THEY SURVIVED HITLER. THEY SURVIVED COMMUNISM. CAN THEY SURVIVE FREEDOM? : The Benedictine Sisters of Berlin’s St. Gertrud’s Cloister Face Their Toughest Foe--Capitalism

The sisters of St. Gertrud’s rise 2 1/2 hours before dawn on winter mornings, climbing out of narrow beds in unheated cells, pulling on black habits and sandals and hastening over cold tile floors to Lauds, their chanted morning prayers.

“Domine labia mea aperies, et os meum annuntiabit lauden tuam.” Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall proclaim thy praise.

Thirty unaccompanied soprano voices ring out in the darkness, 30 veiled heads bow over worn leather-bound songbooks, 30 pairs of hands are raised for the day’s first recitation of the paternoster. Lauds, prime, Terce, vespers, Compline, vigils--more ancient psalms and prayers will follow during the course of the day, in a sacred clockwork interspersed with long periods of unbroken silence. For many of the nuns and novices of St. Gertrud’s, these group prayers, sung and spoken, will be the only utterances until the sun sets, altar candles are snuffed out and the sisters retire for their silentium strictum , the night’s ritual silence.

St. Gertrud’s cloister lies just 20 miles from the southern outskirts of Berlin, in the sandy flatlands that used to be East Germany. Yet nothing could be farther from the traffic, grime and worldliness of the once-and-future German capital than this walled compound.

Here, days are lived out in calm and stillness, faithful to the strict rhythms of a medieval temperament--a spiritually nourishing balance of manual labor, study and prayer. There are other Benedictine cloisters the world over--perhaps as many as 60 in Germany alone--but members of the order say few attempt with the diligence of St. Gertrud’s to live the monastic life as it was prescribed by St. Benedict more than 1,400 years ago.

Nor, perhaps, has any such community had its will to carry on tested in quite the ways St. Gertrud’s has. Founded by a group of Berlin nurses in 1934, the cloister came into being just as Adolf Hitler began in earnest to show Europe what he had in mind for it. Situated just a short distance from the Wehrmacht’s strategic headquarters, the nuns nevertheless managed to shelter dissidents and Jews, to nurse those wounded in body and soul, and to see to it, mostly in secret, that believing prisoners of war detained nearby received the sacraments.

When the guns fell silent, the sisters confronted their next problem: the Red Army. First the Soviets, and later their East German clients, did what they could to obliterate religious communities like St. Gertrud’s--even striking the village of Alexanderdorf from the map of the new German Democratic Republic, as if to keep potential novices from finding East Germany’s only Benedictine nunnery.

Somehow, St. Gertrud’s survived, always attracting enough young East German women to replace the oldest sisters after they died and were buried in the village plot down the road. But, today, the sisters face an opponent more insidious than the Nazis or the Communists. The irresistible power of the almighty German mark, the siren song of materialism, the rush from a hobbling communist economy to a modern commercial society, with its attendant snares and confusion--all of this threatens the life of silence and simplicity that the nuns have made for themselves.

Suddenly, all of the cloister’s costs--utilities, taxes, groceries--are denominated in marks. And the sisters, accustomed as they have been for 40 years to the play money that passed for East German currency, cannot afford to carry on with even their bare-bones existence.

In East Germany, despite its unpleasantness, such basics as heating oil, electricity, bread, milk and other simple foods could be had for pennies. Taxes, levied mainly for the sake of symbolism, were minuscule and easy to calculate. But now prices have spiraled to meet the real-world levels, and the cloister’s tiny income has not kept up. The computer has invaded the sisters’ world, a world more in harmony with illuminated manuscripts than megabytes. And many a visitor appearing at the cloister door today brings a special, post-communist angst over money and a loss of human contact that the sisters find themselves hard-pressed to soothe.

“We aren’t psychotherapists, but some people come to us as if we were,” says the cloister’s Sister Christiana.

All the new pressures were consolidated recently when the government announced that an enormous international airport would be built for a burgeoning Berlin. Probably the best place for it, the government decided, is just a mile from St. Gertrud’s. With it would come all the usual highway improvements, exit ramps, parking lots, flashing lights, fast-food restaurants, rental-car agencies, toll booths, shuttle buses, fern bars and hotels.

