20 Political Isolation
The following interview with Erich Ortlieb and Marianne Zwirner Ortlieb took place four years after the previous chapter and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. Perhaps the reader will detect a slightly different tone to the conversation.
Erich: It is very important that the history of the Church be complete. I believe that the history of the branches in the German Democratic Republic is already a special history because of the people in the GDR. The group was relatively small and was always isolated. We were not isolated because we wanted to be, but because at first the people in the government wanted to isolate us. They didn’t want people to believe in God. They didn’t want people to have ideals.
Later on they decided that our ideals were not so far from their political aims, and then they tried through the media and also through individual politicians to get the Church to go along with them. That’s the point at which we remained neutral. The Church teaches—and this is an important point which I consider correct—the Church says that the state and the church should remain completely separate from one another. And so, if we as a church attempted to have a strong influence on the politics or on the economy of the state in which we, as members, became politically engaged, well, in the GDR that would have meant that we identified ourselves with Communism or with atheism, because Marxism is fundamentally atheistic. And as members of the Church, we didn’t want that. So that is why we withdrew ourselves, and as a consequence, we were naturally quite isolated for several years.
Now as a result of this isolation, not only could we not get permission to build regular church buildings, but it also meant that very few members of the Church were allowed to attend the universities or choose the profession they wanted to follow. There were, of course, many young people in the Church who were interested in a very broad spectrum of studies, but they were simply not allowed to attend the university. Wanting to become a teacher, for example, was out: “Maybe you could be very good teachers, but you could never educate the children properly in the Marxist philosophy.” That was the program of all the schools, in all educational institutions. It was that way in the preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, high school, trade school, and university. This Marxist philosophy was always in the foreground, was always the basis for the educational methodology.
Marianne: Yes, that was more important than anything else. If you got an “A” in these areas, then it didn’t matter if you did poorly in your other studies; that was no sin. But if your grades were the other way around, that was bad. You couldn’t continue.
Erich: And because of this, many members of the Church were held back. Yes, and are so to this day. Not everyone. I never wanted to go to college and made no demands on the State. I can truly say that I have been satisfied with the offers I received from the individual companies or businesses in our country. I am happy that I could accept them without compromising myself, so that no one can say today that I have obligations to the State. It used to be that when a person in the GDR wanted to study, to go to college, then the State said, “Well, you want that from us? Then you are obligated to give us something in return.”
Marianne: Students at the university were actually obligated to spend three years in the army. Everyone had to spend one-and-a-half years anyway, but if you wanted to study at the university, they wanted you to do three years and become an officer. Olaf, our oldest son, really wanted to go to the university. At first they wouldn’t let him, and then he applied again and applied for an area where they really wanted students.
Erich: Construction engineers who specialized in equipment installation.
Marianne: Yes. And he was accepted, and then they wanted to make him serve three years in the army. He had already served his one-and-a-half years before he went to the university. That was obligatory, and now they wanted another year and a half from him, and he was supposed to enter officer training. He wouldn’t do it, and there was a big fuss about it. They called him in for consultation. In the end, they finally let him become a student, but they told him that he would never receive a leadership position in the profession. There was nothing he could do about that. Someone who goes to church and does not follow the party line would never get a leadership position. But now he has become a manager. Now that we are no longer the German Democratic Republic.
Marianne Zwirner Ortlieb and Erich Ortlieb. Dresden, 1990. Courtesy Norma and Garold Davis.
G. Davis: Did a person have to be a member of the Communist Party in order to attend the university?
Erich: No.
Marianne: It wasn’t absolutely necessary, but it was . . . well, they just didn’t want to admit him because he was a member of the Church.
Erich: You see, as a church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we were a very small group inside the GDR. And it was quite natural that the State authorities who decided on the admissions policies for the university looked on us as an American sect. The Protestant and the Catholic churches had a lot more influence in these matters, in political matters. They took advantage of this influence insofar as it was possible, whereas we, as a church, were quite isolated. In the early years, we never attempted to make any contact with the local or state authorities, and consequently there was no possibility that we could do anything in the way of influencing them. That was simply not possible for us. In the beginning, we were only about four and a half or five thousand members in the GDR, and that is a small percentage out of a population of seventeen million.
