Remembering feisty lives of those history almost forgot

I'm at the German Protestant Kirchentag in Hamburg. It is as always, brilliant, stimulating, prayerful.
And this is the way it goes, I receive insight from others ...
Dr B attends a Bible study given by Margot Kässmann on the parable of the unjust judge and the widow in Luke 18. Later he tells me about it, brings me the text, telling me not only about the Dorothee Sölle poetry Kässmann interwove into the study, but also talking about the example of Elisabeth Schmitz, who during the years of National Socialism tried repeatedly to convince Karl Barth and others leading the Confessing Church of the need to take up the cause of non-arians in Germany. In 1935 she wrote and published a pamphlet anonymously Zur Lage der deutschen Nichtarier. It was a lucid and sadly prophetic description of what was likely to happen to Jews and others under the National Socilist regime. She sent it to many of the leaders in the Confessing Church. You can read more about her in the German entry on wikipedia and I've quoted in full the passage from Kässmann's Bible study which mentions her at the end of this post.
What moved and shocked me was this - I should know about Elisabeth Schmitz. Decades ago I wrote a dissertation about the Confessing Church and Anti-Semitism. I got a special mention from the jury for what I wrote. Of course that is because at that time my academic adjudicators were as ignorant as I was, few people had heard of Elisabeth Schmitz, copies of what she wrote were just coming to light but were being wrongly attributed to another feisty women of that generation, Marga Meusel. When Schmitz died in 1977, just seven people attended her funeral ...

The witness of so many feisty women and men is lost.
I'm not going to say more, there is no moral to draw from this story, but I am thankful for the researcher's who have brought her writing and action back to us. That speaks to me of resurrection.

Here is the quote from Kässmann's Bible Study yesterday. Perhaps I should add that Bible study in this Kirchentag context was for 7,000 people.

Vor 80 Jahren ergriffen die Nationalsozialisten unter Adolf Hitler die Macht in Deutschland. Eine beispiellose Vernichtung aller Errungenschaften von Humanität und Aufklärung, von Menschenrechten und Religionsfreiheit sollte folgen. Wenige gab es, die das früh erkannten. Ein Beispiel ist für mich Elisabeth Schmitz.

Von 1933 bis 1936 korrespondierte sie mit Karl Barth und versuchte, ihn zu einer Stellungnahme zur so genannten „Judenfrage“ zu bewegen, was dieser aber ablehnte. Im September 1935 verfasste sie ein Memorandum, in dem sie forderte, dass die Bekennende Kirche sich für die entrechteten Juden einsetzen sollte. Sie schrieb unter anderem: „In einer kleinen Stadt werden den jüdischen Kindern von den anderen immer wieder die Hefte zerrissen, wird ihnen das Frühstücksbrot weggenommen und in den Schmutz getreten! Es sind christliche Kinder, die das tun, und christliche Eltern, Lehrer und Pfarrer, die das geschehen lassen!“

Sie wollte den Text auf der dritten Synode der Bekennenden Kirche 1935 vorlegen, aber die Synode beschäftige sich nicht mit der „Judenfrage“. Als Elisabeth Schmitz 1977 verstarb, waren sieben

Menschen bei ihrer Beerdigung ...

Offenbar hat auch diese Frau genervt. Die Kirchen als Institutionen haben in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus versagt, als es darum ging, die Verfolgten, zuallererst die Juden, aber ebenso Kommunisten, Homosexuelle, Zwangsarbeiter, Zeugen Jehovas und viele andere zu schützen. Selbst die Bekennende Kirche. In ökumenischer Gemeinsamkeit aber haben viele Christinnen und Christen Widerstand geleistet gegen Willkür und Unrecht. Das ist ermutigend. Nicht nachlassen. Weiter beten! Und weiter denken!