“Some people tell us, ‘Well, just rebuild your cloister someplace else,’ ” Sister Christiana says. “But we cling to every single thing that has been built here. It is terribly difficult just to leave it all. I see a piece of history in everything that the sisters have experienced here.”

Sister Christiana is in her late 40s but looks younger, her unlined face a testament to a quarter-century of cloistered life. She has been given permission by the mother superior to leave the cloister’s innermost reaches--the walled-off Klausur, or enclosure, where the nuns spend most of their time--to speak with a reporter in one of the public rooms.

Even if the government heeds the vocal protests of the sisters and citizens groups and builds the airport elsewhere, the world of free-market consumerism will, in all likelihood, change life at St. Gertrud’s inalterably.

“We have lived through all of these different political systems,” says Winkler, “and that makes everything here even more precious. It would be terrible if, now, it were the market economy that made us unable to continue our lives here.”

Lauds are over, and the sisters leave their chapel in a rustling composition of black habits. A novice in a white wimple pushes a wheelchair-bound nun out the door; the elderly nun, Sister Caritas, in her 90s, is one of two founding sisters still alive. The Klausur door clicks shut, and again there is silence; a little wind in the pines, some bird song.

On the other side of the wooden door, in the unbroken stillness of their enclosure, the nuns will spend the next hour in meditation, then return to the chapel for Mass. Finally, 3 1/2 hours after the first predawn tolling of the cloister bell, they will sit down to German breakfast stodge: rye bread, coffee and liverwurst. Even then, they aren’t allowed to tuck in until the sister assigned to read Scripture begins on the morning’s chosen text.

Silence and song, public space and Klausur , solitude and community. Everything about the day is measured, planned, ordered, balanced, point and counterpoint, the better to unburden the spirit and prepare the inner ear for the voice of God.

No spiritual marathon-running for the Benedictines, no hair shirts, no sitting atop stone pillars, no fasting for weeks on end. St. Benedict’s ideal was a well-ordered and moderate monastic arrangement, one offering enough food, sleep, physical comfort and companionship to bring one close to God without pointless self-abnegation.

In practice, at St. Gertrud’s, this means five hours of each day are devoted to the singing of psalms and Gregorian chants, which the sisters regard as a useful, living heritage that must be nurtured for the sake of future generations. An additional three hours are spent in silent, solitary prayer within the Klausur .

Yet another six hours are given over, again in fidelity to St. Benedict’s ideal, to work. In the Middle Ages, this meant driving the community’s flocks from pasture to pasture, kneading dough, trampling grapes. But today, in Alexanderdorf, work consists largely of baking Communion wafers for sale to Roman Catholic churches all over eastern Germany, sewing liturgical garments for several German dioceses, and the routine matters of cooking, and washing dishes, clothing and linens.

“Most people’s lives are filled with social obligations, family obligations, political duties, career responsibilities,” says Sister Gerburg, who has lived at St. Gertrud’s for 47 years. “But we are exempted from this, because we are fulfilling a special duty in the eyes of God. Our only job is to feed ourselves.”

The sisters move through the day in silence; they allow themselves one hour a day--no more, no less--for talk among themselves. The Benedictines accept the value of silence as a given. By holding their tongues, orthodox Benedictines believe, they can best listen to God.

Yet the sisters of St. Gertrud’s are not indifferent to the rest of humanity. Another important element of St. Benedict’s Rule is the principle of hospitality. All guests, St. Benedict wrote, need to be received as though they were Christ himself. This means that while most of the nuns at St. Gertrud’s keep themselves within their Klausur most of the time, there is always a “portress,” or doorkeeper, on duty, instructed to call out, “Thanks be to God!” each time the doorbell rings. She then hastens into the cloister’s public space, divines a visitor’s needs and decides if the cloister can meet them.

“There should never be a time when the cloister is without a guest,” Sister Christiana says.

Schoolteachers with whole classes in tow, the elderly and the frail, overwrought families--all come seeking rest, peace and food for the soul. But the most typical guest is a woman, perhaps a mother seeking escape from the stresses and drudgery of child-rearing, or perhaps a single woman seeking the companionship she can’t find in the workaday world. Most try to stay for about three weeks, but there are more requests than the sisters can honor, and many must settle for shorter stays.

