Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

 

Newsletter — December 2004— Vol. X, no. 12

Dear Friends,
A Prayer for the Christmas Season

Living God,
Through your incarnation you fill us with new hope.
which we have known in word and sacrament,
in the life of the church,
and in the witness of saints and martyrs
May the power of your love,
continue your saving work among us,
and bring us to the joy you promise for all your holy creation.

Contents:

1) Book Reviews: a) Krieg, Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany
2) H-German debate: The Rosenstrasse film
3) Journal articles:

a) Lawson, The Anglican Understanding of Nazism
b) Ederer, Propaganda wars
c) articles in Religion,State and Society, June 2004

4) Conference report: Hastings, Munich Catholics in the 1920s
5) Book notes: Simon Phipps: A Portrait
6) Research in progress: Slater, John Nelson Darby
1a) Robert A.Krieg, Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany, New York/London: Continuum 2004. ix + 234 pp.
ISBN 0-5264-1576-8.

Professor Robert Krieg of Notre Dame University, Indiana, has given us a valuable addition to the English-language studies of German Catholicism during the Third Reich. Together with the work of some younger scholars, such as Kevin Spicer, Mark Ruff, Derek Hastings and Oded Heilbronner, we now have a much more balanced picture than in Gunter Lewy’s initial survey forty years ago. And in contrast to many of the German-language accounts, Krieg has the merit of both clarity and brevity. This will be an excellent work for undergraduates.

These studies have all begun with the inherent question: why did the Catholic Church not forestall or resist more forcefully the tide of Nazi totalitarianism? Or put more sceptically, why did the Church compromise and capitulate so fatefully to the Nazi menace?

Krieg’s answer looks carefully both at the history of the Catholic milieu, and at the theological leaders, five of whom he examines at greater length, while placing them very ably in their context. He points out that German Catholicism was in a unique situation, and, as others have already done, he stresses as major factors the lasting impact of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, and the hierarchy’s search for stability and security thereafter. At the same time, he shows that the prevailing trend in Catholic theological teaching concentrated on the somewhat abstract ideas of Thomas Aquinas, and seemed to give little guidance to the faithful for their political stance in everyday politics. Krieg could possibly have made more of the impact of the loss of the first world war, which in the 1920s disconcerted both Catholics and Protestants alike, resulting in confused and conflicting responses to the challenge of the secular world.

Three of the five theologians whom Krieg analyses, Eschweiler, Lortz and Adam, achieved later notoriety for their open support for the new Nazi regime, at least to begin with. Together with lesser-known figures whom Krieg discusses, their motives were extremely varied. In fact, as he points out, none of these men can be seen as representative of the whole Catholic milieu. Despite the prestige of these professors, their affirmations were matched by the opposing views held by their colleagues and bishops. Karl Eschweiler would seem to have been a firm authoritarian. Hitler’s leadership against modernity and especially against the Bolshevik danger was the main attraction. Joseph Lortz however had a much grander vision. He looked for the renewal of Western civilization, whereby Hitler’s political energies could be united with Catholic spirituality. Such co-operation, as Mussolini had shown, could be beneficial in rebuilding a spiritually vibrant society along organic lines. It was, as Victor Conzemius pointed out, “idealism separated from reality”.

To be fair, Lortz soon enough began to recognize that the Nazi movement contained other and more dangerous elements. His subsequent withdrawal was sufficient to enable him to resume a long and fruitful academic career after the war.

The most noteworthy of these scholars was Karl Adam, professor of systematic theology at Tübingen University, who already in the 1920s had gained a world-wide audience, and indeed may be considered one of the most creative theologians of the early twentieth century. But, in Krieg’s view, he was also most naive in his assessment of National Socialism. As a result, in 1933, he enthusiastically endorsed Hitler’s new regime, believing that here was a leader of messianic capabilities, who would rebuild the national community and revive Catholicism in the process. To his credit, he
recognized the need for a new start, and the spiritual hunger caused by the confusions and uncertainties of political affairs. He agreed with Lortz and Oswald Spengler that the West was suffering a spiritual and cultural breakdown. His answer was to reject the corrosive influences of modernity and individualism, and return to the authority of the church. Faith and culture should find a new synthesis.