A passing thought on the 20th July

Today is 20 July, an important day for us personally, but a more important day in history. This was the day in 1944 when a group of army officers decided it was time to act against Hitler ... because of a table leg the bomb against Hitler did not work ...
Yesterday in Rostock I too this photo outside the railway station as we waited for our tranfer to the ferry port. We smiled at the not quite right translation set here in stone. But I smile too in my heart at the sentiment. How lovely that the local railway flower shop has set things up so that olive trees are in front of this sign.
And yet when I turned around and looked out onto the high rise "socialist" housing opposite the railway station I realised that combatting racism and hatred means having good, decent and respectful housing and social systems; transforming attitudes means being willing to transform lives and communities and not hatred take hold in systems.
That kind of transformation take decades and is not only about words but about real deeds that treat everyone with everyone with respect. Rostock is trying to do that, one word, one school, one train, one housing estate at a time ... it's hard work.

Käthe Kollwitz - sculpting for peace

So here are the photos I took at the memorial in Berlin to all victims of war and violence. This sculpture is a copy of a work by Käthe Kollwitz, a mother cradling her dead son. Stephen first introduced me to Kollwitz's work more than 25 years ago and I still find it very powerful and deeply moving.

My first ever blogpost from a high speed train

Dr B and I are sitting in the restaurant carriage of a German ICE train which left Berlin Hauptbahnhof and goes all the way to Interlaken - we'll probably get off in Olten or Bern to catch a connection to Geneva and then take the F bus all the way home. It's been a great time away and also the final phase in Dr B's healing process. On Monday he's going to go back to work, it will have been nearly three months. This week in Berlin has been a real holiday and re-integration to life for him and he seems to have grown in strength as the week progressed - being in his favourite city no doubt helped that, as did having the family from Merseyside with us, it was great fun.

As you can tell this post is really just an excuse to show off how totally connected we now are thanks to our splendid little vodaphone prepaid "surf stick" (I assure you that is a German word!). Bizarrely this German provider will not only give us good value 3G connectivity in Germany but also cheaper connectivity in France than any of the solutions available there. Sometimes cartel capitalism offers the consumer no choice at all and that's the case with mobile connectivity in France at the moment, so we are returning from Berlin with two of these surfsticks. However this is perhaps the moment to launch the campaign for a common European mobile phone with roaming at no extra cost.
You can find out more about sim card deals and options in various countries from a great blog on mobile connectivity here. The guy writing it has 8 sim cards just for Germany which seems a bit over the top to me, he even has one to switch on the heater in his car. Not something we need, we just take the bus.

What is lost is only there in black and white - wandering around the new national gallery in Berlin

Yesterday after walking in the mid day sun in Tiergarten some of us went to the New National Gallery which is in part of former west Berlin that was in no-man's land. The Berlin Philharmonie and Herbert von Karajanstrasse are part of the same space. The whole area around Potsdamerplatz was destroyed at the end of the war, then with building of the wall there was not much reason for business to move there so major cultural buildings were put up in the space. The 19th cnetury church stands in the middle of all of these museums and concert halls, there are no flats or houses in site, yet from the outside at least the church seems to offer some kind of ministry to the world of the performing and decorative arts.
Meanwhile with the fall of the wall Potsdamerplatz became the place where the "triumph of capitalism" needed to become visible and just further down from the Philharmonie is an enormous shopping centre. It's quite a strange bit of city architecture - born of war and the divisions of history. I do wonder at the hubris of the new development - although of course I visited the shops too.
The permanent exhibition at the gallery tells the story of German history through the art and artists of the time - or maybe that should be it tells the story of German art through its history. At various points in the exhibition there are black and white reproductions of "lost" works - mostly art willfully burnt and destroyed befor the war. It's a powerful way of pointing to the holes in the collection - at first you don't quite notice that something is different.
The 20th century art in the gallery is challenging and powerful stuff, trying very often to tell a story with brash colours and satiricial themes - even if the horrors of the Third reich later went well beyond satire. The colours and lighting of the famous painting by George Grosz particularly struck me yesterday. Looking at the paintings I thought about how Christians and church leaders sometimes go on about the importance of the prophetic word, speaking the truth to power. Yet here were artists - often atheists or like Max Beckman questioning "God's mistakes" - who were painting, sculpting and drawing their perhaps much more prophetic view of society. One of the figures in Grosz' painting is a judge who could be mistaken for a cleric ...
uncomfortable and powerful viewing.
Meanwhile I was rather less convinced by Rudolf Stingel's carpet and chandelier installation in the upstairs area. Also black and white but it didn't quite tell a story for me but then I've never been very fond of patterned carpets.