G. Davis: You never had the feeling that you had been forgotten by the Church?
Marianne: No. On the contrary. It was actually somewhat of a disadvantage to us that there was always someone coming over from America. The police could think they were spies and think that we were agents or something. Our Olaf, when he was in the army, always had trouble when he attended a stake conference, because there was someone there from America. You see, it was like this. Whoever was in the army, the army of the GDR, was not allowed to have any contact with foreigners from the West. And when we had a conference and there was a General Authority there or visitors from the West, then he was never allowed to speak to them. And in case he did speak to them or came in contact with any of them, he was required to report this contact to the authorities at his army base. And that was actually something of a problem with the young people who were in the army. Either they didn’t report, or they got in trouble for not reporting. Of course, it wasn’t always known. Not always. But we never had the feeling that we in the GDR were isolated from the Church as such.
Erich: On the contrary. I think that today we receive fewer Church authorities than we did in those days. There was a time, however, when no one could enter the country. That was after the building of the Berlin Wall. For the first two or three years after that, no visitors from the West were allowed to enter. That was when they were trying (by “they” I mean the people in the socialistic camp to which the GDR belonged) to achieve complete isolation in the areas of economics, culture, science—you name it. They wanted a complete isolation in order to make us independent. They had always believed that an economic dependence on the West brought with it a political dependence, and they couldn’t have that.
I really think they were correct. If I trade with you and we have some kind of common economic interests, cultural and scientific exchanges will follow, and that’s what they didn’t want. And so there was a time, a number of years, when we had very little contact [with the Church].
G. Davis: So what kind of difficulties were there for the Church here in this country?
Marianne: We could never do what we wanted to do.
Erich: Well, there were difficulties. For one thing, we could not do missionary work. The government forbade missionary work. And they didn’t say it was because we were political agitators, but they based this decision on the idea that young people who were working for the Church were not part of the socialistic work force and they were therefore hindering the productivity of the State. So they didn’t put it in direct political terms. They just said that they couldn’t spare young people from production to work for the Church. We were not in the factories for two years. That was the reason they gave, and of course we as a church had to go along with it.
Another difficulty was that we couldn’t have the Stern [Church magazine in German] and we couldn’t have any teaching manuals. We had to copy them off with the typewriter, but that was illegal. For a while, we as teachers had a very difficult time, but there was also a good side to it.
Erich: It was a blessing.
G. Davis: Why was that?
Marianne: Well, it took us a lot more time to prepare a lesson, but we really had to study. We studied a lot more intensively than we do now. Now we have the prescribed lesson, and you have to read it and learn something in order to understand it and so on, but the lessons are so carefully worked out that you don’t have to do much. I used to teach in the Primary. We just had a title for a lesson, “Keep the Sabbath Day Holy” or one of the commandments. And we had to make a lesson out of that. We had to figure out how we could make that apply to the children, and so we had to draw on our own experiences. It was a lot of fun then to be a teacher. Of course it still is. And that’s what’s funny about all of this. It’s hard to imagine how it was anymore. Now we are happy that we don’t have to spend so much time preparing, that we have everything prepared for us.
Erich: But it was a terrible disadvantage when the literature of the Church was not available for the teachers or for the priesthood leaders. We didn’t have any handbooks! Just try to imagine that. There are specific handbooks and specific instructions that tell you how to run a mission. And if anyone had a handbook, it had to be Brother Burkhardt, who was first a counselor to the mission president and then became mission president for the GDR. And if anyone had a question, they had to contact Brother Burkhardt or someone who eventually had a handbook. So it wasn’t only a problem with teaching; it was also a problem for the administration of the Church.
A lot of people were afraid to join the Church because then their neighbors would see that they were attending church. “Oh, you’re a Mormon now.” Then they lost their jobs, or were ridiculed at school or at the university. Many people, when they join the Church, do not yet have the spiritual strength to stand up to this. It’s being locked in like we were that causes this uncertainty and this insecurity. We are living in this large camp, and we hear that America is the land of unlimited possibilities—which must have its negative as well as its positive side. But we didn’t have anything like that. We had only the one perspective, and that is what caused a lot of unrest in the branches.
Marianne: We were talking about the difficulties we had here in the GDR because we were members of the Church. We had them alright. You were always a little bit afraid. When your children went to school, you were always afraid that they might say something that could be to your disadvantage, that could get you in big trouble, because they spied on the children. They could learn from the children if their parents watched Western television, which was not permitted. We lived in what the other Germans called the “valley of the naive” because we couldn’t get Western television here in Dresden. But in other cities they asked the children what TV shows they had seen, and then they knew if the parents had been watching Western TV, and that could get them into big trouble.
