West Berlin Journal

Beer-swigging punks in the church balcony, rock-throwing demonstrators, evicted squatters, gun-toting Communist border guards or saw it all from 1982 to1986 when she and her German-born pastor husband lived at the Berlin Wall in the bohemian district of West Berlin called the Kreuzberg Kiez. Schindler describes ministry in a district which is fifty percent Turkish Muslim and a Lutheran parish area containing twenty-six squatter-occupied buildings. She describes living in a second-floor apartment whose windows look directly into the German husband's need for Heimat, home with a capital H, after twenty years in the U.S. and Argentina.