Angela Merkel's family moved to East Germany

It wasn't unusual at all in 1954. Partitioning was not compete and Germans still moved freely from East to West and vice versa. Taking a job in East Germany was no different to taking one in West Germany at the time.

The English language Wikipedia article on her father (or more accurately at least one of the authors) seems to strongly implicate that Red Kasner had unusual privileges for a non Communist, German, let alone a pastor, although it also says that a "recruitment effort by the Stasi is presumed to have failed".


I'd be interested to know how far reaching Stasi records have been published. I've always assumed that it was quite extensive and if that's the case then a lack of a record is a sign that he was sincere and not attached to the Stasi. But he was critical of West Germany and reunification and active in the regime friendly national front and never among the more dissident elements of the Lutheran church in Germany.

Moving from west to east wasn't the norm, but not unheard of. East German data show that in 1955 270,115 emigrated from East Germany to West with only 77,928 immigrating into east Germany from west.

More interesting would be that a Lutheran minister did this. East Germany went from being merely the Soviet "sector" of Germany to being it's own "Republic" in 1949, so by '55 moving eastward would have been something more than, say, moving from one county or state to another; it would have required formal "immigration" and government approval.... at a time when government oppression against anything religious was reaching it's peak.

The 1949 DDR constitution officially permitted "freedom of religion". But that was on paper only. As a matter of "policy", the 1952 party congress switched from a position of 'neutrality' on religion to active repression, a position that wasn't relaxed until 1968.

So I find it somewhat unusual that in 1955 a minister would have been permitted immigration into the DDR.


source: GHDI - Document

betgo said:

I understand her father was a Lutheran minister, and the bishop asked for volunteers to take vacant positions at churches in East Germany around 1954. Perhaps her father needed the job. Presumably, the clergymen had fled to the west, leaving the positions vacant. It was very unusual for anyone to move to East Germany.

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We had relatives in the east and west and to begin with movement was easy. Germany used to compete as one nation as the United Team of Germany in the olympic games. As more and more people left the east for the west, tighter controls were made until in 1961 the wall in Berlin was made and the fortified front from the baltic to the czech border was created. This was the border in 1950. The border was fortified after 3m people walked across since 1949. In the early days, it was easy to do both legally and illegally.

Silesius Smithee said:

Moving from west to east wasn't the norm, but not unheard of. East German data show that in 1955 270,115 emigrated from East Germany to West with only 77,928 immigrating into east Germany from west.

More interesting would be that a Lutheran minister did this. East Germany went from being merely the Soviet "sector" of Germany to being it's own "Republic" in 1949, so by '55 moving eastward would have been something more than, say, moving from one county or state to another; it would have required formal "immigration" and government approval.... at a time when government oppression against anything religious was reaching it's peak.

The 1949 DDR constitution officially permitted "freedom of religion". But that was on paper only. As a matter of "policy", the 1952 party congress switched from a position of 'neutrality' on religion to active repression, a position that wasn't relaxed until 1968.

So I find it somewhat unusual that in 1955 a minister would have been permitted immigration into the DDR.

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The Wikipedia article says that there was an appeal from the Lutheran general superintendent of Eberswalde. (No sources in Wikipedia and I've not gone to the German article)

The flow of people which led to the wall being built was clearly a headache for the East German leadership, propoanda wise as well as economically.

It's not totally unlikely that the East German regime would want to show that they were open to pastors coming in - not only to close the emigration deficit with West Germany but also to show that they were not as anti religious as they actually were.

So I don't see him coming in to East Germany as evidence in itself that he was a communist agent or sympathiser. What he said twenty years later on the other hand...

This is what the automatic translation from the German article says:

One day before his daughter was born, Kasner moved from Hamburg to the GDR . The migration movements at that time across the not yet completely sealed inner-German border ran in the opposite direction: in the first five months of 1954 alone, 180,000 people left the GDR, between 1949 and the construction of the Wall in 1961 around 2.5 million. Kasner, however, who was also encouraged in this by the Hamburg Bishop Hans-Otto Wölber , stuck to his plan to go to Brandenburg against the background of the shortage of pastors in the GDR at the time. [14] He entered a pastorate in the village of Quitzow near Perlebergat; The wife and daughter, who after the birth had initially lived with their grandmother Gertrud Jentzsch at Isestraße 95 , moved to the vicarage there after six weeks. [15] At that time, the situation of Christians and churches in the GDR was characterized by harassment by the SED . Individual pastors showed varying degrees of willingness to work together with the state leadership and to participate in the " building of socialism ".

The two citations are:
14 - Gerd Langguth : Angela Merkel. 3rd edition Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-423-24485-2
15 - Merkel's father Horst Kasner died. In: abendblatt.de. Hamburger Abendblatt , September 5, 2011, retrieved June 2, 2020.

Previously in the German article it says "During his studies he kept in regular contact with his home church, the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg , and as early as 1951 he expressed the desire to return there" although with no citation

I asked Chat-GPT4 and it said this:

In 2013, a German newspaper, Bild, published an article claiming that Horst Kasner had "friendly" contact with the Stasi, citing a 1954 document from the Stasi archives. However, the document does not provide any clear proof of Horst Kasner acting as an agent or informant for the Stasi.

I can't find the article but this Spiegel review from 2013 references a biography "The First Life of Angela M." which was featured in Bild. Doesn't mention the document specifically and says that the book said Kasner hadn't been recruited.

However when looking for it I came across this article in the New Yorker

Merkel was born in Hamburg, West Germany, in 1954. Her father, Horst Kasner, was an official in the Lutheran Church, one of the few institutions that continued operating in both Germanys after the postwar division of the country. Serious and demanding, he moved the family across the frontier just a few weeks after Angela’s birth—and against his wife’s wishes—to take up ecclesiastical duties in the German Democratic Republic. That year, almost two hundred thousand East Germans fled in the other direction. Kasner’s unusual decision led West German Church officials to call him “the red minister.” Joachim Gauck, a former East German pastor and dissident, who, in 2012, was elected Germany’s largely ceremonial President, once told a colleague that people in the Lutheran Church under Communism knew to stay away from Kasner, a member of the state-controlled Federation of Evangelical Pastors. By most accounts, Kasner’s motives were as much careerist as ideological.

And this from Reuters

Merkel’s father Horst Kasner, by contrast, belonged to a wing of the protestant church that worked with, not against, the political system.

Kasner sought help from above when a class project in Merkel’s last year of high school infuriated the authorities, raising questions about whether the students would receive their diplomas.

She graduated in the end and went on to study her preferred subject physics, while the children of many other pastors, including Gauck’s sons, saw their education blocked by the East German government.