For once proud to be a German

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

It’s been more than two years since my last visit to Germany, my native land. This time I traveled home at the height of the Eurozone crisis. I returned to California just before Christmas filled with pride in my compatriots.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not particularly proud of the fact that Germany is now the leading power in Europe. She has been thrust into this role much against her instincts and desires. It had been far too cozy to be prosperous, financially stable and the world’s leading exporter for decades, leaving the unpleasant chores of global direction to others, notably the victors of World War II.

Moreover, I am in no position to say whether or not Germany’s positions in the current global predicament are wise. But then nobody’s sapience seems to be reliable in the present situation, not even the sapience of Princeton-based Nobel laureates and other economic sages who keep telling the Germans to be less productive and more spendthrift, in other words, act against their better judgment and experience, supposedly for the common European good.

No, what made me proud was the discovery that Germans simply refused to reciprocate the hateful slurs of British tabloids whose “journalists” seem to have learned their craft by reading the polemics of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister.

There exists no equivalent in today’s German language for ethnic smears such as “krauts” and “huns” (for Germans), “frogs” (for the French), “wops” (for Italians) and “wogs” (for anybody hailing from territories east of Dover) that are common currency in British mass-circulation dailies, sometimes in the news pages and regularly in their blogs.

Over the years, the Germans have learned to laugh off these symptoms of the steady decline of England’s media standards that has been accelerating steadily ever since union folly and publishers’ greed have laid barren Fleet Street, that once spectacular bastion of the Angelo-Saxon journalism, which was my professional home for a while nearly half a century ago.

Nobody I talked to in Germany seemed to take offense when columnist Simon Heffer warned in the Daily Mail newspaper of “Germany’s economic colonization of Europe” and opined in a different article, “Where Hitler failed by military means to conquer Europe, modern Germans are succeeding through trade and financial discipline. Welcome to the Fourth Reich.”

Why do the Germans not care? “Well, the English have always been a little absonderlich; that’s why we love them so,” said Michael Rutz, the former editor in chief of a leading German weekly; the agreeable word, absonderlich, is usually translated as “strange” or “bizarre,” but actually has a more charming and subtle connotation.

The other day I discussed the benign reaction of Germans to British and other hatemongering with the editor of a highbrow political journal published in Washington. He said: “The difference is that the Germans still read.” This is true. Germany is less affected by media atrophy than most comparable Western nations. If a German does not know what’s going in in the world, it is his own fault because every major city has at least one but usually several local papers covering regional, national and international affairs, and, equally importantly, cultural events and thought, and then of course there exist national dailies and weeklies of superb quality.

The owner of a newsstand in Munich’s central railway station recently an editor friend of mine that his shop keeps an astounding average of 3,200 papers and periodicals on display.

Because of this Germans are in a better position to put international events in a proper perspective. Of course they did read that Eleftheria, the Athens daily, twice ran an image of Chancellor Angela Merkel in a storm trooper’s uniform on its front page. But they also read that thousands of Greek professionals are busily studying German to find jobs in Germany, where they are well received.

I was stunned to find that even modestly educated Germans seem to bear no malice against Greeks whose country they now have to bail out. Nearly 310,000 Greek immigrants live and work in Germany, and their number is rising. They make good, hard-working citizens, run wonderful restaurants, usually speak German well and delight the natives with their good humor.

In a 250-year old Cologne inn named “Em Kölsche Boor,” Pericles, a Greek waiter serving me a sturdy fare of broad beans and smoked bacon, regaled our table with this joke pertaining to his motherland’s economic predicament: By happenstance, three housepainters showed up at the same time at the portal of paradise, an Armenian, a German and a Greek.

Saint Peter told them, “This is a fantastic coincidence. The Pearly Gate needs a new paint job. Let me have your quotes.” The Armenian told him he would do it for €600. The German asked for €900. The Greek took Saint Peter aside and said, “€3,000.”

“Three thousand! Are you nuts,” Peter cried. The Greek smiled, “Think of it,” he said, “You’ll get €1,000, I’ll get €1,000. We give €400 to the German to keep his mouth shut, and the Armenian will do the work for €600.” The guests howled with laughter. It was fun to have Greeks in Germany.

I had come to Cologne on a 200 mph train from Paris where the general mood seemed morose. The railway unions had voted for one of their perennial Yuletide strikes intended to spoil the Christmas joy of the rest of the population; thankfully, though, this immense nuisance was eventually averted. Some Paris maîtres-penseurs, intellectuals and journalists of the most irritating sort, raised the specter of a new wave of “Germanophobie,” in response to Germany’s increasing power.

The Germans I questioned about this laughed it off, and rightly so. This alleged “Germanophobie” was a chimera in the minds of people utterly out of touch with this season’s dangerous realities. Down in southwestern France, where I have a home, I meet for my regular Saturday morning tipple with the mayors and councilmen of the surrounding villages. Their view of Germany was quite different.

“Tell your Chancellor to stand fast,” they urged me, “she must remain tough. We admire the Germans’ hard work and fiscal responsibility. If only we had followed their example years ago!”

These were not isolated voices. According to some polls, more than 70 percent of the French citizens feel that way, and this is also expressed in most of the blogs in the online editions of France’s national newspapers.

Of course the crisis might eventually catch with the Germans, whose unemployment rate is currently at a record low, and whose industry is booming due to massive demands from around the world for German products. But when I boarded my flight to California at Frankfurt Airport, a left behind smiling, contented compatriots preparing for a joyous Christmas and bearing good will against their less fortunate neighbors.

And this observation made me very proud to be a German.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International has been an international journalist for 55 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

Saddam’s Bio Arms – Wait Till Syria Falls

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

Ten years after 9/11, one captivating thought keeps crossing my mind: When the Assad tyranny in Syria finally collapses, will George W. Bush be vindicated? Will evidence be found that Saddam Hussein did actually possess mobile bio-weapons labs, and had them driven across the border ahead of allied forces advancing on Baghdad.

From my own research in the late 1990s, I strongly suspect this to be the case. Senior European civil servants, military and intelligence officers and especially scientists familiar with Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programs predicted that this was going to happen. They told me almost unanimously that sufficient amounts of biological agents to kill millions of civilians, could be manufactured inside trucks, which international weapons inspectors or invading forces would never find because they were extremely movable.

I conducted my research at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, at the United Nations in Geneva, the Italian Foreign Ministry, and the Iraqi National Congress in London well before Mr. Bush’s election in 2000.

Critics of the Bush administration, including conservatives, have accused it of having contrived proof of “transportable facilities for producing … BW (biological warfare) agents” as a pretext for invading Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented this argument before the United Nations Security Council.

The Bush administration’s critics charge that this information originated with an “asset” (informer) of the BND, Germany’s external in intelligence service and was not confirmed by a secondary source. The informer, codenamed “Curveball” by the Central Information Agency, was an Iraqi chemical engineer by the name of Rafeed Ahmed Alwan who had defected to Germany in 1999.

Alwan, who has since changed his name, told the conservative German newspaper, Die Welt, that he had no idea he was cooperating with a spy agency and that he regretted having triggered a war. According to a recent report by Die Welt, the BND warned he Central Intelligence Agency that it considered “Curveball” as emotionally unstable and therefore not reliable. The newspaper related that Colin Powell’s use of the details provided by “Curveball” seriously marred the relationship between the two allied spy agencies.

My intensive research began more than one year before “Curveball’s” defection to Germany. What alarmed me was an article by Columbia University Professor Richard K. Betts in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs titled, “The New Threat of Mass Destruction.” In this article, Betts, Director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, dealt with “weapons of the weak – states or groups that militarily are at best second class.”

