Worshipping in Berlin
Antony Froggett describes his time as a Quaker in Berlin
Sometime last year we decided as a family that we should live life more adventurously; so I gave up most of my work, we put our house up for rent and moved to Berlin. In England we had been an English family with a German mother and we decided that, for one year, we would be a German family with an Ausländer father. We arrived in Berlin with a letter of introduction from our Local Meeting, asking Berlin Friends to take care of us.
Berlin Meeting is hidden in a courtyard on Planckstraße in what was previously East Berlin before the fall of the wall in 1989. Berlin Meeting has a long and interesting history, starting in the 1920s and enduring the Nazi regime and then the division of Berlin into East and West. Berlin Meeting is dominated by the presence of Gisela, who is ninety-four-years-old and the most long-standing member of the Meeting. Her father was a conscientious objector during the first world war. In the whole of Germany and Austria Yearly Meeting there are barely more members than our Area Meeting in the UK.
Berlin Meeting is the only Meeting in Germany that meets once a week. Berlin is a popular tourist destination and there is a large transient population of young Europeans and Americans. There are often visitors and occasional attenders at Meeting. This is both a source of life and a burden for a small Meeting. I am struck by the patience with which people translate what is said during the notices and in the Afterword following Meeting.
Having attended Central Manchester Meeting for over twenty years we had developed the idea that all Quakers worship like Mancunians! It was quite a shock to experience things done differently. Small changes to our expected routine had a jolting impact on us. People not standing up to give ministry, not having the Bible or a copy of Quaker faith & practice on the table, and not having a long list of notices after Meeting were all surprisingly disconcerting!
What have I learnt from my experience of worshipping in Berlin? I cannot speak German and my inability to express myself or understand what is said in ministry has felt like being a child again. It is as if every utterance is in tongues and is unfathomable. This, I suspect, has been good for me. It has made me wonder about what is essential to Quaker worship and the extent to which thinking that I know things hinders me being a Quaker. This sense of newness to being at Meeting has made me wonder what it might have been like to have been an early Christian or Quaker, when things had to be discovered afresh.
In the absence of being able to understand what is said in Meeting, small things have become very important to me. Worshipping alongside my children while they are knitting or reading (or, more recently, stroking Pedro the dog) has been very special. I will miss them when they return to a Children’s Meeting when we are in England. Socialising after Meetings has become more significant to me. Shared lunches (or ‘pot luck’ as it is called here) I realise are a form of Quaker communion and have been perhaps the most significant part of being at Meeting for me.
In a few weeks’ time a large van will come to load our furniture and drive it the 900 miles back to Manchester. We will follow a couple of days later. We will be glad to be with old friends again, but sad to leave Germany and Berlin Quakers. Worshipping together has been an important part of our attempts to live adventurously and to ‘know one another in the things which are eternal’ (Advices & queries 18).
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