The Politicisation of Martin Luther in the German Democratic Republic

Abstract

This article provides an account of one of the strategies employed by the post-war East German state to restrict the influence of the Protestant churches in the new Soviet order. Under the leadership of Erich Honecke the regime seized upon the idea of portraying Martin Luther as a genuine bourgeois revolutionary and harbinger of the proletarian revolution. Hence the regime permitted the churches formally to mark the Reformation in 1967 and later the 500th anniversary of Luther's birth in 1983. In this way it was hoped to persuade Protestants to acknowledge the ideological leadership of the ruling party. The church was thus forced to accept a role of being “the church in socialism”. The government expected that church people would gradually desert the church and accommodate themselves to the rule of so-called “real existing socialism”; a state of affairs which, of course, never came to pass.