Karl Adam saw himself as a mediator between the church and the Nazi state. This led him to approve the Nazis’ antisemitic policies because each nation has a duty to strengthen its racial identity. But Catholics should relate to individual Jews with justice and love. In Krieg’s view, Adam’s fault lay in not recognizing that Nazism’s goals were incompatible with Christianity, despite overlapping terminologies.
But there were others. Romano Guardini was professor of theology in Berlin until dismissed by the Nazis in 1939. He early on recognized the “barbaric” character of the movement and wrote books implicitly criticizing the Nazi manipulation of the public through their invasive propaganda. But Guardini’s upholding of Christian tradition was muted during the war and only flourished afterwards in rebuilding the Bonn republic on good Christian lines.

A lesser-known figure was the Freiburg dogmatic theologian, Engelbert Krebs, whose broader vision of the church’s mission separated him from those colleagues searching for a political leader who would somehow restore Christendom. Krebs was singular in writing and speaking in favour of Judaism, and thus challenged both the Nazis’ antisemitism and the church’s theological anti-Judaism. But he paid the price of being removed from his professorship in 1937. Like Guardini he was silenced for the rest of the Nazi era.

The variety of these theologians’ responses to the Nazi regime reflected views prevalent throughout German Catholicism. The leading bishops sought to preserve its institutional autonomy, and on the whole succeeded. The result was an absence of any strong prophetic witness on behalf of the suffering and oppressed. Catholics had not been armed by their theologians with the moral fervour or compelling arguments which would have been required for such a stance. None of the German bishops or theologians supported an overthrow of the regime, even when its tyranny became clear. But the limited ecclesiology they espoused did inoculate them against Nazi infiltration or subversion. Their passive resistance saved the pastoral life and ensured institutional survival. However, as Krieg notes, their moral authority was eroded by their silence over Nazi atrocities. Subsequent commentators have rightly criticized this model for the church, and the failure to equip the laity for a more active role in defending freedom and justice.
Krieg is ready to acknowledge the inadequacy of the Catholic ecclesiology adopted during the Nazi era, and blames the popes and theologians who suppressed any more relevant stance. Indeed he goes so far as to affirm that the majority of theologians of the 1920s and 1930s failed to understand the real consequences of the first world war. Not until after the Nazi onslaught did younger theologians like Karl Rahner begin to forge a newer more appropriate response to the secular challenges of political radicalism and modernity. It was only then that the lessons of the church’s struggles with Hitler were learnt.

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2) H-German debate: Rosenstrasse

The recently released film Rosenstrasse, made by the veteran German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotha, describes the events which took place in early 1943 in a shabby back street in east Berlin. The Gestapo summoned to a dilapidated Jewish community centre there nearly two thousand Jewish men, who had not been included in the earlier round-ups and deportations to death camps. They and their wives, most of whom were not Jewish, were of course terrified. But on this occasion, these wives, partners in what the Nazis called “Mischehen” (mixed marriages), took action to protest their husbands’ detention. For several days they organized a clamorous stand-off outside the building, even though the guards were armed and menacing. At the end of a week, the husbands were released and sent home.

This film is based largely on the book by Nathan Stoltzfus of Florida State University, – Resistance of the Heart. Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse protest in Nazi Germany (1996). His interpretation makes a heroic tale out of these womens’ defiance of the mobilized might of the Gestapo. He claims that this singular demonstration of public protest on behalf of the victimized Jews was a success in preventing the Nazis from sending these men to their deaths in Auschwitz. The Nazi hierarchy was forced to recognize the likely consequences if they violated the feelings of the majority of non-Jews, especially those with connections to the Christian churches. The courage of these valiant, but mostly unknown, women is therefore to be celebrated and honoured. The Rosenstrasse protest could have set an precedent if only its message could have been heard and the example followed elsewhere.
This interpretation has however been challenged by a noted German historian, Wolf Gruner, most recently on H-German, 14 September 2004. In Gruner’s opinion, there was never any question of this particular group of Jewish partners in these “mixed marriages” being deported. Heroic as the women’s’ behaviour undoubtedly was, it should not be seen as a victory for popular protest, let alone a sign that the Nazi totalitarian grip could be successfully challenged.