For $20 per night, there is a room with no television, carpeting, room service, bathroom or phone. But there is peace, stillness and the chance to share the monastic life, to see what it has offered the human soul for more than 14 centuries. The sisters make themselves available--stepping outside the Klausur --for guests wanting spiritual counsel, or even just a chat. And guests are free to attend all prayer times and let the Gregorian chants pour over them.

“For me, the cloister is like an oasis, or like a gas station where I can come to tank up for my life,” says Jutta Pannek, a mother of two who has been making twice-yearly visits to the cloister since 1975. “Here I can just let my soul relax. When I talk to the sisters, I feel soothed. Over the course of the years, the cloister has become a piece of home.”

The needs of the Jutta Panneks of this world press heavily on the nuns’ thoughts as the government casts about for a new airport site: the wish for constancy, for retreat, for home. And if they have to set aside their option for silence and serenity for the moment to provide for those needs, fine.

At the moment, three airports service Berlin. That sounds like plenty, but in fact, the airfields, are beginning to feel overtaxed. And with the seat of the German government due to return to Berlin by 2000, some planners say traffic will eventually rise as much as sixfold.

A planning committee was sent out to identify potential sites, and sleepy little Alexanderdorf came back a front-runner, in part because it had a nice, flat, Nazi-era rocket-testing range just outside the village--perfect ground for a runway.

“We found out in the newspapers that a new airport might be coming,” Sister Christiana says. “We never really knew very much about it, until someone brought us a flyer from the Citizens’ Initiative with a map, and we realized it would be right in our neighborhood.”

The Citizens’ Initiative, a local anti-airport group, also hired a forestry surveyor, who determined that 22 million trees would have to go if the airport were to be built.

The sisters were horrified. The one day of the week that they allow themselves a bit of leisure, a term of art if there ever was one, is Sunday, when they shut down their Communion-wafer ovens and switch off the sewing machines in their vestiary and go take walks in the woods. The dour, stingy farmland and forest here is all of the outside world the nuns permit themselves to see with any kind of regularity, and they love it.

“Nature is a kind of cloister, too, in a way,” observes Sister Christiana. “And you seldom meet people there, only a rabbit from time to time. It would be terrible if such a large tract of nature were destroyed.”

“Sometimes, we receive families who just want to come down from Berlin for the day, and they are like refugees, running away from it all, just trying to spend one day in peace,” she adds. “We want to be able to offer these people the possibility of finding God. One can either find God in a prayer, or in nature. But how can you find God in nature if you’re surrounded by concrete?”

The sisters of St. Gertrud’s have begun fighting back, as much as a group of unworldly women committed to a silent life within a monastic enclosure can fight. From their host bakery, they have begun sending out petitions, packed in the boxes of Communion wafers that go to every Roman Catholic church in eastern Germany. Thanks to this distribution network, they have helped Carsten Preuss’ Citizens’ Initiative collect 10,000 signatures against the siting of the airport here.

Next, the nuns wrung the go-ahead from their mother superior, Sister Gisela, to make a few carefully selected anti-airport appearances. The more loquacious among them have even ventured out to attend round-table discussions in the area--something certainly not contemplated by St. Benedict when he wrote his rule for monastic life.

“And we even succeeded in getting the nuns to take part in a TV talk show,” says Preuss, a former East German who is savvy enough to appreciate the PR clout of a nun in full rig, seizing the moral high ground simply by dint of appearance. “They came, and they even said one or two sentences.”

Preuss smiles gently at the memory. “I think they were overwhelmed. I don’t think they will do it again. But we will ask them again.”

Many--Preuss, the local newspapers, officials from the state of Brandenburg speaking off the record--fear the battle is in vain. The nuns say they will try to live with whatever comes their way.

“Yes, we will see,” Sister Christiana says. “Maybe it will work. I hope it will work.”

Although this is one of the nuns’ few rare public battles, they have fought for St. Gertrud’s survival from the very first. Martin Luther, after all, nailed his 95 Theses onto the church door in the eastern German town of Wittenberg, about a two-day walk from Alexanderdorf. Over the next 200 years, the Church of Rome was reduced to near-complete insignificance here.

