Gethsemanekirche: Candles in October 1989
Why is it significant?
Here on Stargarder Straße, the brick church fills the view, its tall tower rising above a little garden and a square of cobblestones.
Key Facts
| Place | Gethsemanekirche: Candles in October 1989 |
|---|---|
| Address | Stargarder Straße 77, 10437 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.54770, 13.41620 |
| Part of Walk | Candles and Courtyards: Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, from 1933 to the Autumn of 1989 |
| Generated | Generated |
Here on Stargarder Straße, the brick church fills the view, its tall tower rising above a little garden and a square of cobblestones. It is called the Gethsemanekirche, built in the early 1890s by the architect August Orth, and named after the garden where Jesus asked his friends to stay awake with him.
That name became a programme. In the autumn of 1989, East Germans were fleeing to the West by the thousands through Hungary, and in the streets the first demonstrators were being arrested. From the 2nd of October the parish opened this church day and night for a vigil for the prisoners. A banner went up with the words Wachet und betet, watch and pray, from the Gethsemane story, and people kept candles burning in the windows and on the steps.
On the 7th and 8th of October, the nights of the state's fortieth anniversary, the vigil was surrounded. Police and Stasi units sealed off the streets you have just walked, and beat and arrested hundreds of people, many of them simply standing outside the church with candles. Inside, packed into the pews, people swapped the names of the arrested and passed on news to Western journalists. The pictures went around the world.
And then, astonishingly, the state lost its nerve. On the 9th of October, seventy thousand people marched in Leipzig and nobody opened fire. Within a month, on the 4th of November, hundreds of thousands gathered on Alexanderplatz. On the night of the 9th of November, about a kilometre and a half north of this church, the border guards at Bornholmer Straße opened the gate, and the Wall fell.
They used to say the GDR was prepared for everything except candles and prayers. Stand in front of the doors for a moment, where people once stood with a flame in their cupped hands, knowing they could be beaten for it. From a water tower where terror began in 1933, past a saved synagogue and an artist's square, to this doorway where courage ended a dictatorship, you have walked through a century of Prenzlauer Berg... and every step of it is still here.