Gruner bases his case on a close reading of numerous Gestapo documents. For example, he quotes a circular from the Reichssicherheitshauptamt issued on 20 February 1943, i.e. a few days before these men were ordered to appear in the Rosenstrasse, which specifically excluded Jews living in mixed marriages from any further deportation measures. The same exemption was ordered a month earlier in January by Eichmann personally for Jews in France. To be sure, these moves were all part of a monstrous and grandiose campaign to get rid of all other Jews as soon as possible.
Gruner pertinently points out that, had the Gestapo really intended to deport these men, they would have been told to report to some much less accessible railway station – as had happened to earlier contingents of such victims. Nor would some have been released even before the women mounted their watchful protest. Gruner suggests that this group of men was called in for more pragmatic reasons. The Gestapo wanted to find out which of them could be employed to fill the vacancies in various institutions and firms, left open by the deportation of the “full Jews”. These men were repeatedly interrogated about their qualifications, especially if they were fitted to work, for example, in a Jewish hospital. In the end, some 200 were told to report for employment as replacements for “full Jews” ruthlessly deported to Theresienstadt in mid-March.

At the same time the Gestapo could do a double-check on these men’s actual marital status and weed out impostors.
Far from the Rosenstrasse episode leading to any amelioration in Nazi policy, the evidence is that the ferocity of their antisemitic campaign was stepped up. Rumours had been circulating that the Nazi leaders planned to pass a law compulsorily “divorcing” all Jews from their non-Jewish spouses – hence enabling their deportation without repercussions in the civilian population. Not surprisingly this proposal aroused vigorous opposition amongst the churches. Cardinal Bertram, the Presiding Catholic bishop, made it clear to the government in November 1942 that any such move would endanger the whole structure of matrimony and the family, and would be morally disastrous. Millions of Germans would be involved – and that was certainly a factor the Nazis did not want to risk at that juncture of the war. The measure was not implemented, but the threat remained.

One of the most determined activists for justice for the oppressed Jews , not only for those converted to Christianity, was Margarethe Sommer, who worked for the Catholic Bishop of Berlin, von Preysing. She has rightly earned a place of honour in the tributes paid to her later, most recently by Michael Phayer. She resolutely compiled information about the Nazis’ attacks on the Jews, and regularly sought to get Cardinal Bertram’s intervention on their behalf. Equally regularly, the Cardinal refused, and in the end forbade her to visit him in Breslau with her importunate petitions.
In the case of the earlier deportations, Margarethe Sommer had diligently prepared lists of the Catholic families affected, organized local parish workers to visit where possible, and if needed helped to make preparations and packing for those who would not likely return. So she was ready to do the same for those summoned to the Rosenstrasse. On 2 March she again traveled to Breslau to call for energetic steps to be taken. She asked for a national declaration by the Catholic bishops to be issued on the following Sunday, 7 March, and recommended that the Pope be requested to send out a pastoral letter over the Vatican radio.

Despite the fact that her advice was not adopted by her superiors in the Catholic hierarchy, she could still draw the conclusion that the vigorous protests that were made, not only by the wives on the spot, but also by their supporters elsewhere, were effective in securing these men’s release. She recorded this opinion in a memorandum to the German bishops in August 1943, later published in the large-scale documentation of the German Catholic bishops’ papers, produced in the 1980s.

Another valiant fighter in the same cause was Gertrud Luckner of Freiburg, whose tireless efforts on behalf of Catholic Jewish families led her to travel across Germany contacting, warning, encouraging, inspiring, sympathizing and helping where she could. But she too was chased down by the Gestapo and shortly after the Rosenstrasse incident was sent to Ravensbrück where she remained until 1945. But her hope that her fate and that of those she sought to protect would arouse the general Catholic population to make vigorous and vocal protests against their rulers’ injustices was to be disappointed. For the majority of German Catholics, including their Presiding Bishop, the Jews lay outside their circle of obligation. The churches’ record of lack of support for the persecuted Jews remains a shocking and regrettable failure.

