East German Answers to the Question What Happens after Death
Happy Believers?: East German Answers to the Question What Happens after Death *1
In the GDR, a virtually unique break with tradition took place in the realm of religion and the church. If in the founding year of the GDR 91 % of the population were still members of one of the two major Christian congregations, in 1989 this number was only 29 %. Since then, the number has dropped even further: today, only 21 % of the population in the “new states” are members of the Evangelical Church (the dominant German mainline Protestant church), and 4 % members of the Catholic Church.2
What in the West took place as a process of religious de-traditionalization in the context of an overall change in values and the increasing dissolution of ecclesiastical ties (especially, but not solely among the younger generation), in the GDR this had a more complex character. Here, clearly several processes overlapped, culminating in a situation where church ties and individual self-conception as "religious" reached a worldwide low. Several factors played a decisive role here. First, the churches lost ground all over Germany before and during National Socialism. In the post war years, however, unlike in West Germany, this was not compensated for by explicit state support for the churches and the civil-religious framing of the constitution. Secondly, the massive decline of church-membership and religiosity in the GDR through the end of the 1960s can be attributed to state repression, competition between religious groups, and a clash of worldviews. Thirdly, what now had become a normal lack of confession began to develop for its part a socializing impact all its own. Finally, a general process of shifts in value that began in the mid-1960s in almost all European countries and in the GDR developed a dynamic all its own as part of the formation of a “working class society.”3
In their radicalness, these developments led to an entirely other structure in the landscape of religious and worldviews in comparison to West Germany.
After the transformations of 1989, many expected that under the changed conditions a revitalization of religious life in the Federal Republic’s new states would take place. This presumption was not fulfiled, but the ‘state of religion’has also not simply remained the same. For the younger generation especially, ALLBUS4 surveys in recent years indicate a certain opening up when it comes to religious issues, in particular a clear increase in belief in a life after death. In the group of 18–29 year olds, for example, a comparison with surveys take at the beginning show a doubling of the positive replies – now 33.6 percent. Similar, if not equally dramatic findings result when questions are posed on the relevance of magic, spiritualism, and the occult. To that extent, the religious landscape of East Germany is pluralizing, even if only to a very limited extent.
At the Universität Leipzig we explored these processes as part of a DFG project5 from 2003 to 2006. We studied how East Germany families dealt with the state-promoted turn away from religion and the churches in the GDR: how they actively participated in it, refused or resisted it, and how they coped with the changed situation following the transformations of 1989.
The project approached the logic of these processes of transformation by way of family interviews, where representatives of three family generations together told the story of their family. These depictions were complemented with questions on particular periods during the GDR and 1989–90, developments in politics, profession, leisure, school, and religion, and stimuli to generate discussion.
In the following, we will explore one of these discussion questions: “What do you think happens after death?”. This question is as a rule considered a particularly‘hard’test for the distinguishing between religious and non-religious attitudes, but also is well suited for exploring all kinds of‘innovations’. The answers that were developed in the course of the debate were in part surprising. In the following, we will present a selection of these responses.
It soon became clear on examining the interviews that despite the general power of the scientific-atheistic worldview6 and linked views of death Christian notions had been preserved through the GDR period. Furthermore, what crystallized along the death question was a series of possible variant answers that were marked in particular by unspecific references to transcendence.
We have summarized these answers under the term “agnostic spirituality”. By this, we understand notions that distinguish themselves from‘material’or‘materialist’viewpoints as well as traditional religious notions. This spirituality is agnostic because‘religious’experience is lacking in terms of what is fundamentally considered possible, and because these individuals have up until now not tried the achieve gain religious experience by way of collective or individual practices. At the same time, the question of transcendence, especially the question of what happens after death, was a highly relevant issue for these individuals, and they reacted readily to relevant conversation stimuli. Here, this spirituality does not present itself in an abstract, purely philosophical form, but communicatively, and is first generated in engagement with various possibilities of concretization. Syncretically mined from the store of old and new systems of interpretation: religion, magic, parapsychology, humanism, but also science and cultural production in the media, especially film. In doing so, the thematic references in a sense remain experimental and serve rather to express a movement of searching, rather than expressing religious beliefs.
In the following, a number of typical answers provided by families or individual family members on the question of what happens after death will be presented, and the relationship to religion expressed in these responses will be characterized. First of all, we can note that in the interviews only rarely did explicitly Christian answers surface (that is, the notion of resurrection) – and when they did only in the eldest generation. It is rather interesting that in Christian families in particular the answers to the death question varied significantly. It was much more frequent that a “hope” was spoken of, a “hope” that one has the right to, or a “secret” that cannot be revealed or one does not want to be revealed. With the metaphor of the secret, in a certain way a religious ban on images is maintained, and by way of the abstract reference to hope a notion of transcendence is implied without the positive aspect of Christian semantics coming into play to support this hope.
