Schwerter und Pflugscharen
A speech of 2014 by the East German theologian Richard Schröder on the origins of the Monday peace prayers in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig. It describes their small beginnings and the quarrels between the church’s officers and the opposition groups who used them.
Schröder, a theologian who had belonged to the peace movement in the GDR, gave the speech when the Monday demonstrations were honoured with a German national prize in 2014. He traces the prayers to the church’s “peace decade” of 1980 and to a youth group in Leipzig, says that the parish council under Pastor Christian Führer agreed to open the church after many critical questions, and gives the attendance at the first three prayers in 1982 as seven, eleven and thirteen. He credits Führer and the superintendent, Friedrich Magirius, with never cancelling or moving a Monday prayer in eight years of pressure from the state.
He also describes conflict. The political groups that used the prayers from 1987, he says, saw the church as a protected space and a stage and had no interest in prayer; in 1988 the superintendent removed the pastor who coordinated the prayers and shut those groups out of shaping them. The peace prayers, he says, should not be imagined as an idyll of Christian harmony.
It is a retrospective account by a participant in the wider movement, not a document of 1989. See Churches and the Fall of Communism.
Cited in
- 9 October 1989, firm date