Letter from the Editors (Summer 2025)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Letter from the Editors (Summer 2025)

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Dear Friends,

We find ourselves at the midway point of the year, which seems to be speeding by. I am pleased to bring you this second issue of 2025, which features a slate of fresh material, including reviews from recent additions to our editorial team.

Blake McKinney addresses the “muddled middle” of Mary Fulbrook’s recent monograph, Bystander Society. He makes a lengthy and complex book accessible, with helpful commentary on how the text will be of interest to readers attentive to questions about and problems with the German churches. Michael O’Sullivan’s review of Anna von der Goltz’s attention to the generation of 1968 – The Other 68ers – highlights the diversity of her material and the valuable complications she brings to a much-studied subject. He tells us that her emphasis on the role of right-wing student protestors is an important correction to understanding the student movement as a whole as well as the history of Christian Democracy in Germany.

Björn Krondorfer offers a review of Mirjam Loos’s German-language book, Dangerous Metaphors (the English translation of the title), based on her 2017 dissertation, about German Protestant communication patterns and spaces concerned with communism, particularly the Soviet variant, in the first half of the twentieth century. Kevin P. Spicer takes on Mikael Nilsson’s Christianity in Hitler’s Ideology, with a fresh perspective on some of Nazism’s foundational texts and Aryan conceptions of Jesus within Nazism.

Finally, Martin Menke has written a compelling triple review of books addressing the history of German Catholic women in twentieth-century Germany: his analysis includes two volumes from the series Literatur – Gender – Konfession. Katholische Schriftstellerinnen, and a chapter review of Dominik Schindler’s study of the Catholic women’s movement and its connections to Michael von Faulhaber, before he was appointed archbishop of Munich and Freising.

The second half of 2025 promises strong issues: our September issue will step away from our regular routine of reviews to offer commentary on how our field of historical inquiry frames various contemporary issues in insightful and disconcerting ways. This special issue will be spearheaded by associate editor Mark Ruff. Our December issue will contain a full slate of reviews and conference reports, including a meeting of part of our editorial team at the European Academy of Religion’s eighth annual conference, held in July in Vienna, Austria.

As ever, I invite you, the reader, to let us know about any major conferences, exhibitions, websites, or films that we should know about to review, by contacting me directly.

On behalf of my associate editors and the editorial board,

Lauren Faulkner Rossi,
Simon Fraser University

Review of Mary Fulbrook. Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Review of Mary Fulbrook. Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 488

By Blake McKinney, Texas Baptist College

Raul Hilberg famously employed a tripartite schema in his Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945. Subsequent works have often divided German society in the Third Reich along these lines. Some have lumped most of the population in the perpetrator category. Others have portrayed German society as a neat bell curve in which perpetrators and victims make up the extremes and the vast majority fit within the bell as bystanders. While categorizations have heuristic value, simple categorical divisions fail to adequately describe the complexity of human activity and change over time. In Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Mary Fulbrook probes the complexity of the concept of “bystanders”— a group she describes as “the muddled middle.”

Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London. She is a familiar and respected contributor to scholarship on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In this work she avoids teleological interpretations of events and rejects simplistic categorizations. She endeavors to tell the story of German bystanders “from the inside out” through “selected accounts of personal experiences” (16). She tells the stories of individuals. In so doing, she humanizes history. Victims and bystanders had names. They had stories. They were not a grouping of data points on a chart. Fulbrook’s subjects are profoundly human, and their complex stories challenge facile characterizations of society in Nazi Germany. Fulbrook’s primary sources for Part I are autobiographical essays from 1939 written on the theme “My life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933.” These essays give a broad range of everyday experiences before such memories were shaped by knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust. Likewise, in Part II she employs a variety of firsthand accounts and memoirs to tell stories from the ground level. Fulbrook argues well for the value and limitations of her source base in her introduction.

Fulbrook divides her analysis into two parts. Part I, “The Slippery Slope: Social Segregation in Nazi Germany,” analyzes German society from the First World War until the beginning of Hitler’s territorial expansions. Periodization matters in historical argumentation, and Fulbrook tells a fuller story of German society by beginning her narrative well before Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship. She gives a rich account of German society and the experience of German Jews before the racialization of the Nazi period. She demonstrates the shift from pre-1933, when “social class, gender, regional, family, or individual issues had been far more significant than religious affiliation or Jewish ancestry”, to the enforcement of (and voluntary conformity with) the dichotomy of “Aryan”/”non-Aryan” divisions in the first years of the Third Reich (27).

Three out of the five chapters in Part I detail societal changes before the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935. Fulbrook demonstrates that, well before the Nuremberg Laws, “Germans were already learning and practising distinctions between ‘Aryans’ and ‘non-Aryans’ in everyday life, and with far-reaching consequences” (91). She asserts, “widespread acceptance and more or less willing enactment… was key to the broader impact of Nazi racism over time” (103). In account after account, Fulbrook illustrates the complexities of conformity and concern. Many victims of National Socialist racial policies recorded moments of kindness from their “Aryan” compatriots, but these were nearly always marked by fear and considerations of self-preservation. Fulbrook contends that this mixture of public conformity and private misgivings allowed non-Jewish Germans to enjoy “both the benefits of public conformity and the moral glow of private dissidence,” but “in the process, this pre-emptively conformist behaviour only served further to define and deepen the rifts that Nazi ideology introduced” (118). The implementation of the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935 further solidified broad conformity with mandated racial discrimination. Part I demonstrates the shift from voluntary conformity to compulsory conformity to Nazi racial policies within Germany.

Part II – “The Expansion of Violence at Home and Abroad” – traces the broader and devastating reach of Nazi racial policies as the Nazi regime began to dominate its neighbors. Chapter six examines the spread of Nazi racial ideology among the German-speaking populations throughout Europe with particular attention on the Baltic states and Austria. Regarding Austria, Fulbrook concludes “the progression from conformity through compliance to complicity was massively accelerated” compared to the early years of Nazi Germany (193). Chapter seven highlights Kristallnacht as a definitive turning point for the “bystander society” in Germany. If non-Jewish Germans feared the potential violent response if they protested mistreatment of “non-Aryans” from 1933-1934, the unrestrained violence of November 9-10, 1938 demonstrated the danger of not conforming with state definitions of the Volksgemeinschaft. Fulbrook asserts, “In November 1938, it was neither ignorance nor indifference that shaped the polarization of popular responses, but perceptions of the relative risks versus potential benefits of different forms of action” (232). Simply put: Kristallnacht changed the math for those calculating the reasonableness of aiding their “non-Aryan” neighbors, diminishing the already small minority of those willing to not conform.

The next two chapters detail the horrific escalation of violence resulting in genocide. Chapters ten and eleven examine the category of “bystander” for Germans from 1941-1945. Chapter ten, “Inner Emigration and the Fiction of Ignorance,” demonstrates the widespread awareness of extreme violence against Jews committed in the East. Auschwitz often functions as a metonym for the Holocaust. Fulbrook explores how German “bystanders” employed this practice to claim ignorance: “The popular refrain ‘we knew nothing about it’ generally restricted the ‘it’ to a very narrow focus, such as the chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The focus on ‘Auschwitz,’ or ‘gas chambers,’ effectively excluded the discrimination and persecution of the peacetime years, with which the majority of people had been forced to comply, in which many had more actively participated, and from which many had also benefitted” (311). Fulbrook covers a wide array of personal cases where non-Jewish Germans learned of the murderous atrocities against Jews. At this point in the regime’s power (and usage of violence), she acknowledges the great difficulty facing citizens who ran the risk of becoming victims of extreme violence if they expressed dissent, “yet remaining silent meant in effect condoning brutality and murder, even if this strategy was a form of ‘muddling through’ in existentially threatening times” (339).

Fulbrook concludes with an indictment of both German elites and the wider society, but with elites bearing the greater burden. She faults elites for not standing against Hitler at an early stage, which left members of the wider society in “an arena of repression and violence, in which it was easier to conform” (341). Fulbrook identifies gradual societal change rather than a driving ideology as the crucial feature of the creation of a “bystander society” that acquiesced to (and often benefitted from) the persecution of Jews. She argues that the greatest lesson is to “explore how very small changes in everyday life that seem anodyne or justifiable at the time can have catastrophic consequences within a matter of just a few years” (374). The pre-war Nazi years are more than the “Seizure of Power,” the Nuremberg Laws, and Kristallnacht. Fulbrook’s careful narration of everyday shifts and accommodations to Nazi racial policy in German society show the complexity of human agency and possible choices in the face of growing violence.

Mary Fulbrook’s account of German bystanders reflects both sympathy for the difficulty of choices made under the shadow of violence as well as grief that courage was the exception and not the rule. She reflects upon the emergence of a “bystander society” — “a society in which social relations and political conditions are such that most people would either not want or not dare to intervene on behalf of victims, and in which most people learned to look away” (381). With hindsight, one can see that the early years of the Nazi regime were the years in which dissidence would have proven most effective, yet in those early months and years when so many Germans expected National Socialism to be a passing fad, many opportunities were missed as people just muddled through. Fulbrook closes her book with a final charge that the best way to enact the cry of “never again” is to be aware enough to enact “earlier or more effective intervention. It is, then, vital that we extend our understanding of the historically contingent conditions for the production of a bystander society” (399). Mary Fulbrook’s Bystander Society enriches the scholarship on German society in the Third Reich and serves as a helpful reminder of the gradual developments that lead to nightmarish catastrophes.

While not directly addressing the scholarship of the modern German churches, this book will help inform future studies addressing the everyday experience of otherwise anonymous members of German society in the Nazi era. Scholars of the German churches will recognize the growth of state power in the mid-1930s that made dissidence far less probable or effective than it was in 1933. Fulbrook’s concept of the “muddled middle” may find particular resonance in studies of German Protestantism, which have often focused on the Confessing Church and Deutsche Christen minorities to the neglect of the majority.

Review of Anna von der Goltz, The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Review of Anna von der Goltz, The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 330.

By Michael O’Sullivan, Marist University

This impactful monograph traces the role of politically right-of-center students in West Germany during the youthful protests of the late 1960s and the left-wing political violence during the 1970s. Anna von der Goltz deserves praise for a source base that includes extensive oral history interviews, pamphlets, posters, speeches, newspaper reports, and correspondence as well as a fluidly written narrative that captures the reader from start to finish. She reframes how the protest activities of the 1968 generation should be researched and taught. This book not only expands the historical narrative by including right-leaning activists, it also convincingly complicates how generation can be used as a concept for historical analysis.

The primary argument of the book is that conservative student activists, and especially leaders of the Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten (Association of Christian Democratic Students or RCDS), were not only present during the 68er generation’s protests but were meaningful actors that shaped many of the era’s signature events. The photographs and opening anecdotes to each chapter alone convincingly prove this point. The cover photo shows a famous debate in Freiburg between the older liberal academic Ralf Dahrendorf and young Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentbund (SDS) figurehead Rudi Dutschke. Lurking in the margins of the photo are young Christian Democrats, Meinhard Ade and Ignaz Bender, who helped organize the event and participated in the debate. Von der Goltz emphasizes how these two students are rarely recognized and sometimes even cropped out of this famous photo to illustrate how the primary subjects of her inquiry have been overlooked. The presence of Ade and Bender at the debate is nonetheless significant. On the one hand, they positioned themselves against their generational spokesperson, Dutschke, and spoke out against left-wing radicalism. On the other hand, their willingness to dialogue with left-wing students and their embrace of the liberal Dahrendorf distinguished them from the older generations of Christian Democrats. Another chapter opens by revealing that the RCDS had organized the visit of the South Vietnamese ambassador in 1966, which Rudi Dutschke and the SDS interrupted, to intentionally draw national attention to the New Left’s unpopular protest tactics. Additionally, the fifth chapter opens with a description of when RCDS chair Gerd Langguth held his ground, condemning the constitutional threat posed by the Marxist Student Association Spartakus while being pelted by cheese curds in 1972. Such examples highlight the often-forgotten role of the right in these moments of protest and illustrates how young Christan Democrats initiated dialogue about reform in the 1960s, imitated many of the theatrical tactics of their left-wing adversaries, and eventually condemned the far-left’s militant turn in the 1970s.

