Walter Schilling was born on 28 February 1930 in Sonneberg, southern Thuringia, and grew up in neighbouring Oberlind. His father was a pastor. His parents were involved in the Confessing Church movement during the National Socialist era, which prevented his father from being appointed superintendent until after the Nazi dictatorship had collapsed in 1945. At the age of 17, Schilling decided that he would become a pastor, despite youthful dreams of becoming a fighter pilot.

Schilling’s background prevented him from enrolling at a university in the Soviet Occupation Zone and during the first years of the GDR, so he found a training position at the Evangelical Church’s Villigster Studienwerk. This institution provided its students with a general education geared towards employment. The idea was to avoid the past mistake of allowing future elites to grow up out of touch from reality. Schilling worked as an agricultural assistant in Westphalia and as a mining worker in the Ruhr region, experiences which later helped to shape his approach to social and practical theology. After studying theology in Münster, Heidelberg and Jena from 1950 to 1955, he took up a post as a parish pastor in the village of Braunsdorf-Dittrichshütte in the Saalfeld district of Thuringia, which he kept until his retirement.

Schilling’s congregation soon grew far larger than one would expect in a village with a population of about 100 people. This was largely due to the open youth retreat facility established in the village in 1959 by Schilling (who had been assigned responsibility for working with the district’s youth), his wife and the Young Congregation of Rudolstadt. The retreat, in a building that had once housed the stables at the Braunsdorf parsonage, became a magnet for young people from all around the GDR. The hippy movement found a welcome there from 1968 onwards. In the GDR, this was more of a proletariat movement than was the case elsewhere: the SED tended to brand non-conformist youth “not worth educating” and refuse them admission to studies, so students were rare among the hippies of the GDR. The group “Open Work’s Disciples” grew up from among the marginalised – in true biblical fashion.

In the early days, most of the young people who came to the retreat were from Rudolstadt or Saalfeld; they were looking for someplace where they could listen to their music without having the police turn up immediately. Brutal attacks on and social stigmatisation of young men with long hair were common in the daily life of “real socialism” in the 1960s. Increasingly, young people were being politicised by experiences with what they perceived as fascist police state. Everyone was welcome at Braunsdorf, regardless of how they dressed. It was a place where they could express themselves and communicate freely, an island in the “Red Sea” offering space to develop and grow freely in a world otherwise regimented and constrained by the standards imposed by the SED. Schilling, himself a long-haired jazz and blues afficionado who loved strong coffee and strong cigarettes, had no interest in compelling declarations of faith or in messianism. Thus, even the more atheistic young people attended his services in the old village church. In them, Schilling always seemed to find a way to link the words of the Bible with real-life experiences from the world that the young people lived in. In the evenings, they would sit around the fire drinking beer from the nearby Watzdorf brewery and debate visions of the future.

In the autumn of 1969, an “alternative” Church service in Rudolstadt organised by the pastor and the young people drew 500 worshipers. Covers of rock hits like “I’m free” and “Paint it black” spoke to the “Beat Generation” and had to be labelled as spiritual or traditional music. Banned bands, like the Medianas, played in the church. It did not take the authorities long to catch on, though, and the group was prohibited from holding a second service of this kind in Saalfeld. The most important thing that came out of these efforts was its authenticity, the fact that the young people were responsible for the arrangements themselves and experienced the conflicts together. Schilling translated the word “solidarity”, which was misused in the GDR, as “being quite close to one another”, and saw personality as essential for it. The freedom for free time and inner peace, as a basic human need and condition for development of the personality, was one of Open Work’s strengths.

The idea was to develop a “togetherness” rather than being a paternalistic church that was there “for” others. This was not the traditional approach of church social work and thus drew the suspicion of Church leaders and congregations. This new form of youth work was taken up first in Zella-Mehlis (Jürgen Hauskeller), Leipzig (Claus-Jürgen Wizisla), Jena (Uwe Koch, Thomas Auerbach) and Dresden (Frieder Burkhardt, Christoph Wonneberger). The term “Open Work” was applied to it from 1970 onwards. In 1971, Open Work practitioners began to hold transregional meetings that were attended both by church employees and by young people who wanted to shoulder responsibility. Their aim was to develop a new model for communities. Hitchhikers spread the word, networking practitioners all over the country. The profile of Young Congregations in bigger cities, such as Erfurt, Halle and East Berlin, began to change and the youth organisations became something like transhipment centres for subversive ideas. Collective holistic living, acceptance of others without prejudice and community without hierarchy became integral to these groups’ image of their best selves. There should be no shortage of fun and spontaneity either.

In a process of engagement with others in a community, a capacity for collective political action developed out of Schilling’s own theological understanding of the emulation of Jesus. In 1973, Schilling concealed an army deserter on church premises despite the presence of a military camp of the National People’s Army (Nationale Volksarmee, NVA) in nearby Dittrichshütte. Again and again, he stood by young men who refused to do their military service. Starting in 1973, the Young Congregation of Jena, with which Schilling also worked, began to grow increasing polarised as a belated effect of the *Prague Spring, culminating in the protests against the denaturalisation of Wolf Biermann.