Mao's Great Famine - the redundancy of courage or the arbitrary banality of evil?

On the last day of our holiday I read in almost a single sitting Frank Dikötter's brilliant account of Mao's so-called "great leap forward" between 1958-1961. Mao's Great Famine makes for fairly desperate reading and I am still shell-shocked from what I have learned from Dikötter's scholarship. The scale of the sheer wanton destruction of human beings and of the natural environment is beyond comprehension. Scholars disagree how many "additional" deaths occurred because of the famine and the violent terror that accompanied it, but it seems to be between 30 and 45 million people.
Part of me was fascinated to read Dikötter's disection of how power, politics and decision-making took place as the great leap forwards was implemented across the party. Part of me simply felt deeply, deeply sick.
Very occasionally individuals try to act against the system, to hide grain for their villages or their family, to question the irrationality of planting in a way that will kill the seed, to say no. Nearly always they encounter a brutal end. Towards the end of the book we hear about the speech of the one highly placed party official, Liu Shaoqui who actually questions and condemns the leadership - having seen the impact of famine on his home province. "History will judge you and me, even cannibalism will go into the books." We are told that Mao is present for the speech. We are made to understand that the leader will bide his time to have his revenge and this comrade will be purged in the cultural revolution. The famine proved to Mao that the party, and he as its leader, exercised almost total control over the most populous nation on earth. His detached political pleasure at the destruction is frightening.
Reading it I was reminded of the title of Timothy Mo's novel about East Timor "the Redundancy of Courage". The hopelessness of resistance in such a system - the hopelessness of even being able to find out what forms resistance might have taken when destruction is so massive and access to information is managed - the only photos of the time of the great famine are propaganda photos. Sometimes even the story cannot survive yet Dikötter uses the detailed information he finds in the archives he has been allowed access to, to try and tell the story of individuals and communities. He gives people, and the tiny shards of information he finds out about them, a story and a name. It is very moving.
However, you cannot read history like this as a theologian without feeling deeply challenged. There is a passing reference to hope about two-thirds into the book. How destructive hope was for people, giving them energy to struggle on. People hoped that "if only the great leader knew" then things could change for the better, for a more rational future. In the face of this level of destruction of human beings and of humanity how do you preach about God's care for each individual, counting the hairs on each of our heads?
After reading a book like this - I have no answers just questions.

Ugly Stories are human stories ...

This morning a package arrived addressed to Dr B but containing a present for me of the book Ugly Stories by Enrique Mayer. It was a wonderful surprise to get the book because I had been looking at another book of Enrique's online in recent weeks but hadn't even spoken to Stephen about that. I'd been looking at a book called "The articulated Peasant" and wondering about how a similar sort of title could work in urban and semi urban settings. The subtitle "Household economics in the Andes" triggered some passing thoughts on oikos, oikoumene and economics - how might economics or ecumenics be articulated in our different secular and ecclesial contexts? Perhaps I'll even have a chance to return to these passing thoughts one day.
Mayer is professor of anthropology at Yale University where the site says he:
specializes in Andean agricultural systems and Latin American peasantries. His work has shown that regions characterized by diversity (such as mountainous environments, small islands, and "marginal" lands), not suitable for agribusiness, are exploited by peasants in strikingly similar ways. Worldwide, peasant forms of production predominate and persist in these environments. These agricultural systems are important to those concerned about world genetic resources, or about environmental conservation, and to scholars who seek an understanding of ancient and yet also very contemporary Non Western rural life-ways.