He wrote, “Biological weapon should be the most serious concern, with nuclear weapons second and chemicals a distant third.” These weapons, he went on, presented “probably… the greatest danger.”

“A 1993 study by the office of Technology Assessment concluded that a single airplane delivering 100 kilograms of anthrax spores – a dormant phase of a bacillus that multiplies rapidly in the body, producing toxins and rapid hemorrhaging – by aerosol on a clear, calm night over the Washington, D.C., area could kill between one million and three million people, 300 times as many fatalities as if the plane had delivered Sarin gas in amounts ten times larger.”

This corresponded to a later calculation by British biologist Malcolm Dando, a professor of peace studies at the University of Bradford in England, that devastating a square kilometer by a nuclear weapon would cost an aggressor $800. To wipe out the same area chemically would be 200 dollars cheaper. But for one single Dollar the same results could be achieved with a bio bomb, which would be even more effective than a nuke. A one-megaton hydrogen bomb would kill “only” a maximum of 1.9 million people; with 100 kilograms of anthrax up to three million could be annihilated.

These data are so alarming that when I interviewed Vladimir Petrovsky, then the Geneva-based United Nations director-general, in 1998 for Die Welt, he sounded scandalized by the indifference of the Western media to these perils. “I don’t understand the Western media,” he thundered, “they are asleep in the face of the greatest danger to humanity since the end of the Cold War.”

There have been some eyewitness reports by defectors claiming that Saddam Hussein’s bio bombs have indeed been stored in Syria alongside that nation’s own weapons of mass destruction. Is there any conclusive evidence for this? There won’t be until Syria falls. But given the massive perils to all humanity, it seemed to me extraordinarily irresponsible to trivialize this problem into an issue for petty partisan bickering.

Erhard Geissler, a molecular biologist formerly involved in the East German WMD research, wrote that even Hitler forbade the use of bio-weapons, presumably because of his bacteriophobic hypochondria. And he related that in World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II outlawed their use against human beings, though not against military transport animals, such as horses and mules.

When in 1916 a military physician suggested using airships to drop plague spores on England, the War Ministry in Berlin replied: “…if we took this step we would no longer be worthy to survive as a nation.” Compared with the nobility of this statement by generals in the middle of a fratricidal war, the squabbling over whether Saddam’s frightening biological weapons programs had to be stopped militarily seems amazingly petty.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 55 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

Born 150 Years Ago: Robert Bosch, Global Entrepreneur

Robert Bosch 1861-1942

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

One hundred and fifty years ago, on Sept. 23, 1861, the visionary industrialist Robert Bosch was born in a village near Ulm in Germany. He became a global entrepreneur whose name is ubiquitous in the auto industry to this very day. And 125 years ago, he founded Robert Bosch GmbH, the largest privately owned corporation in the world today. In 1907, Bosch opened its first U.S. subsidiary. By the time World War I broke out, Bosch presided over a worldwide empire. Its business collapsed after the war, soon recovered, and then was annihilated during Hitler’s Third Reich. Bosch and his collaborators financed the German resistance against the Nazis, rescued Jews and tried in vain to persuade the Western powers not to appease Hitler. Today, Robert Bosch GmbH is the world’s largest supplier of automotive parts.

It was “an act of grace,” wrote Theodor Heuss, West Germany’s first president, that his friend Robert Bosch died of natural causes in 1942. Thus, Bosch was spared the agony of watching nearly everything he had created being ravaged by the war he had struggled to forestall. When the guns fell silent in 1945, his global empire was gone, and 70 percent of his factories in Germany had been leveled by Allied air raids.
Even for Heuss, a political scientist and journalist, it would have been foolish to predict what I saw near Charleston, South Carolina, where Bosch has maintained a subsidiary since 1974. After passing several suburban churches, I arrived at what looked from afar like a country club but is in fact the corporation’s largest factory in North America.

It is an almost idyllic place, where 2,500 workers – called “associates” in Bosch corporate language – churn out automotive products the company has pioneered world-wide: gasoline and diesel injectors; anti-lock braking systems (ABS) among other things. I wondered: Are these workers – 60 percent male, 40 percent female; 65 percent Caucasian and 35 percent minority – familiar with their employer’s legacy?

Did they know that Robert Bosch was the first employer to introduce the eight-hour workday in Germany? Or that Bosch managers had languished in concentration camps for their role in a coup attempt against Hitler and that one was severely tortured? Or that Carl Goerdeler had actually been on the company’s payroll? Goerdeler, was the leading plotter who would have become chancellor of a post-Nazi Germany had he not been hanged for fighting “the criminal,” as Bosch called Hitler.

Most of the younger Bosch employees I spoke with in Charleston had only a vague knowledge of these facts. This part of the history of this huge privately owned corporation was not common currency in the United States, not discussed in the media and at universities. Equally little known was the significant detail that, up until America’s entry into the war, some Bosch subsidiaries in the United States had served as secret bases for the “other Germany” Goerdeler represented. And most employees didn’t realize that, in a unique situation, almost all of their corporation’s earnings go to a foundation supporting a hospital and scientific research, international scholarships and a host of programs to advance international understanding; this foundation holds 92 percent of the Bosch shares.

They were only vaguely aware that with their work they are helping a cause that was dear to Bosch’s heart after World War I – the reconciliation between Germany and France. The same goes for German-American relations, once so close but now often sadly strained, are a priority for the Robert Bosch Foundation, which holds 92 percent of shares in the company, whose global sales topped €47,3 billion ($68 billion) last year.

“Well, those who have been around for a long time had heard about this, as have our workers in Germany,” allowed Mark Widmann, a German executive who managed the production of diesel unit injectors in Charleston at the time of my visit. “But ever since Franz Fehrenbach became CEO of the Robert Bosch Group in Stuttgart in 2003, educating the staff in these matters has become company policy.”

According to Widmann, Fehrenbach corresponds directly with his workers around the world by e-mail to inform them about the corporation’s illustrious past and the special ethos resulting from it. It is a culture of civic responsibility, which Bosch himself had practiced throughout his life. In Charleston, it’s not just about protecting the environment and conserving energy but also doing volunteer work, such as cleaning up a dilapidated local school.

Providing a pleasant workplace for the employees is another mandate of Bosch culture. As we walked through the Charleston plant, communications officer David Brown said: “Have you noticed how pleasantly cool it is in here? And yet, this hall is full of furnaces with 1,000-degree temperatures.”

The Bosch ethos goes beyond good working conditions. It includes forward-looking programs such as German-style apprenticeships, which involve an American college education for American employees paid for by the company. In addition, the Bosch way promotes the cosmopolitan worldview that was the mark of “the Founder,” Robert Bosch.

Bosch, the son of a well-to-do farmer and innkeeper, was a precision mechanic. He traveled to the United States in 1884, eager to learn all about America’s democracy. While there, he worked for Thomas Edison, a man he later depicted as “the quintessential and best kind of American.” Bosch returned to Europe convinced of the truth of the adage, “wars don’t pay,” and proceeded to work for peace.

This cosmopolitan outlook has since filtered down to every level of the Bosch workforce all over the world. Blue-collar and white-collar workers alike are regularly sent abroad for stints at Bosch plants in different countries, according to Chandra Lewis, corporate communications director at Bosch’s U.S. headquarters in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

“Executives will only be promoted to the next higher level if they are willing to serve several years oversees,” explained Wolfgang Utner, director of engineering and manufacturing operations at the Charleston plant when I was there. Like Widmann, he had previously worked in Stuttgart, Bosch GmbH’s birthplace and company home.