Erich: Actually, the problem was that the kids in the schools would talk to one another about TV shows from the West, and then the authorities could say, “Mr. Ortlieb, your children are making propaganda for Western TV.” That was the problem. It was always interpreted falsely. A child could suddenly get enthused about a particular film or TV show, and they interpreted that as propaganda. They never actually said that it was forbidden to watch Western TV. They only said that it was forbidden to talk about it in public. And a child who is in a school is in a public facility. And when these kids talked about a TV show or even made gestures they had picked up that were typical of the West, then that was Western propaganda.
Marianne: If a child wore a T-shirt with any kind of advertisement from the West, they had to take it off or at least, never wear it to school again. Or if they got a sticker on a package from the West, they weren’t allowed to show it at school.
Erich: A school bag, the kind that is common now, if it had any advertisement such as Solomon Skis or Herti Sporting Goods, even if it just had the child’s toys in it, they could not bring that to school.
Marianne: Or, they would be told never to bring it again.
Erich: The entire socialist idealogy was actually supposed to be supported by the smallest unit of society and in every family. And that’s why the people always felt they were being watched.
Marianne: But now, the children can talk about God openly and about their attitudes. It didn’t used to be that way. We always taught our children to speak their opinions freely, but many parents wouldn’t do that because they were afraid that their children wouldn’t be able to get into a decent profession.
Erich: Or they wouldn’t be able to attend the university. It was this way. Our daughter Maja had good grades, and the director of her school recommended her for the university. That was always a privilege to be recommended, and it made a difference if one was recommended or just made an application. If one was recommended, it was as good as certain that the child would be able to attend the university. If one made an application, it was always questionable. And Maja, she brought this recommendation home and said, “Look at this, they want to send me to the university.” Actually she wasn’t so excited about going on with more school.
Marianne: Yes. Yes. She wanted to go.
Erich: Well, maybe then. But she had this recommendation in her records from the fifth grade on, and every year or two the children were asked what they wanted to study. And Maja wrote that she wanted to study medicine. And I was called to a conference for parents at the city hall where we parents were to be clearly informed that our children were going to the university. And there at the city hall they told me that there were other students who were better than Maja and that the State could not guarantee that Maja would be able to study medicine. And so they didn’t process her recommendation.
Marianne: But my husband knew the school director, and he asked him personally, and the school director told him it was because of the Church. He said clearly and openly that it was because of the Church that she could not go to the university. But they said, “No, it was because there were so many other children.” They tried to find an excuse.
Erich: Yes. Yes. They said, for example, that they had a number of applicants, young men who wanted to attend the university whom they had obligated to spend more time in the army. The army always came first. What that meant was that if my boy had bad grades at school and if I applied for him to become a career officer, he had the best chances of getting into the university. And many of them did this, and afterwards their parents would tell them to go to a doctor and get a statement that they were not physically fit to go into the army. But once they been accepted, they could study something else. But our family and the other families in the Church didn’t want to use these kinds of underhanded methods.
M. Ortlieb: But a lot of families did.
G. Davis: Now, tell me about the problem of getting to the temple.
Marianne: There was a time when we could go to the Swiss Temple.
Erich: This is the way it was. There was a particular time in the GDR when people from the GDR were allowed to travel into West Germany. They received a visa for West Germany. And the Church in West Germany made it possible that certain members who were older and who could afford it were allowed to travel to the Swiss Temple. But this was actually illegal. It was not officially sanctioned by the Church here. Officially the Church here was not allowed to issue a temple recommend for the Swiss Temple or for any other temple because the members could not receive a visa from the State authorities to travel into these countries.
Marianne: But there was also a short time when they could go to the temple, before the Wall went up. My mother wanted to go, but it was just at the time when I was on my mission, and she was happy when she was able to give me a little financial support. She wanted to go to the temple, but she didn’t have any money.
Erich: Yes, I can explain that. There was a time when it was permitted to travel from the GDR into West Germany without a visa.
Marianne: That was before 1960.
Erich: That was before 1960. Long before 1960. We had permission to travel into West Germany, but when the United Nations recognized the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, we had to have official State visas. And we couldn’t have a visa to travel to Switzerland or to London or to America. We could have a visa only to travel to the Federal Republic of Germany, and there was no temple there. So we couldn’t go. Members could cross the Swiss border without a visa, but they had to have a temple recommend, and no bishop or branch president could issue a temple recommend that authorized the person to attend the Swiss Temple. It was just impossible.