Stolpersteine - history under your feet

Late last night going back to Nollendorfplatz with our friends Horst and Gaby they showed us two Stolpersteine in the pavement just outside an ordinary house in a side street.

I hadn't come across these small local memorials to people who were deported during the Nazi time. My research this morning tells me that these "stumbling blocks" - more than 1800 in Hamburg and 1600 in Berlin - have already become the world's most delocalised memorial. They were the idea of the artist Gunter Demnig and have spread outside Germany to Austria. The great part of the project is that it involves local people and schools in the research and also to raise money to make the blocks. It is about discovering the lost stories of local people who were forcibly removed. A real example of how the artistic imagination can encourage research, build community today with a sense of the past.
Here's an extract from wikipedia about the project:

Schools, relatives, and various organizations investigate facts about people, who were deported or persecuted during the regime of Nazi Germany.Once the investigation work has been done, Demnig manufactures a concrete cube of 10 cm/ 4 in, which he covers with a sheet of brass. Then he adds the writing “Hier wohnte” (Here lived), the name, year of birth and the fate: mostly the date of deportation and of death. The Stolperstein is then put down flush in the pavement/sidewalk in front of the last residence of the victim. The financial requirements are covered by donations, collections, individual citizens, contemporary witnesses, school classes, or communities. One Stolperstein costs €95.

A creative commons Bible translation in German

Wolfgang Loest is one of the initiators of a brilliant creative, ecumenical online project to make two new creative commons translations of the Bible into German. The "Offene Bibel" idea is that there needs to be an online version of the Bible in German available to people and the churches that is not subject to copyright like the 1984 Luther translation.
The idea is to work on both a translation into modern everyday German and offer a study translation which would be closer to the sentence structure of the original biblical languages. And this online translation would be crowd-sourced - not a translation by a few professional translators but any Christian from whatever tradition who knows how to translate from Hebrew and Greek can participate. The project came about as a result of a conversation at last year's Bremen Kirchentag.
You can follow the progress of the translation here and read an interview with Loest about the details of the project here.
The association to support the project should be launched officially at the barcamp kirche 2.0 event in Frankfurt, if enough people turn up. I really hope it gets off the ground, crowd-sourcing an ecumenical Bible translation is a brilliant idea.

barcamp church and bar camp ecumenism?

Over on evangelisch.de the new German Protestant web portal they have loads of great ideas and initiatives - they launched the Twitter Bible in German last year which is great fun and now they're inviting people to a "Barcamp" on churches, social media, web 2.0 and so on. It's taking place in Frankfurt on May1-2 and you can find out more here. I'm really quite tempted to go along.

The barcamp idea sounds fun and makes me wonder about how we could build something similar into our international ecumenical meetings. We've got to find new ways of doing things. These days methods and content need to mesh more clearly. For church bureaucracies and hierarchies these new informal and networked ways of organizing, making decisions and doing things are quite challenging. I still rather like the idea of trying to do barcamp ecumenism, an unconference conference sounds like the sort of thing I'd quite enjoy!