This book does more than re-introduce Christian Democrats to the history of the student protest movement; it also deconstructs the very notion of examining this era through the lens of generation. The Other ‘68ers uses the members of the RCDS to affirm how other scholars have questioned the stereotypes present in so many commemorations of the protests. By highlighting how the “other 68ers” were both similar to and different from the left-wing 68ers, von der Goltz critiques narratives about generational conflict over the Nazi past that motivated student protest. She also questions the period as one of unfettered left-wing hegemony; undermines notions that socio-economic conditions made protest inevitable; and downplays claims that the protests led to a liberalization of West German politics and culture.

Perhaps the most useful analytical frame of the book is its use of “generational unit” as a tool for looking at this small but influential group of center-right activists. Von der Goltz explores how the RCDS related to the more famous generational unit on the left. Students on the left and the right had a surprising amount in common. Initially both units agreed on the need for reform of the university system as well as a political renewal of the republic itself. Both left and right differed from their elders in how they approached the birth control pill, pre-marital sex, fashion, hairstyles, and flamboyant political tactics. Yet they also engaged in intergenerational conflict that would shape West Germany’s future. They disagreed on cultural norms, including communal living, drugs, music, and the extent to which sexual promiscuity that should be the norm. They diverged politically over whether West Germany was in danger of becoming authoritarian, support for left-wing anti-colonial movements abroad, and the use of political violence within West Germany. Such tensions re-emerged in how both left and right remembered their activist years during the 1990s, culminating in a critical discourse about Joschka Fischer and other members of the Red-Green coalition that had been part of left-wing protests. This emphasis on the era’s inter-generational relationships rather than its generational conflict makes this book compelling.

Most useful for the readers of this publication are the book’s contributions to the history of Christian Democracy. This age cohort began its youthful activities at odds with their elders within the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) due to their attraction to the less formal political rhetoric of the time and their calls for reform within the party and the country. By the 1970s, activists within the RCDS became aligned with the mainstream of the party as they formed a united front against the RAF and other left-wing groups associated with political terrorism. This positioned the men within this group to become influential when the CDU/CSU returned to power under the leadership of Helmut Kohl. While the older Christian Democratic generation called the shots under Kohl, the “other ‘68ers” modernized the messaging of the party and shaped foreign policy. Known as “Kohl’s Kissinger,” Horst Teltschik pushed Kohl to maintain the elements of the foreign policy of the Social Democratic 1970s and prevented a freeze on relations with the GDR. He also led foreign policy efforts with the United States and encouraged Kohl’s aggressive drive for German unification in 1989. Von der Goltz argues that figures from the 1968 generation, such as Teltschik, Wulf Schönbohm, and Peter Radunski, played a leading role in preventing the Kohl government from shifting too far to the right in the 1980s and maintaining a centrist course.

Many scholars of Christianity will be disappointed that this monograph does not devote more attention to the role of religion in the ideological outlook of these Christian Democratic politicians and activists. Von der Goltz often mentions the largely Catholic backgrounds of her historical subjects. She also addresses the secularization of West Germany that accelerated in the late 1950s and differentiated this generation from their elders. The book’s coverage of the support that center-right students articulated for pre-marital sex, the pill, and the abolition of paragraph 175 illustrate how they were culturally similar to their own age cohort and thought little of Christian moral teaching in many aspects of their lives. They even became involved in making birth control more broadly available to women, and would eventually lead the CDU/CSU effort to reach out to women as voters in the 1980s. However, a book that emphasizes the “mental map” of these CDU/CSU members misses an opportunity to complicate postwar secularization. Just as this book problematizes the history of generational conflict and liberalization, it could have also developed a more complex and non-linear approach to secularization. Recent research illustrates the overlapping influence of Catholicism and new social movements of the left; there should also be space to show how both Catholicism and Protestantism remained relevant to Christian Democracy even as formal religious practice waned.[1] In addition the book could have added more context about the unrest within the Catholic Church in West Germany and the mass dissent over the encyclical Humane Vitae in 1968 that affirmed the condemnation of the birth control pill. This book already achieves so much that this shortcoming is likely only pronounced for those who specialize in religious history; perhaps its decision not to probe the entanglement between the secular and the sacred in the 1960s leaves opportunities open for future scholars.

The history of Christian Democratic women from the 1960s to the 1980s is another area where researchers can build on the findings on this monograph. Von der Goltz includes interviews with the women of the RCDS, such as Ingrid Reichart-Dreyer, Maria-Theresia van Schewick, and Ursula Männle. She demonstrates how these women, despite being sidelined by patriarchal men, often criticized not only sexism but also the ways that women’s bodies were portrayed in the political pamphlets of the era. Von der Goltz also shows how women of the right concurred with the left on the desire to legalize abortion but disagreed on how to rally publicly on behalf on repealing paragraph 218. The inclusion of these oral histories demonstrates that Catholic and Protestant women engaged in the student protests of the era; more granular work remains to analyze fully how they pursued power in a movement dominated by men. The recent scholarship of Maria Mitchell on a woman of an earlier age cohort, Maria Meyer-Sevenich, could be a model for a deeper future analysis of the agency of women such as Männle.[2]

This book is essential for all historians of modern Europe. It reorients the history the 1968 generation through its focus on young Christian Democrats. It engages readers with its call for less teleological narratives on liberalization and its problematizing of how 1968 is often commemorated by both left and right. It also illustrates the importance of the student activists to the history of Christian democracy and the era of Helmut Kohl. Beyond its scholarly importance, the book is an engaging narrative filled with original research.

Notes:

[1] Sandra Frühauf, Maria Schubert, and Florian Bock, “Catholic Narratives and Practices and the West German New Social Movements during the 1970s and 1980s,” in Dimiter Daphinoff an Franziska Metzger (eds.), Appropriation as Practice of Memory: Inventions, Uses, and Transformations of Religious Memory (Cologne: Böhlau), 345-376.

[2] Maria Mitchell, “Maria Meyer-Sevenich and the Politics of Emotions, Gender, and Religion in Postwar Germany,” in Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker and Martina Cucchiara (eds.), Women, Religion, and Emotions in Modern Germany and Beyond (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2025), 57-84.

Review of Mirjam Loos, Gefährliche Metaphern: Auseinandersetzungen deutscher Protestanten mit Kommunismus und Bolschewismus (1919 bis 1955)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Review of Mirjam Loos, Gefährliche Metaphern: Auseinandersetzungen deutscher Protestanten mit Kommunismus und Bolschewismus (1919 bis 1955). (Göttingen: Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), pp. 266

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

There are many studies about the role of Protestant churches and theology during the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, including examinations of the Kirchenkampf, the so-called Judenfrage, antisemitism, or complicity with or resistance to National Socialist ideology. So far, however, no systematic assessment has been written about anti-communist and anti-Bolshevist sentiments in German Protestantism during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. “In the historiography of Protestantism,” Mirjam Loos writes, “a detailed analysis of the anti-Bolshevist rhetoric [Sprach- und Denkmuster]” is still missing (17). Her book, Dangerous Metaphors, is filling this gap.

Based on her 2017 dissertation in Protestant theology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Loos presents a meticulously researched, insightful, and densely written work on German Protestant attitudes toward communism in general (ideas, ideologies, organizations) and Soviet communist-Bolshevism in particular. Occasionally referencing pre-World War I events, her focus is Germany’s political transition through the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, tracing the intensification of anti-communist rhetoric on the eve of World War II and the eventual military assault on the Soviet Union in 1941. While the opening chapter points to a few academic-theological debates at the turn of the century on possible family resemblances between the ideals of early Christian and communist communities, the last chapter briefly outlines post-war developments in the Protestant churches until the mid-1950s, with anti-communist stances, though more restrained, remaining largely intact.

Her study might be best described as a historical as well as discourse-critical approach to analyzing how metaphors calling out the evils of communism and Bolshevism operated within a Protestant milieu. Her sources are not limited to academic writings by German theologians or public statements by the Landeskirchen (regional churches). Rather, as Loos puts it, it is a study of processes in the “evangelische Kommunikationsraum,” perhaps best translated as ‘general communication patterns in the German Protestant milieu.’ This Kommunikationsraum includes specific social spaces, organizations, official actors, media, and mechanisms of distribution. Her study thus examines a variety of sources, including sermons, theological journals, educational materials, encyclopedias, official church statements, travel diaries, testimonies, and surveys to stitch together a rich tapestry of the steadily intensifying anti-communist/anti-Bolshevist and, at times, “Bolshevist-Jewish” conspiratorial rhetoric in Protestant milieus. This rhetoric, increasingly divorced from any political reality and analysis, functioned more like a device to first conjure and then combat demonic forces—to a point, as Loos states, that “can only be described as psychotic” (208). The trope in particular of Kulturbolschewismus—an ill-defined, all-encompassing term to assert that Bolshevist ideology has infiltrated every part of German culture and society—eventually established a common ground between German Protestants and Nazi ideology.

The revolutionary events of November 1918 and spring 1919 are the actual starting point of the book’s loosely chronological approach to analyzing Protestant reactions to the threat of communism. Loos focuses on the upheavals during the short-lived “Münchener Räterepublik” and also on violent events in the Latvian capital of Riga. In the latter case, Bolshevist forces murdered Baltic German pastors who, in Christian discourse, were swiftly turned into martyrs. In response to the perceived communist threat, religious leaders (including Baltic German pastors returning from the Gulag) sounded the alarm with first-person accounts, pamphlets, and articles, while paramilitary forces, like the Free Corps (which included pastors and students of theology), fought mercilessly against rebellious workers (Revolutionäre Arbeiterräte). Those events launched the rhetorical patterns of fear that persisted for the coming decades: Bolshevism came to stand in as a general cipher for an attack on religion, Christianity, Germany, and civilization. While at the turn of the century, according to Loos, Protestants mainly took a skeptical stance toward what they called the utopia of communist social ideals, following the violent 1918/1919 events, the ambivalence of German Protestants toward the Weimar Republic increased, blaming Moscow for instigating discord in Germany (like Munich’s Räterepublik) and accusing it for violently repressing Christians in the Soviet Union.

In the following two chapters, Loos examines Protestant responses in the years 1930 to 1932, before Hitler seized power. She mentions the continuing multiplicity of voices in Protestant milieus during those years. On the one hand, there were efforts of solidarity with the persecuted brethren in Russia and protests against the treatment of Christians in the Soviet Union (exemplified by an analysis of official statements coming out of the 1930 Deutsche Evangelische Kirchentag in Nuremberg); on the other hand, German pastors such as the group of “religious socialists,” to which Paul Tillich belonged, were still able to openly identify with socialism and the “proletariat.” Clergy and theologians could still associate with the Social Democratic Party, and special clerical positions were created for a “Proletarierpfarrer” (pastoral care for the working class). Discussions were still nuanced. For example, official church statements condemned religious persecution in the Soviet Union but refrained from demonizing the Soviet social experiment in general. And there were intense internal as well as public debates on the communist memberships of German pastor Erwin Eckert and theologian Fritz Lieb. In the end both were removed from their positions, in the church and at the university respectively. All the while, other voices, today mostly forgotten, pushed a strong anti-Soviet agenda into Protestant Kommunikationsräume. For example, the Baltic German pastor Oskar Schabert condemned with apocalyptic and sexist imagery the anti-church and anti-Christian agenda of Bolshevism: “Satan herrschte, und sein willigstes Werkzeug waren die entmenschten ‚Flintenweiber’, meist junge Dirnen, denen Morden Wollust [war]” (94).* There are also the polemic publications of Iwan Iljin, who had been expelled from Moscow and whose anti-Soviet publications, such as “Gift, Geist und Wesen des Bolschewismus” (Poison, Spirit, and Essence of Bolshevism), reached a wide readership in Protestant milieus. Loos also looks at the travel reports of the few Protestants who had dared to journey to the Soviet Union during those years, like Rudolf Mirbt, who afterward concluded that the Protestant church had to play a decisive role in the final battle (Entscheidungskampf) against Bolshevism.