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3) Journal articles:

a) Tom Lawson’s article on “The Anglican Understanding of Nazism 1933-1945: Placing the Church of England’s Response to the Holocaust in Context” in Twentieth Century British History, Vol 14, No.2, 2003, pp.112-37 deals in fact only with the leading personalities of the Church of England. The rest of the world-wide Anglican communion is ignored. And Lawson’s purpose is more narrowly to take issue with the generally favourable opinion expressed by such reputable historians as Sir Ian Kershaw, Richard Gutteridge, Andrew Chandler, R.C.D.Jasper and Marcus Braybrooke, as to the extent to which the Church of England was aware of and took steps to protest the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
He claims instead that these church leaders failed to recognize the centrality of the Nazis’ campaign to eradicate Judaism, and so interpreted its antisemitic atrocities as significant only as a sign of its totalitarian character. He seeks to explain this failure as resulting from both theological and social factors, even though some of these would seem to be mutually exclusive.

Lawson knows well enough, and has researched thoroughly enough, to realize that the Church of England contained – and contains – a very broad range of opinions which make his generalizations suspect. Nevertheless he asserts that the Church of England’s response to Nazism was far too churchly, arousing sympathy for all those persecuted by the Nazis, to be sure, but stressing particularly such well-known church cases as Pastor Martin Niemöller. These were all seen as the victims of totalitarianism. After 1939, the war was to be waged to overcome this ideological and political threat to Christian civilization. Such an interpretation, he claims, obscured the Nazi persecution of the Jews, which could not be interpreted with any consistency of purpose as important for its own sake.

Thus he ignores the fact that the only two public letters of protest which the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lang, wrote about internal German affairs between 1933 and Sept 1939 were not about the Christians or the Socialists or pacifists, but the Jews. And here he did not mean ‘Non-Aryan Christians’ but Jews altogether. So too Lawson is led to downplay the notable proclamations by Lang’s successor, Archbishop William Temple, and by the united bishops of England and Wales, who in January 1943 published a collective statement of protest at both the Nazi persecution of the Jews, and at their government’s refusal to accommodate more refugees.

Lawson is led on to suggest that these utterances made only a superficial change in Anglican attitudes. The British government’s refusal to listen led to an abandonment of church protests, and so, Lawson asserts, to a lack of lasting understanding of the real nature of Nazism.
Indeed, he believes, these church leaders were increasingly preoccupied with the need for post-war reconstruction, including the “re-Christianization of Europe”, in order to guard against the rebirth of Nazism. In his view, such a post-war world would not have been one in which a Jew could safely be a Jew.

Tom Lawson evidently belongs to that group of historians – especially Holocaust historians – who are busy rewriting history as it should have happened. By indulging their wishful thinking in large measure, they can impose their own interpretation on what was said and done, or not said and done, and thus chide their elders severely for their presumed failures. At the same time, there is considerable grinding of axes, when politically-loaded points are scored which can be useful in more current controversies.

The result is that a distorted view of the actual past is presented. Those of us who can recall the circumstances of that time can only deplore the misreading of people’s attitudes and arguments. In fact, the whole story of British attitudes towards Nazism, and church attitudes in particular, is much more complex than Lawson suggests. His one-sided approach may stir up debate, but it should be seen as a provocative rather than as a definitive contribution.

b) M.F.Ederer, Propaganda wars: Stimmen der Zeit and the Nazis, 1933-1935 in Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 90 no. 3, (2004) pp. 456-72.
Ederer examines how the prominent Jesuit journal Stimmen der Zeit reacted to, or mostly against, the new Nazi regime in its early years. The editors were careful not to engage in open polemics, since they were certainly aware of the Nazis’ open antipathy. But in more subtle ways, they conducted a campaign to keep Catholic ideas unspotted from Nazi associations, and in particular to oppose any form of syncretism. The issues of the journal in these early years reflect a growing alarm at the Nazis’ anti-clerical and indeed anti-Christian, let alone anti-Jewish, policies. Rosenberg’s myths were especially attacked. Ederer follows the evolution of these ideas through the three years under his microscope.

c) Two notable articles in the recent issue of Religion, State and Society, Vol. 32 no.2, June 2004
Serge Flere, Slovenia. Not a perfect religious market, pp 151-7.

