The project, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, aims to make a contribution to research into German history in the late 1940s and 1950s. More specifically, it is concerned with the relationship between religion and socialism in the hinge years of the Soviet Occupation Zone and in the early GDR, in which the decidedly anti-Christian basic trait of the SED and state leadership of the GDR, which was oriented towards Marxist-Leninist doctrine, was only just emerging, so that in this respect there were obviously still options at the beginning that are generally no longer perceived at all in retrospect.

The study focuses on the Protestant theologian Hans-Joachim Mund (1914-1986), who, as an SED member in the late 1940s, held a leading position in the SED's Central Secretariat for Church Affairs and, from 1950 to 1959, worked as a chaplain in the GDR's political prisons as a People's Police commander employed by the Ministry of the Interior. Focusing on Mund as an example for the study is an obvious approach insofar as his development is virtually symptomatic of the decidedly anti-religious basic trait of GDR socialism that was just beginning to emerge. At the same time, due to his direct proximity to the party and state leadership and his pastoral work on behalf of the state, which was also largely followed with criticism and skepticism by the church, he is an extraordinarily prominent protagonist of the state-church relationship, which was also tensely modified with the modifying relationship between socialism and religion. This also affected the relationship between the all-German EKD and the church in the GDR and the establishment of the Ministry for State Security as an institution with its own monopoly on power and increasingly direct access to the political penal system in the GDR in particular.