Wendy Tyndale employs her background in church work and journalism to write a sympathetic account of Protestantism in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from the founding of communist East Germany under the Socialist Unity Party (SED) to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. She assesses the “40 year-long struggle to negotiate enough freedom to be able to act as a church ‘in the storm of the world,’ as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, while resisting cooption by the state” (xxi). Impressed with the contributions of the churches to the peaceful revolution of 1989, Tyndale argues that too few books on the subject do justice to the revolutionary work of East German Protestants. Throughout her book, she explains how they tried to balance two roles. On the one hand, they were “a preserving agent in the SED state,” while on the other they were “the yeast that enabled a small but inspired opposition movement to rise” (166).

Tyndale's work is based largely on extensive interviews with over twenty East German Protestant pastors and church leaders, whose lives, work, and ideas she strives to honor. Drawing from their experiences, she explains how they came to terms—at least in part—with communist rule, and sought to become Bonhoeffer's “church for others” (23). Although these Christians bravely fostered the opposition movement until it grew powerful enough to topple Erich Honecker's regime, Tyndale makes it clear that their desire was to help reform the SED state into a humane, democratic, socialist country, not to rush headlong into unification with capitalist West Germany.

Protestants in Communist East Germany begins with a moving account of the events of 1989, in particular the prayer meetings and candlelight processions in Leipzig, Dresden, and Magdeburg. Highlighting the role of the churches, she uses these stories to ask about the story of East German Protestantism and its role in the downfall of the GDR.

Chapters 2 through 5 discuss the early challenges faced by the church, the establishment of a modus vivendi with the SED state, the battle between church and state for the hearts and minds of young people, and the difficulties faced by Christians in everyday life. Immediately after World War II, the pressing task for the church was simply coping with the collapse of the Third Reich and the occupation of Germany. As tensions among the Allies divided Germany, simply living and working under communism became the greatest challenge for East German Protestants. While the 1949 GDR constitution guaranteed freedom of belief and conscience and the right to religious practice, once the regime declared “atheistic scientific socialism to be the sole guiding theory of the state” (15), arrests, the seizure of church assets, and harassment or infiltration by members of the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, became the norm. A theological debate resulted in which the ideas of Dietrich Bonhoeffer became “the most widely accepted source of inspiration for the East German Church” (23). While Tyndale briefly mentions other points of view, most of her attention is focused on the establishment of the Federation of Protestant Churches in the GDR under Bishop Albrecht Schönherr and the development of “a community of witness and service . . . a church ‘not apart from, not against, but within Socialism’” (38). Rooted in this identity, the Christians Tyndale interviewed worked in critical solidarity with the regime, hoping to reform socialism by fostering an atmosphere of openness and trust. This was an unwelcome intrusion into the role of the SED in shaping East German life, so Protestant leaders were often faced with the choice of helping individual Christians struggling to get by in the GDR or of criticizing the state and inducing higher levels of persecution. Not surprisingly, the churches generally opted for the former.

The greatest conflict between church and state revolved around the education of children and youth. Protestant youth groups (Tyndale calls them Student Communities) faced sharp limits on their freedom to work, religious instruction was banished from schools, and the state education curriculum was saturated with communist ideology and militaristic values. Here Tyndale does well to explain both the crisis of conscience provoked by the Youth Pledge (Jugendweihe)—the SED alternative to confirmation—and the successful Protestant “open work” among the rebellious in the “drop out” youth culture of the GDR (58–62, 67–70). Also interesting is the chapter on daily life, in which Tyndale describes the attempts of pastors and church leaders to speak truth about militarization and economic hardships, using their shared life with the people (clergy received modest salaries, Tyndale explains), discussion groups, and church publications to promote the Christian values of peace, honesty, and justice.

Chapters 6 to 8 describe the rise of the East German opposition movement, the revolution of 1989, and the rapid process of unification with West Germany. Here Tyndale covers familiar ground, with the important contribution of describing the substantial grassroots dialogue which arose from the World Council of Churches' global consultation on the theme of “Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation.” Christians from all over East Germany inundated church leaders with over 10,000 suggested topics for discussion, which the Stasi described as “the most up to date and complex catalogue of demands for socio-political change in the GDR” (103). This mix of “politicized Christian ethics” and “practical, concrete demands” went on to shape the opposition movement of 1989, even when dissident groups were only tangentially connected to the church.

Here Tyndale struggles to explain the complicated role of East German Protestantism in the collapse of the GDR. On the one hand, pastors opened their churches for discussion groups and mass meetings and gave the revolution its conspicuously non-violent character. Church leaders mediated round table discussions between the regime and its opposition and even played important roles in the short-lived post-communist government of 1990. Still, in the end, the churches were left largely emptied and the leadership of pastors forgotten. The reform-minded East German Protestant Church was rapidly subsumed into the richer West German church, even as East Germany itself was rapidly annexed into the capitalist West German state. Along with her interviewees, Tyndale laments the lost opportunity of what might have been for both East Germany and its churches had the values of peace, justice, environmentalism, egalitarianism, and open dialogue been allowed to continue to their political and ecclesiastical fruition.

Protestants in Communist East Germany is not a comprehensive account of the history of church-state relations in the GDR. Its research base is much too scant for that, and frequently the discussion takes place at quite a summary level. What is does do is capture the ideals, dreams, and efforts of a group of moderate East German Protestants who tried to maintain critical solidarity with and in the GDR, even as they helped to bring about its collapse.