Christian Romocea, Reconciliation in the ethnic conflict in Transylvania. Theological, Political and Social Aspects, pp 159-76.

4) German Studies Association Conference report:

D.Hastings, Nursemaid or Nemesis: The Catholic-Nazi Relationship revisited.

Derek Hastings seeks to show the extent to which Catholicism in Munich can be said to have acted as a sort of “nursemaid” to the early Nazi movement, helping it to attain an important degree of viability in its earliest and most vulnerable years. Contrary to the view taken by many scholars that the early Nazi movement comprised either outright opponents of Christianity, lapsed Catholics, or bemused Protestants, Hastings shows that a number of Catholics, even priests, gave hearty support to the fledgling political party. One prominent Bavarian politician wrote to Cardinal Faulhaber in October 1923 to lament that “even Catholic priests are being caught up with National Socialist ideas and are allowing themselves to be misused as Nazi agitators”. Some of them, like the Abbot Schachleiter, quite willingly gave their services to the new movement. It was he who conducted a funeral mass for the Nazi thug and terrorist Albert Schlageter, whose brutal exploits were framed as the embodiment of a heroic Catholic-Nazi synthesis. Many young Munich Catholics, including Heinrich Himmler, were “literally transported by Schachleiter into a holy rapture”.

However, in the following year, most of these converts were lost after a wave of anti-Catholic venom was launched by the völkisch activists led by Erich Ludendorff and his wife Mathilde. Relationships were never the same again, though many Catholics still deluded themselves that agreement was possible and so eagerly supported the 1933 Concordat. And the readiness of so many Catholics during the whole Nazi era to believe they could be both good Catholics and good Nazis owes something to this initial period when Munich Catholics acted as the “nursemaid” of the Party.
(precis by JSC)

5) Book Notes:

Simon Phipps: A Portrait, ed. David Machin, London: Continuum 2003 ISBN 0-8264-7138-2 144pp.

Bishops and biographies belong together, especially if they were bland, blameless and boring. How to steer between open hagiography or critical assessment is the issue in most such episcopal obituaries. This tribute to Simon Phipps, Bishop of Lincoln 1974-1986, certainly leans more towards the former formula, but is of help in depicting an Anglican leader who responded effectively, and not at all boringly, to the challenges of his office. Particularly Phipps was known to have given leadership on social issues, as an industrial chaplain in Coventry, where his left-wing politics were appropriately relevant. It was therefore paradoxical that he should then have served as bishop in two rural dioceses, first in Horsham in Sussex, and then in Lincoln, still a largely agricultural county, full of ancient churches but few parishioners. This ministry called out all his pastoral skills, first deployed as Chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge. In the words of one contributor, Simon Phipps was a gracious and courteous God-fearing radical. The sketches in this small book bring the various chapters of his career to life with affection, but also lead on to consideration of the wider task of how to exercise episcopal leadership in the late twentieth century.

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6) Research in progress:

Jonathan Slater, University of Toronto, writes:

The area of interest for my doctoral dissertation is the reconstruction of Christian understandings of God, Christ and Salvation in nineteenth-century England. I plan to focus on F.D.Maurice, Thomas Erskine and John Nelson Darby. Darby was a prolific writer whose influence upon nineteenth and twentieth century religion extends far beyond the exclusive sect that still claims to hold to his teachings. If, as some argue, Maurice and Erskine represent the birth of certain trends in liberal theology, Darby lays claim to representing the birth of the most significant trend in conservative theology, i.e. dispensationalism. Darby’s novel proposal regarding divine providence, the relationship between Israel and the Church, and, in particular, his apocalyptic eschatology, has had a significantly formative influence upon the development of conservative theology in North America. At the centre of this relationship was a debate concerning the suffering humanity of Christ, a topic which would reappear in numerous forms throughout Darby’s writings.

