Background
Berger was born in Posen, at that time a major industrial city in the heart of eastern Germany.
Berger was born in Posen, at that time a major industrial city in the heart of eastern Germany.
He was a leading ecumenist. Before he was 2 war had broken out, which would end in 1945 with his birth city part of a geographically reconfigured Polish state, ethnically cleansed of its former German population. After 1945 the family lived in Thuringia, now part of the Soviet occupation zone in what remained of Germany.
He was ordained in 1963.
After this, between 1964 and 1966, he became the first ordained minister for alternative military service in a unit of the National People"s Army, which had been established in 1956 and was heavily dependent on "national service" conscription. He subsequently created and for many years led the illegal convention of former non-fighting "Construction soldiers" in the German Democratic Republic.
By doing this he attracted an intense and sustained programme of "observation" from officers of the ubiquitous Ministry for State Security and their collaborators in what, since October 1949, had been the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic. lieutenant was also during the early 1960s that Christfried Berger married a fellow theologian-minister called Almuth Brennecke.
Between 1966 and 1974 he served as an evangelical pastor in the Schmöckwitz district in the southern part of Berlin.
In 1985 Berger was appointed Director of the Ecumenical Missionary Centre of the Berlin Missionary Society. During the defining closing months of late 1989 and early 1990, Christfried Berger chaired the Foreign Policy Working Group of the East German Round Table exercise. Following reunification, which took place in October 1990, he headed up the Ecumenical Missionary Institute of Berlin"s Ecumenical Council until his retirement in 1997.