The importance of faith assumes greater importance when it is ruthlessly denied. It always does.Suzanne Fields has a fascinating article in Jewish World Review today about the legacy of religious faith in Germany.
The religious focus here is of an entirely different order than in the United States. No one much cares that Angela Merkel grew up as the daughter of a Lutheran clergyman in Communist East Germany, where being religious was an invitation to official trouble and harassment. The omnipresent Stasi, the government's efficient secret police, lurked behind every cross, a symbol of the free society the communists hated. But freedom of religion was only one among many of the freedoms the Germans were denied in the East.
Germans enjoy neither freedom of speech nor separation of church and state as we know it. Germans are free to say whatever they like, as long as they don't say anything forbidden by the government such as anti-Semitic Nazi slogans. All "official" religious bodies must pay taxes to the state, and in return receive subsidies from the state. Curiously, the fastest growing religious community here is made up of Jews, partly because so few were left in Germany after the Holocaust. The number of Jews in Germany is estimated to be as high as 200,000. The big growth started after the Wall came down; 85 percent of them coming from the former Soviet Union, where they were denied freedom of worship.
The Germans, forever looking for ways to assuage their guilt over the Holocaust, have been particularly receptive to Russian immigrants who signify a revival — especially in Berlin — of a Jewish culture, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of Auschwitz....
Read the whole of Field's article over here. (The photo above shows Germany's biggest synagogue, recently restored after having been nearly destroyed by the Nazis with the ruins left to fester by the Soviets. It is in East Berlin.)