Darby’s understanding of the suffering Christ provides a point of comparison with Maurice and Erskine, as an example of a significantly different response to a common historical and cultural context. I am especially interested in how these men reacted to the growing historical understanding associated with German biblical criticism and the search for a historical Jesus on the one hand, and the increased appeal to experience and feeling associated with nineteenth century Romanticism and the post-Kantian turn to the subject on the other.

Best wishes to you all,
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

 

Newsletter — November 2004— Vol. X, no. 11

Dear Friends,

Contents:

1) Book reviews

a) Kohlbrugge, Mein unberechenbares Leben
b) B-Rubinstein, Reading Hochhuth’s The Deputy
c) Linn, Escaping Auschwitz

2) Journal articles

a) Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte
b) Zucotti, Pius XII and rescue of Jews
c) Sun, Catholic workers in the Weimar Republic.

3) Kirchliche Tourismus: Montgomery, The Last Heathen in Melanesia
1a) Hebe Kohlbrugge, Zweimal zwei ist fünf. Mein unberechenbares Leben seit 1914. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2003. ISBN 3-374-02051-6 380pp. Eur.12.80

Hebe Kohlbrugge is clearly one of those indomitable Dutchwomen whose staunch Calvinist background makes it impossible for her to tolerate injustice or compromise with evil. Equally clearly these glimpses of her life story can’t do justice to her vibrant personality, but they do illustrate her resolute commitment to her faith in a succession of conflictual situations.

As a student in the 1930s she was sent to Berlin to learn household management and there sat in on Martin Niemöller’s bible classes and later assisted Günther Harder, one of the champions of the Confessing Church. Here she learnt about the evils of Nazism at first hand, and the need for the church to stand fast in Christian witness.

Returning to Holland, she hoped to study theology with Karl Barth in Basle. But the outbreak of war and the later
German occupation of her homeland instead drew her into a variety of perilous resistance activities. She even managed to undertake a highly dangerous journey to Switzerland, where she took messages from the Dutch church leaders to the officers of the World Council of Churches and other ecumenical bodies in Geneva. But for this and other acts of defiance, she was arrested and deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where her fellow Dutchwoman Corrie ten Boom was already incarcerated.

After the war, she was equally determined to play her part in reconstruction efforts, and served the Dutch Reformed Church in a number of enterprising activities in witness of reconciliation, peace and justice. In the 1950s she was mainly involved in establishing links to fellow Christians in East Germany, but later took on wider assignments in Mississippi, Soweto and Israel. One of the agencies she got involved with was the Christian Peace Conference, organized in Prague by the Czech Professor Hromadka. This attempt to build Christian bridges across the Iron Curtain was a brave endeavour but too full of wishful thinking to succeed. In any case, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 broke Hromadka’s heart and destroyed what little credibility the Conference had left. As one of the survivors, her report is interesting on this ill-fated undertaking and the failure of its peace moves. It showed her the limits of Christian idealism in a world of ruthless power politics and official hypocrisy.

Nevertheless Hebe Kohlbrugge’s commitment to finding ways to express her Christian political witness kept her going. Numerous visits to Germany, Czechoslovakia and other eastern European countries, as a Dutch guest, gave her the opportunity to see the dangers of compromise with the Communist state, but also to support the church in pursuit of its and her nobler aims. She helped to organize student exchanges, seminars and house groups, even in illegal circumstances, in order to keep the lines of Christian communication open. Her reports on the tyrannical surveillance and the nerve-wracking oppression of dissident churches by the Communist authorities in Roumania and Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s are a valuable witness to the conditions then prevailing.