For decades, the Bosch leadership had been strangely reticent about its distinctive culture and history, especially its daring anti-Nazi activities before and during the last world war. Why is it that the world knows all about Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved 1,100 Jews from the Holocaust – but next to nothing about Bosch’s wide-reaching variety of resistance?

“Perhaps this is due to a Swabian virtue – ‘Bescheidenheit’ (modesty),” said Widmann. Bosch was a Swabian; he hailed from the former German kingdom of Württemberg whose people are renowned for their reserve. But his is a story worth telling – the story of a successful craftsman who since the end of World War I labored with Count Richard Coudenove-Calergi (1894-1972), a former Austrian diplomat, to forge a united Europe, a dream that would not be realized until another global conflict had ravaged the Old World.

It is, too, the story of a liberal who was active in an association to fend off anti-Semitism well before Hitler came to power in 1933. It is about a quiet, behind-the-scenes operator who pumped millions into schemes to protect Jews, or smuggle them out of Germany, until the very eve of World War II, and who provided work for the disenfranchised Jews who could no longer make a living anywhere else in the country.

Bosch was an agnostic who funneled large sums of money to the Lutheran Church of Württemberg led by Bishop Theophil Wurm, a leader in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church movement. And it is an astonishing tale about the Byzantine ways in which this new denomination served as a cover for the transfer of Bosch funds to Jews.

Bosch was remarkable for his philanthropy, for example, in 1910, he gave one million gold marks – a huge sum in those days – to the Technical University of Stuttgart, and in World War II managed to found a large homeopathic hospital. However, Bosch’s story is one with many curious quirks that sometimes might seem hard to fathom for contemporary readers:

On the one hand, Bosch resisted Hitler. On the other hand, Bosch factories produced military hardware for the Wehr­macht, Germany’s military. Moreover, the company employed prisoners of war provided by the regime to take the place of workers serving at the front. And what are we to make of the fact that the Bosch management’s conspiratorial endeavors on behalf of the Jews and the German resistance would have been impossible had they not enjoyed the protection of Gottlob Berger, an enigmatic general in the Waffen SS?

According to Bosch’s biographer, Joachim Scholtyseck, this top-ranking Nazi probably even knew the true reasons why Bosch had employed Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, in 1937. Goerdeler had been a foe of the regime since 1933 and resigned from his post when local Nazis blew up a monument to Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, a Protestant composer of Jewish descent. Hitler had personally blocked his employment by other corporations, yet Bosch took him on – ostensibly as economic adviser, but in truth with the explicit task to warn world leaders of Hitler’s intentions.

“Hitler is no bulwark against Bolshevism,” was Goerdeler’s message to his Anglo-Saxon interlocutors. Rather, Goerdeler explained, Hitler too was a kind of a Bolshevik who “will first destroy Judaism, then Christianity and ultimately capitalism.” Goerdeler urged American, British, French and other leaders to stand up to the tyrant. Only then, he claimed, would the anti-Nazi faction of the Wehrmacht’s leadership rise against Hitler, arrest him and have him tried for treason. Sadly, Goerdeler was ignored.

Two years after Bosch’s death, the coup d’état of July 20, 1944 – one of the around 40 assassination attempts against Hitler – failed. Among those who were arrested were Goerdeler and some of Bosch’s top executives. Goerdeler ended at the gallows, the others in concentration camps.

Remarkably, Robert Bosch’s CEO and successor Hans Walz was not discovered, even though it was the passionate Christian who had engineered most of Bosch’s resistance operations – ranging from the protection of Jews to secret meetings secretly with Allied diplomats in Switzerland. It was Walz who and funded his church’s activities against the régime, and and who was Carl Goerdeler’s principal associate in corporate headquarters.

While the Gestapo did not nab him, the U.S. military did. Though aware of Walz’ wartime activities, the U.S. occupation forces interned him for two years for the “offense” of having headed a major German corporation. Theodor Heuss, the future West German President, denounced this as “alberner Schematismus,” a ridiculous display of a schematic mindset.

In the immediate postwar days, the mere mention of the German resistance was forbidden. On Nov. 8, 1948, Volkmar von Zühls­dorff, an anti-Nazi émigré who had returned to his homeland from exile in New York, wrote to his friend and fellow émigré Hermann Broch, an Austrian Jewish writer:

“You ask me why, in Germany, nothing is written or said about the heroes of the resistance? … Recently I spoke about this with … (Robert) Lochner who heads Radio Frankfurt [as Chief Control Officer on behalf of the U.S. military] … There exists an ordinance that July 20 [the day German Wehrmacht colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg tried to kill Hitler] must not be mentioned, and this ordinance is still in force. Why? Because all Germans are Nazis, and if one mentions July 20, people might get the idea that there were a few who were not Nazis, and that is not permissible.”

Walz went quietly back to work, rebuilding Bosch’s empire. But some of the Jews he had rescued and who now lived in America had not forgotten. At their initiative, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel recognized that at the risk of his own life, Walz had saved Jews. It declared him a “righteous among the peoples.”

In 1969, a tree was planted in Walz’ honor at the Holocaust Memorial at Yad Vashem. Today, the Robert Bosch Group is bigger than ever, with 300,000 employees and 320 plants and outlets in 140 countries producing automotive parts, power tools, security systems and, in a joint venture with Siemens, some of the world’s leading home appliances.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 55 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

The Berlin Wall and the laughing God

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the Berlin Wall story, which I covered for the Associated Press 50 years ago, is its spiritual dimension. I did not realize this then, on August 13, 1961, when the East Germans began building this monstrous structure to stop the mass exodus of its citizens to the West. I was a lukewarm Christian at best and had therefore little hope that this abomination would disappear in my lifetime. That God is the ultimate Lord of history is not something I fully understood when I was a 24-year old junior reporter.

The Wall that split not just the city of Berlin but also its Catholic diocese and territorial Protestant Church into two halves reduced the flow of fugitives to a trickle. But by then 2.6 million people had already fled from the Communist-run part of Germany. By and large they represented its elite – “elite” in the sense of skill and education. They were highly qualified craftsmen, scientists, engineers, professionals and farmers. Such was their impact of their flight on the economy that entire branches of East German industry had ceased to function.

On the other hand, these refugees generally belonged to the social strata that had been the mainstay of the Christian Church in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and their disappearance suited party leader Walter Ulbricht’s ideological ends. Ulbricht was intent on establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and the proletariat had long been alienated from the Church, especially its highbrow Lutheran branch whose very cradle this part of the country was. By relegating the former upper and middle classes to an inferior status and driving them out, Ulbricht created the main cause for the decline of church membership from some 95 percent of the population in 1945 to one quarter at the time of the GDR’s collapse in 1989.

The persecution of Christians began well before the GDR was established in the Soviet zone of occupation in 1949. I remember it well from my childhood in Leipzig. A Marxist teacher had taken over our class. Every morning he admonished his 80 pupils: “There are three Christian swine among you who still go to church. Go beat some sense into them after school”. The three of us, one Catholic and two Lutherans, learned to outrun our roused classmates; eventually my mother had me smuggled across the border to the British zone of occupation, where I ended up in a boarding school.

In the East Germany, young Christians were denied access to higher education, unless they joined the Communist youth movement and subjected themselves to a ceremony called Jugendweihe, a Marxist substitute for confirmation. Some did this, for example Angela Merkel, a pastor’s daughter, who was allowed to study physics and later became chancellor of reunified Germany. Others made no such concessions. They fled or accepted discrimination at school and work in order to live a life of faith.

