Schwerin, the GDR, and its lasting influence…

We live in Schwerin, which was part of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) until October 3, 1990. Now, it wasn’t exactly as “democratic” as the name suggests. Let us introduce you to Margarete Reuter:

She was born in Hohenkirchen near Wismar as the daughter of a farming family. After the war, she worked on her parents’ farm, trained as a teacher, and then studied at the Catechetical Seminary in Schwerin. From 1951, she taught religious education in Brüel and voluntarily led the ‘Junge Gemeinde.’ (“Young Congregation” / “Young Church”) This put her at odds with the GDR government, which wanted to impose a materialistic worldview, and she was betrayed (by whom remains unknown to this day).

In February 1953, a police officer knocked on her door, asking if he could come in to conduct, as he put it, “a small house search.” The young woman let him in. After briefly flipping through a bookshelf, the officer came across a children’s book titled The Sisters of Memel. The mention of the name of a former German city in the East was used as a pretext to arrest Margarete Reuter for “racist incitement.”

During the police interrogation, however, the book itself hardly played a role. Instead, the questions focused on the Junge Gemeinde and its supposed financial backers.

After Margarete Reuter was transferred to the MfS detention center in Schwerin, she was accused of events that had taken place two years earlier. At the time, she was attending the Catechetical Seminary in Schwerin. Along with fellow students, she often stood on the balcony of the seminary building to comfort the prisoners of the nearby prison on Klosterstrasse by singing songs.

Three months later, the court sentenced her to eight years in prison for “war and boycott propaganda.” The public was excluded from the reading of the verdict. She ended up in the women’s prison in Bützow, where conditions were dire. It was only after the trial that the convicted woman received the nearly two-month-old news that her sister had died in a car accident. Her unshakable faith helped her get through this tough time. In 1955, after a reduction in her sentence, she was released early.

Well… free… a normal job was, of course, out of the question. Freedom of religion or expression was still nonexistent, and just to make it crystal clear that she was far from free, she was literally(!) handed a bill for her “detention costs”… asking if she would like to pay it.

And what has that led to, even to this day, in this region? A lot. You can sense the mistrust—who is your neighbor, can you trust them? (Because before you know it, they could betray you.) What you think, you don’t just say out loud, especially not to a stranger. And who is God? No idea, because religion is completely(!) absent from the culture, and so on, and so on.

And the GDR? It’s been officially gone for over 35 years… but truly gone from the culture? Not by a long shot.