I have never travelled to Peru nor have I ever met Enrique Mayer (yet), though it did make me smile that in some of the reviews of "Ugly Stories" he's described as "of Peruvian ancestry". I grew up looking at pictures of my parents wedding and being shown a good looking young man on my father's side of the family, someone I never saw at family parties, "that's Enrique" I would be told and his name always sounded splendidly exotic compared to the other members of the family. I suppose he is my second or third cousin and I did manage to engineer a meeting between Stephen and this part of my family when Dr B was travelling to Peru in 1996. By chance Enrique was also there, in part researching for what would eventually become "ugly stories". Over the years news of my family in Peru would reach me through both expected and unexpected routes - an Oxfam worker lodging with my landlady in Oxford who had worked with Maria Scurrah née Mayer - their aunt Lotte Carrive telling me my own mistakes in German mirrored those of Renate Millones née Mayer - and also regaling us with exploits of buying handbags when visiting (and embarassing) the family in South America.
Anyway it is wonderful to have a copy of Enrique's book for so many reasons. I've already devoured the introduction, acknowledgements and first chapter over breakfast. I was moved by his desciption of the painstaking way the book finally came into being - discarding much that was written more than a decade ago and then finally writing approximately a chapter a year each summer, relying on the encouragement of others, feedbook from those he read some of the stories to. It spoke to me of how things can come to fruition even after a long germination and growing time. Ugly stories are both human and deeply political, the book meshes together oral stories with scholarship. I'm looking forward to devouring more of it on my travels in coming weeks. And through reading I in some way get to meet the young man on my parents wedding photos as well as discover new areas of history.
I do also have to admit that the gift of a book at breakfast did not stop me buying further books from the Librairie Centrale at our trip round the market this morning.

La rebelle - a bottle of wine in the feminist tradition

I said it would take at least 10 posts to begin to do justice to our feminist theology evening last night and I sense that I am probably going to run out of energy before I get to the end of what I want to say - unlike our brilliant 89 year old speaker Jacqueline Berenstein Wavre.

We always give our speakers a present to say thank you for their time and last night Ria carefully included a bottle of local pinot noir wine from this vinyard which celebrates local Genevan and Swiss personalities for it various "cuvées".

La rebelle is the female rebel and as soon as Jacqueline received it she started to talk to us about Emilie Gourd in whose memory it is named. I did not know that Gourd had founded an early feminist journal called "le mouvement féministe" in 1912. It will celebrate its 100 anniversary in just under two years. The journal has gone through problems in recent years as has much print media but is continuing with a web presence which I think I may have manged to track down here.

As is often the case when you remember one person from the past you also recall others and speaking about Emilie Gourd prompted Jacqueline to talk to us also about her friend Jeanne Hersch, who had been a close friend of her husband's and a passionate defender of human rights.
So much to learn about about women's history, so much to read, so much to be enlivened by ... just like good rebellious wine!

"La Rebelle" rend hommage à Emilie Gourd, Genevoise qui se battra toute sa vie pour la condition féminine. Ce n’est qu’en 1960, quatorze ans après sa mort, que son rêve se réalise enfin : le droit de vote est accordé aux citoyennes genevoises.

When events you have lived through become walks of history

At one time I had intended to call my GDR memoir "Herr Modrow walks home" Hans Modrow was leader of the SED in Dresden at the end of the GDR. Many attribute the fact that early in October things took a peaceful turn in Dresden to his leadership at the time - he was in the end the premier of the GDR when the first free elections took place.

Today coming out of the Hauptbahnhof I was confronted by the Wege in die Freiheit street installation. I remember those days in early October 1989 so well ... then less than a year later on 3 October 1990 Germany was united. Who has even heard of or remembers Hans Modrow now? A trivial pursuit question in a very specialised history section.

Walking through the streets of Dresden and finding my way to the Ibis hotel where the Kirchentag is putting us up and realising it is the same hotel we stayed in when we started our honeymoon here in Dresden is quite an odd trip down memory lane. It looks the same but it doesn't at all feel the same ...
everything has been so repackaged and events are such a long time in the past already.

My heart loves this part of Germany. Coming to Dresden has shown me how much this is part of me and I am still part of this history - not just from 20 years ago but from further back still. My German grandmother came from further east still, Breslau, now Wroclaw. The streets here speak to me, even without the history installation, but perhaps without that visual reminder I wouldn't have begun to listen to the streets talking.

Of course I never did write a memoir - maybe I'll have to change that and finally type up my diaries for the 25th anniversary.

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.

History: how do we live with it?