The three daughters of my uncle Horst Persing, a Lutheran minister, accepted this fate. In 1976, Rev. Oskar Brüsewitz made an even greater sacrifice. He immolated himself in front of the parish church of Zeitz in protest against “the suppression of our children in school.” His sacrifice was one of the first steps toward the popular protest movement that eventually brought down the Wall in 1989.

One day as I was covering the Berlin crisis in the autumn of 1961, East German police stopped me at the Heinrich Heine Strasse border crossing to question me about the source of a highly sensitive story of mine they had read on the AP wire. I did not give them her name. A few weeks later my grandmother sent me a poppy seed cake from Leipzig. Inside I found an aluminium tube with a message warning me against travelling again to the GDR. A well-meaning neighbour who was a “people’s prosecutor” had tipped her off that I would be arrested for espionage if I tried to do so.

I was now cut off from my East German relatives forever, or so I feared. “Eternity” turned out to be short, though. In 1975, the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe ended many travel restrictions in Germany. To my amazement the GDR granted me an unrestricted six-month visa. I drove to my uncle’s parsonage near Leipzig where I first found out about of an awakening among young East Germans. One of its many centres was the Church of St. Nicholas (Nikolaikirche) in Leipzig, which later became the fount of the peaceful revolution that toppled Communism.

For weeks I travelled from church to church, monastery to monastery, parsonage to parsonage, trailed by secret police. Later I discovered that they considered me a religious crackpot, albeit a harmless one, which still perplexes me because the focus of my research should have troubled them: a large ecumenical movement luring thousands, including soldiers in uniform, to youth services and eventually providing an umbrella also for non-Christian opposition groups against the East German dictatorship.

I learned that this had begun in 1968 when Ulbricht had the Gothic University Church on Leipzig’s Karl Marx Platz (now Augustusplatz) blown up. It stood an a square that was designated to be a socialist parade ground, and Ulbricht did not want it to be “blighted” by a gracile sanctuary, where both Lutherans and Catholics worshipped.

Twenty days later, an international Bach contest took place in Leipzig. Suddenly in the presence of VIPs from all over the world and of East German party bigwigs an automatic mechanism unrolled a huge yellow banner showing the contours of the murdered church flanked by the dates of its consecration and its death, 1240 and 1968, plus the inscription “Wir fordern Wiederaufbau” (We demand reconstruction).

The authors of this act of defiance were five young physicists and science students. They were captured and imprisoned. But they inspired sympathizers throughout GDR to form what became the nucleus of a “peace movement”, which gradually snowballed into the avalanche that swept away Communism two decades later.

The Nikolaikirche is only a few steps away from where the University Church stood. It became known worldwide as the epicentre of this ecumenical enterprise, arguably one of the most impressive in post-Reformation history. Admonished by Protestant and Catholic clergymen not to resort to violence, tens of thousands marched on Monday evenings quietly around Leipzig’s city centre. Their most momentous demonstration occurred on 9 October 1989.

On that evening, pastors and priests had preached on Proverbs 25:15: “With patience a ruler will be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone.” Then a crowd of 70,000, chanting hymns, set off on a procession that softly felled a 40-year tyranny. Had they given the Communist authorities the slightest provocation, it might have resulted in a Peking-style massacre. The regime was certainly ready.

From the side streets their workers’ militia had their guns trained on the protesters. Local hospitals cancelled the leaves of their medical staffs. Ample amounts of coffins and body bags had been brought into town. A concentration camp had been set up in Markkleeberg, south of Leipzig. Later lists with the names of intended inmates were found. They included pastors, priests and Kurt Masur, the conductor of Leipzig’s famed Gewandhaus orchestra.

But the demonstrators remained peaceful, as did the peace marchers who emulated them in many parts of the GDR. We know what happened next: The Wall opened in the following month. The GDR ceased to exist one year later. In the interim, Christians temporarily assumed positions of power in East Germany. Rainer Eppelmann, a Lutheran pastor and pacifist from Berlin who had done time in a Communist prison, became the GDR’s last minister of defence.

It is now 50 years since I saw the Wall go up and 22 since it came down. The Christian movement in eastern Germany seems to have collapsed. When Germany was reunited on 3 October 1990, most Protestant churches did not even ring their bells in gratitude, in contrast to Catholic churches, which did. Once again, eastern Germans are turning their backs on the Christian faith in droves. Next to the Czech Republic, the former GDR is the most secularized region in Europe, and Berlin is its most godless capital.

What happened here is a phenomenon well knwn from Scripture – the continuum of human ingrate forgetfulness of God’s mercy. Theologically speaking, this was a manifest expression of Original Sin in the sense of man’s innate inability to believe and trust in God; but at the same time it confirmed of Martin Luther’s brilliant insight about cloudbursts of the Holy Spirit that suddenly soak one area richly, and then inexplicably move on. This is what we have witnessed after the collapse of the Wall.

But it would be foolish to believe that this is the end of the story. History is always open to the future and the Holy Spirit, the creator of life and faith, always good for surprises. There is also an amusing side to this drama about this interface between faith and politics. To prove to the world that he was the greatest, Ulbricht had built the tallest structure in Berlin, a 1,200-foot television tower with a glass bubble containing a rotating restaurant at its top.

When the tower was finished in 1969, it turned out that the sun reflected on this bubble in the shape of a huge cross. Ulbricht was so furious that he refused to invite the tower’s architects to its inauguration. His regime spent huge sums of money to remove this symbol of the Christian faith – in vain: Regardless of whether you approach Berlin from the East, the West or the South, the first thing you can see from afar on a clear day will be the Cross.

The God Christians believe in is the God of Israel, and if they have read their Bible well they know that He is a God with a Jewish sense of irony about whom we read in Psalm 2:4: “He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.”

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 54 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine,

And the wall fell down flat

Uwe Siemon-Netto

(From The Tablet, London, August 12, 2011)

Exactly 50 years ago, work began on the construction of a lethal barrier dividing Berlin that was to last nearly three decades. Years of protests by East German Christians led to its destruction and that of the Communist regime which tried to contain the faith of its people.

On August 13, 1961, a Sunday, the Associated Press sent me to Berlin where East Germany had begun building a Wall that morning to stop the mass exodus of its citizens to the Western sectors. Fifty years later, I recognise that this turned out to be not just a reporting assignment for me but the beginning of a long story of faith.

I was 24 then, myself a refugee from Leipzig. From what I saw I did not expect Germany to be reunified in my lifetime. Yet it happened 28 years later, in large part thanks to a peaceful Christian resistance movement. This is actually the most important story about the Wall; it is a tale of hope.

I flew from Frankfurt to Tempelhof Airport and drove to Bernauer Strasse, a street dividing the French and Soviet sectors. On the eastern side, people were roping themselves down from windows, while Communist cops stormed their buildings from the backyard. Some refugees jumped into nets spread out for them by firemen, some fell to their death.

I watched East German workmen render the Protestant Church of Reconciliation inaccessible with barbed wire. Located on what became known as the death strip, it symbolised Christianity’s condition in divided Berlin, where both the Catholic diocese and the regional Protestant church were split into two halves.

I observed workers’ militiamen open fire on a fugitive family of nine prompting a French lieutenant to blast off warning shots from a machine gun mounted on his jeep. “Stop shooting or I’ll shoot you,” he yelled. The escapees made it across the border. I accompanied them to the Marienfelde refugee camp, the central stage of this drama in the heart of Germany. Of the 2.6 million fugitives thus far, 1.5 million had been housed here before being flown to West Germany. By the time East German leader Walter Ulbricht ordered the Western sectors of Berlin sealed off, up to 2,500 left his country every day. Its economy was about to collapse. Entire branches of industry no longer functioned because their skilled workforce had run away.