More links, opinion pieces, reactions, interviews on Margot Kässmann

Retired Bishop Bärbel Wartenberg Potter has an interview in Der Spiegel with the title: "Sexism has a jealous face". She describes Kässmann as highly talented and as speaking the kind of language that could be understood by people within and beyond the church. She goes on to say how Kässmann was not afraid to make herself vulnerable but then also says that women have less experience of coping with public failure than men and that woemn's failure is often much more harshly judged than men's. Women, particularly in leadership roles are still pioneers in the church. She goes on to say that if Kässmann returns to a parish she has many qualities that will be able to be used there.
Yesterday on TV there was already speculation abotu her going in to politics ...
Meanwhile there is an excellent reflection on evangelisch.de by Olaf Droste, a Bremen pastor who works in radio. His piece was broadcast this morning on Radio Bremen/NDR. He takes up once more her theme of never falling so low as not to be caught by God's hand and adds that no one says that god's hand is particularly well upholstered ... it's been a hard fall. He describes her resignation and his own sadness, even if he knows that other faces will now emerge to lead the church.
evangelisch.de also have a a whole series of articles and comments here. Meanwhile the EKD site has various reports on this weekend's EKD Council meeting in Tutzing and this report which made me cry ... There are of course a number of reports on epd. I have good friends working at both epd and EKD and I dare not phone them to see how they are, I can just imagine how hard all in communication and the adminsitration must be working at the moment. Take care out there folks and hope you get some sleep soon - maybe next week?

This is what made me cry - not sure why, but this has certainly been an emotional time

„Evangelisch aus gutem Grund“ – so hieß die Kampagne einer Landeskirche vor einigen Jahren, die sprichwörtlich geworden ist. Und so hegen an diesem Tag viele Menschen, die der Kirche nahe sind, neben den unvermeidlich traurigen auch wieder hellere Gedanken. Dankbarkeit, Traurigkeit und Zuversicht - es gibt Tage, in denen diese Gefühle ineinander greifen. Die Herrnhuter Losung des heutigen Tages stellt solcher Gefühlslage einen hoffnungsvollen geleitenden Vers zur Seite:

„Der Herr wird seinen Engel mit dir senden und Gnade zu deiner Reise geben.“ (1. Mose 24, 40)

Margot Kässmann was a bishop for more than 10 years and a national church leaders for three short months. I should be thankful that I have lived at least to see that. I sort of doubt that I shall see another woman church leader of her stature in my lifetime. Perhaps in my sadness I should trust more. A friend at work said to me today that she is still showing politicians the way to deal with these sorts of crises - quickly and straightforwardly - I did something wrong, I step down from public office. Tony Blair of course never thought he did do anything wrong. Silvio Berlusconi is busy rewriting the law to try not claim he didn't do anything wrong and Robert Mugabe is still depriving Archbishop John Sentamu of wearing his dogcollar.

Präses Nikolaus Schneider takes over as chair of the EKD Council

I like it that Nikolaus Schneider is not a bishop, or should I say that he is not called a bishop but a präses or president. As deputy chair of the EKD council he has now taken over as chair of the Council following Margot Kässmann's resignation, at least in the interim and perhaps for longer. Given the voting last Autumn - he came a very strong second to Kässmann and none of the other bishops or church leaders came anywhere close - I think he will be a strong candidate for Chair more permanently, but we'll have to see how church politics play out.
Schneider is head of the Evangelical Church in the Rheinland which is a United Church with strong Reformed elements - very few Reformed churches have bishops most have moderators, stated clerks, presidents or some similar name (the tiny Polish Reformed Church is one exception). It was in the Rheinland Church that the Barmen Declaration was drawn up and agreed in 1934. It's a church with strong ecumenical links, particularly to minority Reformed churches elsewhere in Europe and the world.
Schneider has highlighted four areas in initial interviews: the question of social policy and how the poorest are treated; global justice, ecumenism and climate change. He supported Margot Kässmann's position on Afghanistan and seems set to continue to take on the political agenda for the protestant churches in Germany.
Schneider speaks excellent English and some French. I've worked with him on the French Reformed Church's ministries commission over two weekends. He was keen to see what his church could learn from the way we interviewed candidates and discerned about future ministers.
A good man, he now has a very difficult job. May God give him courage and strength as well as laughter and lightness, these are not easy times for the churches in Germany - Protestant or Catholic.