We have been walking aorund in an overcast Berlin and seem to have already packed masses in to the day and it's not yes 18.00. Time now for a rest and a think.
The flats where we are staying overlook the extraordinary memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, just around the corner is the Brandenburg Gate with on one side Unter den Linden and on the other the Strasse des 17ten Junis ... We caught a bus this afternoon on the corner of Rosenstrasse, where the non-Jewish wives of Jewish imprisoned men protested against the imprisonment of their husbands just around the corner from the Gestapo headquarters. Read more here and in Nathan Stoltzfus' book Resistance of the Heart.
We spent time going around the exhibition about the path to German parliamentary democracy in the German Dom on Gendarmenmarkt, (the English title is: Milestones - Setbacks - Sidetracks and the German title Wege - Irrwege - Umwege). This was the exhibition that used to be housed years ago in the Reichstag before the wall came down and the German parliament finally moved back there. It was interesting to go around it today with young people who are about the age I was when I first went around it with my father. Some of the most powerful images were those of the total destruction of German cities at the end of the war.
Looking the French Dom opposite led us to talk about the French Protestant refugees who had been welcomed by the Elector of Brandenburg following persecution in France. And then we went on to Bebelsplatz and looked down through the glass in the ground onto the completely empty bookshelves beneath - this, the square just next to the Kaiser's palace and opposite the university, is where the Nazi's famously burned books early in the Third Reich. Yet thousands walk past without even noticing this very discreet monument or memorial ... walking over history.
From here we walked up the Unter de Linden and went in to what was formerly the tomb of the unknown soldier following the first world war and which became a memorial to the victims of fascism in GDR times and which now - rather than an eternal flame and goose-stepping soldiers - houses an absolutely wonderful and desperately powerful sculpture by Käthe Kollwitz with the simple dedication "to all victims of war and violence". I had never been inside before and didn't know about this change which deeply moved me. The scupture shows a woman cradling her dead son. Not only the male soldier "heros" of war are remembered but the ordinary families suffering violence, a huge difference in how history can be viewed and the conscious placing of women at the heart of remembrance.
After that we headed to the Reichstag, for coffee and cakes, but also to show the family Richard Rogers' extraordinary dome. The building of parliamentary democracy in Germany has become a worldwide tourist attraction, it really makes the building belong to the people, makes what happens in the building a bit more attractive too. Politics can become a bit more fun if its architecture is like this.
So our day has been a little bit like an exercise in a historiography of public buildings and official monuments.
Walking up and down in the dome, looking across the once divided city, seeing the golden domes of the synagogue and cathedrals, looking at the hideous and beautiful highrise buildings of capitalism and socialism, the victory column and gate of the princely past and the huge sky, I thought about the huge discontinuity and continuity that are part of German history. Then I wondered about how nations build up national myths of continuity - some have integrity, others less so. What is amazing about wandering around the central parts of Berlin is how the ambiguity of continuity and discontinuity are made visible in the ways exhibitions are organised and memorials are built.
How do we live with history? My neighbour in Ferney recently said to me "We need to remember that wherever we put our feet the dust we are walking through is the dust of humanity". I felt that very much today walking around the city where my father was born. He was 15 when he had to leave and yet this is the city his daughter still wants to return to. My way of living with history perhaps.

The 65th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden - how do we write history?

Over on Holy Disorder Dr B has written a post about the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, a sign perhaps that he is beginning to get better.
This morning on the radio there was an interview with someone from bomber command trying to claim the moral highground for the bombers - he deplored that there was no memorial to the bomber pilots in Britain whereas we had a memorial to women's contribution to the war.
His derision of the role of women in the British war effort irritated me no end as you can imagine, but it is also interesting that we think that the "real work" of war is more about bombing civilians, destroying cities, churches and galleries than ploughing fields, typing papers, caring for children making sure food is prepared. Decrying as insignificant the supposedly "soft" role that women performed is also an ignorant approach, given historical studies that put forward the idea that one of the things that may have finally held Germany back in the second world war was the persistent refusal of the Third Reich to involve women in the labour force.
However, leaving my feminist rant to one side, what shocks me about the debate in Britain on "Bomber Harris" and on the whole bombing policy of Germany, is the way that those who continue to question the policy of bombing were called "revisionists" by the person interviewed on the radio this morning and this went unchallenged. In terms of the Second World War the "revisionists" are those who claim that the Holocaust didn't happen, putting those who question Allied bombing policies in the same camp is really not on. I am very concerned also at the ideological approach to history. This was war, it was not all good or right, wrong decisions were taken. Any memorial to those who did the "heroic" bombing surely needs to be held together with a memorial to those non-heroic victims in Dresden, Coventry, London, Hamburg, Berlin and elsewhere who lost their lives to those heroic bombs and the ensuing destruction. Memorials errected only to the supposed heros do not tell us the whole story of the horror and futility of war for ordinary people.

