| In 1980s Berlin, churches held a special position: while much social and political discussion was forbidden in public, pressing issues could be addressed openly within the church's walls. A March 1978 meeting between Bishop Albrecht Schonherr and Head of State Erich Honecker led to a tentative rapprochement: in exchange for official political neutrality, people in church spaces were allowed to express themselves freely, and religious content could not be forbidden. Using this new autonomy, churches emerged as sites in which multiple ideologies could be engaged simultaneously, public zones established within private spaces. In doing so, they entered into a decades-long debate over ideas of publicity, privacy, and how a church should sound.;Each of the many groups that used a church space - including political activists, artists, musicians, hippies, and punks - had its own desires, its own demands on the space, and its own beliefs about the meaning of that space. When these diverse needs collided, the negotiation between divergent views brought new and profound meanings to the social space of the church. I investigate this negotiation as it was manifested in three particular East Berlin churches - the Samariterkirche, in Friedrichshain, the Erloserkirche, in Lichtenberg, and the Zionskirche, in Prenzlauer Berg - and the ways in which people within those churches engaged in public action through sound. I also examine the sometimes tense interplay between the subcultural groups involved in the debate, through the increasingly heterogeneous sonic world of the East German Church. In these churches, sound, broadly conceived, became a signifier of pluralism and of political action. The growing heterogeneity of sounds in East Berlin churches emerged in parallel with diverse new social movements.;I use a combination of archival and ethnographic research to examine two complementary case studies. The "Blues-Mass" genre, performed at the Samariterkirche and Erloserkirche, blended sacred and secular content, including American-influenced blues music as a means of addressing multiple subcultures within the church. By contrast, the Zionskirche boldly positioned itself as a concert venue and as the largest non-state- run publisher in the GDR. The Blues-Masses ended when participants became unwilling to accept the limitations of work inside the church. Meanwhile, a 1987 skinhead attack on a punk concert at the Zionskirche revealed the risks of broadening the church's outreach. Examining these two approaches to music and social space, as well as these churches' emergence from socialism, reshapes our understanding of the ways publicity, privacy, political action, and sound intersected in the East German Church. |