Ironically, the flight of highly qualified craftsmen, of scientists, engineers, professionals and farmers, was not just a catastrophic loss to the Communists but also had a religious dimension. These refugees belonged primarily to the social strata that had been the Christian Church’s mainstay. Ulbricht’s regime was intent on establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, relegating the former upper and middle classes to an inferior status, and driving them out. This was the main cause for the decline of church membership from some 95 percent of the population in 1945 to one quarter at the time of East Germany’s collapse in 1989.

The persecution of Christians began well before the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was established in the Soviet zone of occupation in 1949. I remember it well from my childhood in Leipzig. A Marxist teacher had taken over our class. Every morning he admonished his 80 pupils: “There are three Christian swine among you who still go to church. Go beat some sense into them after school”. The three of us, one Catholic and two Lutherans, learned to outrun our roused classmates; eventually my mother had me smuggled across the border to the British zone of occupation, where I ended up in a boarding school.

In the GDR, young Christians were denied access to higher education, unless they joined the Communist youth movement and subjected themselves to a ceremony called Jugendweihe, a Marxist substitute for confirmation. Some did this, for example Angela Merkel, a pastor’s daughter, who was allowed to study physics and later became chancellor of reunified Germany. Others made no such concessions. They fled or accepted discrimination at school and work in order to live a life of faith.

The three daughters of my uncle Horst Persing, a Lutheran minister, accepted this fate. In 1976, Rev. Oskar Brüsewitz made an even greater sacrifice. He immolated himself in front of the parish church of Zeitz in protest against “the suppression of our children in school.” His sacrifice was one of the first steps toward the popular protest movement that eventually brought down the Wall in 1989.

One day as I was covering the Berlin crisis in the autumn of 1961, East German police stopped me at the Heinrich Heine Strasse border crossing to question me about the source of a highly sensitive story of mine they had read on the AP wire. I did not give them her name. A few weeks later my grandmother sent me a poppy seed cake from Leipzig. Inside I found an aluminium tube with a message warning me against travelling again to the GDR. A well-meaning neighbour who was a “people’s prosecutor” had tipped her off that I would be arrested for espionage if I tried to do so.

I was now cut off from my East German relatives forever, or so I feared. “Eternity” turned out to be short, though. In 1975, the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe ended many travel restrictions in Germany. To my amazement the GDR granted me an unrestricted six-month visa. I drove to my uncle’s parsonage near Leipzig where I first found out about of an awakening among young East Germans. One of its many centres was the Church of St. Nicholas (Nikolaikirche) in Leipzig, which later became the fount of the peaceful revolution that toppled Communism.

For weeks I travelled from church to church, monastery to monastery, parsonage to parsonage, trailed by secret police. Later I discovered that they considered me a religious crackpot, albeit a harmless one, which still perplexes me because the focus of my research should have troubled them: a large ecumenical movement luring thousands, including soldiers in uniform, to youth services and eventually providing an umbrella also for non-Christian opposition groups against the East German dictatorship.

I learned that this had begun in 1968 when Ulbricht had the Gothic University Church on Leipzig’s Karl Marx Platz (now Augustusplatz) blown up. It stood an a square that was designated to be a socialist parade ground, and Ulbricht did not want it to be “blighted” by a gracile sanctuary, where both Lutherans and Catholics worshipped.

Twenty days later, an international Bach contest took place in Leipzig. Suddenly in the presence of VIPs from all over the world and of East German party bigwigs an automatic mechanism unrolled a huge yellow banner showing the contours of the murdered church flanked by the dates of its consecration and its death, 1240 and 1968, plus the inscription “Wir fordern Wiederaufbau” (We demand reconstruction).

The authors of this act of defiance were five young physicists and science students. They were captured and imprisoned. But they inspired sympathizers throughout GDR to form what became the nucleus of a “peace movement”, which gradually snowballed into the avalanche that swept away Communism two decades later.

The Nikolaikirche is only a few steps away from where the University Church stood. It became known worldwide as the epicentre of this ecumenical enterprise, arguably one of the most impressive in post-Reformation history. Admonished by Protestant and Catholic clergymen not to resort to violence, tens of thousands marched on Monday evenings quietly around Leipzig’s city centre. Their most momentous demonstration occurred on 9 October 1989.

On that evening, pastors and priests had preached on Proverbs 25:15: “With patience a ruler will be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone.” Then a crowd of 70,000, chanting hymns, set off on a procession that softly felled a 40-year tyranny. Had they given the Communist authorities the slightest provocation, it might have resulted in a Peking-style massacre. The regime was certainly ready.

From the side streets their workers’ militia had their guns trained on the protesters. Local hospitals cancelled the leaves of their medical staffs. Ample amounts of coffins and body bags had been brought into town. A concentration camp had been set up in Markkleeberg, south of Leipzig. Later lists with the names of intended inmates were found. They included pastors, priests and Kurt Masur, the conductor of Leipzig’s famed Gewandhaus orchestra.

But the demonstrators remained peaceful, as did the peace marchers who emulated them in many parts of the GDR. We know what happened next: The Wall opened in the following month. The GDR ceased to exist one year later. In the interim, Christians temporarily assumed positions of power in East Germany. Rainer Eppelmann, a Lutheran pastor and pacifist from Berlin who had done time in a Communist prison, became the GDR’s last minister of defence.

It is now 50 years since I saw the Wall go up and 22 since it came down. The Christian movement in eastern Germany seems to have collapsed. When Germany was reunited on 3 October 1990, most Protestant churches did not even ring their bells in gratitude, in contrast to Catholic churches, which did. Once again, eastern Germans are turning their backs on the Christian faith in droves. Next to the Czech Republic, the former GDR is the most secularized region in Europe, and Berlin is the most godless city.

What happened? A manifest expression of Original Sin in the sense of man’s innate inability to believe and trust in God; but at the same time a confirmation of Martin Luther’s brilliant insight about cloudbursts of the Holy Spirit that suddenly soak one area richly, and then inexplicably move on. This is what we have witnessed here.

As for me, this amazing story still gives me huge hope. For it has reinforced my faith by confirming, on a secular level, the maxim that history is always open to the future and the theological truth God is the ultimate Lord of history that the Spirit always good for surprises.

Dr Uwe Siemon-Netto, a former foreign correspondent from Germany and a lay theologian, is director of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life at Concordia University in Irvine, California, where is also a professor of journalism.

I was there when they built the Wall

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Early Sunday morning the telephone rang in my Frankfurt apartment. „Off to the airport,“ my managing editor instructed me. Drowsily I asked, „To Leopoldville?“ For weeks I had been waiting for my marching orders to the former Belgian Congo to cover its civil war for the Associated Press. „No,“ said “Schmitti,” my boss. „You are going to Berlin. Ulbricht is building a wall.“

That was on August 13, 1961. My longest working day ever lay ahead of me: 36 hours. I took a PanAm DC-6 to Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin and then drove in a rented car to Bernauer Strasse, a street dividing the French and Soviet sectors. On the eastern side, people roped themselves down from windows, while Communist cops stormed their apartment buildings from the backyard. Some refugees jumped into safety nets spread out for them by Western firemen. Nine days later, Ida Siekmann missed a net and dropped on the sidewalk, becoming the first casualty of the Berlin Wall.

For the next three months Bernauer Strasse became my most important place of work. I was there when East German workmen unrolled bales of barbed wire and later replaced it with a wall; when they rendered the Protestant Church of Reconciliation inaccessible; when workers’ militiamen opened fire on a fugitive family of nine prompting a French lieutenant to blast off warning shots into the air from a machine gun mounted on his jeep.

