Braun's period of episcopal office, which lasted for nearly two decades, started in a period of heightened social tension, with a popular mood affected by the backwash from the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in the east and a period of well publicised student and worker unrest across much of western Europe. There were practical problems resulting from the division of Germany, and there were constant tensions with the secular authorities, even if government in East Germany was for most of the time less confrontational in its approach than in neighbouring Poland where the perceived political threat to the regime from the church was much greater. Braun's approach was traditionalist. He had a pastoral concern for the re-evangelization of the "Mid-Germany Diaspora", but was not an overtly political bishop.