In chapter 5, Loos examines how the anti-Bolshevist attitudes, which had become a cohesive, identity-building force within Protestantism, enabled the churches to find common ground with Nazism and its anti-Soviet propaganda. The chapter starts with tracing the neologism of Kulturbolschewismus (cultural infiltration of Bolshevism) in 1931 and moves forward to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. It is a historically and conceptually rich chapter, and any short summary here will not do it justice. But let me say this: important to note is the author’s analysis of the ill-defined yet all-encompassing term Kulturbolschewismus, which became a “cipher for everything ‘evil,’ completely detached from any political ascriptions” (145). At times, this term morphed into the antisemitic trope of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Loos seems to suggest that the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism, though not absent in Protestant publications, was far more prevalent in Nazi ideology than in Protestant rhetoric. And yet, it is always appalling to realize how leaders of the various regional churches succumbed and conformed to Hitler’s war. For example, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, church leaders, including bishop August Marahrens (Hannover), sent a telegram to Adolf Hitler pledging their support and solidarity: “You have, my Führer, contained the Bolshevist danger in our country and now call on our Volk [people] and all the people in Europe to go into a decisive battle against the mortal enemy of all Ordnung [discipline/rule-based/divinely-willed order] and of the whole occidental-Christian culture” (167). The chapter ends with an apt summary: “In view of the 1936 Spanish Civil War and the attack of the Soviet Union in 1941, various church committees confirmed their loyalty to Hitler and the National-Socialist state” (179).

In the concluding chapter, Loos returns to a conceptual discussion of the role of metaphors regarding anti-Bolshevist rhetoric in Protestant spaces, and how the imagery of nature, meteorology, war, and victimhood morphed into suggestions of a final apocalyptic battle between Christianity and Bolshevism, in which the Soviet Union stood for chaos and darkness and Nazi Germany for light and order. Moving into the post-war period, Loos indicates that anti-Bolshevist sentiments remained intact in Protestant church circles after 1945, especially in West Germany, now under U.S. military administration. Yet, she writes, divergent opinions began to emerge in the 1950s in West German Protestant circles regarding the assessment of danger emanating from the Soviet Union, especially when the question of German rearmament was widely and controversially debated at the onset of the Cold War.

The book ends with a quote from theologian Helmut Gollwitzer, who had been a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union. After the war, Gollwitzer argued for a more differentiated view of communism, suggesting that communism is not “satanic,” though it might be a flawed idea. Coming full circle, Loos writes, we need to know that Gollwitzer had once been a student of Fritz Lieb, the socialist-leaning theologian who had been removed from his university position in 1933.

Notes:

* “Satan ruled, and his most willing tools were the dehumanized ‘gun-toting women’, mostly young prostitutes for whom murder was a source of pleasure.” (Editor’s translation)

Review of Mikael Nilsson, Christianity in Hitler’s Ideology. The Role of Jesus in National Socialism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Review of Mikael Nilsson, Christianity in Hitler’s Ideology. The Role of Jesus in National Socialism. (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024). ISBN: 978-1-009-31497-8.

By Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., Stonehill College

In 2021, Routledge published Mikael Nilsson’s Hitler Redux: The Incredible History of Hitler’s So-Called Table Talks, a critical deconstruction of several post-war books that purported to record Hitler’s verbatim conversations on various topics. In this investigative work, Nilsson, an independent historian who earned his doctorate from Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology, demonstrated an uncanny ability to make connections between historical texts, uncovering misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and falsifications in the process. Nilsson pursues a similar approach in his newest study, Christianity in Hitler’s Ideology: The Role of Jesus in National Socialism, while also advancing arguments initially made by Richard Steigmann-Gall in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (Cambridge, 2003), who endorsed Nilsson’s book. Steigmann-Gall asked if National Socialism was Christian. Nilsson investigates Jesus’s place within Hitler’s and National Socialism’s ideology. Rejecting interpretations of Hitler and National Socialism as anti-Christian, Nilsson posits that both were fundamentally Christian, though defined radically different than the norm. Hitler saw Jesus as an Aryan warrior sent by God to rid the world of Jews and their influence on it. He and his followers sought to “reestablish the original teachings of Jesus, which they thought had been lost over the centuries due to the manipulations of the apostle Paul and then the Catholic Church” (3). While many scholars have written extensively about the Aryan portrayal of Jesus under National Socialism, Nilsson offers further insight and depth by largely fulfilling his introductory promise to examine anew National Socialism’s foundational texts.

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Nilsson is convinced that one must take religion seriously to understand Hitler and National Socialism entirely. He writes, “…we must understand the National Socialist movement and its revolution not as ‘quasi-religious,’ as [Joachim] Fest and others have put it, but as an ideology that was religious to its core” (29). For him, many historians cannot begin to ascertain this assumption, either by ignoring religion or refusing “to ascribe to religious beliefs any responsibility for this extremely violent and negative part of modern European history” (19).

In his sprawling first chapter, Nilsson emphasizes the importance of understanding National Socialism’s ideology, particularly in comprehending its perspective on Christianity. He is adamant in explaining in detail that Hitler did not create it in a vacuum. Instead, it developed from various strains of nineteenth-century right-wing social-Christian enmeshed thought. Nilsson focuses explicitly on the journalist and publisher Theodor Fritsch and the Protestant pastor and politician Friedrich Naumann, illustrating Fritsch’s extreme antisemitism and Naumann’s gradual adoption of Social Darwinism and racial struggle. Naumann initially presented Jesus as a social reformer but soon abandoned this emphasis entirely, focusing less on him. Fritsch openly posited that Jesus had been an Aryan of Galilean descent who dedicated his life to combating Jews. In early 1920, Franz Schränghamer-Heimdal, in a series of articles published in Völkischer Beobachter, advanced the Galilean-Aryan Jesus argument. Others, including Hitler, followed suit, elaborating on such ideas. In a July 1923 speech at Augsburg, Hitler declared, “…true Christianity did not turn the other cheek like a coward, but instead chose to combat injustice and fight for what was right” (62). In his writing, Alfred Rosenberg, the chief party ideologist, similarly argued, “the Pauline churches are thus essentially not Christian, but rather a product of the Jewish-Syrian Apostle activity, such as it was begun by the Jerusalemitic author of the Gospel of Matthew and, independently of him, completed by Paul” (62). Nilsson concludes that Rosenberg wrote here as a “theologian just as much as a National Socialist ideologue….he thought of himself and the NSDAP as the harbingers of real Christianity” (63).

The second Chapter, “Hitler’s Religious Teachers: Dietrich Eckart and Houston Stewart Chamberlain,” examines the influence these individuals had on Hitler, both of whom he knew. Chamberlain’s Christ was a strongman who shunned weakness. Less emphasis was given to compassion for human weakness, as evidenced by the rejection of Jesus’ teaching about turning the other cheek. Nilsson recounts that in 1923, Hitler proclaimed that Jesus did not mean for anyone “to cowardly offer the other cheek, but to be a warrior for righteousness and a combater of every injustice” (90). Nilsson includes further examples from Chamberlain’s writings and links them to excerpts from Hitler’s speeches. The two diverged, however, over their interpretation of the apostle Paul. Chamberlain viewed him as a heathen who had brought Hellenistic influences into Christianity, while Hitler saw him as the Jewish corrupter of Jesus’ teachings.

Dietrich Eckart, a Catholic and rabid antisemite, had even more significant influence over Hitler and instilled in him a fierce hatred of Jews. However, Nilsson cautions how we use Eckart’s writings to determine Hitler’s own thinking. He accepts Margarete Plewnia’s conclusion that the conversation discussing religion, among other topics, between Eckart and Hitler in Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin is fictional and cannot be definitively quoted. Likewise, Nilsson agrees with her assessment that Eckart’s interaction with Hitler in the early 1920s affected how Hitler spoke about Jews. Eckart’s outlook on Catholicism also influenced Hitler, who, at least initially, viewed it as “very important…. In Mein Kampf, he expressed a profound admiration for the Catholic Church as a bureaucratic organization, as an institution with a strong ideology and core message, and as a propaganda outlet” (117). Nilsson laments scholars’ dismissive attitude toward Eckart’s Catholic beliefs and his role as Hitler’s religious mentor.

Chapter three focuses on whether Hitler believed Jesus was divine. He rejects historian Michael Burleigh’s conclusion that Hitler “talked a lot about God, rarely about the Saviour” (17). Nilsson finds that Hitler considered Jesus to be divine. In a 1920 speech in Rosenheim, Hitler characterized Jews as unproductive and work-shy money changers “whom our teacher of religion, the carpenter son from Nazareth, drove out of his father’s temple with his whip” (136). Likewise, in a December 1928 speech, Hitler referred to Jesus as “Christ, our Lord” (147). According to Nilsson, Hitler prayed to God, citing several speeches. Nilsson’s evidence becomes less convincing when he discusses if there was proof that Hitler was a Christian, hypothesizing that Hitler came close to mirroring an early sect, the Ebionites, who did not believe that Jesus was divine but an ordinary man whom God adopted. He also cites a 1921 letter in which Rudolf Hess describes Hitler as a good Catholic. Hess recalls accompanying Hitler to a Catholic Mass (Nilsson refers to it as a service), in which Father Achtleitner presided and delivered a sermon. The original document is most likely referring to Abbot Alban Schachleiter, O.S.B., a devoted follower of Hitler, whose history Nilsson may not be aware of. There is no “Achtleitner” among the German clergy in the General Schematismus at that time.

Nilsson’s book takes an almost bizarre turn in Chapter Four when he examines how Hitler modeled his political conversion narrative in Mein Kampf on the Apostle Paul’s religious conversion in Acts 9. Nilsson reminds us that scholars, including Thomas Weber, claim that Hitler used biblical stories as staging motifs. He argues that Hitler had a “good knowledge of the Bible” (160). Most importantly, Nilsson compares Paul’s conversion narrative, including his temporary blindness,” with Hitler’s own experience of blindness in World War I. Perhaps this is the case, though one must wonder if Hitler hated Paul so much, why would he appropriate the apostle’s narrative as his own?

In the fifth and final chapter, Nilsson seeks to understand if Jesus was an ideological inspiration for Hitler and the NSDAP. He answers in the affirmative and encourages us to take Hitler’s words at face value in our attempts to explain his actions. We should not attempt to dismiss or deconstruct passages, such as the infamous one in Mein Kampf, “Today I hence believe that I am acting in accordance with the Almighty Creator’s intention: When I defend myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord’s work” (181). Nilsson argues Hitler used such religious language sparingly, reinforcing its importance as belief, not propaganda. If so, he argues, Hitler would have frequently employed them. How Hitler read Jesus’ words is debatable, though as pointed out above, Nilsson emphasizes that Hitler was knowledgeable about the Bible. Hitler’s library also contained Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Worte Christi, which consists of 160 sayings attributed to Jesus. As Hitler marked up his copy, Nilsson surmises that Hitler may have drawn inspiration from this text.

In his last chapter’s final section, Nilsson asks if Hitler planned the Holocaust from the outset and, in turn, if Jesus was the inspiration for this ultimate evil. At face value, the question is offensive; however, if you accept Nilsson’s understanding of how Hitler understood Christianity and Jesus, it makes more sense. Hitler saw Christ as God’s warrior sent to eradicate Jews. Nilsson agrees with Thomas Weber that “Hitler and Eckart shared a genocidal rhetoric concerning the Jews from very early on” (223). He reasons that it is “not completely unrealistic to assume that Hitler already in 1924 had arrived at the conclusion that the Jews had to be physically exterminated if Germany was to be saved” (225). Nilsson later adds that Hitler saw Jesus as “the greatest Aryan warrior, that Jesus had fought against the Jews and was killed by them before he had time to finish his work, that is, the physical destruction of the Jewish people, and that the NSDAP was going to pick up where he left off and this time his work would be brought to completion” (232).