When I first read Stephen's post about Dresden this morning I actually thought about Rolf Hochhuth's book A German Love Story - Eine Liebe in Deutschland. It's years since I read it and as with many of my favourite books it seems to have disappeared from my shelves, must have lent it to someone. The book charts a love story between a Polish prisoner of war and a German woman in Brombach, it is based on fact and on Hochhuth's interviews with people and also has fascinating wider picture excerpt from Churchill's war rooms as he plans for the bombing of german cities. It is a hard read - the reader struggles with the story, the reportage and the history, feeling buffetted by the different prose forms and time lines. It holds together the atrocities of war, the personal tragedy of war and leaves the reader with more questions than answers. Hochhuth is best known for his polemical play The Deputy, Der Stellvertreter, which charts Kurt Gerstein's story. Until I started writing this I did not know that his play "Soldiers" which implicated Churchill in bombing of civilian targets was initially banned in Britain.

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.

Looking back to Basel 1989 at Holy Disorder

Dr B has been writing about the many anniversaries marked this year in Germany. He's also written in more detail about the 20th anniversary of the 1st European Ecumenical Assembly held in Basel from 15-21st May 1989

In no church assembly before or since Basel has the ecumenical agenda been so affected by and linked to the dynamic of political changes in Europe," said Joachim Garstecki, a Catholic theologian who served as an advisor on peace issues to East Germany's Protestant churches, and who traveled with the 24 activists to the Swiss city (see Episcopal Life's pick up of an ENI story).

Multiple identity - the faith(s) of Felix, Abraham and Moses Mendelssohn

You may be able listen again to a fascinating programme about faith, identity, integration and music made by Sheila Hayman, a descendant of Felix Mendelssohn's sister Fanny

I’d always known about the Mendelssohn connexion, and I’d always felt the sense of not quite belonging in our family – my father has been, in his life, a Jew, a Lutheran, an Anglican, a Quaker and a Moslem - but I’d never connected the two until a family gathering four years ago, when I heard about Moses Mendelssohn for the first time.

The programme charts Felix's response to and promotion of Bach's music and also shows how his dual faith inheritance can also be traced in his music.

Hayman talks to conductor Kurt Masur, an Aryan boy in 1930s Berlin, forbidden to listen to Mendelssohn, and Claus Moser, a Jewish boy in Berlin at the same time, forbidden to listen to Beethoven and consoled by Mendelssohn. Steven Isserlis shows how Mendelssohn's own struggle between his two faiths can be heard in his music.

The Moses, Abraham and Felix Mendelsohn story is of integration, translation, language learning, of taking the path of rationalism and then of conversion when this did not fully satisfy society of the time. It is also interesting to see something of a dual perspective coming out as his work progresses, one part of "Elijah" is regularly used in Orthodox Ashkenazi synagogues as the scrolls are returned after being read. Even though it is not Jewish music as such it sounds Jewish and so is sung.
The story is of course also one of anti-semitism, Wagner and Schumann's musical anti-semitism - no doubt fuelled by not a little professional jealousy - and wider anti-semitism in German society of the 19th and 20th centuries. Despite the last practising Jew in the family having died in 1870s, Mendelssohn's descendants in the 1930s including Sheila Hayman's father, either have to flee or to distance themselves completely from their Jewish roots in order to survive.
Meanwhile it struck me that the two pieces of music most chosen for traditional weddings in Britain are by Mendelssohn and Wagner.
The programme is a moving account of the struggles of a mixed identity, bringing together philosophy, religion and the arts, well worth a listen if you get the chance to hear a repeat. There is also an interesting personal account of how part of the family escaped the death camps here.

Visiting the past and celebrating Holy Disorder

Dr B is on a tour around the past and the present in central Germany this week. He is in Erfurt today but yesterday visited Greppin where we lived for six months in 1990. He's been posting photos and thoughts to the Holy Disorder blog. It was quite a shock just now to see pictures of where we used to live and to be taken back to thinking about the people I lived and worked alongside in the dying days of the GDR.
Anyway there is a post here about today's launch of the Holy Disorder campaign to remember the 20th anniversary of the peaceful revolution but also to underline the need for Christians to be involved in politics today. You can also read about the "light sculpture" that's been commissioned to represent the texts of the Ecumenical Assembly.

Women as religious leaders in Japan

Thre is a really interesting ENI article on how women played a key leadership role in Japan's religions in the medieaval period.
I've posted more about it to the Women in Ministries blog.

