Forced secularity contains the results of an accurate qualitative study of the religious changes that have occurred in Eastern Germany from WWII to the present day as they are related by families. The five authors of the book, based at the Leipzig institute for Kulturwissenschaften, draw and elaborate on the current debates in the sociology of religion and the social study of generational dynamics in an original and exhaustive way. While other social scientists also converge in finding the study of Eastern German secularity from a bottom-up perspective highly insightful (see Peperkamp Esther and Malgorzata Rajtar, 2010, Religion and the Secular in Eastern Germany, Brill), the originality of this book lies in the choice of its object of analysis and its methodological standpoint: it draws on 24 biographical and 24 collective family interviews involving three generations and covering different events of global-historical importance – Nazism, Socialism and post-socialism. Thereby the authors gain an insight simultaneously into individual and social dynamics, short and long term processes, and subjective and milieu-specific points of views. Moreover the region, once the cradle of Lutheran Reformation, is today probably the most secularized one in the Western world: only one out of four East Germans is today affiliated to a religious community at all. Statistical indicators of secularization and the theoretical paradigms underlying them are the starting point of the authors’ main arguments but their study goes well beyond the quantitative level. They document, on the one hand, how secularization was successful during socialism – something which had already been shown by numerous historians and social scientists, although too often in a way the authors qualify as deterministic – and on the other hand, how a secular habitus has emerged out of that experience and is maintained until today as a dominant way of dealing with religion. The authors hence argue along the distinction between secularization, which as a process belongs rather to the past in this case, and secularity, a cultural frame of current East German society. According to them, the genesis of East German secularization revolves mainly around precise conflicts resulting from constant challenges by the socialist regime and equally constant, but somehow more ambiguous, resistance on the part of churches. It also revolves from the way in which these conflicts were reflected in the choices, made day after day, between membership and ritual participation, between religious and socialist morality, between scientific and religious world-views. East Germans reacted to repression by differentiating, in their lives, between spheres of authenticity and the sphere of the state, typically deemed to be inauthentic. Such differentiations also concerned religion, which was often seen as a state-free zone. Today’s older generation tended either to exclude or differentiate the opposing world-views, for instance by following Luther’s doctrine of the two reigns and identifying “a father state and a mother church”, which double-tracked and complicated their lives. Or else they tried to integrate ideologically socialist and Christian principles, such as community, sincerity, or work. A relatively signifiant number of families were thereby able to maintain a religious identity and practice during the GDR. Still, secularization was imposed by the political project of the GDR government, but – as announced in the title – social and inner-family dynamics have forcefully kept secularity as a habitus after that government and its repressive authority disappeared. Various surveys conducted after 1989 indicate that religious plurality has increased, but also that 50 percent of the population still defines itself as atheists. This persistence, the authors argue, demonstrates that individuals actively embraced the plausibility of secularity despite the repressive context. After 1989 religion has regained some importance, most of all as a reservoir of stories and myths offering moral guidelines during one’s life-time. However, these guidelines rarely reach the transcendent level. This is well illustrated in the chapter dedicated to the younger generation aged between 20 and 30, and displaying a higher level of religiosity in quantitative studies. These interviewees did not experience conflicting oppositions around religion, but today share with their parents and grandparents a skeptical perspective on the capitalistic world. Rarely do they again become members of any church, but their personal aspirations are often spiritual (pilgrimage, yoga and meditation, for instance). Contrary to the situation in Western Germany, those who adhere to secularity continue and thereby produce a secular family tradition: this collective secular habitus frames local identities and individuals’ most important decisions.

When dealing with the new types of religiosity emerging among East Germans, the authors anchor much of their reflection in Thomas Luckmann’s typology of transcendence. Very illuminating is the chapter dedicated to the question of the great transcendence, the question of “what comes after death”, as 50 percent of East Germans in the 1990s still prefer anonymous forms of burial. The answers to this question are wide-ranging but only the very young generation increasingly believe in life after death. The authors show the emergence of a category of people being characterized by an “agnostic spirituality” that contains neither explicit atheist views nor Christian beliefs but an openness to ideas such as the individuality of the soul or reincarnation. Since the dominant habitus is secular, such an openness appears as spiritual. Scientific explanations emerge, however, clearly as more convincing than Christian interpretations of death. This also points to the fact that the newly acquired role of religion as a set of ethical and moral principles does not contain any major transcendent dimension.

Because of its empirical originality and theoretical exhaustiveness, this analysis will be a reference work for anyone studying religion in Eastern Germany. The reception of this study by the international community of social scientists, which would be encouraged by an English translation, could certainly also initiate what was outside the scope of this study: explicit comparisons with other social institutions apart from families in Eastern Germany and elsewhere.