Nilsson presents us with a thought-provoking book. It is filled with numerous examples from primary sources and, at times, overwhelms the reader with digressive arguments. Too many of the examples are from the 1920s and Nilsson does not consider this discrepancy in significant depth. He does importantly admit that while Hitler “did not slavishly adopt ideas wholesale from any source, he was not an original thinker or intellectual either. He used what he found in others to create a blend that suited him” (126). One wonders then if Nilsson has read too much into his brief excerpts from Hitler’s speeches and writings, attributing to them too much weight. Nowhere does he ask if Hitler’s Austrian-Catholic childhood and adolescence impacted his religious view. Despite these reservations, Nilsson offers the reader much to ponder about Hitler’s religiosity.

Reviews on the History of German Catholic Women

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Jörg Seiler, ed. Literatur – Gender – Konfession: Katholische Schriftstellerinnen, Vol. 1. Forschungsperspektiven. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2018, pp. 216.

Antonia Leugers, Literatur – Gender – Konfession: Katholische Schriftstellerinnen .Vol. 2. Analysen und Ergebnisse. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2020, pp. 288.

Dominik Schindler, “Michael von Faulhaber und die katholische Frauenbewegung (1903-1917). Zeitgemäße Seelsorge eines modernen Bischofs.” In Katharina Krips, Stephan Mokry, Klaus Unterburger, eds. Aufbruch in der Zeit: Kirchenreform und europäischer Katholizismus. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2020, pp. 207-220.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

In the ever-widening definition of church history, the role of women of faith remains an open field. The three contributions under review here demonstrate not only the extent of research that remains to be done but also the significant contribution that Christian women’s history makes to a greater understanding of Christian life in general, especially in the twentieth century. The first two volumes under consideration are the result of a multi-year grant-funded study on Catholic women authors from 1900 to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), while the single chapter throws new light on the support of Michael von Faulhaber, before his appointment as archbishop of Munich, for Catholic women’s groups as well as his views of the woman’s role in church and society.

The study on Catholic women authors was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and based at the University of Erfurt. Antonia Leugers, Jörg Seiler, and Lucia Scherzberg, well-known historians of German Catholicism, as well as other church historians and several literature scholars and experts in database-supported research, collaborated on this study. Establishing a database of 160 Catholic women authors, as many as the grant permitted, the participants welcome future scholars to append additional writers, especially from earlier and later periods, to the historical record.

Based on theoretical concepts such as Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “symbolic power” and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, the researchers inquired how these women fared as women authors and whether the authors met contemporary ideals concerning Catholic women. Did they dedicate their careers to upholding these ideals? Did identifiable subgroups exist? Which works caused scandal, which were forbidden, either by the Reichsschrifttumskammer or the Allied powers? Which authors went into exile? How did that experience change their views? While the volumes answer these questions, they lack effective summaries that conclude “indicators of processes by which these authors emancipated themselves from church norms by analyzing their fictitious characters” (vol. II, Leugers, p. 10) The authors of this volume analyze the degree to which Catholic women authors, in their personal lives and their fiction, adhere to the Catholic image of womanhood promoted by both the church and secular society, especially by the National Socialist regime. Many authors in their lives and their works differ from both Church and social expectations in matters of marriage, chastity, parenthood, and gender.

Instead, the volumes offer a wealth of case studies. Some of the authors, such as Gertrud von le Fort and Hedwig Dransfeld, were well-known, while others published only a few works. Each of the authors has their history. The Leugers volume includes a primarily quantitative summary of the women’s experiences, how many got divorced, converted to Catholicism, left the church, lived in same-sex relationships, had children out of wedlock, attempted suicide, chose cremation, were childless, etc. Leugers admits, however, that such personal information is sometimes difficult to obtain and that, given the limited sample, the data are more “symptomatic” than representative. This detailed qualitative analysis, however, lacks explanatory power. The more important questions raised in the project remain unanswered. The authors offer no conclusions about Catholic women’s emancipation, their understanding of gender, chastity, and parenthood. While some suggest disapproval of modernity, most suggest ways of accommodating it while maintaining a life of faith. In all cases, Catholic faith triumphs. Beyond this, however, this rich body of evidence cries for additional meaningful analysis. One wonders if these volumes report results from which results can be drawn.

Determining a work’s effect, i.e., its reception history, remains difficult. The project includes contemporary critiques of the authors’ works, mostly by Catholic publications. Many of the works were considered trivial. Those authors who adhered most closely to Catholic moral standards tended to fare well in the reviews. Those who problematized Catholic teaching or offered differentiated explanations of human behavior were often condemned by church authorities and Catholic publications. For the period 1933-1945, the detailed records of the Reichsschriftumskammer, which evaluated the publications for ideological conformity or at least compatibility, offer insights into the works. One of the regime’s objections was the Catholic praise for virginity and chastity. The regime denigrated women who chose not to bear children. A final measure of a work’s popularity was the number of volumes printed. In some cases, new editions were published well after the war, while other works sold only a few hundred copies.

While the research summary volume by Leugers, the second in the trilogy, focuses on the various types of Catholic women authors, the contributors to the Seiler volume, the first in the series (these two volumes are reviewed here; the third volume, also edited by Seiler, discusses the literary conflict between Carl Muth and more conservative, orthodox groups), offer insights useful for future scholars. Lucia Scherzberg, for example, analyzes the gendering of God throughout history and how Protestantism is often defined as male, while Catholicism is usually described as female. She asks how the authors constructed gender and what role religious affiliation plays in constructing gender. In general, she inquires about the role that gender plays in the thinking and works of these authors. Scherzberg provides no answers and poses these questions to future scholars.

In an apparent rebuke to Leugers, Scherzberg also questions “whether or not social scientific theory can capture the contingency of historical processes.” Social scientific theories often cannot provide micro-historical explanations.

Günter Häntzschel discusses Catholic lyric poetry. Interesting is his summary of the conflict between Carl Muth, who founded Hochland, the premier intellectual Catholic journal of the period before World War II, and who sought to establish Catholic literature independent of Catholic teaching, and Richard Gralik, who founded the Gral as a conservative Catholic magazine. Muth became the driving force behind an independent non-ecclesiastical Catholic intellectual life in Germany. Maria Cristina Giacomin addresses Muth’s concern about inferior Catholic literature more directly. Muth feared that Catholic literature, directed primarily at women and older girls, had been feminized. The first novel by a woman that Muth published in Hochland was a complex account of an anti-Catholic man and the Catholic woman who denounces him as a Lutheran for blasphemous desecration, but also reconciles him with the Catholic faith. Gendered religious identities, erotic undertones, and the protagonist’s refusal to bear children yielded much criticism. Giacomin argues that Catholic readers at the time were accustomed to clearly didactic novels in which the Catholic moral lesson was presented unambiguously.

Regina Heyder explains that while Catholics considered women’s chastity and virginity laudable before 1945, in the post-war era, chastity was considered a burdensome outcome of fate. Several authors explain that Catholic women authors described convent schools as places of repression and punishment, but also, more importantly, as places dominated by obscurantism and “void of intellectual and artistic nourishment” (Seiler, 166).

Martin Papenbrock analyzes book covers from the Beaux-Arts style to post-war modernity. While offering little commentary on the works’ Catholicism, he notes that publishers often commission book covers that do not accurately reflect the nuanced discussions provided in the text. They reflect more the times in which the book was published than its contents.

While both volumes lack an analytical, summative conclusion, they complicate scholars’ understanding of twentieth-century Catholicism. Women who read and could afford books, or who sought out lending libraries, were offered a differentiated and challenging image of Catholic womanhood, one that demands further analysis and explanation. These works paint a more complicated picture of Catholic womanhood, as the views of womanhood discussed in these volumes were ascribed to Catholic men of their subjects’ time, and ecclesiastical concerns about “modern” Catholic women. Most importantly, the volumes offer evidence of the significance to Catholic social, moral and cultural history of women’s agency.

Another instance in which women’s agency proved important can be found in Dominik Schindler’s discussion of the relationship between the Katholische Deutsche Frauenbund and Michael von Faulhaber, a theology professor at Strasbourg and bishop of Speyer. In a nuanced brief essay, Schindler argues that Faulhaber actively supported the formation of the Frauenbund and the Hildburgisbund, an organization supporting female university students. According to Schindler, Faulhaber largely adhered to traditional values, but insisted that Catholic values reflect the equal role many Catholic women played in securing the family’s income. He also argued publicly that Catholic theology proved no obstacle to women’s suffrage. While men remained heads of household, this did not consign women to second-class status. Faulhaber’s view of the family remained conservative. Still, he acknowledged that in an industrial society, a man’s wages might not suffice to meet the family’s expenses, and thus a woman might be forced to work. Faulhaber argued that women from the upper classes should be encouraged to participate in social and cultural life. In contrast, women in the lower classes deserved much support to earn an honorable living. He believed that women’s work was necessary to meet the needs of their children. Schindler argues that, even if Faulhaber’s views seem backward today, at the time, they were quite progressive.

The three works in question raise more questions than they answer, but there is justification for such works. While Laura Fetheringill Zwicker, Martina Cucchiara, and others, including the scholarship reviewed here, have made inroads into German Catholic women’s history, much work remains to be done, work that will enrich the record and challenge scholars to be sensitive to greater differentiation.

Letter from the Editors (Spring 2025)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

Letter from the Editors (Spring 2025)

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Dear Friends,

Since my last missive, many events have prompted me to remember lines from a Yeats poem that first impressed me decades ago, that suddenly have distressing significance: “turning and turning into the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” I gesture to not only the multiple and daily reorientations and whiplash attempts at change unleashed by the new administration in the United States, with widespread repercussions internationally; but also, and much closer to home intellectually, to the unexpected and devastating death of Thomas Großbölting, in a train accident in Germany last month. It is with uncharacteristic somberness that our year, and my letter, begins.

Dr. Thomas Großbölting

Two of our long-time editors who worked closely with Thomas Großbölting – who was himself a close friend of our journal, and who attended the 2013 conference in Vancouver, BC, that feted our founder, John S. Conway – have written Nachrufe that appear below. These tributes from Mark Ruff (originally written in German and delivered at a celebration of life, that he has translated into English) and Manfred Gailus (printed in the original German), are a fitting way to open our issue, to remember our colleague and friend.

To launch us into 2025, we bring you several reviews and an article that appeared in Der Tagesspiegel. Martin Menke examines Alexander Lamprecht’s revised and published Master’s thesis about Catholic clergy in South Tyrol, revealing an oft-overlooked peripheral region caught between Italian fascism and German Nazism. Martina Cucchiara delves into the biography of Benedicta von Spiegel, head of the Benedictine abbey of St. Walburg in Eichstätt for over a quarter of a century, until she died in 1950. Dirk Schuster offers two reviews: one of the film Zwischen uns Gott, a provocative Austrian documentary released last year that immerses itself in the paradoxes of contemporary religion; and the second of Andreas Pangritz’s slender 2023 volume that explores theological – that is to say, Christian – roots of antisemitism. This review dovetails nicely with Manfred Gailus’s contribution from Der Tagesspiegel, in which he grapples with the evolution of Christian (Protestant) antisemitism in Germany in the twentieth century.

We have also uploaded a formal list of submission guidelines on our website, meant to clarify the scope and formatting of submissions for potential reviewers.

I invite you, the reader, to let us know what you think by leaving a comment on our site, and to relate any major conferences, exhibitions, websites, or films that we should know about to review, by contacting me directly.

On behalf of my associate editors and the editorial board,

Lauren Faulkner Rossi,

Simon Fraser University

Kindly note: the editorial board of the CCHQ reserves the right to consider requests for translations of articles by contributors. Please direct your request to Lauren Faulkner Rossi at lnf@sfu.ca.

