Tracing Joachim Gauck’s path from pastor in the anti-religious East German dictatorship to head of state in a reunified, democratic Germany – By Kai Schlieter

Critics say Germans will soon tire mightily of Joachim Gauck’s sermons. The thing is, Gauck never felt that he was destined to become a man of the cloth. He was still struggling with the idea shortly before his ordination and had to learn the pastor’s trade from the bottom up. The fact that he succeeded has less to do with his faith than his ability to read people.

“Gauck was very close to the problems of his congregation and had very direct contact,” Christoph Kleeman says today. Kleemann began working in 1976 as a student pastor in Rostock. Six years earlier, Gauck began his career there as congregation pastor in Rostock-Evershagen, a district of Communist-era high-rise apartment blocks in the Eastern port city.

He had abandoned his actual dream of becoming a journalist. Gauck was banned from enrolling in a university German program and besides, in East Germany the press served only to buttress the regime. No thank you, Gauck thought. Under the Communist dictatorship, only the enclave of the Lutheran Church offered the minimum degree of freedom he needed to stay in the country. The Communist regime had taken his father away when he was 11.

On June 27, 1951, two men bundled the former ship’s captain and inspector for workplace safety at Rostock’s Neptun shipyard into a blue Opel – officially, to clear up the events surrounding an accident. In reality, the 45-year-old father of three was abducted by the Soviet secret police and wound up in a Siberian gulag near Ulan Ude on Lake Baikal. He was handed two sentences of 25 years each of forced labor. Only two years later did the family find out what had happened to him. In 1955 he was released, in the wake of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s visit to Moscow.

Perhaps it was this early experience of state-sponsored oppression that prompted Gauck to launch his ministry in the godforsaken monotony of Evershagen. His mission began in a Communist utopia set in concrete that didn’t even have a room for the congregation, let alone a church. Pastor Gauck became the bane of an atheist state that had torn his family apart.

“The fate of our father became an educational cudgel,” he wrote decades later in his memoirs. When Joachim came home with a commendation from school for his excellent grades, his mother slapped him. No wonder this young man would become a staunch anti-communist with a purist vision of law and the state.

Gauck had experienced first hand that even good intentions can result in evil. The desire to work for what is right can actually encourage wrongdoing. For him, the binding rules of a law-based state outweigh any idealist goals or utopias. To this day, he has championed these views like a true North German – stubbornly.

His uncompromising manner is one reason why Joachim Gauck continues to raise hackles across party lines. Aptly, his principles can seldom be classified as belonging to any political faction. When he speaks, his words generally reflect his own life story. For leftists as for conservatives, therefore, he’s considered a loose cannon. His pastoral sermonizing cannot be reconciled with political rhetoric and alienates many politicians.

Given his past in a Communist regime, Gauck instinctively avoids letting himself be categorized or co-opted by any political camp. He refers to himself as a “leftist conservative libertarian.” Regardless of where he may be at any one moment, he remains an outsider. He was a bourgeois under Communism, an East German who dreamed of the West, a man of God in an atheist society and a pastor for whom theological issues never had absolute priority.

This explains his capacity to empathize with the lives of others, and his descriptive oratory. Even colleagues from his East German days who criticize him have emphasized this trait. In 1988, he found out just how much he can impress a crowd, at a Lutheran church assembly in Rostock that he organized.

He spoke frankly about the East German ban on travelling to the West. His remark that “We will want to stay once we are allowed to leave” made it onto West German TV screens. “That was a watershed moment. All his hidden gifts awakened,” says Hartmut Dietrich, a fellow pastor from Rostock at the time. Yet Joachim Gauck was more of an opponent than a dissident or revolutionary. That became apparent in 1990, when he came into conflict with those whose opinions he actually shared.

On Sept. 4, activists occupied the Berlin headquarters of the East German secret police, the Stasi. Some, led by grass-roots organizer Bärbel Bohley, went on hunger strike. They spanned banners between the windows reading: “The files belong to us.” Their actions were driven by the fear that the Stasi records might be destroyed.

It was a well-founded fear. In East and West, documents were already being shredded. Even the West German government under Helmut Kohl was convinced that a new start could succeed only if the country’s Stasi past was erased – especially as the publication of Stasi dossiers on West German politicians from Kohl’s CDU were causing upheaval in the party.

By then Gauck had risen in the East German parliament, the Volkskammer, to chair the newly established Special Committee on Controlling and Disbanding the Stasi. He deftly used this new pulpit to gain recognition in the West as well. East German lawmakers passed a new law on the treatment of personal data collected by East German intelligence – the forerunner of the Stasi Documentation Act and foundation for the Stasi Documentation Authority that would go on to become an international benchmark.

Yet Kohl’s government bristled at including the law in the unification treaty between East and West Germany. That was when the activists seized Stasi headquarters. But Gauck, who like Bohley wanted to preserve the Stasi files, distanced himself from their action.

In a democratic system, everyone has to respect the law, he said. At that moment it was a remarkable position to take. Among the West Germans, Gauck’s pragmatism inspired more trust than did the bearded men and strident women on hunger strike. For the activists, on the other hand, Gauck had unmasked himself as an opportunist, caring primarily about his own career.

Still, Gauck managed to pull the governing parties onto his side. “I tried to establish a consensus by looking to history. I asked the deputies, ‘do you want the same predicament as under Adenauer? With Nazi-era figures like Hans Globke working for the Chancellor? Or have we learned something from history?’ And, lo and behold, they had learned from history,” Gauck said.

Today he calls this time “my most important phase.” Practically at the last minute, on Sept. 18, 1990, the rescue of the Stasi files became enshrined in the Reunification Treaty. Several figures were behind this historic achievement but Gauck’s role as an East German who opposed the dictatorship and yet knew how to operate on the political level, was crucial.

Some activists of the time still resent Gauck’s conduct then. Some had risked their lives. He did not. But Christoph Kleemann, himself politically active at the time and Gauck’s colleague in Rostock, remembers: “He was pretty cheeky in those days. He liked being provocative. In a dictatorship, that’s refreshing.” Gauck says he integrated all the issues of East Germany’s opposition into his work as pastor, “except that on my doorbell it said pastor, not civil rights activist.”

“In my encounters with the congregation members I lost the fear of becoming engulfed by doubt. I was able to grow intellectually and managed to communicate a few things,” he wrote in his autobiography. In a society where not even schoolchildren could speak their minds, it is perhaps no surprise that churchmen frequently went on to political careers.

In East Germany, some liberties existed solely within the church. Therefore only ministers learned to speak freely in public. They were schooled by the Protestant tradition of debate, says Ulrike Poppe, a former civil rights activist currently in charge of the Stasi files in Brandenburg state.

Gauck, who once hesitated to become a minister, learned from that profession what he would later need to find his new path in life. Today, Reverend Joachim Gauck is addressed as “Mr. President.”