Pfarrer Christian Führer erinnert sich an den 9. Oktober 1989
An interview in which Christian Führer, pastor of the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, looks back twenty years later on the peace prayers and on 9 October 1989. It is his own account, given long after the events.
Führer gives three answers. In the first he says that he established the yearly peace decade at the Nikolaikirche from 1981 and that peace prayers were held there every Monday from 20 September 1982; that from 8 May 1989 the police blocked the approaches to the church; that he and a fellow pastor were summoned before the district prosecutor; and that on 7 October hundreds were arrested in front of the church. In the second he says that on 2 October he had asked the other churches to hold peace prayers as well, that about 8,000 people were brought into the inner-city churches on 9 October, and that the feeling when the march ended without a shot was one of enormous relief. In the third he calls the church the only free public space the GDR had.
This is testimony twenty years after the event by a man with a stake in how it is remembered, and its figures differ from the secret police’s count on the day. See Churches and the Fall of Communism.
Cited in
- 9 October 1989, firm date