In autumn 2019 Germany celebrated thirty years since the peaceful revolution in the GDR. This jubilee marks a turning point: contemporaneity is slowly becoming history. Given the recent authoritarian changes in Europe, the freedom narrative of 1989 comes to its end too. This shift in perspective affects church history as well. A current overview of the history of GDR Protestantism is therefore very welcome.

Veronika Albrecht-Birkner, a church historian at the University of Siegen, chooses a systematic approach. She firstly analyses the main features of church policy in the SED, which aggressivly promoted atheism as its leading educational tool. Then she turns to the focus of her book, the eight historic regionally-organised Churches of the GDR, the so-called Landeskirchen of Mecklenburg, Saxony, Thuringia, Greifswald, Berlin-Brandenburg, of the church province of Saxony, of Anhalt and of Görlitz. Albrecht-Birkner demonstrates the differences in their piety, in their ecclesiastical structures and in their different political orientations towards the state. How important this regional church identity was (and is) for East German Protestantism becomes apparent. Instructive, too, is the chapter on the Free Churches in the GDR. Until its end there were thirty-one officially registered Churches and religious communities, among them a small number of Methodists, Baptists, Mennonites and Quakers. Birkner-Albrecht points out their ambivalent status: the SED promoted their existence in order to present itself as a guarantor of religious freedom.

In contrast, the chapters about the Federation of Protestant Churches in the GDR, the Bund Evangelischer Kirchen in der DDR, a kind of nation-wide Protestant church federation, and the chapter about on transnational and ecumenical Protestantism in the GDR offer little new. Albrecht-Birkner offers a view from within of different church actors, including church leaders as well as church-related groups or parishes. Because her sources are mostly the written testimonials and self-descriptions of former church members she draws a picture of lived experiences, of the life of the church and its theology from within. In terms of methodology she takes an explicitly theological approach. This has two consequences: Firstly, GDR Protestantism is not placed in the context of major historiographical patterns of interpretation. Readers learn nothing about the socio-historical foundation of the Protestant Church of the GDR, of its cultural-historical context or its special significance when compared to other Protestant churches in Communist countries. Mary Fulbrook's history of the GDR would have offered an excellent bridge, but Albrecht-Birkner completely neglects non-German literature. Secondly, Albrecht-Birkner's theological approach fosters the continuation of the narrative of a dichotomous East-West antagonism, as it was formulated by some GDR eyewitnesses, especially in the 1990s. Metaphors such as ‘learning community’ or statements such as ‘freedom as a GDR-Protestant signature’ are normative and are offered as the timeless legacy of GDR Protestantism.

Thirty years after 1989, Albrecht-Birkner's book stands at the turning point between contemporaneity and historicisation. It is worth reading for those who prefer a view from within the Church, rather than a detached historical assessment, and for those who want to understand the Protestant Church in GDR through its own voices and from the perspective of contemporaries.