It was under the weight of this discouraging history that, 61 years ago, a small group of Catholic nurses from the Visitation of Mary maternity hospital in Berlin banded together and bought the summer house of a titled Prussian family that was down on its luck.

Chronicles in the cloister’s library tell of the early months of backbreaking work, as the nurses struggled to clear the land, rebuild the manor house and erect a wall. Even today, the cloister looks rather forlorn, with its graying stucco walls, unadorned facade, darkened windows and squat Prussian bell tower.

“The stern spirit of Prussia continued to lurk in the dark corners,” writes Heinz Kuehn, a Jew whose father took refuge at St. Gertrud’s in the early 1940s. “St. Gertrud’s had none of the features that usually attract visitors to Germany’s famous Benedictine abbeys: The irresistible combination of authentic architecture, inspiring scenery, flawlessly performed Gregorian chants and rich meals. But the spirit of the place was genuine--artless, serene, open, of a springlike flavor.”

Its relative unattractiveness was its salvation. “Cloisters like ours made useful places for a power-grabbing state to set up youth camps and other institutions,” says Sister Gerburg, the cloister’s unofficial historian--but St. Gertrud’s managed to escape the attentions of the Gestapo. Throughout the Nazi Reich, the portress was always there to open the door, candle in hand, to welcome all manner of political dissidents, homeless monks, prisoners’ wives, Jewish children. “Thanks be to God!”

“Every new arrival was a potential threat,” says Kuehn, a writer and the son of a mixed Jewish-Catholic home, “a threat to the political stability of each of the regular guests and to the very existence of the priory.”

Today, gratitude for what the sisters did spans generations. Sister Gerburg says that even now, the occasional young Jewish visitor will appear in Alexanderdorf, looking for the cloister and eager to thank the nuns for hiding his grandparents.

The barren and empty land that the sisters had chosen as a place apart had also been selected by Hitler’s general staff for some of the Wehrmacht’s 15-jewel installations. The doomed German invasion of the Soviet Union was planned just a few miles from the cloister in the village of Wuensdorf. And just a mile or so southwest of the cloister wall, in the neighboring village of Kummersdorf, the Nazis put prisoners of war and other forced labor to work in the development of their V-1 rockets, which by 1944 would be slamming into London by the thousands.

In the spring of 1944, the nuns began to understand fully what it meant to have Wehrmacht generals as neighbors. With the help of both German soldiers and prisoners of war, they dug a bunker in their garden and fashioned an altar inside. Their missals, wrapped in oilcloth, went into the greenhouse, where the sisters planted a bed of lettuce over them. At the first blast of an air raid siren, the nuns would gather in the bunker and, with the sound of Allied ordnance falling like giants’ footsteps over their heads, pray and chant just as St. Benedict did in an age that knew nothing of gunpowder, much less world war.

Peace came to Alexanderdorf in May, but so did a new kind of struggle.

“On the one hand, we felt liberated,” says Sister Gerburg. “The Russians’ arrival meant this awful, awful war was over. On the other hand, we knew that Russian Bolsheviks did not look favorably on Christians.”

The nuns now began fulfilling St. Benedict’s obligations of hospitality by climbing the cloister tower and blowing a horn whenever they saw Russian troops coming, throwing open the chapel doors and giving the Protestant village women habits and wimples. They had discovered that Russian soldiers would not rape a nun.

“I think they still had some old, obscure feelings of respect for the church,” says Sister Gerburg. “One village woman even brought her baby into our church. The Russians saw her and shouted, ‘Look! A nun with a baby!’ But they didn’t touch her.”

The fear-the-worst relations between the arriving Red Army troops and the sisters of St. Gertrud’s prefigured the antagonism that simmered between the church and the East German state during the next 45 years. The roughest stretch was in the early 1950s, when the newborn East German government jailed priests and chaplains, seized liturgical books and closed Catholic kindergartens. By the mid-1950s, however, East Germany’s Politburo seemed to have figured out that the church was, to some extent, here to stay, and that repression might even be counterproductive.

And so an unspoken agreement resulted. The government would leave the Catholic Church alone, and in return, no Catholic clergy or lay officials would engage in politics or openly criticize the governing Communists.

