Contradictory Conditions: Jewish Life in East Germany, Past and Present

It’s a decidedly blustery day on Karl Marx Street in Eisenach, in the eastern German state of Thuringia. Gold and rust-tinted leaves scatter the ground of a small park marking the site of the town’s former synagogue—burned down by a Nazi mob on Kristallnacht, the nationwide pogroms on November 9, 1938.

Tucked away in a quiet corner not far from Eisenach’s theater, the memorial is one of 32 sites across Thuringia—spots where synagogues were desecrated or destroyed that night in 1938. Of the many previously active synagogues, only a few remain today. Only one has been rebuilt for weekly services. The others are marked by memorial stones and stairways leading to nowhere—including empty lots or garden plots, apartment buildings, and even a grocery store. Where the small town of Vacha’s synagogue once stood, there is now a hobby shop.

These places dot the east German landscape, from Potsdam to Zwickau, Dresden to Magdeburg. Along with other memorials like Stolpersteine—stones with brass plates bearing the names of Holocaust (Shoah) victims, laid in the pavement in front of their former homes and businesses—they stand as stark reminders of the absent presence of the region’s once thriving Jewish population. They are places where the palpable influence of eastern Germany’s Jews remains potent, even where they are no longer present.

They also signal the Jewish community’s present absence. Since the Shoah, under sometimes radically conflicting conditions, a range of diverse Jews have returned, resettled, and restored a sense of Jewish life across the former East German Republic (GDR). But the community is less-than-half what it was in pre-war Germany.

In places like Berlin, Leipzig, and Erfurt, Jews’ stories over the last century speak to lives lived between far-right politics and those of the far-left, communism and capitalism, growth and decline, remembrance culture (Erinnerungskultur) and an ominously encroaching antisemitism. Looking at East Germany–past and present–through Jewish eyes reveals today’s controversies are nothing new.

The challenges Jews in Germany faced following the Holocaust, including perils to their very existence, have shaped Jewish lives in the east for decades. The story of how under such conditions they still preserved their heritage is decades long. Now, facing declining demographics, a resurgent antisemitism, and fearing a far-right political turn, eastern Germany’s Jewish communities are once again under threat. And, once more, they are not only preserving their heritage, but claiming their place in German society.

The Library of Forgotten Wonders

In a small, eastern German city, a treasure trove of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian manuscripts invites visitors to explore the longstanding and ongoing connections between Europe and the Middle East.

You could walk by every day and not know it was there.

That is, if you could ignore a sprawling, white-walled palace perched high upon a hill, overlooking the town of Gotha’s bucolic environs in central Germany.

Known as Friedenstein Palace, it is one of the best-preserved examples of early Baroque European architecture. Established in the mid 17th-century by Duke Ernst I (1601-1675) of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, the building survived World War II and the Cold War, but the signs of its age are showing. With orange stains dripping from its windows, rotting support beams in its vaulted roofs, scaffolding clinging to columns in the courtyard, and the detritus of renovation strewn about its gardens, Friedenstein might look like a palace long past its former glory. But inside are resplendent rooms reflective of the riches of a dukedom at the height of its power and, in the east wing, a world-famous collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts and artifacts.

PHOTO courtesy AramcoWorld/Fabian Brennecke.

Altogether, the Gotha Research Library holds about 1 million objects, including nearly 362,000 books, manuscripts, and print materials. Among them are 800 years of Islamicate scholarship, comprised of 3,500 manuscripts in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. This “Oriental Collection” — featuring reams of legal, literary, grammatical, philosophical, geographic, theological, and other texts — sits side-by-side on the floor-to-ceiling shelves with paragons from the history of Europe, including a UNESCO World Heritage first print copy of the German Protestant Reformer Martin Luther’s "On the Freedom of a Christian,” published in 1520.

Each book and every manuscript has a story: from a famous hadith collection possibly pulled out from under a murdered mufti’s corpse during the siege of Buda in 1684 to an account of the life and exploits of Alexander the Great in Turkish, featuring a richly colored depiction of the Greek king’s mythical “flying machine” — a set of gryphons chained to a throne with rods of meat above. As they traveled, these texts survived numerous, disruptive epochs in European and Middle Eastern history — including two world wars, the French campaign in Egypt and Syria, and the decline of the Ottoman Empire.

Today, scholars across the globe travel to Gotha to explore its almost encyclopedic collection of treasured documents.

The library’s history tells a tale of scientific adventure and of a contemporary renaissance in the study of Middle Eastern manuscripts. More than that, it reveals how such a significant treasury made it to a somewhat forgotten, small city in the former East German Republic.

*Corrections: the lead image on the website is of the Herzogliches Museum of Gotha, not the Palace with the library. Also, Kathrin Paasch did not become director until after the tenure of its previous director, Rupert Schaab, ended in 2005.

Church Planting After the Fall (of the Berlin Wall)

Three generations after East Germany rejected Christianity, a small group of prayerful believers see an opportunity.

The contrast could not be clearer.

On one side of a thin yellow line marking the old East-West German border (1949-1990) is a striking black and gray mass that used to constitute former East Germany. On the other, West German, side of the map is a kaleidoscope of multi-hued blues and reds, with some grayish zones mixed in. The red represents degrees of adherence to Catholicism, the blue Protestantism, the blacks and grays, “None” or “Other.”

The map, produced by social media account Nerdy Maps and based on data from the Statistical Offices of German States in 2011, was tweeted out by Andrew Wilson, Teaching Pastor at King’s Church London and Christianity Today contributor, on October 4, 2022.  

“This is staggering,” he tweeted, “it shows a) the catechetical power of state ideology and b) the importance (and challenge!) of slow, patient, long haul church planting in eastern Germany.”

Multiple missionaries, pastors, and ministry leaders responded, echoing Wilson’s sentiments and sharing their own hopes to plant churches and “reach the lost” in eastern German cities like Leipzig, Chemnitz, and Berlin.

As the “dark side” on the map intimates, church planters and missionaries face an uphill battle in a post-church landscape where some people don’t even know that the Christmas holiday has Christian origins.

According to Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung), a 2018 survey found that 64.2% of Germans surveyed nationwide identified as Christian. The second largest group (27%), were atheists and agnostics. But it was the differences between western and eastern Germany that were truly remarkable: while only 16.6%  in western Germany described themselves as non-believers, in eastern Germany the figure was 68.3%.

Simon Tarry, originally from the United Kingdom and now a church planter with Newfrontiers, a network of evangelical, charismatic churches, near Frankfurt a.M. said, “the barriers to the Gospel are different across regions, but any assumption that Germany is a Christian nation is really flawed.

“The stats are sad enough, but the reality is even starker,” he said. “Germany is equivalent to an unreached people group. You might think of the 10/40 window, places in Asia or the Middle East. But a lot of places in Germany and Northern Europe as a whole are much more ‘unreached’ than elsewhere in the world,” said Tarry.

That’s especially true in the former East, where Tarry said the reality might even be bleaker than what the map shows. “The scales of measurement are membership where people pay their church tax for marriage and baptism purposes, but beyond the taxes, there’s no living faith.

“It’s incredibly hard work to plant a church in Germany. It’s incredibly discouraging at times. It feels like really really hard ground,” he said.