Religion and Politics: The Controversy over the Political Mandate of the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD) Relating to the Eastern Policy 1950–1972

Abstract

In the decade earmarked by the Cold War between East and West, one can observe among intellectuals in West Germany, above all within German Protestantism, a growing awareness of the inadequacy of the prevailing politics of Konrad Adenauer’s government. The rigid insistence on Germany’s alleged legal claim to the earlier Eastern (now Polish) territories and the refusal to acknowledge the German Democratic Republic hedged in the possibilities of operations in foreign policy. Since the early 1950s, the official policy in West Germany consigned to those driven from the East in all of West Germany (16.6 % of the total population) a so-called Recht auf die Heimat, i.e. right to the land, which one has fled from. The word of the German Protestant Church on this subject was not unified. On the one hand there was theological support given to the demand for a restitution; on the other hand, one saw in the loss of the homeland a consequence of the German guilt, i.e. the judgement of God which must be acknowledged. The result of heated controversial discussions in the 1960s was a common Word of the church, not prescribing for politicians compellingly necessary decisions, but targeting on the preconditions of political action, or as one might say, on political hermeneutics. This act of ecclesiastical pastoral care made an essential contribution to the “Neue Ostpolitik” (New Policy for the East) successfully promoted by Willy Brandt, which made possible a rapprochement between the Federal Republic and its neighbours in the East.