The most common explanations view either the socialist past or larger scale processes of modernization to be the cause of eastern German secularization. The volume attempts to discover historically variable reconfigurations of religion and the secular at the local level.

As the birthplace of the Reformation, Germany has been the site of some of the most significant moments in the history of European Christianity. Today, however, its religious landscape is one that would scarcely be recognizable to earlier generations. This groundbreaking survey of German postwar religious life depicts a profoundly changed society: congregations shrink, private piety is on the wane, and public life has almost entirely shed its Christian character, yet there remains a booming market for syncretistic and individualistic forms of “popular religion.” Losing Heaven insightfully recounts these dramatic shifts and explains their consequences for German religious communities and the polity as a whole.

As the first historical study of East Germany‘s sepulchral culture, this book explores the complex cultural responses to death since the Second World War. Topics include the interrelated areas of the organization and municipalization of the undertaking industry; the steps taken towards a socialist cemetery culture such as issues of design, spatial layout, and commemorative practices; the propagation of cremation as a means of disposal; the wide-spread introduction of anonymous communal areas for the internment of urns; and the emergence of socialist and secular funeral rituals. The author analyses the manifold changes to the system of the disposal of the dead in East Germany—a society that not only had to negotiate the upheaval of military defeat but also urbanization, secularization, a communist regime, and a planned economy. Stressing a comparative approach, the book reveals surprising similarities to the development of Western countries but also highlights the intricate local variations within the GDR and sheds more light on the East German state and its society.

As the number of the non-affiliated and religiously indifferent is on the rise, this book adds a hitherto absent historical dimension to the field of secular studies. It shows a variety of ways in which the non-religious at large - be it organizations, networks or even committed individuals - impact upon the interface between the state and the religious or the non-religious. To what specific legal statuses have these processes led? What elements were taken into consideration when making these decisions? Who opted for a recognition of a non-confessional lifestance and why? Conversely, who opted for a wall of separation and why? Are things that clear cut? Doesn't the variety of choices and frameworks offer a more varied spectrum? What continuities and discontinuities are to be observed in the history of seculars and their organizations? These patterns, divergent and entangled, are developed and explained within the broader conception of 'multiple secularisms'.

This book explores the profound transformations that prisons and offender rehabilitation programmes in Eastern Germany have undergone with respect to religion. Drawing on participant observation and interviews of inmates, ex-prisoners, chaplains and prison visitors, this book connects the institutional to individual: focusing on the religious changes individuals experience when they are imprisoned and released. Including comparative studies from Italy and Switzerland, Becci reveals that despite diverse local, historical, denominational, political and social contexts the transformation patterns of individuals' relationship to religion, and their use of religious resources, are strongly shaped by the total character of prisons. Becci also explores the difficulties faced by released people in keeping their religious life alive under the harsh conditions of social stigma in a highly secular outside society.

The book argues that religion is a system of significant meanings that have an impact on other systems and spheres of social life, including cultural memory. The editors call for a postsecular turn in memory studies which would provide a more reflective and meaningful approach to the constant interplay between the religious and the secular. This opens up new perspectives on the intersection of memory and religion and helps memory scholars become more aware of the religious roots of the language they are using in their studies of memory. By drawing on examples from different parts of the world, the contributors to this volume explain how the interactions between the religious and the secular produce new memory forms and content in the heterogenous societies of the present-day world. These analyzed cases demonstrate that religion has a significant impact on cultural memory, family memory and the contemporary politics of history in secularized societies. At the same time, politics, grassroots movements and different secular agents and processes have so much influence on the formation of memory by religious actors that even religious, ecclesiastic and confessional memories are affected by the secular. This volume is ideal for students and scholars of memory studies, religious studies and history.

From German unification in 1871 through the early 1960s, confessional tensions between Catholics and Protestants were a source of deep division in German society. Engaging this period of historic strife, Germany and the Confessional Divide focuses on three traumatic episodes: the Kulturkampf waged against the Catholic Church in the 1870s, the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy and state-supported Protestantism after World War I, and the Nazi persecution of the churches. It argues that memories of these traumatic experiences regularly reignited confessional tensions. Only as German society became increasingly secular did these memories fade and tensions ease.