Gethsemane Church, Berlin, June 26, 2018
The Geistkämpfer (spiritual fighter) by Ernst Barlach. Source: online photo.
Upon the first anniversary of the death of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo, a public memorial will be held in the Gethsemane Church (at Stargarder Str. 77, 10437) in Berlin, on July 13, 2018, at 6:00 p.m. On this day last year, China’s most famous political prisoner perished in custody, under tight surveillance and official control, in a hospital in Shenyang, Liaoning Province. Two days later the world saw his ashes scattered in the Yellow Sea.
The Gethsemane Church in Berlin is as renowned as the Nikolai Church in Leipzig — both of which were important refuges for East German dissidents. A few days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gethsemane sternly rejected the entry of a police-military manhunt, and provided asylum to over a thousand underground rebels. The church is also well-known for hosting Rolf Reuter’s (music director of Komische Oper company) conducting of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, followed by his speech with the lines that “The Wall Must Go!”, which shocked the East. On the evening of October 9, 1989, when the church’s late service finished, protesters walked outside still holding their candles and stood in the streets by their tens of thousands — a prelude to the collapse of the Communist Party of Germany.
We thus feel that the Gethsemane Church — sacred ground for human rights and democracy — is the ideal location for a memorial and prayer service for a man who fought till his death for those very values. The church sounds an alarm for a world upon the cusp of transformation: the Berlin Wall has been rubble for 29 years, but the economically powerful Chinese dictatorship continues to imprison over a billion members of the human race behind its own ‘Berlin Wall,’ which it keeps expanding. The 10,000 or more victims of the Tiananmen slaughter have received no restitution, and China’s Gulag Archipelago is distributed and hidden in untold corners of the country, in which new dissidents are arrested and imprisoned every day. In another time and another place, Liu Xiaobo would have been an East German — one full of bravery who scaled and pushed over the Berlin Wall, and died riddled with bullets for it.
The organizer of the memorial is the German pastor Roland Kühne, long associated with human rights causes. Rallied to action by the plight of the imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Kühne has from 2010 to this day led hundreds of vocational college students to hold protests outside the Chinese embassy in Germany. Last year they carried aloft a coffin as part of the demonstration. Another organizer, Tienchi Martin-Liao (廖天琪), is the chief editor of Liu’s works in Chinese, German, and English; she also serves as president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, and is a longtime ‘comrade-in-arms’ with Kühne.
Kühne and Martin-Liao will preside over the memorial service. Opening the event will be the 82-year-old Berlin Wall-era poet, singer, and Georg Büchner Prize Laureate, Wolf Biermann, a household name in Germany. Biermann ‘defected’ from East Berlin in 1976, then held a famous concert, attended by over 10,000, in the Cologne Sporthalle. His 1974 ‘In China hinter der Mauer’ (In China Behind the Wall) infuriated the Communist Party of Germany, and he was eventually expatriated by the Party.
Biermann has since last year also been tireless in his efforts to help get Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia out of China. To this end, he’ll be singing ‘A Dirge to Jürgen Fuchs.’ Memories of Fuchs, a dear friend of Biermann who was secretly arrested in 1976, were the first thing to flood to Biermann’s mind on the day that Liu died. Fuchs was locked up in the Volkseigener Betrieb (VEB) People’s Prison, where he was irradiated with gamma rays on a daily basis by intelligence operatives posing as doctors. He silently fell ill and died of leukemia, becoming a famous case of radiation poisoning. Biermann sees Liu Xiaobo as a similar warrior belonging to all mankind, one who fell into the hands of the enemy in the battle for freedom, yet kept resisting until the end.
Herta Müller, one of Germany’s most famous poets and herself a Nobel Laureate in literature, will read in German poems composed by Liu Xia, which Müller translated from English. Müller was one of the key nominators of Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace Prize. Her literary works — including The Hunger Angel (Atemschaukel), Nadirs (Niederungen), and My Homeland Was an Appleseed (Mein Vaterland war ein Apfelkern) — all depict the daily experiences and struggles of life under communist dictatorship. Müller has long taken a close interest in China’s political prisoners and exiles, and has been a key figure involved in the attempts to rescue Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia, from last year to this day.
