Obituary: Friedrich Schorlemmer: Anger and affection

In every real conversation, those involved discover a truly beautiful experience. Namely: being able to navigate in problem spaces. Whenever you met Friedrich Schorlemmer, you experienced energy. In the exchange I felt how uplifting being overwhelmed can be. So much interpretive frenzy with this pastor and preacher and civil rights activist and life storyteller.

Schorlemmer was a methodologist; In his theological work he knew about the organizing power of systematics, but the edifying thing about conversations with him was wandering through labyrinths, and at every junction the fear of fatigue prevailed. God, Jesus, faith, poetry, music, politics, happiness, doubt, nature, eternity, transience – Transience, eternity, nature, doubt, happiness, politics, music, poetry, faith, Jesus, God. Back and forth, back and sideways, every inward a groundward. Cheerfully upwards into the bottomless.

The theme park is always a wilderness: tracking and cutting paths, finding paths and impassability, clearing and darkness, circling and new approaches. Authenticated by God? He shrugged his shoulders: How to name what you can’t grasp because it captures you? For him, resurrection was a lifelong rising before death. Death from indifference and greed and heartless habituation.

This priest, that was anger, for whom kindness was not lost. This was kindness that didn’t whine and wag. This pastor’s life was achieved above all by working against those elbow-gunners who unerringly undercut man by man. By only celebrating people where they irreversibly become customers, competitors and servants.

The Peace Prize winner of the German book trade (1993) was tormented by the fact that in society’s “one-way street of adjustment” it remained difficult to make one thing clear to West Germans about the East: “It wasn’t just pork that was sizzling in the niche.” That wasn’t why Schorlemmer was so vehemently against the SED -Power disputed, only to end up in a catch-up retraining for the status quo in the West. Connection? Departure! Bananas and Mallorca absolutely, but not this reversal of evolution: from “training to walk upright” (Volker Braun) “forward” to the umbilical cord of the department store chains.

Enlightenment as self-research, not primarily as education of others. This is what differentiated Friedrich Schorlemmer from many leftists.

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The theologian was one of the courageous people in the GDR, who are probably one of the few in any historical situation – but to whom the large middle, the moderate and also moderate rest later rely. Schorlemmer raised the high forehead of his alert spirit towards everyone – all those who scurried in discipline, those who lurked opportunistically, those who spied on partisanship, those who fell silent in fear and all those who were idealistically exhausted. In the GDR state, he introduced Christian young people to the young Marx – and was viewed by his parents as an SED man. He preached conscientious objection – and had fathers and mothers tell him that he was endangering his sons’ career paths. He condemned “obedience to shooting orders and Stasiism,” but he did not harden into unforgiveness.

The pastor’s son, born in Wittenberge (Prignitz) in 1944, was an “enemy element” even as a student. The SED trained their talents for contempt, destruction and destruction on him. And just such a persecuted person says one day as the reason why he did everything he could to avoid going to prison: “I wanted to avoid becoming an irredeemable anti-communist.” He feared that he would remain a marked person, and one inevitably becomes a marked person, ” when your soul rages as if it were just a field of weeds.” The Stasi registered him as “OV Johannes”. John: Jesus’ favorite disciple. Could it be more infamous? Yes. The son’s file name: “Judas.” At people’s police training courses it was said that it couldn’t be difficult to solve the “Schorlemmer problem” in road traffic.

On November 4, 1989, he went to Alexanderplatz in Berlin. He would speak at the big demonstration for freedom of expression. This day elevates him: finally public. High culture of Fried skill, which meant: Nothing is finished, everything begins. So in the morning he goes to Alex’s and writes down the slogans of the popular joke in his little notebook – the cover of which is telltalely red. He is shouted at. Red book – red bailiff. Until some people recognize him. Yes, him! The man who became famous years ago during the protest against eastern and western nuclear missiles: “Swords into plowshares!” in 1983 in the Lutherhof of the Wittenberg Castle Church.

Best experience in the fall of 1989? The doorbell rang in Wittenberg. A coal driver, dirty due to work, put a card in the priest’s hand: “Our thanks to those who helped us to find our language again. VEB Kohlhandel, Brigade Retail”.

The admirer of anti-heroes such as Jeremiah, Jesus and Francis was a vicar in Halle-Neustadt, a student pastor in Merseburg, and he worked for a long time at the Evangelical Academy of Saxony-Anhalt. A peace mover. His father, as a medic, wore the Wehrmacht uniform until shortly before Moscow – the icy legs of dead comrades were sawed off because every thawed pair of boots brought reprieve from their own death from the cold. The secret diary in the front trench: bitterest (self-)accusation.

After 1990, Schorlemmer became SPD parliamentary group leader in the city parliament of Lutherstadt Wittenberg. Into big state and party business? No. “I was never a politician who parked in church.” No feeling for lobbying. Fear of character deformation. A grassroots person still up in the pulpit. He remained a tireless person who spoke as if they were stars that could be plucked and placed anew in a sky entirely out of high meaning. Enlightenment as self-research, not primarily as education of others. This distinguished him from many leftists. Of course, pastoral care also means that someone usually has to worry about their own soul. Fate of the suggestion boxes.

“Seeing clearly and yet hoping” is what he called his memories. He wrote and preached in the middle between tragedy and hymnal joy, at the intersection of expectation and pain, where everything is suspended, where everything is possible, both good and disastrous; and it is precisely there that the tensions of the heart and of the mind are greatest. He liked to judge, but when he made judgments, they didn’t fall like stones. Stoning is not a form of conversation. He had a freedom in his sights that did not want to be freed from the person he was addressing.

He knew how to enter a circle and become the center. He told us where God lives. In doing so, he led us into the most inhospitable area in the world, which is also the most mysterious area: the furthest thing we know and the closest thing we are exposed to – our own self. It is the eternal void and the equally eternal place of fulfillment. In Schorlemmer’s opinion, humans were neither the smallest nor the largest, neither the best nor the most important. But a being who may never run out of possible forms.

Schorlemmer’s practice, which can be read in so many of his books: Don’t make yourself smaller than is good for you; throw yourself into submission. Live in such a way that you can see and feel: This difference between perfection and imperfection, which can never be erased, is important to you.

Unfortunately, there is currently a metaphysics of participation, set in motion by neoliberalism, which consolidates our tiresome, almost Old Testament basic equipment: everyone does everything to the other that they can do to them without having to pay for it. This author opposed this with his anger and his affection; He summoned the courage to no longer see solidarity as a “loser’s slogan” but as the main object of self-experience. »Faith is not an insurance against fear, but rather an existence in fear. Everyone should be careful not to resort to a lack of courage without any effort of the will, which is simply cowardice.”

On September 8th, Friedrich Schorlemmer died at the age of 80 in a nursing home in Berlin.