But here's a taster:
"Networking with these women predecessors from the past in their imaginations might empower today's women leaders in their resistance against familial, social, religious, and political misogyny." said Nawata Ward.
"Also, Christian women leaders might carefully find some enriching resources in Japan's Buddhist and Shinto cultural traditions while being critical in assessing what it means to be Christian leaders in a predominantly non-Christian environment," she added.
In writing the book, she became aware that there had been many women leaders who were part of earlier mission movements who created their own ministries.
Nawata Ward added, "I would like to have a network of scholars, researchers and leaders from the ecumenical Church who might be interested in resurrecting these women leaders' stories from Goa, Macao, Manila, China, Vietnam, Brazil, Ethiopia, England, Canada, and perhaps in other places that I have not even imagined during the early modern period and beyond."

Digitalising Bonhoeffer's papers

Madeline Chambers has written an interesting piece for Faith World about an appeal for funds to digitalise the Paper's of Dietrich Bonheoffer, a prominent member of the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany.

The Berlin state library says it needs 40,000 euros to save the documents which it counts as one of its most prized collections. It wants to put about 6,200 pages of his work on the Internet to make them more widely available.

The papers include the farewell letter Bonhoeffer wrote to his parents before his execution in a concentration camp in 1945, just days before the end of World War Two, for opposing Hitler. He was 39.

Bonhoeffer's legacy is fascinating. His life story speaks deeply to people around the world even today. Here was a Christian not only committed to and interested in theology but also fully engaged in a personal very costly way with the society of his time and place. The struggle with issues of pacifism and how far one can go ethically to combat evil are still live ones for our own time.

There's also a translation interest. For more than a decade a group of translator and scholars have been working on a new English translation of his complete works and much of this has now been published.

Meanwhile I must also remember to mention this project to my colleagues at the WCC library where the archives also house a few letters from Bonhoeffer.

Word of the day - Vergangenheitsbewältigung

Vergangenheitsbewältigung is not an easy word to translate. Leo will give you "coming to terms with the past" but although this is correct, the historical event that hangs over Vergangenheitsbewältigung is the Holocaust, the Shoah. To some extent for many Germans in the second half of the 20th century the word meant living with the immeasurable weight and guilt of genocide - a past that cannot be come to terms with.
Genocide cannot be come to terms with. Sense cannot be made out of slaughter. And yet human beings try to - we dare to speak of reparation, forgiveness, restorative justice, reconciliation ...

Dealing with that past has been part of me all my life. Estimates say as many as 11 million died, 6 million of them Jews. There are almost no Jews left to be buried in new graves in the Weissensee Jewish cemetry where my great grandparents are buried.

How do we deal with this past? This so-called ceasura in western history? Can horror be overcome?

As I watch images from Gaza, I cannot do so without thinking of the ghetto in Warsaw. Of course the scale of death is not the same, but death is death, injustice is injustice and wrong is wrong. Is the world's focus on this part of the Middle East conflict part of our own way of trying to deal with a past that cannot be come to terms with? A product of our sense of guilt?
How do we deal with our feelings of rage and helplessness to change things?

In the prayers of peace we are saying each day this week we use that powerful book from the Hebrew scriptures, the book of Lamentations.

My eyes are spent with weeping;
my stomach churns;
my bile is poured out on the ground
because of the destruction of my people,
because infants and babes faint
in the streets of the city. (Lamentations 2.11)

And also this from Jeremiah and Job:

A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more. (Jer 31:15)

Even when I cry out, "Violence!' I am not answered;
I call aloud, but there is no justice. (Job 19:7)

I lament my own lack of integrity, and lack of discernment and learning about the Israeli-Palestinian issue over the decades. I lament in dry-eyed horror and shock at pictures of dead babies, families and futures crushed. I need verses from the Bible to speak, otherwise my lips would not find words. Enraged I lament a discredited US president telling the world that Israel has the right to protect itself in this premeditated disproportionate way.
My compassion is fatigued. My anger dull. I make no sense of this slaughter. I find no words.
And so I try to pray ...