“Stop shooting or I’ll aim my gun at you,” he warned; to my knowledge these were the only shots fired by an allied soldier in the 1961 Berlin crisis. The refugees made it safely across the border. I took them into an “Eckkneipe,” as Berlin street corner pubs are called. I bought the adults a round of stiff drinks, and raspberry sodas for the kids; then I accompanied all of them to the Marienfelde processing center for escapees.

The emergency camp in the Berlin district of Marienfelde was at that time the central stage of this drama in the heart of Germany. Of 2.6 million refugees thus far, 1.5 million had been housed here before being flown to West Germany. By the time the East German leader Walter Ulbricht ordered West Berlin sealed off, up to 2,500 left his country every day.

These were university professors, professionals of every field, engineers, scientists, farmers, technicians, craftsmen, and hundreds of thousands of skilled laborers. The collapse of East Germany’s economy seemed imminent. Entire branches of its industry could no longer manufacture anything because most of the working elite had “voted with their feet,” as the saying went; they had run to freedom.

Things did not look good for the West either, though. With the support of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, Ulbricht demanded an instant end to this drain of manpower. He was determined to gain control of the access routes from West Germany to West Berlin, a city still under the sovereignty of the victorious four powers of World War II. Fortunately, this would never happen.

In June, the Associated Press had sent me to Vienna to reinforce its local staff during the summit meeting between Khrushchev and U.S. President John F. Kennedy. We found out that Khrushchev regarded Kennedy as immature, calling him a “boy in short pants” whom he could intimidate, which he accomplished masterfully.

In those days the President had “no sympathy for the Germans,” retired diplomat R.W. Smyser wrote in his book, “Kennedy and the Berlin Wall.” His indecision and indifference were fueled by the counsel of the liberal “eggheads” in his immediate entourage. These were academics such as Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and speechwriter Ted Sorenson, whom Kennedy called his “intellectual blood bank.”

John McCloy, the former U.S. high commissioner in Germany, quipped about these men to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that in their entire professional lives they never had to make a decision “except which of their fellow professors should get tenure,” according to Smyser who added that Adenauer perceived Kennedy as a weak president and therefore clung to France’s Charles de Gaulle as an alternative.

So, in 1961, Kennedy did not interfere with the Communists as they walled in their own people. His stance would toughen significantly later under the influence of Gen. Lucius D. Clay, the “father of the Berlin Airlift,” whom Kennedy sent to Berlin as his personal representative. In 1963, Clay accompanied Kennedy on his trip to Berlin where JFK made his celebrated “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. In this speech, which worried his “egghead advisors,” JFK went on to say: "I am proud (...) to come here in the company of my fellow American, General Clay, who has been in this city during its great moments of crisis and will come again if ever needed." To this day, Clay is more beloved in Berlin than any other statesman of any nationality before and after him.

But Kennedy’s vacillation during the summer of 1961 laid the seeds of the insidious anti-American qualms that would so bewilder my friends in the U.S. in the years to come. Egon Bahr, the closest associate and spokesman of Willy Brandt, Berlin’s governing mayor, explained to me that his distrust of the U.S. began with this episode. Brandt numbed his sorrows in a manner causing Adenauer to nickname him Willy Weinbrandt (Billy Brandy); 1961 was an election year in West Germany, and Brandt ran against Adenauer as the Social Democrat candidate. Adenauer won.

Egon Bahr, who is still alive, never overcame his misgivings.

Kennedy’s irresolution was shared by British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, Smyser writes, but contrasted markedly with the hard-line stance of French President Charles de Gaulle and the feistiness of West and East Berliners alike. While Kennedy dithered, de Gaulle positioned himself as “Adenauer’s protector, not only against Khrushchev but also against pressures coming from London,” according to Smyser.

As for the Berliners, irresolution was definitely not their prevalent mood that summer. Only 16 years after the collapse of the Nazi tyranny they were in no frame of mind to give in to yet another oppressor even if their stubbornness carried the prospect of enduring another armed conflict just when they had rebuilt their town from is devastation in the war.

We journalists, diplomats and spooks congregating nightly at Berlin’s premier intelligence exchange of the day, the piano bar “Inge und Ich” just off Kurfürstendamm, never ceased to marvel at these plucky people; they were a far cry from the irksome characters who gave their town a bad name seven years later. I am talking about those fetid draft dodgers who would soon nestle on the Western side of the Wall; those whining and sometimes violent wannabe revolutionaries demonstrating against the Shah of Persia and the War in Vietnam and chanting “Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-minh;” those eternal students who would stay enrolled at Berlin’s Free University for 50 semesters because cafeteria meals and public transportation were cheap for their kind. Let it be stated here: Real Berliners they were not!

Back to the summer of 1961: We brash young journalists covering the erection of Ulbricht’s Wall even managed to mine some wacky fun from this distressing assignment. We established observation posts near the border crossings, especially Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstrasse, which was reserved for non-Germans and Communist bigwigs. Mine was a bedroom above Café Kölln, a sleazy beer bar in the building where now the “Mauer-Museum” (Wall Museum) is located. This room had a wonderful bay window affording me a perfect view of the East German control center.

Early one evening I spotted a white Mercedes 220 with East Berlin license plates heading west. The man on the wheel turned out to be “Sudel-Ede” (Smirching Eddie), the most despised Communist television personality. His real name was Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. He had a propaganda program titled, “Der schwarze Kanal” (the black channel), where he regularly ran clips from western TV shows as “evidence” for his vile agitation against the alleged “neo-fascism,” “militarism” and “war-mongering” of our side.

“Smirching Eddie” was married to Marta Rafael, a striking Hungarian actress who must have been on tour that day for he clearly entered West-Berlin intent on poaching among our lonely hearts, of which there were plenty. So soon after the War, the city was still replete with unattached women in their late thirties whose male contemporaries had died in combat or Soviet POW camps.

And where did they find solace? In ball houses such as the “Resi” in the Hasenheide district, an establishment with dancing fountains, a full orchestra, 200 telephones and pneumatic tubes connecting all tables. That’s where “Smirching Eddie,” endowed with an East German exit permit and plenty of West German currency, directed his Mercedes while his fellow countrymen were locked up behind the Iron Curtain. I alerted my colleagues, and so a howling horde of international reporters chased after him.

Directed to a table, von Schnitzler began scanning beauties in the room but never managed to make contact with any of the scores of available females. For we had positioned ourselves strategically at neighboring tables and now bombarded him with telephone calls and pneumatically posted invitations to waltz and to tango. Puce in the face the frustrated Smirching Eddie stormed out of the ballroom and returned east. We followed him to Checkpoint Charlie and then piled into Café Kölln to celebrate our personal triumph in the Cold War.

It so happened that earlier that year I had befriended a comely East German government official at the Leipzig Trade Fair. She hated the Communist regime. Now as the Wall was being built she found witty ways to tip me off. One item of information she sent turned out to be a present for my 25^th birthday. In the middle of the night I received a secret message urging me to rush to the former palace of Prussia’s crown princes in the Eastern sector. There I discovered, probably as the first Western reporter, that more than 30 Soviet tanks had moved into the city. Two days later they confronted U.S. armor at Checkpoint Charlie, which turned out to be the most dramatic point of the 1961 Berlin crisis.

On the following evening I had a date with my friend but was stopped at the border and grilled: “Who was your informer?” I did not tell the investigators but soon discovered that as a result of this incident I was not to see my family in East Germany again for years to come. My grandmother lived in Leipzig. Her neighbor was a well-meaning prosecutor. She warned her that if ever I attempted to enter the country again I would be tried for espionage. Granny slipped this information into an aluminum tube and mailed it to me in a home-baked poppy seed cake.