Exile Chinese author and musician Liao Yiwu (廖亦武), an old friend to Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia and winner of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, will be joining with the young German violinist Fabian Lukas Voigtschild to perform the new work ‘Liu Xiaobo’s Last Moments’ (《劉曉波的最後時刻》). The inspiration for the work came from a phrase spoken by Liu Xia in an August 31, 2017 telephone conversation with Liao: “He [Liu Xiaobo] told me I had to get out of the country.… In the end he stopped speaking — he just kicked his leg to show what he meant. His legs kept moving, almost like he was walking, non-stop, for over an hour, both legs walking non-stop… without cease, without cease…”
American author and Pulitzer Prize winner Ian Johnson will give a speech on the day. Johnson is a long-time resident of Beijing and has interviewed numerous dissidents as a correspondent for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Review of Books. He is a well-known author of long-form journalism, as shown by the influential works “Wild Grass: Three Portraits of Change in Modern China,” and “The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao.”
Pastor Kühne will lead all attendees in a section-by-section reading of Proverbs 31:8 (“Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. / Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.”) A film review of Liu Xiaobo’s life will also be screened, as well as the April 30, 2018, phone call recording with Liu Xia, in which she cried, for three minutes, in despair. The female singer Isabell, who bears a striking resemblance to a 1960s-era Joan Baez, will perform ‘Donna, Donna,’ closely accompanied by a choir of several hundred students from the Rhein-Maas-College (Rhein-Maas Berufskolleg). The performance will slowly lead into a joint chorus by the entire body of memorial participants, who will sing together to call for Liu Xia’s freedom.
We invite every recipient of this invitation to come and participate in this memorial — no matter where you are in the world, whatever your political views, or the color of your skin or content of your beliefs. Please, all keep in mind this pacifist and author of the statement ‘I Have No Enemies’ (《我沒有敵人》). Following the massacre of 1989, Liu Xiaobo was jailed four times and in the end died a caged prisoner. His wife, Liu Xia, has been held under long-term house arrest simply because of her love for him, and has been unable to leave the country and seek treatment for her severe clinical depression.
If you cannot join us, please spread this invitation and the song ‘Donna, Donna’, make your own appeals to governments, or pray.
Gethsemane Church, Berlin, Germany
Organizing Committee for the Memorial on the First Anniversary of Liu Xiaobo’s Passing
June 26, 2018
德國柏林 Gethsemane 教堂
2010年諾貝爾和平獎獲得者劉曉波遠行一周年追憶會