Thomas Großbölting in Memorium

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

Thomas Großbölting in Memorium

By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

The fields of German history and religious history suffered a devastating and irreplaceable loss on February 11, 2025. The prominent German historian and Director of the Research Center for Contemporary History in Hamburg, Thomas Großbölting, who had generated headlines in Germany for having uncovered the sordid details of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic clergy in the diocese of Münster, died tragically in a train accident in Hamburg, Germany. He was the sole fatality in a collision between his high-speed ICE train with 285 passengers and a semi-truck at a rail crossing in Hamburg-Rönnenburg.

Dr. Thomas Großbölting

His death comes as a shock to all who knew him, and not least his wife of nearly thirty years and four children. Großbölting was a highly respected, if not revered figure for multiple reasons. The most obvious was his remarkable scholarly output that spanned thirty years and multiple subdisciplines in contemporary Germany history. He was the author of ten monographs, the co-editor of seven edited volumes, and the author of dozens of journal articles and chapters in edited volumes. His topics ranged widely in their geographical and chronological scope. He earned renown not only for his magnum opus on religion in Germany since 1945, which was translated into English under the title, Losing Heaven: Religion in Germany since 1945, but also for his exposé of the clerical sexual abuse scandal. He wrote about the Stasi, German society after reunification, the representations of societal order in industrial and trade exhibitions in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries and their role in popularizing consumption, the politics of memory in Italy after the Second World War, amongst many other topics.

Born in 1969 near Bocholt, Thomas Großbölting was a product of the flat western regions of the Münsterland, in Westphalia in northwestern Germany. He studied history, German, and Catholic theology at the nearby university in Münster. He spoke fluent English and Italian. But even while a student there, he exhibited that characteristic which would accompany him until his final minutes on a high-speed train: he was constantly in motion. He jaunted from one archive and center of historical research to another. These early years in Münster were filled with excursions to Cologne, Bonn, and Rome. Fittingly, his final undergraduate research broached a topic that would remain part of his scholarly journey over the decades: debates in the Catholic Church about reform following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). His dissertation, however, was about the history and fate of middle-class bourgeois society in the East German cities of Magdeburg and Halle during the Cold War. From there he went to Berlin, where he led scholarly investigation into the Stasi files. His more than five years of research culminated in a book about German society post-reunification, which appeared in print in 2020. His waystations as a professor began in Magdeburg, moved back to Münster following a detour to the University of Toronto, and concluded in Hamburg. He was involved in more scholarly nexuses, organizations, and associations than it is possible to list. He remained one of the best-connected historians – on both sides of the Atlantic – that one will find. An inveterate organizer, he mastered the fine art of bringing people together, delegating where necessary, and synthesizing.

His remarkably scholarly career aside, Großbölting was revered for a more important reason. As nearly of the testimonials and eulogies printed in Germany correctly note, he was that rare German academic with a combination of intelligence, ambition, and rigor – minus the vanity. As frequent a presence as he was on podiums across Germany and North America, he was equally a listener. He was never one to prescribe: serving as a mentor to dozens of budding scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, he was generous with his wisdom. He indeed was more than willing to offer constructive suggestions when his many students, research assistants, and co-workers needed them. He nonetheless never did so from an exalted or lofty position that sought to tell others what they needed to know or had failed to grasp. His assistance came instead from a position of trust and confidence. When taking part in a conference at Regent College in August 2013 to commemorate the Canadian church historian, John Conway, he offered many constructive suggestions for how to transform Conway’s newsletter that had focused on German church history and recent church developments into an electronic journal encompassing a broader range of topics and geographies.

Above all, Großbölting exuded optimism, radiated sunshine, and transmitted energy. Even when he was not traveling to another archive or to give another talk, he was always on the move. His favorite way of relaxing was to go jogging. I knew Thomas for almost thirty years, almost to the day. We met in early 1995 in a working group based in Münster whose focus appropriately was contemporary church history. The Arbeitskreis für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte in Münster was then under the direction of its founder, the renowned church historian, Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Damberg. Thomas and I were both 25-year-old graduate students; that we were from opposite shores of the Atlantic did not matter. We quickly developed a friendship that was equal parts scholarly and personal. We planned and led four seminars between 2014 and 2017 at the German Studies Association on the subject of religion in Germany between 1789 and the present. We also co-edited a volume, Germany and the Confessional Divide, which was published by Berghahn Books in 2021. While collaborating on these projects and seminars, we hosted each at other at our respective homes in St. Louis and until recently in Münster over the decades. Following conferences, we went swimming in the Pacific in San Diego and Vancouver Bay in British Columbia. Großbölting was at ease equally in discussing the vicissitudes of German Catholic history and the lives of our respective children. He was a devoted father to his four children, for whom he was an inspirational figure and his loss incomprehensible.

For me too, his untimely death remains inexplicable. It is akin to a rolling stone ceasing to move. In earlier eras, as Thomas knew all too well – and himself wrote about! – sudden departures from this world were more the norm than the exception. Theologians, hymnists, priests, and pastors all repeatedly spoke of the frailty and contingency of life. Here, today; gone tomorrow. In the words of one such German chorale, as rendered into English in The Lutheran Hymnal of 1941:

Who knows when death may overtake me!
Time passes on, my end draws near.
How swiftly can my breath forsake me!
How soon can life’s last hour appear!
My God, for Jesus’ sake I pray
Thy peace may bless my dying day.

That of all people, it was Thomas, the sunniest of optimists, who came to illustrate this age-old axiom is the bitterest of ironies. Yet in keeping with the spirit of the 17^th century, this hymn also concludes on a note of solace:

And thus I live in God contented
And die without a thought of fear;
My soul has to God’s plans consented,
For through His Son my faith is clear.

In his book, Losing Heaven, Großbölting explicitly described how remote and incomprehensible the religious sentiment articulated in this chorale had become in the later years of the Federal Republic. If the Christian churches wished to contribute to the moral questions facing society in the 21^st century in light of changing religious understandings, he wrote, they needed to show openness and enter into dialogue with those of all faiths as well as those of no faith. Yet as his untimely death also tells us, particularly in times of upheaval like ours, the task of church historians and theologians is to enter into a dialogue between past and present. The collective wisdom of the past and the needs of the present have to be in constant and constructive conversation. Thomas Großbölting would have agreed whole-heartedly.

I would like to close by extending my condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues who are suffering from this terrible loss.

Nachruf auf den Historiker Thomas Großbölting

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

Nachruf auf den Historiker Thomas Großbölting

By Manfred Gailus, Technischen Universität Berlin

Die Nachricht war ein schwerer Schock: Am 11. Februar stieß in Hamburg-Harburg ein ICE mit einem schwer beladenen Sattelschlepper zusammen, der fatalerweise auf einem ebenerdigen Bahnübergang stehengeblieben war. Es gab Verletzte und ein Todesopfer. Einen Tag später erfuhren wir, dass es der Historiker Thomas Großbölting war, der auf diese tragische Weise im Alter von 55 Jahren aus dem Leben gerissen wurde. Ein Schock, nicht zu fassen, ein vermeidbarer Unfall, und ausgerechnet er.

Großbölting stammte aus Westfalen (Dingden/Kreis Wesel) und studierte nach dem Abitur Geschichte, katholische Theologie und Germanistik. 1997 wurde er mit einer Studie über SED-Diktatur und Gesellschaft in der Region Magdeburg und Halle promoviert. Bei Hans-Ulrich Thamer in Münster habilitierte er sich mit einer Untersuchung über Industrie- und Gewerbeausstellungen im 19. Jahrhundert. Er bekleidete zahlreiche Anschlusspositionen in Magdeburg und Berlin, bis er 2009 einen Ruf als Professor für Neuere und Neueste Geschichte an der Universität Münster annahm. Beruflich außerordentlich erfolgreich und mit innovativen Projekten stets in Bewegung begriffen, trat er 2020 die renommierte Position des Direktors der Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg an.

Er hinterlässt ein beeindruckend breitangelegtes, vielfältiges wissenschaftliches Oeuvre. Der Öffentlichkeit wurde er insbesondere durch die Leitung einer wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung zum Missbrauch im Bistum Münster bekannt, die 2022 erschien. An der im Januar 2024 publizierten Aufarbeitungsstudie zu sexualisierter Gewalt in den evangelischen Kirchen war er ebenfalls maßgeblich beteiligt. Großbölting veröffentlichte über katholische Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus, über die gesellschaftsgeschichtliche Bedeutung von Bi-Konfessionalität in der deutschen Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, zuletzt über die deutsche „Wiedervereinigungsgesellschaft“ seit 1990.

Vielbeachtet war seine Studie „Der verlorene Himmel“ (2013) zum gesellschaftlichen Bedeutungsverlust beider großen christlichen Konfessionen nach 1945. „Ein ‚christliches Deutschland‘“ – so schrieb er damals pointiert – „gibt es nicht mehr.“ Gleichwohl seien Glaube, Kirchen und Religion aus dem Leben der Deutschen nicht verschwunden, aber sie hätten sich verdünnt und seien mehr und mehr an den Rand geraten. Seinerzeit verfasste Großbölting mit diesem lesenswerten Buch eine erste umfassende moderne Religionsgeschichte der Deutschen seit 1945, ein Buch, in dem seine eigene katholische Hintergrundprägung sublim durchscheint.

Es fällt schwer, diesen Nachruf schreiben zu müssen. In Hamburg, wo er seit 2020 wirkte, hatte er in wenigen Jahren eine enorme Fülle an neuen Projekten angeregt und viele verantwortliche Positionen übernommen. Man wird ihn schwerlich ersetzen können. Jeder Kollege, jede Kollegin, überhaupt alle, die ihn kannten, schätzten seine stets freundliche, zugewandte, liebenswürdige Art – dabei konnte er gut zuhören und brachte immer frische Ideen mit, in jedem Gespräch, auf jeder Tagung. Als ich im Dezember 2021 in der Berliner Stiftung Topographie des Terrors ein Buch über Religiosität im „Dritten Reich“ vorstellte, sagte er sofort für die Moderation zu und kam von Hamburg herüber – mit dem Hochgeschwindigkeitszug. Fotos von diesem Abend zeigen ihn, wie er war und wie er im Gedächtnis bleiben wird: anregend, ideenreich, immer klug und abwägend in seiner Argumentation.

Wir alle werden ihn sehr vermissen. Mit seiner Familie – er hinterlässt seine Frau und vier Kinder -, mit vielen Historikerinnen und Historikern, und mit allen, die ihn kannten, trauern wir um einen hochgeschätzten Kollegen und überaus liebenswürdigen Menschen.

“The New Testament is the most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” Christian Antisemitism in the 20th Century

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

“The New Testament is the most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” Christian Antisemitism in the 20th Century

By Manfred Gailus, Technischen Universität Berlin; Translated by Lauren Faulkner Rossi, with the assistance of DEEPL

This text originally appeared in German in Der Tagesspiegel, 7 February 2025, pg. 12-13.

There is a portrait of the former court and cathedral preacher Adolf Stoecker in the reserve room of Berlin Cathedral. For a long time, the huge painting hung in the sacristy of the church, where the clergy prepare for their sermons. Together with other portraits of cathedral preachers, the painting was taken down years ago, wrapped in packing paper and tied up tightly. This has symbolic power: Stoecker, the Christian-social co-founder of modern German antisemitism, has been made to disappear for the time being.

Stoecker died in 1909 and was buried with great expressions of condolence by the Protestant congregation. The renowned theologian Reinhold Seeberg from Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin gave a memorial speech for the deceased and paid tribute to him as a powerful, strong man of great gifts: a “pious child of God” and “gentlemanly man” at the same time. The cathedral preacher and the professor of theology were kindred spirits. With justification, Seeberg can be counted among the main guardians of Stoecker’s spirit. In 1922, he gave a lecture on Judaism and the church to the Central Committee for Inner Mission: the fight against the “Jewish spirit” is to be waged as a struggle against an orientation hostile to Christianity and Germanness. Seeberg saw Judaism as a foreign body that promoted the “dissolution of the historical and national life of the peoples”. The poison that “the Jew” served to others – so the theologian believed – was not injurious to himself. However, Seeberg rejected the unleashing of a “racial struggle” against Jewry with the aim of expulsion. One could not resort to the methods of Bolshevism. Anti-Jewish measures of violence, such as those recommended by Luther in his writings on the Jews, no longer made sense for that time.

