Women of the quiet frontline: Four pastors in atheist Brandenburg
Thirty-five years after Germany’s reunification, Brandenburg – the rural state surrounding Berlin – shows both promise and peril. Economic modernization has not prevented social fragmentation. Political freedoms coexist with mistrust. In this vacuum, populism thrives. Yet in the quiet, unhurried work of four women pastors, another possibility flickers: that civic trust can be rebuilt from the bottom up, sometimes with beer and a Bible.
February 22, 2026 -
Ulrike Butmaloiu
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Issue 1-2 2026MagazineStories and ideas
On a Saturday night in Treuenbrietzen, a small town of fewer than 8,000 people roughly an hour southwest of Berlin, the sound of bass shakes the fieldstone and Gothic brick masonry of St Mary’s Church, which dates back to the 13th century. Strobe lights flicker across its round arches, sweep over its pillars, and glide across the famous Wagner organ. At the altar, before a crowd of music enthusiasts, a woman with long black hair and a clerical collar takes the microphone. As the DJ fades the beat, Pastor Simone Lippmann-Marsch reminds the crowd that they have not gathered to escape the world, but to remember that hope can still sound louder than fear.
Lippmann-Marsch, 42, is not the kind of pastor most people expected. Tattoos run down her arms; a silver ring flashes at her lip; her voice cuts through the rhythm of the music. She does not ask her listeners to be pious, she asks them to listen: to each other, to themselves. This scene could unfold in Berlin’s nightlife, yet it happens here, in Brandenburg – the sparsely populated state that encircles the German capital like a patchwork of growing commuter towns and fading villages. In many rural areas beyond Berlin’s commuter belt, villages are emptying, shops have closed, and buses arrive once an hour if at all. In the space left behind, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD) has built its strongest bastions. In some counties, more than a third of voters support a party now monitored by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency as extremist.
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