Freiheit finden in Tradition

For some time now, there has been an increasing number of contributions in pastoral care that carry out an assessment of the practice and prospectively develop guiding ideas as to what pastoral care and counseling of the 21st century should look like.With recourse to Ernst Lange, this article attempts to indicate the corresponding “poimenical general weather situation” and, using the example of unresolved research questions on pastoral care in the GDR, pleads for, despite all the focus on the future, not forgetting the dimension of contemporary history. Rather we should to find out what impulses could be gained for the present discourse if the contemporary prognostic view were combined with the retrospective view of contemporary history.