“But still they tried to marginalize (the church) as much as possible,” says Church of England historian Paul Oesterreicher, who is writing a history of the Catholic and Protestant churches in the German Democratic Republic era. A key lever was education: Parents were routinely told that unless they stopped going to church, their children would never be allowed to study for university degrees.

“Those pressures caused two-thirds of the pre-Communist membership to leave the church,” Oesterreicher says.

But it didn’t stop young women from finding St. Gertrud’s, intentionally or not. Sister Christiana’s mother had been baptized a Catholic, but left the church when she and her husband divorced. Sister Christiana was studying painting and photography at East Berlin’s prestigious Humboldt University when she fell ill. She went to St. Gertrud’s seeking a cure. Instead, she found her calling.

“It was totally against my nature,” Sister Christiana says, insisting that her decision to take up the religious life had nothing to do with what was going on in East Germany then. “It is a secret of my heart, which my mind can’t understand. My calling was simply a work of God.”

When the Berlin Wall fell, democratic freedom brought opportunities, but it also brought perils: the risk of unemployment since jobs were no longer guaranteed, the exotic new need to compete and rents that skyrocketed, among others. And it brought simple headaches, too, as members of a society accustomed to cradle-to-grave paternalism suddenly had to learn how to do their own banking, pay new taxes and fend off armies of fast-talking insurance salesmen and investment counselors.

Suddenly the Communion-wafer bakery, for instance, was thrust into unlikely competition with a rival host maker in the Catholic southern German state of Bavaria. The Bavarian bakers never lived under communism, and their ovens are state-of-the-art.

So the sisters of St. Gertrud’s finally broke down and went high-tech, buying equipment that feeds the unleavened wafers continuously into an oven by conveyor belt. But such innovations simply don’t jibe with a demanding prayer schedule devised centuries before the Industrial Revolution.

“Now we can’t just stop working when it’s time for prayers,” Sister Christiana says. “The machine has to keep running, and so you have to go on working instead of going to prayers. This shows how dependent we can become on technology.

“We can’t cut ourselves off from change,” she adds. “It can’t be our goal to be an island. Today’s challenges are different from those that we faced before unification, but we have to accept them, too. The basic question is, ‘How do we live our chosen lives today, without losing the real thing, the essence of it all?’ ”

And if the sisters should fail to come up with an answer to this far-from-rhetorical question, what difference will it make to the rest of the world? For one thing, of course, a piece of connective tissue to the European past would be lost. The Benedictine order was “the grain of mustard seed from which the great tree of Western civilization has sprung,” said historian Arnold Toynbee. This is hardly an overstatement, considering the magnificent buildings, the advances in agriculture, the illuminated manuscripts, the love of music and intelligent companionship that the medieval Benedictines bequeathed to this continent.

But there is something else. Every day, every waking minute, the sisters of St. Gertrud’s are seeking God, trying to bring Him closer to themselves--and to the rest of us. In a world of nonstop war and suffering, at the close of history’s most destructive century, in a time when most people are too busy and distracted--not to mention embarrassed or afraid--to pray, it is, perhaps, a small source of comfort just to know that the nuns are there.

The sun has been down for an hour when the bell in the garden rings, calling the sisters to vespers. No lights are on in the manor house. The village is mostly dark, and the only illumination on the grounds are a few lamps marking the garden paths to the chapel. Far from the profane swagger of Berlin, in darkness this profound, the stars seem almost stagy in their uncontested brilliance.

The prayers marking the course of the sisters’ days have different purposes and are offered in tones appropriately their own; evening worship has a formal choreography. The sisters make for the chapel in double file, genuflect when through the door and then bow to each other, two by two. They take seats in ranks of pews that face each other, and begin singing back and forth, call and answer, their faces and songbooks illuminated by candlelight and the bare bulbs of light fixtures left over from East German times.

“E profundis clamavi ad te Domine. “ Out of the depths, I called to you, Lord.

When the singing dies away, Mother Gisela brings an aspergillum and sprinkles each bowed, veiled head. The nuns slip their songbooks into shelves built into their pews, and file out. One sister stays behind to pinch out the candles and to open the windows to let the smoke out into the night sky. Then she, too, is gone through the Klausur door, and all that remains is the silence.