Born on 30 April 1952, Martin Gutzeit grew up in a village near Cottbus. His father, a pastor with several villages in his care, had belonged to the Confessing Church movement before 1945. Gutzeit’s mother died when he was quite young, in 1957. Reverend Gutzeit’s politics were unambiguously anti-communist; the atmosphere in the parsonage was one of intellectual openness. Looking back on his family home, Martin Gutzeit wrote in the early 90s, “There are certain values, standards, principles, responsibilities that you stand by. And it doesn’t matter what other people say about you, whether your reputation suffers.” This recognition guided Gutzeit’s choices in life and influenced his development to a substantial degree.

Gutzeit was not permitted to sit the upper secondary school-leaving examination: from the SED’s perspective, his parents’ politics were reason enough to bar him from doing so. So Gutzeit took up an apprenticeship as an electrical fitter in 1968, which he completed in 1970. While an apprentice, he attended a programme aimed at preparing students for the upper secondary exam at a night-school in Cottbus. Although his employers attempted to block this path to university eligibility as well, he was able to earn the qualification in 1971. He was not sure when he got the qualification what he would do with it, but he was fond of logic, so his preference would have been to study mathematics.

The excitement the 1960s and early ’70s did not leave Martin Gutzeit untouched. The literature and the music of the period had their influence on him; his hair got longer and longer. The American civil rights activist Martin Luther King became a role model for him. The student unrest and the anti-authoritarian behaviour were fascinating for this young man living by the German-Polish border, who had a love of freedom. He watched enthusiastically as reform-oriented communist forces in Czechoslovakia attempted to give socialism a “human face”, during the *Prague Spring. He was less shocked and appalled than many, though, when the *invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops allowed the world to see the snarling visage that was the true face of communism. Though he had hoped things would end differently, Gutzeit had already understood enough about power, history and communism to know that the use of tanks against one’s own population had never been an impossibility. He was disappointed but also motivated to understand what “holds the world together in its inmost core”.

Gutzeit’s Christian upbringing was reflected in his actions: in 1971, he refused to perform military service of any kind and worked as an assistant in the Christian welfare work at Martinshof in Rothenburg (in Oberlausitz/Upper Lusetia). At the time, he knew full well what his absolute refusal of military service might mean, because there was a deacon in Rothenburg who had recently returned from two years of penal servitude. He was neither charged nor detained, though, and thus faced with the question of what to do next. “There were two options open to me. I was not going to be allowed to study at a public university. I could either train as a church social worker or … study theology at a church institution.” In 1972, he entered a programme in theology and philosophy at Sprachenkonvikt, a Protestant theological college in East Berlin. Students there could study freely and independently in the sheltering shadow of the church and with financial support from the West. Philosophy and the history of philosophy became the favourite subjects of the theology student Martin Gutzeit.

In 1974, he met Markus Meckel, who had come to Sprachenkonvikt to continue the study of theology he had begun in Naumburg in 1971. Questions about freedom, ownership, law, the constitution of a state, society and “what is politics?” were at the centre of the debates among Gutzeit, Meckel and other students. They also discussed the great philosophers and the recent texts of the opposition. That the writings of Rudolf Bahro, Robert Havemann and Wolf Biermann should appeal to Gutzeit seems almost inevitable, but it was not the case that the political convictions and assumptions of these authors all resonated with him to the same degree. Gutzeit, a Protestant trained in Hegel and Kant, found nothing to inspire him in designs for a communist society, no matter how fierce their critique of the communists currently in power. Gutzeit, Markus Meckel and a few others drew questions about the present day and the future into the philosophical debates of the group they set up to discuss Hegel. The group was monitored by the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. MfS) from 1977 to 1981.

Martin Gutzeit finally cut his hair short at the end of the ‘70s. It was time: he no longer needed such symbols to express his resistance to imposed standards. He had grown independent enough, internally, to reach out and take the freedom that he required in life. 

Officially, Gutzeit ended his studies in 1979. However, he continued to study privately at the college, working odd jobs to support himself. He did not work as a pastor until 1982, when he took up a post in Mecklenburg. Half a year later, his wife, Gudrun (they had married in 1973) followed him to Mecklenburg, where she did her curate training (Vikariat). The two of them shared the position as pastor from 1984 onward. Alongside this time-consuming and demanding work, Gutzeit continued his studies of philosophy and worked with Markus Meckel in the independent peace movement. Gutzeit led an active and varied political life in the 1980s, engaging in seminars on peace and human rights, the mobile Mecklenburg peace seminars and the Vipperow peace group, to name just a few. He stayed in close contact with the world outside the GDR, particularly with acquaintances in West Berlin, West Germany and the Netherlands.

Alongside his work in his own congregation, intellectual engagement with social theories was always a mainstay of his work. In 1984, he joined the working group on theology and philosophy at the Federation of Evangelical Churches. In 1986, he returned to the Sprachenkonvikt and worked as an assistant to Richard Schröder. He taught philosophy and languages while working on a dissertation on Hegel’s logic and philosophy of religion. Fortunately, as Gutzeit would probably say, he was unable to finish the work, though it had grown dear to his heart – fortunately, because he was prevented from doing so because events took a course almost no one expected: communism went away.

Martin Gutzeit was one of the few who had been able to envision its end – and he had done so for quite some time and in considerable detail. He had never felt truly at ease within the opposition groups, most of which he was familiar with. For him, they were short on theory and above all in policy. Many of their members seemed to him to lack a real drive to eliminate the non-legitimate authority of communism.