I was banished from my native region “forever.” But this “eternity” lasted a little more a dozen years. In 1975, the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe ended many travel restrictions in Germany. Only a few weeks later I was issued a six-month visa allowing me multiple entries into my homeland. I raced to the parsonage of my favorite uncle, Horst Persing, a Lutheran parish pastor near Leipzig, who told me about a stunning development – the Christian awakening among young East Germans, which eventually produced the umbrella for the huge resistance movement that would bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989 resulting in Germany’s reunification a year later.

I was in San Francisco when the Wall tumbled. I flew home to rejoice with my fellow countrymen and remember fondly the plucky Berliners I loved so much in 1961. Returning to reunified Berlin now once every year or two is a bittersweet experience, though. Yes, this is arguably Europe’s most exciting city, a throbbing metropolis with stunning new buildings and an abundant cultural life.

But with memories like mine, I find it hard to stomach that a coalition of mainly left-of-center Social Democrats and Communists now governs this marvelous place. I know why the latter are still so numerous. The East German regime had moved all its top functionaries, its military and secret police officers from the entire country to its capital. Now they still reside in the heart of the city, and they vote for a party called “Die Linke” (The Left), which is the successor of the Socialist Unity Party whose leaders had built the Wall.

Most Berliners seem to have accommodated themselves to the shameless misalliance between the Social Democrats – once Willy Brandt’s very honorable party -- and their “dark red” minority partners. But I can’t. I can’t forget what they have done to their people and my country. I can’t forget that they shot refugees like rabbits. I can’t forget that they chopped Berlin into two. And I can’t forgive the Social Democrat-Communist city government its refusal to name a street after Ronald Reagan, who in April of 1987 stood at the Brandenburg Gate appealing to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate, Mr. Gorbachev, open this Wall!”

This is so disgraceful that I could not bring myself to accede to my British wife Gillian’s wish to move to Berlin. That said, I take consolation in the fact that history is always open to the future and always good for surprises. This is the comforting news I have learned in the 50 years since covering the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, is conducting a lecture tour related to the 50th anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall, which he covered as a young reporter of The Associated Press. For information, contact: uwesiemon@mac.com . He has been an international journalist for 55 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications.

Soldiers: God’s masks in fatigues

Lecture at Annual Conference of the Augsburg Lutheran Churches in El Paso, TX, July 25, 2011

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

We journalists have a tendency to talk with great authority about other people’s craft. This has become so bad that by now talk show hosts tell statesmen and other professionals how to do their jobs.

Think of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. He won’t ever allow his interview partners to finish a sentence. He always knows better. His favorite line is, “I have always said…” And he is not alone in this. He just does this more shamelessly than his lesser peers.

I am not much of a Paul Tillich fan. But this state of affairs confirms Tillich’s insight that hubris is a structural element of original sin. Thus hubris should be added to Article Two of the Augsburg Confession as a constituent part of Original Sin alongside man’s inability to believe and trust in God and concupiscence. On this point I agree with Tillich. Hubris is an innate human condition that foolishly presumes to trump God.

That said, I am brazen enough to talk about a vocation that is not mine: I mean soldiering. I have never served in the military. I have never fired a shot in anger. But I have spent a lot of time with soldiers in combat. I have been shot down in a helicopter in Vietnam. And I have held the hands of dying GIs screaming first for his mother and then for God, always in this order. I have been attached to a large platoon of Marines, which lost 40 men in 12 hours.

I am also the son of a German officer cadet who was blinded in action in World War I. I have heard his harrowing tales since my childhood and watched shrapnel protrude from his skin about once a month literally until the day he died more than 50 years ago.

During my CPE I worked as a chaplain intern with Vietnam veterans in the VA in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Some of you might have read my short book, The Acquittal of God, a Theology for Vietnam Veterans. It was based on the MA thesis I wrote at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.

So come to think of if, I actually can speak with some authority about soldiering. When I claim that soldiers are God’s Masks in Fatigues, I know what I am talking about. And I also know what I am talking about when I call those self-righteous pacifists of the 1960s and 1970s who vilified returning warriors as baby killers of being the devil’s masks. I can call upon Luther as my witness.

Luther described Christians serving their neighbors out of love the masks behind which God hides as he is accomplishing his concealed purposes in the world.

By this logic, warriors are divine masks doing God’s work. “God honors the sword so highly that he says that he Himself has instituted it (Romans 13:1),” Luther wrote in his brilliant treatise, “Whether soldiers, too, can be saved.”

“For the hand that wields this sword and kills with it is not man’s hand but God’s; and it is not man, but God who… kills and fights.”

Luther compared the soldier’s craft with that of a surgeon who amputates so that the whole body may not perish.

This means that soldiers come under the rubric for which Luther coined the Latin term, “larvae Dei,” masks of God. He also said that people who are not larvae Dei are by definition larvae Diaboli, the Devil’s masks. There exists no neutral position between these two extremes.

Often the Devil’s Masks are perceived to be divine because they sound so nicely. My favorite Devil’s mask banner is the bumper sticker reading: “War is not the answer.” The Devil stops you from asking the obvious: “What’s the question?” Leave a dopey statement in a limbo and you instantly grow wings in the perception of a naïve public that has never read Luther’s statement that the devil is the great imitator: “Where God builds his Church, the devil brings his imitators along and builds a chapel, nay many chapels, right beside it.”

There exists a species of copiers of the divine called “Lutheran pacifists,” although this very expression seems an oxymoron. Let me focus on one person who has become a paradigm for this contradiction in terms.

Her name is Margot Kässmann. Until last year she was the Lutheran bishop of Hanover and chairwoman of the EKD, Germany’s state-related Protestant churches.

Then the police caught her careening around town blind drunk at midnight in her luxurious office car, a Volkswagen Phaeton, allegedly with former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder by her side; admittedly, she is quite an attractive woman.

I am not holding her DUI against her. We are all sinners. We screw up. She paid the price and resigned from her high office; kudos to her for that.

But what I do hold against her are her utterly un-Lutheran homilies on war. Shortly before she gave up the highest office in German Protestantism, she stepped into Germany’s most coveted Lutheran pulpit – the pulpit of the Frauenkirche (Church of our Lady) in Dresden – and opined in a New Year’s Day sermon: “Nothing is good in Afghanistan.”

The only way out was to negotiate with the Taliban. This year she followed this up by making this idiotic pronouncement: “It would be better to pray with the Taliban than to bomb them.”

Let this sink in for a moment. After the United States and Britain, Germany maintains the strongest military contingent in Afghanistan. German soldiers are dying or getting maimed in the Hindukush as are their American comrades-in-arms.

Many soldiers fighting in Afghanistan hail from the former East Germany where they were brought up in an agnostic or atheist environment. In many cases, the first time they have ever heard the Gospel was in their camps or forward positions where both Catholic and Protestant chaplains are doing a valiant job of evangelizing. For German clergymen, Afghanistan has become fertile mission field. Nowhere else have they found a more receptive young audience.

And along comes the nation’s most revered church leader and tells the soldiers and their families that their work is no good, their sacrifice in vain. What’s even worse is that Mrs Kässmann has just been named her Church’s “ambassador” to the world with the task of promoting Lutheranism as we prepare for the Reformation’s Quincentenary in 2017. Talk about setting the cat among the pigeons.

Luther called pastors poaching in the political realm “false clerics and schismatic priests,” and warned that “cooking and brewing” together the spiritual and secular realities of life was the devil’s work. He was right.