The 'selective dismantling' of history

While Dr B was attending a conference on dealing with the past of East Germany, that past was -quite literally- being dismantled less than a kilometre from where the conference was taking place. This was all that was left on Friday of the "Palast der Republik", the 'palace of the republic' constructed by the GDR authorities in 1976 on the site of the Berlin Schloss that they had demolished in 1950. Not only did the palace house the GDR parliament (which in communist times met only a few times each year to approve what had already been decided by the Politburo) but a conference centre, a theatre, concert hall, restaurants and even a bowling alley. It was here that the first freely-elected East German parliament in 1990 voted for the unification of Germany. Three days before the unification on 3 October 1990 it was discovered that the palace was contaminated by asbestos and the lights went out on the people's palace. Since then a political and ideological battle has raged as to what to do with the site: while some wanted the palace of the republic to be rebuilt, others wanted the site to be cleared and the Berlin Schloss to be rebuilt. Still others wanted a completely new contemporary building to mark the site at which German unity was decided. The political constellation of forces decided to rebuild the Schloss, or more precisely to rebuild the facades of the schloss as part of a complex housing museums, hotels and leisure facilities. The Berlin state government has a whole web site (in English) devoted to the process of dismantling the palace, with an updated web cam photo of the building site.The winner of the architectural competition was announced on Friday, the day the last remnants of the palace of the republic were to have been cleared away. Unfortunately, the last "tooth" of the building couldn't be removed in time. Probably no other square in Germany has been the subject of such an ideological debate about architecture. One example of this is that the Palace of the Republic, in official terminology, has not been "demolished" but is being "selectively dismantled". Meanwhile, Marx and Engels, whose statues are in the nearby "Marx-Engels-Forum" have turned their backs to the palace.

The Maria Christina Gomez cross

The wonderful thing about showing people around the ecumenical centre is that I get to learn new things. Yesterday Ana Vilanueva from the World YWCA told the group of women I was showing around about the cross pictured here and I realised that the true story of Maria Christina Gomez made the rather general "this is a cross from El Slavador with a woman on it..." seem pretty tame.
Ana was with the delegation from the WCC which recieved the cross in the early 1990s and she also spoke movingly of the incredible solidarity work that women from the churches around the world had understaken at the time to make sure that women in prison in El Salvador not be forgotten.
Her telling the story made me realise how very poor our oral traditions ar in the West we forget to even pass on some of the most passionate stories. Interestingly it's a story about women too that has been forgotten, a relatively recent one at that.
I'll add more to this post in coming days but here's an extract from Wikipedia:

María Cristina Gómez (c.1938 - 5 April, 1989) was a Baptist primary school teacher and community leader in El Salvador who was abducted on April 5, 1989 and subsequently murdered.

A member of Emmanuel Baptist church in San Salvador, Gómez was a national leader both of Baptist women and in the teachers' union.^[1] She was a founder of the National Coordination of Salvadoran Women (CONAMUS), an organization of women founded in 1986. Since then, CONAMUS has addressed the issues which directly affect poor women in El Salvador, including domestic violence and rape, economic survival, lack of political participation, and social inequality. In 1989 CONAMUS opened a clinic to respond to women who were victims of domestic violence and rape.
According to witnesses, heavily armed men dressed in civilian clothing forced Gómez into a car when she returned from the John F. Kennedy School in Ilopango. An hour later, she was pushed alive from a car, in front of hundreds of witnesses near a cemetery in Antigua Cuscatian, on the outskirts of San Salvador. Four shots were fired at her and she died immediately.
On examination, her body showed signs of torture and burns most likely caused by chemicals such as acid. The murdered teacher had been taken from an area that was the operational base for the Salvadoran Air Force. General Juan Rafael Bustillo, the then head of the Salvadoran Air Force, has been implicated in the murder. The National Association of Salvadoran Educators (ANDES) has stated that Bustillo had publicly threatened Gomez on previous occasions.

Full article here.