全球文告
2018年7月13日傍晚18點，在德國柏林 Gethsemane 教堂 (Stargarder Str. 77, 10437 Berlin) 將舉行2010年諾貝爾和平獎獲得者劉曉波遠行一周年追憶會。去年這一日，作為中國最著名的政治犯，他殆於嚴密監控中的遼寧瀋陽一家醫院，兩天之後，通過官方直播，全世界目睹了他的骨灰被沉入中國內海。
柏林Gethsemane 教堂與萊比錫 Nikolai 教堂齊名，是前東德兩大異議人士聚會場所，就在柏林牆倒塌前幾天，還嚴詞拒絕軍警搜捕，為上千名地下反抗者提供庇護，享有盛譽的 Rolf Reuter曾在這兒指揮演出貝多芬第九交响樂，并發表“拆除柏林墙”的演講，赢得陣陣歡呼，震撼全東德。1989年10月9日傍晚，Gethsemane 教堂的祈禱禮拜结束，反抗者們手持蠟燭走出來，在街頭聚集數萬民眾，成為共產黨政權垮臺的前奏。
我們認為在 Gethsemane 教堂這樣一個人權和民主的紀念聖地，舉行一個為人權和民主奮鬥至死的偉大人物的追憶祈禱，意蘊深遠。這是轉折關口的全球警鐘：柏林牆已倒塌29年，可在經濟騰飛的獨裁中國，禁錮十幾億人類的“柏林牆”依舊挺立，并蜿蜒擴張，上萬名天安門大屠殺死難者得不到撫卹，古拉格群島分布在数不清的角落，每天都有異議人士被捕。作為歷史和現實寫照，劉曉波倒下了，超越時間和時代，他也是一個東德人，一個為翻越和推倒“柏林牆”而中彈倒下的東德人。
這次追憶會組織者 Roland Kühne，是德國著名人權牧師，受“獄中諾貝爾和平獎得主”的事跡感召，2010至今，年年帶領數百名職業高校學生，到中國駐德國使館門前集會抗議，去年還進行了擡棺遊行示威。而另一名組織者廖天琪，是劉曉波著作中、德、英文的主要編輯和獨立中文筆會會長，也是Roland Kühne 的“長期戰友”。
追憶會由Roland Kühne 和廖天琪主持。開場 Wolf Biermann (沃爾夫 比爾曼), 82歲，柏林牆時代家喻戶曉的詩人和歌手，畢希納文學獎獲得者。1976年從東柏林“叛逃”，在科隆體育館舉辦萬人演唱會，一曲《長城內的中國》令東德共產黨震怒，登報開除了他的“國籍”。比爾曼也是從去年至今的營救劉曉波、劉霞行動的不懈參與者。此次他將演唱《给Jürgen Fuchs 的輓歌》。在劉曉波遠行當天，比爾曼想起1976年被秘密逮捕的Jürgen Fuchs, 他的好兄弟,被投進東德VEB人民监狱,整日被冒充醫生的特務們用伽瑪綫籠罩輻射，悄無聲息地種下病根, 最後死於血癌，成為此類放射受害者的典型案例。比爾曼認為劉曉波也是這樣一位屬於全人類的“在爭取自由之戰中孤陷重敵卻堅持抵抗”的勇士。
Herta Müller將朗讀自己從英文轉譯的劉霞詩作, 她是諾貝爾文學獎獲得者，也是諾貝爾和平獎獲得者劉曉波的主要推薦人之一。其文學作品《呼吸鞦韆》《低地》《我的祖國是一粒蘋果籽》都與共產黨獨裁下的個人經歷密切相關。Müller 女士長期關注中國政治犯和流亡者，也是從去年至今的營救劉曉波、劉霞行動的主要參與者。
流亡作家和樂手廖亦武，劉曉波和劉霞的多年故交，德國書業和平獎獲得者，此次將和德國年輕的小提琴演奏家Fabian Lukas Voigtschild (法比安)合作，演奏新創曲目《劉曉波的最後時刻》。这个曲目的靈感來自劉霞在2017年8月31日下午的一段講述：“他讓我一定要出去……最後他不說了，就用腿演示。腿不停的，好像在走路，不停的，一個多小時，兩條腿不停地走……不停的，不停的……”
美國普利策奬獲得者 Ian Johnson (張彥) 將受邀發表演講，Ian Johnson 長期駐北京，採訪過眾多異議人士，是《紐約時報》《華爾街日報》《紐約書評》的特約記者，也是這個時代出色的報道文學作家，代表作《野草－底層中國的緩慢革命》、《中國的靈魂－毛澤東時代後宗教的歸來》，影響極其深遠。
Roland Kühne 牧師將帶領大家，分段進行 Wachet nud Betet–Tu deinen Mund auf für die Stummen und für die Sache aller die verlassen sind (守望與祈禱—為那些被禁言者和被遺棄者發聲吧)。追憶會還將播出劉曉波生平影片，以及劉霞在2018年4月30日的電話錄音，當她對友人的絕望哭訴延續至三分多鐘時，一位酷似1960年代人權歌手 Joan Baez 的女孩 Isabell 將懷抱吉他領唱《Donna Donna》，由 Rhein-Maas Berufskolleg（萊茵-馬斯職業高校）幾百名學生組成的合唱團緊緊跟隨，逐漸擴散為追憶會全體參與者的合唱，以此為劉霞的自由呼籲。
我們邀請讀到這個《全球文告》的所有人參加這個追憶會，不管您身在何處，不管持有何種政治理念，不管是何種膚色和信仰，請記住這個公開宣稱“我沒有敵人”的和平主義者。1989年的天安門大屠殺之後，他四次入獄，最後死於囚籠。他的妻子劉霞僅僅因為愛情，也被長期軟禁，無法出國治療深度抑鬱症。
如果您因故不能參與，請傳播這個文告，請傳唱《Donna Donna》，請在任何時候，任何地方，呼籲或祈禱。
德國柏林Gethsemane教堂
劉曉波遠行一周年追憶會籌備小組
2018年6月26日
[…] is expected to attend Friday evening’s memorial in Berlin’s Gethsemane church to commemorate the first anniversary of Liu Xiaobo’s death. […]
[…] article was the first published on China Change website on June 26, […]
[…] Liu Xia left Beijing for Berlin on Tuesday morning, ending the years of extralegal house arrest that followed her husband Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize award in 2010. She is said to be physically frail but in good spirits, in contrast with her reported despair earlier this year. She may attend a memorial for her husband to be held in Berlin on the anniversary of his death on Friday. […]