"We protested against it. I wrote a letter, it was in a church magazine or in a newspaper, the Kostnitské jiskry. And gee, that made people awfully angry, such stupid Westerners here, talking against the Americans. So we said we have to endure it, and we see and understand, after the history that was here, so-called socialism, and totalitarianism. So we also understood that 'ecumene' was the wrong word, because 'ecumene' meant collaboration with the state, with the World Council of Churches, which in turn collaborated with the Soviet Union and so on, just full of agents from the East. Just, the whole world was kind of collapsing for us."
"We just read what they wrote, what a beautiful vision they had, and somehow we wanted to believe that it could be in this world, something so righteous. For me, Czechoslovakia, and then Chile, it was five years after that, it was quite a parallel experience. Just great hope, and then great disappointment. So it ended up with once it was the Russians and once it was the Americans, so with that, the superpowers and their imperialist ambitions were side by side. We always said, 'We want socialism, but not the GDR', and we knew that and we said, 'No way, no way', because there we also, as I said before, from that first visit to Berlin, the experience of that fear and that unfreedom... Just here is the wall and here is the end of the world, in the GDR. Of course, that was not a model for us at all."
"As a young man, he had already gotten into his head the Führer's vision that we would have a large area in the East. My dad had already seen himself there somehow as a peasant with a big farm in the east, as the Germans beautifully depicted it, what they were going to buy and how it was actually already prepared for the Germans. So that was pretty close to him. The young people got it into their heads and probably believed it, that it was a beautiful prospect. But the war certainly wasn't, it wasn't."
Gerhard Frey-Reininghaus was born on 3 October 1951 in Neckarmühlbach, southern Germany. He spent his childhood surrounded by a loving family on the farms in Neckarmühlbach and Schlössle. His parents’ memories of the difficult war years cultivated in him a strong social conscience and pacifism. Thanks to the support of the local church, he studied at the convent schools in Maulbronn and Blaubeuren. In the late 1960s, when the youth movement was growing, he was attracted to the ideas of liberation theology. He intensely experienced the social changes in Czechoslovakia, and the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops was therefore a deep disappointment for him. After a year’s experience with a Methodist congregation in the United States, he began theological studies at the University of Mainz and Tübingen. His final thesis was on “The Christian Socialism of Leonhard Ragaz”. After graduation, he served as minister of the congregation in Köngen for ten years. A new chapter in his life began in 1989, when he and his wife were sent to Prague to study. The post-revolutionary changes in society brought new challenges and needs. For the management of the ETF (Evangelical Theological Faculty) the witness became an invaluable helper. He became involved in teaching German, contributed significantly to the building of the new ETF headquarters, was entrusted with ecumenical activities and worked selflessly for the healing of Czech-German relations, which became his life’s work. In 2003, he was instrumental in founding the Servitus association, made up of representatives of Christian churches and Jewish communities, for the purpose of reconciliation and the development of volunteer service. In 2024 he was living in Prague.
