Captive and free: spiritual life in an East German prison

ALTHOUGH FEW of his writings have been translated into English, Wolf Krotke is one of the most prominent theologians to emerge from the formerly communist East Germany. Especially important is his 2001 book Gottes Klarheiten ("God's Clarities"), which investigates the attributes of God and how they clarify human faith and life.

As a young theology student at the state university in Leipzig, Krotke, like all university students, was required to take classes in Marxist-Leninist philosophy. During one especially boring lecture, he wrote a short poem poking fun at the class and the teacher. At the end of class, he absent-mindedly left it on the desk. Another student found it, and university authorities turned it over to the Stasi, the secret police.

Krotke was arrested on April 25, 1958; condemned to 21 months in prison; released (three months early) on October 5, 1959, his 21st birthday; and placed on two years of probation. He was forbidden to study further at a state university. Krotke completed his theological studies at church seminaries in Naumburg and East Berlin. In 1966, Karl Barth invited him to Basel to finish his dissertation, but state authorities denied him permission to travel.

Krotke served in two pastoral posts, and then in 1973 began teaching systematic theology at the church seminary in East Berlin. After the reunification of Germany in 1990, he was finally able to return to a state university, becoming professor at Humboldt University in Berlin and the first dean of its reconstituted theology department. The state officially rehabilitated him in 2000.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a radio address and then published in Germany in 2006, Krotke looks back at his arrest and how it shaped his life and theology.

There are places in our lives that are more than just places on a map. They come along with us. Where I grew up, where I went to school, where I made important life decisions--these places have buried themselves deep into my life, and without them I would not be who Wolf Krotke is. A wise philosopher once taught me, "If you really want to know who someone is, then you must ask where someone is." He is right. Our lives become our particular lives insofar as we in all of our insignificance nevertheless inhabit particular places within the wider spaces of the world. A person unable to identify any place that has shaped his or her life would be a ghostlike creature.

Places associated with our life journey are nothing in themselves. Only if a very famous person has lived there does a particular city or town adorn itself with his or her name. The Luther-town Wittenberg or the Schiller-town Marbach invites visitors to reverently admire the buildings and localities in which the "great son of the town" once lived and worked. But as a rule we are rather disappointed when we return to the places where we used to live. One is no longer able to reconstruct what one once did, thought or felt there. I myself am sometimes amazed that I ever felt at home in some of the places that belong to my biography.

Thus, returning to a place that was a part of our lives in no way guarantees that we will experience what we once experienced there and has remained alive in our memory. That is also true of those places in which we have experienced God. They have not been "sanctified" by the fact that we associate them with a certain feeling of God's presence. For this reason, I am skeptical that students of local history will be able to get to heaven by finding "holy" places in our midst. The place that comes to my mind when people ask me where faith in God became especially important to me certainly doesn't lend itself to that purpose. It was anything but holy.

I saw it again when members of the democratization movement occupied the state security prison in Leipzig in 1989 and filmed what they encountered there. To be sure, I'm not entirely certain whether it was precisely my cell that I was once again able to peer into. They all looked the same. There was the wide, wooden bench for sleeping that filled the entire rear of the room, and above it, the so-called window composed of glass blocks set into the wall. A small hole had been placed into the middle of it, through which a bit of air flowed. Otherwise, this "window" allowed nothing but dull light to penetrate the room. You couldn't know what kind of weather was outside. It was as though the sky had retreated. Only the fall of night was noticeable. There were at most two steps of free space in front of the wooden bench and three to the side. To the right in the corner was the stinky bucket. In front of me the door with the peephole and no handle.

THIS SPACE of two in-front-of and three to-the-side accompanied me when I was transferred out of the cell more than four months later. And I regularly catch myself moving in this space even today when I get up from my desk and wander back and forth in my study. My movement certainly has something to do with the pressure that I as a theologian experience when I want to formulate a thought but nothing happens. Walking around helps me to relax and removes the pressure. At that moment, the two steps forward and three steps to the side that the prison cell provided me are somehow still present to me.