Court and cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring spread similar resentment. Previously he had mixed his aggressive war sermons with racial antisemitic vocabulary. In his cathedral sermon on April 25, 1924, he declared that the “national question” now so burning in Germany had been awakened by the “shameless behavior of Judaism, which is hostile to Christ”. Ancient Jews could have become “the people of the earth”, but they had stoned their prophets and nailed Christ to the cross. As a people, they had thus condemned themselves to die. The clergyman proclaimed to his ever-growing audience in the cathedral that the Jews had become the “typical negative” of the world. With such convictions, the political preacher agitated in organizations such as the Evangelical League, in other associations, through a flood of newspaper articles, and as a member of the DNVP in the Reichstag.

A third important Protestant representative was also inspired by Stoecker. As a theology student, Otto Dibelius had attended a celebration of the Association of German Students in 1900, heard Stoecker’s speech, and spontaneously joined the antisemitic association. This marked the beginning of his career as an antisemitic publicist. In 1922, he complained of an “undesirable mixture of blood” due to the excessive immigration of “Eastern Jews.” In June 1927, now as general superintendent of the Kurmark in the rank of bishop, he wrote in the Berlin Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt: “The Jewish question is not primarily a religious but a racial question. The proportion of Jewish blood running through our national body is much higher than the religious statistics show.” Dibelius associated the political rise of the NSDAP after 1930 with expectations of a re-Christianization following the end of the “godless Republic” of Weimar. Accordingly, he welcomed the rise of Hitler’s party to power in alliance with the German Nationals. In the aftermath of the Nazi boycott of Jews, on April 1, 1933, which he justified, he made a more fundamental statement on the “Jewish question”: the “Jewish element” had played a leading role in all the dark events of the last fifteen years. The strong influx of Jews from the East had endangered “German national life.” No one could seriously object to the current suppression of Jewish influence. In order to solve the “Jewish question”, Germany’s eastern border had to be strictly sealed off.

Professor Seeberg, Cathedral Preacher Doehring, General Superintendent Dibelius – these voices are not outsiders, but represent the center of national Protestantism in the Weimar era. Their hybrid antisemitism combined theological anti-Judaism with set pieces of political and cultural antisemitism, while at the same time their speech about “the Jews” was mixed with völkisch ideology. With Hitler’s rise to power and the advance of the German Christian (Deutsche Christen – DC) movement, Protestant antisemitism became seriously radicalized. The publication Die Judenfrage (1933) by the renowned Tübingen New Testament scholar Gerhard Kittel should be singled out from the wealth of corresponding creeds. With his writing, he wanted to give the fight against Judaism a Christian meaning: the “meaning of our antisemitic struggle” must be to place Jews under strict immigration law again. The Christian also had his place in this battle. Jews were once the people of God, but they were no longer. Because they crucified Jesus, they had become homeless. In the New Testament, Kittel recognized the “most anti-Jewish book in the whole world.” The “calamitous mixing of blood and race” since the Enlightenment had caused a “putrefaction” of the German people and had to be corrected through strictly nationalist policies.

Where the German Christians predominated as they did in Berlin, they erased traces of Jewishness in theology, liturgy and songs. “Non-Aryan” pastors were ousted. Church hymns had to be rewritten; for the future, no “Zion” and no “Hosanna” were to be heard in the German church. Lectures on “Luther and the Jews” or Adolf Stoecker were the order of the day. In March 1937, the Berlin superintendent Schleuning* was thankful for the special edition on the “Jewish question” issued by the inflammatory newspaper Der Stürmer. He proudly emphasized that the Nuremberg Laws that Hitler gave to the Germans had their precursors in the church’s own Jewish legislation.

Now, the German Christians were not the only ones who represented the Protestants during the Nazi era. There were other, more moderate groups – or, like the Confessing Church (BK), there was church opposition. But even there, opposition to Nazi Jewish policy remained an exception – such as the high school teacher Elisabeth Schmitz‘s memorandum, “On the situation of German non-Aryans” (1935), or the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. On the contrary, ambivalence predominated in the church opposition camp: alongside sympathy and support for the persecuted, there were also explicitly antisemitic voices.

The churches were generally silent about the November 1938 pogroms, with some DC regional bishops even explicitly welcoming the outbreaks of violence. Critical voices were few and far between. Open protest against the state’s Jewish policy was dangerous. The reformed theologian Helmut Hesse preached in Wuppertal in June 1943: the church had to resist all antisemitism, testify to the salvation-historical [heilsgeschichtliche] importance of Israel in the face of the state, and resist any attempt to destroy Judaism. He was imprisoned and later sent to Dachau concentration camp, where he died at the end of 1943 at the age of 27.

After Hitler and the Holocaust, hybrid Christian antisemitism was not immediately overcome. The racist antisemitism of the German Christians was no longer present in the church public. But where had the many Nazi pastors gone? What about traditional religious anti-Judaism? The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945 made no mention of the persecution of Jews, in which the church itself was partly involved. The Württemberg Bishop Theophil Wurm, who was the first Chairman of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), defended the severely incriminated Tübingen “Jewish researcher” Gerhard Kittel in an expert opinion (April 1947): it had been part of Kittel’s ecclesiastical teaching assignment to point out the “divine causes of the rejection of the people of Israel.” Kittel’s theologian friends in Tübingen even said that, with his writings, Kittel had “resisted in the most pronounced sense” in the area of the “Jewish question.”

The “Hoff case” was shameful: in 1943, the Berlin provost Walter Hoff* had boasted in writing that he had participated in the liquidation of Jews during the war in the East. After he had initially been stripped of his clerical rights, growing calls within the church leadership to rehabilitate the alleged Holocaust pastor reached Otto Dibelius, who had risen to become bishop of Berlin. The consistory’s decision in February 1957 restored the former provost’s full pastoral rights.

Only a few voices spoke plainly. Theological revisions of the Christian-Jewish relationship took a long time. As a religious mentality, the anti-Jewish spirit of Stoecker was deeply ingrained and outlasted the caesura of 1945. Leading churchmen such as Theophil Wurm, Bishop Hans Meiser in Bavaria and Otto Dibelius remained influenced by it throughout their lives. Ultimately, breaking away from this unfortunate tradition was a generational issue. The critical zeitgeist of the 68ers brought a breath of fresh air, in theology as well as in the churches. In January 1980, the Rhineland Regional Church adopted a groundbreaking declaration on the renewal of Christian-Jewish relations. It acknowledged its shared responsibility for the Holocaust, condemned all anti-semitism and renounced the mission to the Jews. A significant step was the Day of Repentance sermon by Wolfgang Huber, then bishop of Berlin, in 2002, which was dedicated to remembering the fate of Christians of Jewish origin. According to Huber, the Confessing Church as an institution had also failed at the time.

Through synod resolutions, the appointment of commissioners on antisemitism, and various other activities, the member churches of the EKD have distanced themselves from antisemitic traditions and are engaged in interfaith dialogue with Jewish communities. The painful issue is not closed. Uncompromising church self-education about its own antisemitic past in the twentieth century remains an important prerequisite to convincingly oppose any spread of völkisch ideas in the church and in politics and society today. Adolf Stoecker has now been taken down in Berlin Cathedral, firmly packed away in the storeroom. Thank God, one might say. May he remain there forever.

Notes:

* Translator’s note: Johannes Schleuning, superintendent of Berlin-Lichtenberg, was a Russian-German chaplain and journalist.

* Translator’s note: well-known for his antisemitism, Walter Hoff was provost of St. Peter’s Church in Berlin beginning in the mid-1930s. During the Third Reich, he was a member of the German Christians (DC) and the Nazi Party. He served in the Wehrmacht during the war.

Review of Alexander Lamprecht, Zwischen Seelsorge und Diktatur: Südtirols Kirche in der NS-Zeit

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

Review of Alexander Lamprecht, Zwischen Seelsorge und Diktatur: Südtirols Kirche in der NS-Zeit. Bozen (Bolzano): Athesia Verlag, 2019. 299 pp.

By Martin Menke, Rivier University

This volume is a revised version of the author’s Master’s thesis at the Philosophical-Theological University of Brixen (Bressanone), the seminary for the diocese of Brixen-Bozen. The work’s nature and its author’s affiliation, however, do not diminish the study’s value. It is an important work not only because it details the role of bishops and clergy during the period. It also is another well-illustrated example of the dilemmas that Christians living under fascism faced. South Tyroleans were ethnic Germans but had been living in Italy since the Treaty of Saint Germain-en-Laye in 1919 moved the Austro-Italian border to the Brenner Pass. Under the terms of the October 1939 Hitler-Mussolini Agreement, South Tyroleans were forced to opt for German or Italian citizenship. While Italy initially promised South Tyroleans respect for their German language and culture, the Italian fascist regime forcibly eliminated their language from public life. It enhanced the Italian presence in the region by building a large industrial complex in Bozen. As a result, much of South Tyrolean life, including German language instruction, went underground. As Lamprecht shows, most South Tyroleans bore little love for Italy.

Under the terms of the Hitler-Mussolini Agreement, all those South Tyroleans who retained Austrian citizenship after 1919 were now considered citizens of the Reich. They had no choice but to resettle in post-Anschluss Germany. South Tyroleans who had become Italians in 1919 were given a choice. They could opt for Germany and be resettled as German citizens in Germany, or remain and be confirmed in their Italian citizenship. Lamprecht successfully illustrates the painful decisions that South Tyroleans, lay and clergy, had to make. As a result of effective German propaganda and Italian fascist repression, more than eighty percent of South Tyroleans opted for Germany. South Tyrolean laypeople opted for Germany primarily out of resentment of Italian fascism and Italianization policies. The clergy in the parishes, however, found the decision much more difficult. Most sought to remain in their homeland.

Lamprecht explains that, after the border shifts of 1919, the Holy See had rearranged the diocesan boundaries along the new frontier but otherwise left the South Tyrolean dioceses of Brixen and Trent (Trient/Trentino) intact. In 1939, the bishops of the two dioceses responded very differently to the demand to choose between Germany or Italy. Prince Bishop Johannes Geisler of Brixen decided that, no matter the clergy’s personal preferences, the South Tyrolean parishes moving almost intact to Germany required the pastoral care of their clergy. Thus, the clergy must opt for Germany. The clergy, however, vehemently objected. As a result, a deep chasm arose between the bishop and his curia on the one side and the clergy on the other. The clergy pointed to the German government’s animosity towards the Catholic Church as a deterrent from opting for resettlement. Their bishop, however, countered that any clergy remaining in South Tyrol would have to minister in Italian, both from the pulpit as well as in more personal duties. He warned that many clergy, whose Italian was poor, might find themselves without a purpose or an income once the resettlement process was complete. Geisler himself opted for resettlement and took up residence in the Austrian parts of his (non-contiguous) diocese. He felt secure in his choice since the diocese owned forests and other resources that would financially support his position. His priests, however, enjoyed no such security. By the end of the option process, Bishop Geisler no longer enjoyed any credibility or respect among his clergy.

In the southern part of the region, the Prince-Archbishop of Trent, Celestin Endrici, vehemently opposed the option for Germany. In this, he enjoyed the support of almost all his clergy. In May 1940, Endrici sent the Holy See a twenty-eight-page memorandum describing the state of his archdiocese. He explained that his clergy initially were reluctant to involve themselves in the option question. Once they became aware of the anti-Catholic views and practices of the German government, however, they warned their faithful to opt against resettlement. As a result, the German resettlement authorities in South Tyrol intensified their campaign against the clergy, which widened the gap between parishioners, who largely opted for Germany, and their clergy. While the German authorities were pressuring those inclined to remain by pointing to the many South Tyroleans who opted for Germany, Endrici argued that the clergy had to warn their parishioners because South Tyroleans were unfamiliar with the persecution of the Catholic Church that was so prevalent in Germany. Not to warn South Tyroleans of the dangers of National Socialism would be negligent.