Marianne: Brother Burkhardt did it. He filled out recommends for Switzerland.
Erich: Yes, Marianne, that is true. We filled them out too, but that doesn’t matter. He knew that when he filled it out he was going against official instructions from the State, and that’s why in the later years he stopped giving these temple recommends.
In the ’50s and ’60s, we always had the feeling that the Church was a blessing for us. That was very important. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have remained faithful to the Church. A church that has nothing to give its members has lost its value. And we members of the Church understood that. But these problems really come about when a church or a country is isolated. The leaders of the Church have always talked about the “iron curtain.” And the leaders of the Church have always tried to get around it so that we have never really felt that we were alone. There was never a time when we had to say, “Well, they have forgotten us.” That never happened. Of course, there were times in the small branches where the people felt they were alone, but that is probably true also in America.
The fact is that we here in the GDR were only a small unit of the Church, and we were together for special conferences and meetings for more than forty years. If there was a conference here in Dresden or we had to travel to Leipzig, in Leipzig they would announce that three hundred or five hundred members of the Church would be coming and that they would need housing. The members in the GDR were not able to pay for a hotel. So they would say, “Sister Davis, how many people can you take in?” And Sister Davis would say, “Well, two can sleep in that corner, and two can sleep over there.” Then that night she would have ten members to take care of in her three-room apartment, members from Rostock and from Erfurt. That’s the way the members inside the GDR got to know one another and how they grew into a beautiful unified group.
We, as a family, the Ortlieb family, the Zwirner family, we felt this to be a wonderful thing. We never gave this a second thought; we just thought this is the way it has to be. It couldn’t have been better. Whenever there was a conference or a special occasion here in Dresden, we always had guests in our home. There were even occasions when members of our own family who came for the occasion were offended because we had the house full of guests. They wanted to stay with us, but they hadn’t told us they were coming, and there was no place for them to sleep. But this is the way the Church family in the GDR grew together.
And there were also the youth conferences, where the young people for the entire GDR came together. Then they all stayed at the chapel.
Once when we had a youth conference, the young people from Dresden or those from Leipzig got an assignment to build a large Sphinx. You know, there by the pyramids in Egypt there is this big lion or Sphinx. And they told us, you have to build a Sphinx. And then they came. And the big room at the ward house it would be decorated like a robbers cave.
Marianne: Or like a pond with fish.
Erich: Or there would be a festival at the court. All the young people would have on courtly costumes.
Marianne: Like a court festival.
Erich: We put on a court festival, and all the young people brought their families with them.
Marianne: And everyone participated. It’s not that way anymore, at least they tell us that they do this and that. And sometimes the young people don’t even come. And we used to dance. Not at all like they do now where a bunch of them stand around in a corner.
Erich: Maybe I could say something. When I was responsible for the young people, we had a youth conference for the Dresden district over in Bischofswerde. And Bischofswerda had a meeting place that had a high ceiling, but the ceiling was covered with wood panels, and the bishop over there said, “You can’t go home until drops of water start falling from the ceiling.” By that he meant, that we had to get so warm from our activities and sweat so much that moisture would drip from the ceiling. And it really happened. The young people were so enthusiastic, and, I’m sure those things happen today, but you asked how things were inside the GDR in those years. A very strong spiritual and emotional feeling developed among us in the Church in the GDR. It developed because of the isolation we felt from the State. We said, “We have to take care of ourselves. There is no other way.” And many things happened. And the young people always felt very secure.
Marianne: In the old chapel, there was a room up there in the second floor which we called the Celestial Kingdom [Himmlische Herrlichkeit]. That’s where we wanted to sleep when we had the youth conferences. The room wasn’t so large as it was down on the main floor, where most of the young people had to sleep. Someone would always say, “Let’s make a place up here for the Dresden group.” We would spread our things out so we had room to sit and to sleep. Oh, those were beautiful times.
Erich: And you have to understand that we who were in leadership positions were interested in offering the young people something in contrast to the offerings of the State. The State had many things to offer the young people not only for their cultural and scientific development, but also for their social life too. As leaders in the Church, we wanted to fill this cultural and educational void for the young people in the Church in the GDR, to close the gap. So Brother Burkhardt and the leaders of the Church were always seeing to it that the young people had not only the opportunity to get together, but also the financial support that they needed. And the young people looked forward to the next youth conference for a whole year.
