The roots of revolution in the autumn of 1989 in the GDR lead back to Oskar Brüsewitz, a Protestant pastor from Rippicha. His act of public self-immolation on 18 August 1976 on the market square in the district town of Zeitz, a stronghold of the socialist workers’ movement and the “electoral district” of Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security, sent a signal flare in the battle against Communism seen throughout the GDR and beyond its borders. The SED and its state had been insisting for years that the leadership of the Evangelical Church of the Church Province of Saxony remove the “troublemaker”, and his transfer to a post in another parish was now imminent. With his last act, Oskar Brüsewitz was both denouncing the state’s discrimination against young Christians in the GDR (“Calling all persons... calling all persons... The church in the GDR indicts communism! Due to the oppression of children and adolescents in schools”) and articulating a bitter accusation against the Church leadership for its own role in socialism.

Born on 30 May 1929 in Vilkyškiai (Lithuania), Oskar Brüsewitz was the son of Agathe and Arthur Brüsewitz, a master painter. They were an ecumenical couple, she was Catholic, he was Protestant. The four Brüsewitz children were brought up in their father’s faith. Oskar Brüsewitz went to school in the nearby town of Viešvilė from 1935 to 1943 and then began a business apprenticeship in a mixed goods business in Kreuzingen in Eastern Prussia (present day Bolshakovo, Russia). He was then drafted into the Reich Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst: RAD) as a member of the Hitler Youth before he could complete his training. The RAD sent him to Roßleben, and later to Atern, both in Thuringia. At the age of 16, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht to serve as an anti-tank gunner. Brüsewitz was deployed against the Red Army in Warsaw, Lithuania and Eastern Prussia. These formative years explain his penchant for military terms: “We will storm”, he would say later, meaning campaign on the Lord’s behalf in the SED state.

Interned as a Soviet POW towards the end of the war, he was reunited with his family in the Saxon town of Burgstädt in the autumn of 1945, where he then trained as a shoemaker. In 1947, he left for the “West”, settling down in Melle in Lower Saxony, where he worked as a shoemaker. He became self-employed in 1949 and was awarded the title of master craftsman by the Chamber of Crafts in Osnabrück in 1951. He began to involve himself the life of the congregation, first in Melle and then in Hildesheim, and became active in the YMCA. After his first marriage, from 1951, ended in divorce, he moved to Weißenfels (Saxony Anhalt) in the GDR. He found work at a shoe factory but was dismissed for making an unauthorised trip to the West.

In these years, he engaged in passionate, spontaneous and publicly visible activity in the “Elim Christian Community” in Leipzig. In this community, Oskar Brüsewitz found his true calling as an activist theologian. At this time, this free-church community, which attached particular importance to missionary work, believed in the literal interpretation of Biblical texts and practised adult baptism, had its central offices in Hamburg. For this reason, the Elim communities were under observation by the Ministry for State Security (MfS) within its operation “Sects, Gnadau community associations”. Thus, State Security already had its eye on Oskar Brüsewitz in the 1950s and attempted to isolate him so that people would not begin to see him as “a martyr for his religious ideas”. From that point onwards, he was repeatedly exposed to pressure, largely of a covert nature, from the state apparatus. This pressure increased when he used his own money to rent a property and build a Christian children’s playground on it or put up a striking showcase (“Jesus Christ says, “I am the First”) or de-commissioned railway car to generate attention and get people thinking (all forms of action that he would use again in Rippicha later). This provoked a fierce reaction from the state, to the displeasure of the Elim Communities, which preferred to remain inconspicuous. Oskar Brüsewitz and Christa Roland, whom he would later marry, left the community and joined the Evangelical State Church.

The avowed Christian’s ambition was to attend the seminary in Wittenberg, but ill health forced to leave after only a month. In 1955, he entered into business on his own, first in Markkleeberg, then in Weißensee (Thuringia). His shop, which specialised in children’s shoes, flourished, employing as many as ten people for a while. The state incorporated Brüsewitz’s business into the manufacturing cooperative Handel Sömmerda in 1963, after which he stayed on as a branch manager.

This situation led him, in 1964, to make another attempt at the seminary. This time he was able to completed his studies in Erfurt in 1969. He wrote a paper for an examination there which discussed Paul Blau, Protestant theologian and head of the Uniate Evangelical Church in Poland, whose views he shared. In it he describes the Soviet policy on churches as aimed at secularisation and disintegration and said that it sought to play Christians off against other Christians with the intention of making the Churches submissive. In short: the aim was the “destruction of a church by a totalitarian state”. Oskar Brüsewitz never strayed from this view; on the contrary, it is the key to his symbolic final act. This act can be seen as the last in a series of developments beginning with this examination paper: Brüsewitz, the assistant pastor (1969/70) and then pastor of Droßdorf-Rippicha consistently sought to thwart a policy towards religion of the kind he describes in the paper.

In Rippicha, Brüsewitz developed a lively church youth work programme and social activities that drew considerable attention, like that of setting up a Protestant playground. His unorthodox and non-dogmatic way of living as a Christian and preacher in the GDR was also striking. The state responded with repressive measures that grew more severe following a series of symbolic and varied acts of protest by Brüsewitz. One of these was the installation of a 2.5-meter-long neon cross, visible for miles, on the side of the tower of the Rippicha church that faced the Zeitz-Gera motorway in 1969. Another act, also in 1969, was holding up a poster reading “2,000 years of the Church of Jesus Christ” during the GDR’s bombastic celebration of its 25th anniversary. He also countered one the SED’s rhyming slogans with a prominently posted rhyme of his own: responding to the SED’s “Without God or if the sunshine stops, we shall still bring in the crops” with “Without God and the rain he sends, in bankruptcy the world will end” [both slogans translated here very loosely to preserve the rhyme, see the German version of this page for the original wording –trans.].

The authorities, which had been urging the leaders of the Evangelical Church to transfer this pastor elsewhere for some time ratcheted up the pressure in the spring of 1976. That summer, after rebuffing these requests for years, the Church leadership decided to suggest a transfer to another parish to Oskar Brüsewitz. Feeling forsaken by his Church, Brüsewitz chose to commit suicide in an act of public protest which he hoped would be understood as a fire on the hilltop, lit in warning. On 18 August 1976, Brüsewitz set himself on fire on the market square in Zeitz as around 300 people looked on in horror. Earlier, he had put up two posters indicting communism for its crimes.

Oskar Brüsewitz died of his burns in the district hospital in Halle on 22 August 1976. His funeral became a silent rally of the GDR opposition. The SED and its apparatus of repression attempted, unsuccessfully, to suppress the symbolic effect of Brüsewitz’ act and cast it in a slanderous light. Small though it was, the solidarity movement that followed was unexpected and dealt a decided blow to the Church’s confidence. Rendered uneasy, the Church reacted coldly to establishment of the Brüsewitz Centre in the FRG in 1977. This centre supported the opposition in the GDR and documented acts of reprisal committed by the SED state. It held a memorial event each year on the date of Brüsewitz’s death. A memorial column inscribed “Oskar Brüsewitz 18. 8. 1976” was ceremoniously installed in front of St Michaelis Church in Zeitz on 18 August 1990.