecclesiastical reflections. In addition, there are three overviews and one title on the free churches. The research thus focuses on individual topics that cover a broad spectrum of content and are mostly diachronic. In many cases, the entire SBZ/DDR period is covered; otherwise, no temporal focus can be identified. In some cases, a cross-dictatorship perspective is adopted; in other cases, the descriptions extend beyond the end of the GDR and include questions of reception and dealing with the past. Occasionally, a pure internal church perspective is adopted; in most cases, state, intelligence, social and church actors of different levels are taken into account. German-German research approaches are still comparatively rare. Beyond the historical research itself, the relevance of the history of the GDR church for the present is sometimes decidedly at issue, especially with regard to the topics of irreligiousness and coming to terms with the past in view of the churches. In addition to historical and church-historical works, other disciplines are also represented, such as social and political science, literature and linguistics, and cultural studies. In this first part, overviews and publications on the relationship between church, state and society are presented.
VERONIKA ALBRECHT-BIRKNER, Freiheit in Grenzen. Protestantismus in der DDR (Christentum und Zeitgeschichte 2). Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2018, 288 S. - THOMAS BRECHENMACHER, Im Sog der Säkularisierung. Die deutschen Kirchen in Politik und Gesellschaft (1945-1990) (Die geteilte Nation 2). Berlin: be.bra Verlag 2021/Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung 2022, 208 S. - ANDREAS STEGMANN, Die Kirchen in der DDR (C.H. Beck Wissen). München: C.H. Beck 2021, 126 S.