Mormons as Citizens of A Communist State: A Documentary History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in East Germany, 1945-1990

From 1945 to 1990 communist East Germany was an officially atheistic state. Nevertheless, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints practiced their religion there. Mormons as Citizens of a Communist State is based on primary sources—government and church documents, interviews, and private letters —to create a documentary history of the church during that historical period. The history of church-state relations begins with attempts to terminate the church’s legal status in the early 1950s, continues with the building of the Freiberg Temple from 1983 to 1985 (the only LDS temple ever built in a communist state), and concludes with the historic meeting in 1988 between current LDS Church President Tomas S. Monson and Chairman Erich Honecker that permitted the entry of LDS missionaries from the West. The relationship between the Latter-day Saint citizens and their atheistic government is a major theme of this book. Did church members manage to be true to their faith and simultaneously function as citizens within that state, and if so, how did they achieve that balance? Mormons as Citizens of a Communist State was originally published in German in 2008 by Leipzig University Press.