When I think about the region of Berlin-Brandenburg, I remember vividly my time there in the early 1990s. As a young graduate student engaged in dissertation research, I walked among the empty shells of churches in the city of Brandenburg, frozen in their ruined state almost fifty years after the end of World War II. Searching through eastern church archives, I found thick files labeled “Confessing Church” containing documents from 1934 until well into the 1960s. These were sobering reminders that the German “church struggle” which had begun under National Socialist rule had continued into the communist era for the many Protestants and Catholics whose parishes had fallen under Soviet rule. Sean Brennan has now joined the growing ranks of scholars grappling with this story—the history of the East German churches under communism. His book, The Politics of Religion in Soviet-Occupied Germany, analyses “the religious policies of the Soviet zone, but more importantly, who devised them, how they did so, and how they attempted to implement them” (xi). It also considers the manner in which eastern German church leaders responded to these policies, and the role they hoped to create for their churches in the Soviet-occupied region of the country. This is certainly a strength of the book. Focusing on the dynamic four years between the fall of the Third Reich and the establishment of the German Democratic Republic, Brennan draws on German and Russian state and church archives, along with newspaper records, to craft an account which encompasses the perspectives of the five main contributors to occupation-era religious politics: the Soviet military administration in Germany (SVAG), the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), the Protestant and Catholic Churches (and particularly their leaders in the zone, Bishops Otto Dibelius and Konrad von Preysing), and the eastern version of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which did much to represent the interests of the churches in the political realm.

At first, Brennan finds Soviet occupation authorities moving cautiously, cognizant of the tension between rival powers in Berlin and influenced by “a desire . . . not to move too fast in creating Stalinism in the Soviet zone, lest they throw away a chance to influence the Western zones of Germany as well” (xx). Soon, however, issues like the churches' relationship with the CDU, the provision of religious education, the existence of church youth and women's organizations, and the charitable activities of the churches all generated friction between church and state. By 1947, a harsher anti-religious policy had emerged—one which would mark the ongoing relationship between the German Democratic Republic and the churches after 1949.

In chapters two and three, Brennan considers the relationship between the CDU and the churches. During the first phase of the occupation era, until late 1946, the CDU retained a fair degree of independence and participated with communists, socialists, and liberals in the anti-fascist transformation of eastern German politics. It was under the second leader of the CDU, Jakob Kaiser, that the party declared its commitment to the principle of “Christian Socialism” and with that a public role for eastern German churches (28). Both the churches and the party shared a number of important concerns: restoring Christian belief to the heart of German culture, continuing religious education in the school system, caring for German expellees from Poland and Czechoslovakia, limiting Soviet land reform, and resisting one-party rule. The result was that both Protestants and Catholics tended to support the CDU, even though the churches and party never collaborated as closely as Soviet occupation authorities and eastern German communists imagined or feared. In the campaign leading up to the free election of October 1946, both the SVAG and the SED attacked the CDU as a form of political Catholicism (evoking the memory of the Center Party's contribution to bringing the Hitler regime to power) and as reactionary movement uncommitted to the democratic transformation of Germany. In addition, both the SVAG and the SED argued they supported “religious freedom” and could provide a suitable atmosphere for Christians in eastern Germany, so that there was no need for the Christian Socialism of the CDU. In turn, the CDU reminded voters that its use of the adjective “Christian” drew on the tradition of anti-fascist Christian resistance to Nazism, confirmed its commitment to Christian Socialism, and symbolized its plan to preserve a prominent public role for the churches (36). As a result, in the October 1946 election, the CDU placed a strong second, preventing the SED from achieving a majority in any of the eastern provinces. Though the churches themselves were subdued in their response, the SED responded by attacking both the CDU and the churches. Kaiser was replaced by the more compliant Otto Nuschke, and by 1947 the independent policy of Christian Socialism was abandoned in favor of closer cooperation with the SED (55).

This same trajectory marked other aspects of the relationship between the eastern German churches and the SVAG-SED regime. At first, the regime moved cautiously and negotiated with the churches. Later, it adopted a harsher tone. In the realm of religious education, for instance, in April 1946 the churches managed to secure the right to offer voluntary religious education in state schools, though not during regular class times (76). Soon, however, communist officials circumvented the arrangement, often refusing to authorize church instructors or scheduling religious education courses at inconvenient times. In the area of youth and women's organizations, the regime allowed independent organizations at first, but soon suppressed CDU groups and tried to absorb church groups into its umbrella organizations, the Free German Youth (FDJ) and the Democratic Women's Federation (DFD). Eventually, church group leaders were arrested and meetings banned (104).

Brennan argues that the communist authorities never intended the churches to have any meaningful role in their state, and thus the propaganda campaign touting the SED's support for “religious freedom” rang hollow among Christians, who could see the chasm between official pronouncements and lived reality. Only in the area of the churches' charitable activities—the work of the Innere Mission and the Caritas organizations to provide food, housing, spiritual care for POWs, and institutional and medical care—did the regime allow Protestants and Catholics to work independently in the Soviet zone, since they relieved the state of a significant burden of care for its subjects (137, 158). In many respects, Brennan's analysis of religious policy confirms our existing understanding of the overall Stalinist transformation of eastern Germany (221), but he demonstrates nicely how later policies pursued by GDR dictator Erich Honecker had their roots in the immediate postwar occupation era.