Endrici openly opposed the neutrality that his colleague Geisler in Brixen had imposed on his clergy. Endrici demanded that his clergy fight against resettlement everywhere except from the pulpit. He did not want his clergy accused of preaching outright propaganda, but he wanted it to oppose the pro-German option. In underground meetings, in family visits, during youth catechesis, the priests were to urge South Tyroleans to remain. Lamprecht argues that those lay people in the Archdiocese of Trent who opted to remain did so because of the decisive influence of the clergy. In Brixen, Bishop Geisler had explicitly forbidden the clergy from discussing the option.

Lamprecht carefully differentiates his argumentation. For example, he notes that Giuseppe Mastromattei, the Italian prefect of Bozen, was worried about the double loss (and subsequent economic impact) of too many qualified workers as well as thousands of residents moving to the Reich. He wanted to encourage dissatisfied and disloyal South Tyroleans to leave, but he also wanted the majority to assimilate into Italian culture and remain. He went so far as to argue that anti-Nazi clergy would not be welcome in Germany and might better find refuge in a seminary or monastery, but in ethnically Italian provinces instead of in South Tyrol. The prefect feared for the economic stability of his province and thus sought to assuage the fears of South Tyroleans. His efforts led to German protests, so in 1940, the Italian government transferred him to another post. Also, implicitly, Lamprecht demonstrates that, until the German military occupation in 1943, Italian authorities jealously safeguarded their autonomy from German officials who were promoting and organizing the option registrations and the resettlement in Germany. Lamprecht’s explanation of the motives of different priests to decide one way or the other is also very well differentiated. Some wanted to remain as representatives of German culture in South Tyrol. Others feared for their economic security should they leave. Lamprecht, however, does not discuss the influence of the priests’ local ties on their decisions.

Less convincing is Lamprecht’s claim of an active Catholic resistance against Italian and German authorities. Lamprecht claims Catholic Action was the most effective measure against National Socialist youth workers, who were making inroads among the youth of South Tyrol. While Catholic Action worked discretely and in the shadows, it is not clear that encouraging young people to remain loyal to their faith constituted resistance. The leader of Catholic Action, Father Josef Ferrari, secretly recruited for the Andreas-Hofer-Bund, an underground organization committed to informing the faithful about the truth of National Socialism. While the German authorities sought a warrant for Father Ferrari, the Italian authorities merely admonished him to be more discrete. More explanation is needed for a convincing argument that the Andreas-Hofer-Bund was a resistance organization rather than an informal network of like-minded South-Tyroleans. Lamprecht argues that most South Tyroleans did not support the Bund and the most effective means of resistance remained Catholic Action.

The remainder of the work gives the impression of a list of topical odds and ends. For example, Lamprecht mentions that male clergy of German ethnicity and citizenship had to leave Italian territory or head into purely ethnic Italian areas, where their ability to function would be limited by a lack of Italian language skills. Female consecrated women, however, did not have to move as long as they applied for Italian citizenship. Also, given the organization of the work into separate discussions of Brixen and Trent, the author ends up repeating discussions and analyses. The author ends the work by listing questions requiring further research, such as the Church’s role in both the postwar negotiations about autonomy as well as in South Tyrol during the war more generally, which is ironic given the work’s title.

Despite these criticisms, the work is a valuable contribution to the field. Not only does it document the effect of the option program for South Tyroleans on the Catholic faithful, priests, and bishops, but it also contributes to the more extensive discussion of the Church’s role under fascism and National Socialism. Catholic leaders had to weigh the evils of Italian fascism against those of German National Socialism. They had to consider the need to provide pastoral care with the desire to oppose oppression. One can compare the dilemma of South Tyrolean clergy with the much more drastic fate of the French worker priests sent by their bishops to accompany those pressed into forced labor in the Reich to their German work sites, disguised as simple workers in the Service du Travail Obligatoire. South Tyrolean priests seemed more reluctant to follow their flocks in this manner.

This study, grounded in scholarly literature and extensive archival research, provides another example of the profound conflicts of conscience that many suffered under the mid-twentieth-century dictatorships. Lamprecht successfully illustrates not only institutional challenges but also the personal dilemma faced by bishops, priests, and laypeople in confronting the evils of fascism.

Review of Gerlinde von Westphalen, Lady Abbess. Benedicta von Spiegel—Politische Ordensfrau in der NS-Zeit

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

Review of Gerlinde von Westphalen, Lady Abbess. Benedicta von Spiegel—Politische Ordensfrau in der NS-Zeit. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2022.

By Martina Cucchiara, Bluffton University

In over five hundred pages, this hefty biography traces the life and leadership of Abbess Benedicta von Spiegel, who led the Benedictine abbey of St. Walburg in Eichstätt for nearly twenty-five years, from 1926 until her death in 1950. While the title emphasizes the Nazi period, the strength of the book lies in the rich account of von Spiegel’s entire eventful life that straddled two centuries and included her troubled time in two other cloisters before ultimately settling at St. Walburg.

Born Elisabeth Agnes Wilhelmine Klementine Freiin von Spiegel in January 1874, the young noblewoman grew up in wealth and privilege alongside her eight siblings on the family’s vast estate in East Westphalia. The Catholic von Spiegel family, whose lineage dates to at least the fourteenth century, maintained a close and enduring connection to the Church. In many ways, this book is as much a history of the von Spiegel family as it is a biography of Benedicta von Spiegel. Readers interested in the German aristocracy will gain considerable insights, into not only intimate family relationships revealed through von Spiegel’s extensive personal correspondence, but also the immense influence that the nobility still wielded in twentieth-century Germany and considered their birthright.

At the age of twenty-five, von Spiegel entered the contemplative Benedictine abbey of Maredret in Belgium, where she took vows two years later and received the religious name Benedicta. In 1914, after the outbreak of war, she moved to the German abbey of St. Hildegard in Eibingen in the Rhineland before finally settling at St. Walburg in Bavaria in 1918. Unlike apostolic congregations of Catholic sisters, which focus on teaching, nursing, and social work, nuns like the Benedictines are dedicated primarily to prayer.[1] These communities typically observe more demanding monastic rules than apostolic congregations, including strict claustration. During von Spiegel’s tenure at at St. Hildegard, for example, nuns were prohibited from leaving the cloister even for necessary medical treatment.

During the eighteen years that von Spiegel spent at Maredret and St. Hildegard, she struggled profoundly with her vocation and appeared to experience several extended episodes of mental illness, though any retrospective diagnosis remains uncertain. Additionally, she seems to have faced serious conflicts with the abbess of St. Hildegard, who doubted her religious calling and described her as a burden to the community and as “severely affected” (erheblich belastet) (p. 112). The latter longed to remove her from the abbey. Despite limited documentation, von Westphalen presents a nuanced discussion of these struggles, offering readers rare insight into the inner workings of contemplative cloisters and the deeply personal challenges of an individual nun. Von Spiegel’s extensive correspondence with her spiritual advisors, including her Belgian confessor Columba Marmion, sheds light on how she and her mentors sought to address these crises within the framework of strong mystical beliefs. The letters reference “invisible beings” and, at one point, even suggest the possibility of an exorcism (pp. 78, 81). The author’s exploration of von Spiegel’s deep mystical affinities is a valuable contribution to the scholarship on modern religious women, a field that too often neglects the significance of mysticism, spirituality, and religious experience. Many readers will likely wish to learn more about practices such as the annual rite of the miraculous oil at St. Walburg (Walburgisöl) or the use of the rite of exorcism in the modern Catholic Church.

Von Spiegel’s affinity for mysticism perhaps explains her long and close friendship with the famous stigmatic Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth (1898–1962), whom von Spiegel met some years after her move to the abbey St. Walburg in 1918. There she finally found a permanent home, becoming abbess only eight years after her arrival. The abbey grew considerable under her leadership, not least because she transformed it into a thriving religious community devoted to the fine and decorative arts. Von Spiegel also interpreted the rule of claustration in a very liberal manner and frequently left the cloister to travel or visit friends in the local community. This newfound freedom enabled her to forge close friendships with a circle of Catholic intellectuals in Eichstätt, which included the journalist Fritz Gerlich, the Capuchin priest Ingert Naab, the aristocrat Erich Fürst Waldburg-Zeil, and the theology professors Franz Xaver Wutz and Joseph Lechner. Von Spiegel, an intellectual in her own right who spoke several languages, thrived in this environment. Therese Neumann, who hailed from a modest peasant milieu and lacked a formal education, became an important member of this circle.

Neumann remains of considerable interest to scholars, and von Westphalen dedicates an entire chapter to her friendship with von Spiegel. After experiencing visions and stigmata—the spontaneous appearance of wounds resembling those of Christ—for the first time in 1926, Neumann quickly rose to fame as a Catholic mystic, drawing both admiration and skepticism. Her claim that she neither ate nor drank anything for years, except for a single consecrated host per day, invited considerably suspicion and scorn, especially since she refused to undergo a clinical observation to verify her claim. The author asserts that she has uncovered new evidence proving that Neumann’s close circle of friends and influential churchmen were aware of her fraud regarding her eating habits and even helped to cover it up. The key piece of evidence is a letter from May 1938 written by Joseph Lechner, a confidant of von Spiegel, in which he suggested subjecting Neumann to a controlled clinical observation, albeit under the condition that the results would be sealed and deposited in the Vatican. He writes that the Cardinal Secretary of State and future Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, agreed to this arrangement. Von Westphalen notes that this “unattainable so-called proof under lock and key” in the Vatican “would have made Therese Neumann more or less untouchable” (p. 202). Although no direct evidence exists in which von Spiegel and her associates explicitly acknowledged knowing about (and abetting) Neumann’s fraud, the author infers that they actively supported it because “Therese Neumann had long since become a symbol of unwavering Catholic resistance” in Nazi Germany (p. 13).

The theme of resistance is central to von Westphalen’s narrative of von Spiegel’s conduct under Nazism. She argues that the abbess was “political and engaged in the resistance against National Socialism” (p. 9). However, this assertion is problematic, not least because of the lack of a clear definition of resistance. It is evident, however, that von Westphalen does not define resistance as total opposition to the regime that involved concrete actions to bring about its downfall. Von Spiegel’s life certainly was deeply affected by violence when her close friend Fritz Gerlich was arrested in 1933 and later executed during the Röhm Putsch in 1934 for his anti-Nazi writings in the newspaper Der Gerade Weg. However, von Spiegel herself did not take part in these journalistic efforts. Instead, her actions in Nazi Germany were entirely in line with those of Catholic Church leaders at the time who adhered to a cautious and conciliatory policy, which primarily sought to preserve Catholic institutions. From time to time, von Spiegel engaged in what Martin Broszat termed Resistenz, meaning nonconformist behavior that aimed at preserving pre-1933 values without directly confronting the Nazi regime. This was the case during the school struggle in the mid-1930s, when the Bavarian state dismissed women religious teachers from public schools and commenced the closure of Catholic secondary schools. Von Spiegel wrote lengthy (and ultimately futile) protests to Nazi officials, but this was not at all unusual or even all that political.

Moreover, the book’s broad scope makes it difficult to explore certain critical topics in sufficient depth. The foreign-exchange trials of 1935–36, which directly affected von Spiegel and St. Walburg, were pivotal moments in the regime’s campaign against religious congregations and orders. Yet the author devotes less than a page to them. Similarly, von Westphalen cites part of a 1990 local news report claiming that St. Walburg had sheltered “a person persecuted by the SS,” but offers no further context or corroboration (p. 404). Where the book truly excels is in its rich portrayal of von Spiegel’s family history. The detailed accounts of her siblings, nieces, and nephews—each following different paths in the Third Reich—provide a compelling snapshot of one aristocratic Catholic family navigating Nazi Germany. The book’s greatest strength lies in its ability to illuminate the intimate world of one woman and her family, offering a deeply personal lens on history.

