Coventry Cathedral Launch of Stepping Off the Map

Stepping Off the Map has been published to mark the 50th anniversary of the Coventry/Dresden project of reconciliation. The guest speaker at the launch was Canon Paul Oestreicher, a former director of the Coventry Cathedral Centre for International Reconciliation. In his address, which was read by Canon Sarah Hills, Coventry Cathedral Canon for Reconciliation Ministry, he described his involvement with the Coventry/Dresden reconciliation project of 1965, and his wider work behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

Pictures Taken at the Launch of Stepping Off the Map

Ian Bruce, one of the contributors to Stepping Off the Map, welcomes guests at the Coventry launch.

John Witcombe, Dean of Coventry Cathedral, at the launch of Stepping Off the Map

Merrilyn Thomas, editor and compiler of Stepping Off the Map, speaking at the second launch of the book in Richmond, London

Richard Leachman, one of the contributors to Stepping Off the Map

Sarah Hills, Coventry Cathedral Canon for Reconciliatiion Ministry, delivering Paul Oestreicher’s address at the launch of Stepping Off the Map

Dieter Brandt speaking at the Coventry Cathedral launch. He survived the Dresden air raid as a child and later became a volunteer with the Coventry/Dresden reconciliation project

Daniel Lewis, the British representative of Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, speaking at the launch of Stepping Off the Map

Martin Turner, the leader of the Coventry/Dresden reconciliation project in 1965, at the launch of Stepping Off the Map

Guests at the launch of Stepping Off the Map at Coventry Cathedral

(Pictures by Martin R Williams)

Coventry Cathedral: Peacekeeping in the Cold War
In 1965 Coventry Cathedral sent a small group of young volunteers to Dresden in the heart of the communist state of East Germany, at the time regarded as illegal by the West and generally recognised only within the Eastern Bloc. This was presented as an act of reconciliation between the two bombed cities, and the strong relationship that continues between the cities to this day has its roots within that group’s seven months in Dresden.

It emerged many years later, however, that the deeper political motivation behind the project was to help bring about conciliation between the Church in East Germany and the East German State. There was at the time a risk, perceived by both the British and East German governments, of an explicit challenge by Christians in East Germany to the moral and spiritual legitimacy of an unchristian government. The consequences of such a challenge could have been dire, not only for the tolerated existence of the Church in East Germany, but more dramatically for the relative independence of the government itself, with a real possibility of Soviet invasion as later happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968. And that would likewise have been disastrous for Western Europe, indeed for world peace.

The story of the political machinations and subterfuges that underlay the Dresden project is told by the Cold War historian and UCL Research Fellow Dr Merrilyn Thomas in her book Communing with the Enemy. The political purpose of the project was that the group’s presence should as widely as possible demonstrate to the Christian community the goodwill of the State, communicating the concept that Church and State could co-exist, without that being seen as government weakness. Dr Thomas has now edited Stepping off the Map, a collection of writings by some of the volunteers who describe, from their Western perspective, their experiences and impressions of life in East Germany in 1965. As far as is known, this is the only group of westerners ever to have been granted complete freedom to travel throughout East Germany; extraordinarily, they experienced no hindrances whatsoever, were free to photograph and film, and were free from any overt supervision or observation. Their memories and insights offer a unique anecdotal history of a remarkable time and place.

Stepping off the Map is being launched in Coventry Cathedral on the fiftieth anniversary of the Dresden project, at the same time as the Rising 15 symposium on peace and conflict. The significance of the book for the symposium is that it describes the lived experience of a relatively small and very subtle venture of reconciliation that was, unknown to its participants, designed to nevertheless reap rich rewards in terms of political conciliation. The original project had been conceived and crafted by Richard Crossman MP, a heavyweight politician who was a propaganda specialist during the Second World War. He was widely experienced in minimal interventions that could engineer disproportionate outcomes. The Dresden project was, as far as one can tell, highly successful in helping to bring the Church in East Germany towards a less conflictual relationship with the State, thereby averting the possibility of catastrophe. It stands both as an exemplar of the role of minimal interventions in peacekeeping, and as an early achievement in Coventry Cathedral’s honourable history of international relations.