Gethsemanekirche

This red-brick church in Prenzlauer Berg was the centre of Berlin’s peaceful revolution in the autumn of 1989 – the place where the city’s opposition became visible, and where the East German state used mass force against its own people for the last time.

On 2 October 1989, activists from the Weissensee Peace Circle, the Environmental Library and the Kirche von Unten (Church from Below) opened a round-the-clock vigil here under the motto “Wachet und betet” – Watch and Pray. A contact telephone in the parish hall collected reports of arrests from across the country and passed them to Western journalists, working as an improvised news agency inside a church. By 4 October three thousand people were attending the evening services, and the forecourt was covered in burning candles.

On the night of 7 October, the GDR’s fortieth anniversary, riot police and Stasi units beat and arrested demonstrators in the streets around the church; water cannon and armoured vehicles were deployed outside it. More than a thousand people were detained across East Berlin over two nights. On 23 October, opposition groups presented a hundred-page report on the police violence to the international press from here. The full story is in our Peaceful Revolution in Berlin guide.

The Gethsemanekirche is still an active parish church and a concert venue. A memorial plaque and Karl Biedermann’s low relief Resistance commemorate the autumn of 1989. In front of the west portal stands the Segnende Christus (Blessing Christ), rescued from the Versoehnungskirche – the Church of Reconciliation that stood on the death strip until the GDR dynamited it in 1985 – and Ernst Barlach’s bronze Geistkaempfer (Spirit Fighter), placed by the state of Berlin in 1994 to honour the democratic movement born here.

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