Notes:

[1] Benedictine nuns follow the Rule of St. Benedict (6th century). Their communities are typically autonomous and focus on contemplative life and liturgical prayer within a cloistered setting. Catholic sisters usually follow the rule of St. Augustine. They usually practice limited or no enclosure and are dedicated to apostolic work in their communities, including teaching, nursing, and social work. See: Relinde Meiwes, “Arbeiterinnen des Herrn”. Katholische Frauenkingregationen im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 2000), 52–67.

Film Review of Zwischen uns Gott, Directed by Rebecca Hirneise

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

Film Review of Zwischen uns Gott, Directed by Rebecca Hirneise (Ruth Beckermann Filmproduktion, 2024)

By Dirk Schuster, University of Vienna

Zwischen uns Gott (Between Us God), the title of the documentary by director Rebecca Hirneise, already gives a clear indication of what the audience can expect. Hirneise visits her family in southwestern Germany to talk to them about religion. Her grandparents, both now suffering from dementia, have raised their children to be religious in a strict Methodist tradition. Her uncles and aunts tell Hirneise—among other things—how they experienced their childhood, how they relate to God and, above all, how they deal with the fact that Hirneise and her mother have turned away from Christianity and no longer want to be Christians. Hirneise manages to bring her sister, her brother and their husbands together after years of distance and talk to them about God and themselves as a family. What the viewer gets to see and hear—Hirneise has one-on-one conversations with everyone involved—is sometimes exciting, sometimes shocking and sometimes just bizarre. One aunt mourns her lost youth, as her parents (Hirneise’s now-deranged grandparents) had completely forbidden all non-religious leisure activities such as dancing, going out, and so on. The siblings’ youth was dominated exclusively by activities within the religious community—no wonder that all of them found their spouses inside the religious community. Her husband has, in turn, founded his own charismatic community in which healing is practiced with the help of God. The viewer cannot help but note that harmony in this marriage seems to be foreign, and divorce perhaps overdue, though outward appearances seem to be more important than personal happiness. This same uncle claims with complete conviction that severed limbs have grown back in his presence simply by asking God. Unfortunately, however, he is not prepared to let the camera in on such events.

Another aunt, on the other hand, talks incessantly about the damnation that awaits Hirneise because of her turning away from God. For this aunt, there is no reality outside of faith, which is why she constantly asks God for forgiveness for Hirneise and her mother. This aunt’s husband is also strictly religious, but unlike his wife, he accepts scientific views to explain the world. For example, he sees the creation of the universe through the Big Bang as entirely possible. And he also accepts that people turn away from God, a stance that his own wife acknowledges with incomprehension. Hirneise’s mother, for her part, reports how her own mother (Hirneise’s grandmother with dementia) had demanded that her daughter remain completely abstinent until her husband—who, it should be noted, had left her—came back to her. The subject of the divorce is not discussed further, so it remains unclear why Hirneise’s father left the family. And of course, he never came back.

Unsurprisingly, the experiment of talking together does not end well; it does not lead to an understanding discourse. The viewer witnesses how accusations are made by family members against each other, such as how the secular mother blames the religious fundamentalists because she was virtually expelled from the family after her divorce and renunciation of faith. Conversely, the fundamentalists condemn Hirneise and her mother because both no longer believe in God. In between are the moderates, who somehow want to mediate, but that doesn’t work. This dispute ultimately ended the family talks.

The film is raw documentary: no scene is acted, no dialogue is prearranged. This unscripted approach makes the movie both exciting and shocking. In an increasingly secularized (Central European) world, the viewer is given an unfiltered view of how faith in God is present within Hirneise’s family and how that faith prevents a peaceful coexistence based on mutual acceptance. Hirneise does not judge, but lets the viewer form his own opinion. This cinematically realized field study documents the tenacious power of religion to determine family dynamics—God has, almost literally, come in between its members. This viewer hopes that this sober anti-blockbuster will be seen by many people, because it impressively reflects the religious conflicts of the present day: one’s own point of view is so entrenched that other opinions can no longer be accepted at all. A different view to one’s own—in this case a Christian fundamentalist view—is not tolerated at all. As a result, the family can no longer even sit at the same table and talk to each other. This fact alone is thought-provoking.

Review of Andreas Pangritz, Die Schattenseite des Christentums. Theologie und Antisemitismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)

Review of Andreas Pangritz, Die Schattenseite des Christentums. Theologie und Antisemitismus. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2023.

Dirk Schuster, University of Vienna

Theology and antisemitism: to be honest, the subtitle of the book initially led me to believe that this was yet another classic theological-apologetic attempt to negate the Christian inﬂuence in the development of antisemitism. Fortunately, Andreas Pangritz, Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at the University of Bonn, proved me wrong. With his book, based on a lecture at the University of Bonn in 2020, Pangritz wants to achieve exactly the opposite. He follows the basic assumption that there is a connection between Christian theology and antisemitism (11). Accordingly, the main thesis is that antisemitism is essentially Christian antisemitism and that the importance of Christian theology in the formation of antisemitism should not be underestimated (17).

In the second chapter, Pangritz addresses the problematic distinction between the terms anti-Judaism and antisemitism. He shows that the distinction between a theologically-argued hostility towards Jews and a racially argued antisemitism, which has been repeatedly postulated since the end of the Second World War, has not stood the test of time. On the contrary, such a distinction harbors the danger that (Christian) hatred of Jews is trivialized by juxtaposing it with antisemitism. Pangritz proposes “not to speak of a break, but rather of a transformation of the traditional Christian ‘doctrine of contempt’ (Lehre der Verachtung) into the modern forms of antisemitism” (35). It remains unclear, however, why Pangritz returns to the concept of anti-Judaism later in the book (e.g. 119). The term has been overused by Christian apologetics, and Pangritz himself has pointed out that the academic distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism has not produced any new insights or meaningful differentiations. (30). Conceptual clarity would have been helpful here, especially since Pangritz argues well with Léon Poliakov, Peter Schäfer and even Reinhard Rürup that “antisemitism” should be used in its most general sense: “The word ‘antisemitism’ denotes hostility, hatred and contempt of all kinds against Jews and Judaism; this does not exclude differences in motivation, but includes them” (33). However, this small point is the only criticism I can make in the entire book.

In Chapter Three, Pangritz argues cogently why Christian theology included a self-image that was explicitly directed against the existence of Judaism from its inception. The theological interpretation that Christians had replaced Jews as the chosen people of God inevitably led to antisemitism. From this particular Christian perspective, the Jews’ refusal to recognize Jesus as the Messiah means nothing other than denying the Christian claim to truth.

Pangritz devotes an entire chapter to Martin Luther and his radical hatred of Jews. Here, too, he succeeds in demonstrating how Luther’s inﬂammatory writings served as a reservoir for the development of the scientific antisemitism in later centuries. Accordingly, Pangritz also denounces the attempts of Protestant theologians to separate Luther the reformer from Luther the anti-Semite in order to trivialize the latter as a negligible, even marginal phenomenon in history. True to the motto: what must not be, does not exist.

In German national Protestantism, which unified German national identity and the Protestant faith, the anti-Jewish ideas of Protestant theologians ultimately culminated in an “antisemitism of redemption” (as coined by Saul Friedländer). It is correct that Pangritz emphasizes the admiration of such Protestant leaders as Theophil Wurm and Otto Dibelius for the most popular antisemite of the late nineteenth century, Adolf Stoecker. The antisemitic outbursts of church representatives during the Third Reich therefore can no longer be attributed solely to the German Christians (Deutsche Christen)—a disingenuous shifting of blame that still happens far too often in German-speaking countries, though, fortunately, less frequently in America. This juxtaposition of good (Confessing Church) and evil (German Christians), or “intact” and “broken” regional churches, as is still standard in Protestant church historiography, is ultimately just another attempt to serve one’s own myth of victimization instead of dealing seriously with anti-Jewish theology and its history within one’s own (Christian) faith.

In his conclusion, Pangritz once again addresses different scholarly views on possible straightforward connections between Luther and Hitler. Whether these connections are direct or indirect is ultimately not of decisive importance, and Pangritz does not make a deﬁnitive statement here, either, which is not necessary. Instead, he concludes with an appeal: “Within Christian theology today, there is still consensus on the condemnation of antisemitism. The question remains, however, whether this condemnation also translates into a willingness to repent regarding anti-Jewish thought patterns in theology and, in particular, in theological education” (192).

The book deserves a broad audience. For non-theologians, the book offers a number of suggestions for focusing more on Christian theology and its inherent hostility towards Jews when dealing with the phenomenon of antisemitism. For theologians, on the other hand, to whom the book is primarily addressed, the book represents an excellent critical self-reﬂection of their own faith. Anyone, whether an active scholar or a lay Christian, who still holds the view that the murderous antisemitism of the last two centuries did not originate in Christian hatred of Jews should read this book.

Letter from the Editors (Winter 2024)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Letter from the Editors (Winter 2024)

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Dear Friends,

Very warm Christmas greetings to our readers! Once again I bring our issue to post a bit later than intended, but I hope that the very full content makes up for the tardiness. As my first year as managing editor comes to a close, I am quietly very pleased that our journal can end on such a strong note, with a variety of contributions for December and the promise that 2025 and beyond will feature similar breadth, depth, and quality scholarship from our editorial board.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer with his students. By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R0211-316 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5436013.

This issue features a variety of reviews, including five book reviews and a film review, as well as an article note and two conference reports: one concerning a seminar on religion and secularism in nineteenth-century Germany from the September 2023 German Studies Association meeting; the other detailing the joint meeting of editorial boards for Contemporary Church History Quarterly and Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte in Washington, DC, in October. This conference report was written collaboratively by the editors in attendance and features brief summaries of all papers presented, to give our readers an idea of the ongoing commitment to and relevance of church/Church history and related fields on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and in multiple languages. It was a fruitful and all-too-brief opportunity for our board to meet in person, and for the executive committee to welcome several of our newest editors; we are hopeful that such meetings will occur with more frequency, or at least more regularity, in the coming years.

Martina Cucchiara has written a detailed analysis of David Kertzer’s The Pope at War, one of the most recent contributions (and there is sure to be more) to the scholarly debates about the activities of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust using the recently-opened wartime archives of his papacy. In his review of a related work, Gerald Steinacher takes on the edited volume of Marshall J. Breger and Hubert R. Reginbogin, The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality, with essays that explore the concept of neutrality and its ability to explain Vatican diplomacy over a century of history. Andrew Chandler offers a comment on Keith Clements’ study of two ecumenical pioneers and their role in Christian internationalism in the twentieth century in J.H. Oldham and George Bell: Ecumenical Pioneers. Jonathan Huener examines William Skiles’ study, Preaching to Nazi Germany, of the responses of Confessing Church clergy to National Socialism to explain their failure to mount stiffer opposition to its ideology. In an article note, Kyle Jantzen comments on Harry Legg’s exploration of instances of Jewish self-discovery in pre-WWII Europe, published in Contemporary European History this past fall.

A pair of reviews intersect in prominent and provocative ways in taking on new material about a much-studied and popular subject in the annals of German church history, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Christopher Probst’s film review of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin (2024), is a sensitive and careful reflection of what the film does well in addition to identifying some serious flaws. (The film attracted significant media attention both in Germany as well as in the United States because of its use – and misuse – in Christian nationalist propaganda.) Connected to this, our own editor-emerita Victoria Barnett writes a detailed review of Tim Lorentzen’s most recent study, Bonhoeffers Widerstand im Gedächtnis der Nachwelt, which considers Bonhoeffer’s role in the resistance to Nazism and how the legacy and memory of this has shifted over time.

As ever, I invite you, as the reader, to let us know what you think by leaving a comment on our site, and to relate any major conferences, exhibitions, websites, or films that we should know about to review, by contacting me directly at lnf@sfu.ca.

On behalf of my associate editors and the editorial board,

Lauren Faulkner Rossi,
Simon Fraser University

Kindly note: the editorial board of the CCHQ reserves the right to consider requests for translations of articles by contributors. Please direct your request to Lauren Faulkner Rossi at lnf@sfu.ca.