There are three interlocking arguments against Mrs. Kässmann’s behavior, which reminds me so much of American clerics agitating from the pulpit against the Vietnam War and even forbidding returning soldiers to attend services in uniform or wearing crew cuts. I am not kidding you: I organized pastoral care groups of Vietnam veterans in the VA in St. Cloud; many told me that they had actually been banished from their home congregations, Lutheran congregations included.

My first argument is doctrinal. The “sword,” meaning all governmental power including military might, is from God. Like all other vocations, a soldier’s labor is a work of love designed to protect good order, maintain peace, defend the nation and punish evildoers. Where a soldier kills in the service of an unjust ruler, it is that ruler who bears the guilt. If the soldier arrives at the conviction that he is definitely fighting an unjust war, then he must offer passive resistance but suffer the consequences, which can mean execution.

The second argument is about human care. A pastor telling soldiers that their sacrifice is futile is committing callous malpractice. I can’t think of a more mindless and unloving pursuit of ministry than this. We know from the treatment of soldiers by antiwar activists in the Vietnam era that such comportment is self-serving, making pastors feel good about themselves.

I am not saying that the church should endorse any policies; this too would amount to cooking and brewing the kingdoms together. Chaplains have more than enough work to do when they bring word and sacrament to the suffering soldiers and tell them that God is suffering with them in a godless world, to paraphrase a famous statement by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

All they have to do is to assure them that a soldier’s vocation is also divinely ordained. All they have to do is to feed them the means of grace. There is no more compelling account of perfect pastoring than the story of a Lutheran chaplain in the besieged Marine base of Khe Sanh in Vietnam in 1968.

As the stacks of body bags were piling up all over the place, he ran, with a stole over his flack jacket, from gun emplacement to gun emplacement to commune the fighting men, saying: “The body of Christ, broken for you; the blood of Christ, shed for you.” The impact of this statement was overwhelming: in the sight of all those broken bodies he brought the marines the one broken body that gives life. I have been told that several of the surviving men later went to seminary.

Finally, let me posit a third argument against. Kässmann’s rhetoric, and this argument has to do with service. God calls us to serve others, not ourselves. If we serve others lovingly we render the highest possible service to God. The chaplain in Khe Sanh did precisely that, making no pronouncements on whether the war in Vietnam was just or unjust because to do so would not have been his Amt, as Luther would say; it was not his office.

Let’s look at this more closely. Mrs. Kässmann clearly affirms women’s rights; without feminist instincts she would probably not have striven to become a bishop and the first female head of the Protestant church in Germany.

Now she says: Let’s negotiate with the Taliban, clearly ignoring that when these folks were in power in Afghanistan ten years ago, women were not allowed to drive; forbidden to read and write; to show their faces in public, to exercise any kind of profession. We have seen on television secretly filmed documentaries of women being flogged and stoned to death in the Kabul sports stadium on Friday after church.

So what concessions does Mrs. Kässmann expect from the Taliban if they are ever allowed back to power? That they flog and stone women only on every other Friday? That they are allowed to learn half the Arabic alphabet, either from “Alif” to “Sad” or from “Dad to Ya”? And that they drive cars with small slits in their otherwise blacked-out windshields and only between 10 and 11 o’clock in the morning, not during the rest of the day?

Ah, and then she proposed praying with the Taliban rather than bombing them. Goods. Let her, a clergywoman, be the first to pray with these men – in the name of Christ, as is her obligation as a Lutheran minister. And then see what happens to her on Fridays after church.

Pardon my sardonic sense of irony, but what we have here is so self-serving it makes me gag. I am scandalized that nobody out there seems to takes people like this one to task, and people like Kässmann exist on this side of the Atlantic just as much as in Berlin. Where are the women’s groups when the future of Afghan or Iraqi or other Muslim women is in question? Are human rights only reserved for Westerners, not for Orientals? Or have women’s groups reduced their agenda to abortion rights?

When do we start countering such smarmy “peace-loving” pronouncements that disregard the safety of fellow members of the human race?

Let me tell you why this makes me so angry. I have seen what soldiers went through in Vietnam. I have been with them when the received Dear John Letters from their wives and girlfriends who had been sucked up by the self-serving peace movement back home. There was a veritable epidemic of such letters back in the late Sixties. In one case I am familiar with a GI found a video in a parcel from his fiancé. It showed her in bed with a bearded peacenik. The GI went apoplectic, grabbed his M-16 and proceeded to randomly shoot down Vietnamese civilians.

In Vietnam I have learned the stories of soldiers who dementedly walked into enemy fire and got killed after reading farewell letters from home. And when I returned to New York after covering this war over a period of five years, the fashionable thing to say on the cocktail party circuit was: “Ugh, Vietnam Veterans, my most unfavorable minority!”

Doing ministry among Vietnam veterans in Minnesota, I found many had retreated into the forest to live in isolation from the rest of society, which they though had rejected them. Most of the vets I dealt with had “flipped off” God, as they called it, not because they didn’t believe in Him but because they thought that God had already abandoned them in Vietnam and that they were now doomed. They were victims of lousy catechesis, bad pastoral care and a self-righteous society that didn’t want to be bothered by them.

Now that I am living in southern California, I am closely connected with the huge Vietnamese community there. And you know what I have found? That there are thousands and thousands of former South Vietnamese soldiers among them still traumatized by the aftereffects of head injuries they received when tortured in Communist re-education camps after the Vietcong victory in 1975 – thirty-six years ago.

There actually exists a stark study of this phenomenon. One of my doctors, a Vietnamese woman, gave it to me. This study was conducted by a group of scholars led by Harvard psychiatrist Richard Mollica. I published it in an Internet newspaper edited by a journalism class I taught at Concordia University Irvine last year.

Do you think I could interest any mainstream media outlet in these astonishing findings? No! Not even conservative papers wanted to know about this. You see, it makes people feel too uncomfortable? And do you want to know, why? Because even in our current climate, which is much friendlier toward the military than was the case back in the Sixties and Seventies it is not commodious to think of soldiers as Masks of God, especially as veterans often act strangely – not in line with generally accepted societal standards – and will probably do so for the rest of their lives, as I learned from observing my blind father who became a prominent lawyer but was never “quite right.”

Please pardon my bluntness, but in my ranting I am actually pursuing an agenda. And this agenda comes out of a conviction based on personal experience that made me interrupt my very successful career as a journalist in order to study theology – Lutheran theology – when I was fifty.

I found that neither the ditsy liberal nor the boneheaded right-wing theologoumena dominating religious discourse provide an answer to the quintessentially Lutheran question I raised yesterday: now that we know that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone, what are going to do with the rest of our lives right here in the hidden God’s left-hand kingdom.

And the answer is this: We serve. We serve with guns and pens, in operating theatres and in schools. We serve by giving love and by lovingly receiving love. And it is this message that so often eludes those of us for whom soldiers have risked their lives, and those soldiers who have never been told that their sacrifice is a divinely ordained service; that when they shoot God shoots; that when they suffer they are suffering with God because this is their cross, and God never lays a cross on us that is heavier than we can bear.

This is why the League of Faithful Masks would welcome a network of local chapters in military units around the world. I believe that recognizing each other as divine masks not just in military barracks but also in their relationship with chapters in the civilian world would make a soldier’s life much more rewarding, for it would bring clarity to his vocation.

Mentoring each other to fulfill their function as priests in the left-hand kingdom is more than an exercise of soldierly camaraderie. It also differs from the brotherly love between combatants. It is different in that it is, - well -- priestly. Priests perform sacred rites, and according to Luther the most sacred rite in the secular realm is the service of love.