Ce qui touche le coeur se grave dans la memoire

This is a 'bonmot' of Voltaire that forms the refrain of the latest song - Voltaire-Chanson by Wolf Biermann, the East German singer who was forced into exile and deprived of his GDR citizenship in 1976, Dr B writes from Berlin. 'That which touches the heart is engraved in the memory.' The sentiment chimed with the reason for the concert, which took place during a two day conference preparing for the 20th anniversary of 1989 on, 'The peaceful revolution, the opposition and the Socialist Unity Party'. The conference has brought together academics, researchers and activists involved in the citizens' movements and political parties. The concert took place at the Langenbeck Virchow Haus. This was the first seat of the East German parliament and it was where Wilhelm Pieck was elected the first president of the GDR in 1949. It is also the place where the founding assembly of the New Forum citizens' movement took place during the peaceful revolution. Biermann wrote his latest song to mark the ceremony on 7 November at which he was presented (several decades late) with his graduation certificate from the Humboldt University. The Stasi had instructed the university back in GDR times not to give Biermann the certificate, but not to destroy it either. The conference itself is a reminder of the immense courage of the people who took to the streets in East Germany in 1989 to demand change, not knowing whether or not the government was planning a 'Chinese solution' and suppress the uprising by force, as well as the daily harrassment many of the activists had to ensure.

A hot potato for some of those who worked for civil rights in East Germany

In this international year of the potato it seemed fitting that at ecumenical tea-time today I was invited to drink a small glass of Rotkäppchensekt to celebrate the award of the Heisse Kartoffel (hot potato) to Dirk-Michael Grötzsch who works with the Lutheran World Federation in the office for communication services.

The "hot potato" is an award first made in 1993 to people who have had a particular impact on economic and social affairs in "Mitteldeutschland" and it's given by the Mitteldeutsche Presseclub zu Leipzig e. V. The Sentin.el press agency organized the prize giving. Each recipient receives a small version of the sculpture by Jörn Konrad which shows a hand wounded by a hot potato but still holding on to the hot potato despite being wounded by it.

This year the award was made to a group of people who played important roles in the peaceful autumn revolution of 1989 in the former GDR (Mitteldeutschland is mainly located in the former GDR). Dirk-Michael was a spokesperson for Neues Forum, one of the new political parties founded as part of the protests and movements that led to the Berlin wall coming down.

As we drank our Sekt he told us how some of the others in the group who already had children had made arrangements for adoption of their children in case anything should happen to them because of their political activities. Civil courage is something that builds up civil society but it comes at great personal cost sometimes. Working for human and political rights isn't easy work.

Ah yes and Rotkäppchensekt means little red riding hood champagne. And of course the little red riding hood forest is also in Mitteldeutschland.

So who was John Calvin? Neither a saint nor a murderer - or maybe a bit of both?

Tuesday last week saw the launch of a short series of lunchtime library conversations. Theodore Gill got us started with a brilliant lecture called "So who was John Calvin?"

Theo began by showing us some of the cartoons of Calvin you can find in the Calvindrier that The Protestant Church of Geneva has published for the 500th anniversary of Calvin's birth.

So, who was John Calvin? La Vie Protestante, the magazine of the EPG or Protestant Church of Geneva, offers us one answer to the question. As the headline of this month’s editorial tells us, Calvin was Ni un Saint, Ni un Tueur – neither a saint nor a cold-blooded killer. It seems a rather negative assertion – attempting to explain what he was not, and quite defensively, rather than who he was. I prefer to commence in a different way…

I advance the proposition that John Calvin was very much a creature of the sixteenth century – a product of the high middle ages as they intersected with renaissance, a humanistic scholar whose academic concentrations had been in the fields of classical literature and law. But the basis of all education in those days was theology, and it was to this discipline that Calvin returned in earnest after he had completed his studies at the Collège de Montaigu in the University of Paris and made his way to the city of Basel.

The concomitant point I’m trying to make is that we are not creatures of the sixteenth century, not even the most Reformed among us, nor the most Lutheran or Anglican or Mennonite or Unitarian or Jesuitical. Our post-Enlightenment orientation and assumptions are so different from those of Parisians in the 1530s or Genevans of the 1550s that we do well to put a historical spin on the injunction, “Judge not, that you be not judged.” We lack the existential basis for judging 16th-century ancestors in the faith. To know John Calvin, much less to render judgment, we first would have to borrow a page from C.H. Dodd and enter into that alien era of Calvin, and Farel, and de Bèze, and Servetus, so as to live ourselves into its strangeness, and then return to our present. This is not likely to happen over one lunchtime, but let us try to go a few steps of the way.

The lecture was a birlliant reumé of Calvin's life and theology. Now you too can benefit from our lunchtimes in the library. The podcast and full lecture can be found on the website of the Ecumencical Centre Library (click on the links), and you can browse their site for other nuggets of fascianting information, a truly wonderful resource.