Margot Kässmann - however low you may fall it is always into God's hand

Since the news broke earlier this week that Margot Kässmann had been found to have driven through a red light while nearly three times over the legal limit there has been a huge furore in the German media. Today she confirmed her decision to step down from all of her church offices - both as chairperson of the EKD Council and as bishop of Hanover.
It is difficult for me to say just how desperately sad I am about this. I quite understand how she felt she would no longer have any credibility or self respect if she tried to speak out on moral or political issues. It is nevertheless a tragedy. She is a hugely talented leader and theologian, a brilliant preacher, creative writer and speaker. The issues she raises strike chords with people's experience of God and life, she understands how to talk about prayer and faith in that sort of way.
Drink driving is stupid and dangerous and could be deadly, she will pay the legal consequences of her stupidity. Meanwhile, the church loses one of the very few world class women leaders it had. Somehow I fear that the reaction to this will be to play safe, to not choose the creative edge again but to choose the safe candidate. I suppose part of me feels that a man in this position would probably have tried to sit out the media storm, and might have been given a slightly easier time because a man would not have been quite so high profile in the first place ...
I already miss all that Margot would have been in her position as church leader, I feel as if part of my future has been taken away. And yet she remains one of my role models. Roles models are not supposed to be perfect, just to be people trying to be disciples of Jesus Christ.
As I read the statement she made below I cried as I got to the end where shes says that she knows from having lived through other crises that however low you fall it is always into God's hand.
One way and another it's been quite an emotional day. Margot may you continue to be held in God's hand and may those hands also hold all of us who today are so very, very sad ...

24.02.2010 16:21
Erklärung der Vorsitzenden des Rates der Evangelischen Kirche in
Deutschland (EKD) Landesbischöfin Dr. Margot Käßmann
Hannover (ots) - Es gilt das gesprochene Wort!

Am vergangenen Samstagabend habe ich einen schweren Fehler gemacht,
den ich zutiefst bereue. Aber auch wenn ich ihn bereue, und mir alle
Vorwürfe, die in dieser Situation berechtigterweise zu machen sind,
immer wieder selbst gemacht habe, kann und will ich nicht darüber
hinweg sehen, dass das Amt und meine Autorität als Landesbischöfin
sowie als Ratsvorsitzende beschädigt sind. Die Freiheit, ethische und
politische Herausforderungen zu benennen und zu beurteilen, hätte ich
in Zukunft nicht mehr so wie ich sie hatte. Die harsche Kritik etwa an
einem Predigtzitat wie "Nichts ist gut in Afghanistan" ist nur
durchzuhalten, wenn persönliche Überzeugungskraft uneingeschränkt
anerkannt wird.

Einer meiner Ratgeber hat mir gestern ein Wort von Jesus Sirach mit
auf den Weg gegeben: "Bleibe bei dem, was dir dein Herz rät" (37,17).
Und mein Herz sagt mir ganz klar: Ich kann nicht mit der notwendigen
Autorität im Amt bleiben. So manches, was ich lese, ist mit der Würde
dieses Amtes nicht vereinbar. Aber mir geht es neben dem Amt auch um
Respekt und Achtung vor mir selbst und um meine Gradlinigkeit, die mir
viel bedeutet.

Hiermit erkläre ich, dass ich mit sofortiger Wirkung von allen meinen
kirchlichen Ämtern zurücktrete. Ich war mehr als 10 Jahre mit Leib und
Seele Bischöfin und habe all meine Kraft in diese Aufgabe gegeben. Ich
bleibe Pastorin der hannoverschen Landeskirche. Ich habe 25 Jahre nach
meiner Ordination vielfältige Erfahrungen gesammelt, die ich gern an
anderer Stelle einbringen werde.

Es tut mir Leid, dass ich viele enttäusche, die mich gebeten haben, im
Amt zu bleiben, ja die mich vertrauensvoll in diese Ämter gewählt
haben. Ich danke allen Menschen, die mich so wunderbar getragen und
gestützt haben, für alle Grüße und Blumen, die meiner Seele sehr gut
getan haben in diesen Tagen. Dem Rat der EKD danke ich sehr, dass er
mir gestern Abend deutlich sein Vertrauen ausgesprochen hat.

