Requiem for the Reformer

In the stone-grey East German city of Wittenberg, where Martin Luther posted his 95 theses, last week banners proclaiming SOCIALISM WILL CONQUER THE WHOLE WORLD overhung the main streets. At kiosks, vendors peddled a new kind of Kewpie doll -- portly and dressed in the brown robes of an Augustinian monk. In one shop window, portraits of Luther and Lenin glared at each other across the open pages of an ancient Bible. Thus was the 450th anniversary of the Reformation celebrated in the midst of a "democratic socialist" republic.

Thanks largely to the cool hostility of the East German government, Reformation Day observances at Wittenberg were less majestic than they might have been. Though East German churchmen had invited 850 Western colleagues to the ceremonies, the government granted visas to only 217. It prevented a huge "Christian witness" rally that the churches had planned, by refusing to approve the use of a suitable auditorium in nearby Leipzig. Western visitors, moreover, were not allowed to travel outside the Wittenberg area, occasioning a signed protest from several Christian delegates, among them, World Council of Churches' General Secretary Eugene Carson Blake, declaring that they might not have attended the observances at all "had they known of this restriction."

Promise for the Mourning. On October 31, an ecumenical procession of colorfully robed clergymen shuffled solemnly along Wittenberg's cobbled streets from the Lutherhaus, the building where Luther worked and taught, to the stately Castle Church. There, East German Bishop Johannes Janicke of East Germany's Evangelical Church preached a sermon based on the beatitudes that had a distinctly contemporary relevance. Today, he said, "the cry of the masses for righteousness has been clad in atheistic ideology." Nonetheless, "the beatitudes place the poor, the mourning, the meek and the hungry under the promise of God's government. God has a plan for this world."

Later, Presbyterian Blake admitted that "I went to Wittenberg on a church invitation, and I was shocked at the restrictions." For all that, Blake was encouraged by the willingness of a Marxist state to commemorate Luther in its own way, even in the dubious guise of a precursor of the proletarian revolution, and by the mere fact that East Germany's much-beleaguered Protestants were able to hold commemoration services at all. "The thing that needs to be understood in the U.S.," Blake said, "is that the church exists and lives in East Germany."

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