On the other side of the spectrum are those interview partners who in connection with the question, what comes after death, an explicitly aesthetic poison and the notion of a life after death rejected. For example, an older doctor (born in 1935) answered the question of what happens after death: “Dust and nothing more. That’s what scientists think.”. She then moved towards what in the GDR was called “scientific atheism”, a combination of scientism and atheism, where the two mutually supported one another. In this perspective, religion appears merely as an irrational remainder.
A different variant of such atheistic positions are notions where the dead body itself only figures in terms of its materiality. One of the persons questioned quoted her father, saying, “My father always said, ‘Not in a cemetery. Throw me on a compost heap, then I’d be of use to something’”. Such a viewpoint is quite contrary to Christian notions. Neither does the body take on a special significance (in contrast to Christian notions of corporeal resurrection of the body), nor is the standard culture of burials and commemoration – which requires the buried body or the burial of the ashes as a point of linkage – of any interest.
Those notions of death – which in the following we would like to subsume under the notion of “agnostic spirituality” – are not completely void of content, but feed on various sources. On the one hand, they fulfil the function of compensating for a certain fundamental remoteness of the question of what happens after death. On the other hand, they provide new semantics for illustration that are clearly not considered “passé”, as is often expressed of other clichéd popular religious notions and certain Christian theological interpretations. And finally they generate –particularly by picking up on scientific theories and science fiction – some plausibilities that provide the “irrational” aspect of the notion of life after death with a new “rationality”.
In numerous interviews on the issue of death, reports on near death experiences – which clearly fascinate many – and similar supersensory experiences serve as a bridge to things far from experience. But notions of reincarnation can often be found in atheistic surroundings as well. As one man (born in 1959) said, referring to his own death, “There’s no exotus [sic.], somehow the brain can’t just shut down all at once. I don’t believe that […] then you wouldn’t see anything at all anymore, or what?” When his wife sought to explain to the interviewer that at issue is a notion of reincarnation, and her husband at some point will return as a “flower in the meadow”, he responded that he wants to return as another person. Clearly, the issue of reincarnation was already often explored in this family. But what it comes to what the father here developed, this is surely not an elaborated religious theory, but rather something that ameliorates the horror evoked by the thought of “exitus” and the linked end of the individual person. This notion of reincarnation, which of course has little to do with its Hindu origins, is clearly for many easier to accept than the Christian notion of resurrection.
Another young woman (born in 1974) argued similarly. She developed the notion that despite the decay of the body into many molecules, her consciousness would someday be placed in a different body. “What happens to my body, that’s meaningless to me, because that goes back into circulation. I think that there will at some point some body, that [...] that there will be a person who’s me.” The fact that her atheist mother then, disturbed, asked, “You think that?”, exemplifies how in these processes of transformation of religious worldviews, the generations often diverge, whereby the younger generation also offers potential inspiration for the older generation.
Other persons questioned took recourse to science-fiction-like notions, distancing themselves from atheistic and Christian notions alike. For example, as a younger man (born in 1973) laconically remarked in the course of the discussion, “At some point the little green men visited us or whatever and used the entire earth as a test object.”. According to this, we would be part of a higher logic, and the question of our death would become irrelevant, for responsibility lies in a certain sense beyond us.
Scientific theories are also mobilized for the purposes of argument: for example, a Catholic family agreed after extensive debate that a “bundle of energy” remains after death, clearly relying here on the law of the conservation of energy.
In summary, we can conclude that particularly in highly secularized areas like that of eastern Germany, the approach to the religious realm leads through an“agnostic spirituality”. All the same, such semantics remain chronically unstable, for they are hardly linked to any institutions or stable forms of community formation. At the same time, what is articulated here is a certain openness to religious questions that brings something new into play in comparison to the‘materialism’of the GDR, but in some aspects also takes this‘materialism’as a staring point.
Uta Karstein, Thomas Schmidt-Lux, Monika Wohlrab-Sahr
1 For more on the following, see: Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, Uta Karstein, Christine Schaumburg: Ich würd’ mir das offenlassen: Agnostische Spiritualität als Annäherung an die 'große Transzendenz' eines Lebens nach dem Tode in Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 4/2005, pp. 153–174.
2 For a current overview of the statistics, see www.ekd.de/statistik/3217_mitglieder.html.
3 Wolfgang Engler: Über die Ostdeutschen. Kunde von einem verlorenen Land. Berlin, 1999.
4 Allgemeine Bevölkerungsumfrage der Sozialwissenschaften
5 DFG Project Generationenwandel als religiöser und weltanschaulicher Wandel: Das Beispiel Ostdeutschland. Director: Prof. Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, Universität Leipzig. Further contributors in addition to the authors of this article were Mirko Punken, Anja Frank, Birgit Glöckl, Jurit Kärtner, Katja Schau, and Christine Schaumburg.
6 A. Kosing, Wie sehen wir die Welt? Weltall, Erde, Mensch: Ein Sammelwerk zur Entwicklungsgeschichte von Natur und Gesellschaft, Berlin 1954, pp. 13–24; see also T. Schmidt-Lux, Wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung und Religion. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie des Säkularisierungsprozesses und seiner institutionellen Akteure am Beispiel der Urania, Ph.D. thesis, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig 2006.