Ich danke allen Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeitern in der hannoverschen
Landeskirche und in der EKD, die mich haupt- und ehrenamtlich
unterstützt haben. Insbesondere danke ich meinem engsten Team, das mir
in manchem Sturm die Treue gehalten hat. Ich danke allen Freundinnen
und Freunden, allen guten Ratgebern. Und ich danke meinen vier
Töchtern, dass sie meine Entscheidung so klar und deutlich mittragen
und heute hier sind.

Zuletzt: Ich weiß aus vorangegangenen Krisen: Du kannst nie tiefer
fallen als in Gottes Hand. Für diese Glaubensüberzeugung bin ich auch
heute dankbar.

Dr. Margot Käßmann, 24. Februar 2010

Originaltext: EKD Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland Digitale
Pressemappe: http://www.presseportal.de/pm/55310 Pressemappe via RSS :
http://www.presseportal.de/rss/pm_55310.rss2

Word of the day "Tankstelle für die Seele"

epd reports that a second motorway church may be inaugurated on the A9 in Germany. This time it is a Roman Catholic Tankstelle für die Seele that is being planned. The phrase made me smile as I'm sure someone had alot of pleasure coming up with it. "A filling station for the soul" would be a translation I suppose, I like the idea, perhaps because I have spent most of the day beginning to sort out various medical matters. I could do with a filling station for both body and spirit!

The German twitter Bible gives an insight into the best known parts of the Bible

So Dr B has returned from his 20th anniversary tour of East Germany and Berlin with a copy of Und Gott chillte - which is the whole Bible tweeted in German. I've been reading the introduction and it's interesting, though not so surprising to see that there are favourite bits of the Bible which got tweeted again and again. The challenge for evangelisch.de was to get the whole Bible tweeted - even the more obscure bits - as part of the world record earlier this year.
In the end more than 3000 of us contributed tweets - including Dr B and myself. Tweeting in German is quite a challenge as German words are of course longer!
Anyway the introduction to the twitter Bible says that as they started tweeting at the Kirchentag it became obvious that people wanted to tweet the creation story, Noah's ark, the birth of Jesus and passages from the Song of Solomon. Isaiah was apparently not on the favourites list. Interesting that we create our own Bibles which are a reduced version of the original.
Anyway I'm looking forward to reading Und Gott chillte as part of my Advent observance. However, to get the full variety of the different tweets I'll still have to go the evangelisch.de twitter website. It seems that the editors chose their favourite tweets for each Bible passage and haven't published every tweet that was written. Maybe one day there will be some interesting German hermeneutical studies on how these redactional choices were made!

German Protestants launch evangelisch.de

Earlier this year evangelisch.de undertook the brilliant and daring project of tweeting the whole Bible in German. A printed version of the tweeted German Bible will be launched later this year at Frankfurt, I'm really looking forward to getting a copy.
Today evanglisch.de launched a really great new portal in Germany. It's got great wide-ranging content and will take me a long time to even begin to look around. Today is also the day that the EKD begins meeting in Kassel about its reform process.

60 years of the Grundgesetz

While the Kirchentag is celebrating its 60th birthday Germany is also marking the 60th anniversary of the German basic law or Grundgesetz. This is an important date, some political scientists say it takes three generations (or sixty years) for democracy to really take hold. Of course the Grundsesetz has only been the basic law for some citizens of the Federal Republic for 20 years part of Germany. When it was first written it was not intended to be a lasting constitution, as it clearly saw itself in terms of being an interim constitution drawn up to regulate political life in one part of the country before unity of the two parts of Germany could be achieved. There were discussions in 1989-90 as to whether it could really serve as the basic law for both parts of Germany. Dr B will no doubt add more to this.
The graphic comes from the Rheinischer Merkur and looks to me very much like a take on some artwork Klaus Staeck did in 1990 called Ordnung muss sein. Anyway, despite not at all being my usual reading the RM also has a feature about the GDR, Leipzig and the road to German unity.