Rainer Eppelmann was born in Berlin in 1943, the son of a carpenter and a seamstress. His father was a member of the SS until 1945 (he sought out a doctor who removed the tell-tale SS tattoo after the war) and served as a driver in the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar for a while. Eppelmann's mother worked as a postal worker until the end of the war and was a member of the NSDAP. As in the vast majority of German families at the time, the crimes of National Socialism were not a topic of conversation in the Eppelmann home. Thus Rainer Eppelmann was unaware of his father's roles in the concentration camp until his mother finally told him in the 1990s. The family was decisively anti-communist. This meant, for instance, that Rainer Eppelmann could not become a member of the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend: FDJ). He attended secondary school at West Berlin's Johannes-Kepler-Gymnasium, until August of 1961. When the Wall was built, the household was divided: his father, who worked in West Berlin, did not return to his family.

Children who, like Rainer Eppelmann, had been attending a school in the Western section had to serve “period of probation”, as he wrote in his autobiography, before being admitted to further training or education. Eppelmann took employment as a roofing worker. Once the “penalty period” was over, he was permitted to start training as a bricklayer. After that, he was allowed to train at a school of civil engineering. However, Eppelmann objected to the ideologically slanted education and dropped out to begin working as a bricklayer. He would later write that he had seldom felt so free in the GDR as he did in those days. 

Eppelmann was a consistent non-voter, the only exception being a municipal election in September of 1961, when he very pointedly cast a “No” vote. He did not participate in elections again until the late 1980s, when he went to the polls as a civil rights activist with the aim of exposing election fraud. In 1964, he refused to do his military service in an armed unit and became a “construction soldier”, an option which had been established in the GDR only shortly beforehand and had no parallel in any other Eastern Bloc country. However, he and a friend refused to take the oath required of construction soldiers as members of the National People’s Army, which earned him an eight-month prison sentence. Eppelmann did not want to find himself the situation of having to carry out orders that he disagreed with. He was thinking of his father.

Eppelmann later wrote that it was knowing why he had been imprisoned that kept him from being broken by the months spent in prison in Greifswald, Neustrelitz and Ueckermünde. He was still required to do his service as a construction soldier at the end of his sentence but did not have to take the oath. Eppelmann tried to emigrate to the West after his return to East Berlin in the summer of 1967; his siblings had already emigrated with the help of the Protestant church. He protested the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August of 1968 by signing the book of condolences opened at the Czechoslovakian embassy.

When it became apparent that Eppelmann and his then fiancé and future wife would not be able to emigrate together, both decided to remain. Not wanting to continue working as a bricklayer and with no other training programmes open to him, Eppelmann decided to train as a pastor. There followed what he later called his “most regime-friendly period”. He got married and began to study theology at the Paulinum, a Lutheran seminary, in September of 1969. During his studies, he became fascinated by theologian Dorothee Sölle’s idea of atheistic belief in God. He later made this concept the cornerstone of his own faith.

During his theological training, Eppelmann was active in the Young Congregation in Berlin’s Hohenschönhausen district. He completed his training in 1975 (by then a father of five children) and became a pastor in the Berlin Samaritan congregation. He also took over the role of local youth pastor in Berlin-Friedrichshain. In November 1978, Eppelmann was in a serious automobile accident that nearly killed him.

In his role as local youth pastor, Eppelmann met with other church employees engaged in youth work on a monthly basis to exchange experiences. Discussion at these meetings often turned to the work with young people who had not found a place for themselves in society. When Eppelmann was approached by blues musicians who wanted to perform in his church, he recognised an opportunity and worked with them to arrange the first “Blues mass” in the summer of 1979. This combination church service/concert/lay theatre/informational event quickly became a huge success. There were very few places in the GDR where people could laugh so irreverently or speak so frankly. Attendance numbers soon soared beyond even those of the Christmas services, which were always well attended. Young people came from all over the GDR to attend. Sometimes demand was so great that the blues masses had to be held three times in a row. The organisation of these events and his clashes with the congregation council and the leadership of the Evangelical State Church, which came under enormous pressure to put a stop to Eppelmann’s work from the SED and State Security, ultimately lent Eppelmann political prestige of a kind that few East German dissidents could match.

To no small extent, Eppelmann’s influence was due to the fact that Eppelmann took advice offered to him by #Robert Havemann, whom he had met in 1980, to heart: Havemann encouraged him to take the offensive in his dealings with the journalists and diplomats from the West, as this was the only way to protect himself and popularise his own views in the GDR. Havemann’s example taught Eppelmann how important a public stage could be under the dictatorship.

Eppelmann met with #Robert Havemann and his wife Katja several times over the years. In the summer of 1981, they arranged to write open letters to the Leonid Brezhnev, Communist Party leader and head of state, and to Erich Honecker, and together they drafted the “Berlin Appeal”, which was intended to provide a platform for the GDR peace movement. Eppelmann was arrested on 9 February 1982, after the Berlin Appeal was published in the West German media. He was already a well-known figure, though, and protests led to his release just three days later. Eppelmann’s use of Western media as a means to present his cause to the public elicited strong criticism in his own congregation and within the Church as a whole. After Robert Havemann’s on 9 April 1982, Eppelmann spoke at his graveside, emphasising his influence as a role model for opposition activists.