Naturally she rejoiced to be present in November 1989 to bring ecumenical greetings to the East German and Czech churches in the aftermath of the downfall of the Communist system. And she was delighted when in 1990 she was awarded an honourary degree from the Charles University in Prague, acknowledging her services in promoting international friendship and intellectual dialogue between East and West.
Hebe Kohlbrugge stands in a long and honourable tradition of Protestant social activists, whose determination to follow the faith’s commands leads to speaking the truth uncompromisingly and unflinchingly. Her witness, against both Nazism and Communism, will be an encouragement to her successors along the on-going path of Christian discipleship in the coming century.
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1b) Emanuela Barrasch-Rubinstein, The Devil, the Saints, and the Church. Reading Hochhuth’s The Deputy.
New York etc: Peter Lang 2003 xi,124 pp ISBN 0-8204-6358-2 U.S. $53.95

Forty years ago, Rolf Hochhuth, a young Swiss-German author, wrote his play Der Stellvertreter (in English The Deputy or The Representative). It caused tremendous controversy because of the defamatory depiction of Pope Pius XII, whose cynical indifference to and silence about the fate of the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust was caustically attacked. The dramatic confrontation between the frigid ecclesiastical statesman and a young idealist Jesuit priest was one of the highlights of the play. So too was the depiction of the sinister German medical doctor, Mengele, responsible for horrendous cruelties and mass death in Auschwitz.

Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein’s short book successfully analyses the character of the play and Hochhuth’s reasons for making use of this form. She points out that it appeared twenty years after the events it sought to portray, at a time when the Nazi atrocities had been extensively researched, and one of the perpetrators, Adolf Eichmann, had just been on trial in Israel. Hochhuth was not old enough to have been involved himself in these events in all their complexity, but young enough to want to find some idealistic explanation. Like many of the survivors, he engaged in the wishful thinking that some more positive response to the Nazi crimes could have saved many more lives or even prevented the Holocaust from happening. Pope Pius XII became a scapegoat, who could be blamed for his refusal to take a more forceful, and therefore more appropriate, stand.
But Hochhuth’s awareness that the conventional explanations for the Holocaust, based on political, military or social factors, were inadequate led him to recast the narrative as a mediaeval morality play. He placed the well-known historical events within a transcendental framework in a cosmic conflict between Good and Evil. The overtones of Goethe are obvious. Auschwitz is represented as the Kingdom of Evil where all the moral traditions and restrictions of Christian civilisation have been overthrown. Here Dr Mengele operates as the devil incarnate, and the young Jesuit who identifies with the Jewish victims and is prepared to share their fate in Auschwitz, is portrayed as a saint. So too, as a saintly figure, we have a Protestant SS officer, Kurt Gerstein, who seeks to prevent further loss of life by informing his church superiors of what is happening, and indirectly loses his life as a result. By contrast, Pope Pius XII’s cold-hearted selfishness represents the defeat of the church at the hands of evil and hence the victory of death and destruction. God fails in his ancient battle with the devil.

In recent decades, the moral issues raise by Hochhuth have not gone away. No more satisfactory explanation of the Holocaust’s extreme destructiveness has emerged. The renewed debate about Pius XII’s actions or inactions has once more stirred up controversy about the role of the church. The distortions of wishful thinking about what might have happened, if only . . . . have again become apparent. But Hochhuth’s attempt to portray the historical record in a transcendental dimension as part of a continuing spiritual conflict has remained a one-time occurrence. It stemmed from the ambivalences of the 1960s which saw both imaginative schemes for reforming the Christian church and at the same time theologians proclaiming that “God is dead”.

It was to Hochhuth’s credit that he was the first to challenge the comfortable amnesia of received orthodoxy about the Nazis’ crimes, as well as pointing an accusatory finger at Pius XII and the Vatican for their policies during the second world war. The impact of the play was such that it popularized a pejorative view of the pope which has been widely prevalent ever since. Despite all the conscientious attempts by historians to correct the errors in history contained in the play, its success rested on compelling the audiences to face the moral issues presented.
We are indebted to Ms Barasch-Rubinstein for this insightful, if belated, anaysis of this unique literary-political experiment.

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1c) Ruth Linn, Escaping Auschwitz. A culture of forgetting. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 2004. 154pp. ISBN 0-8014-4130-7
(The following is not a book about ecclesiastical history, but its relevance to the subject of the previous review is obvious, and so I believe it will be of interest to many of our list-members.)

Sixty years ago, in April 1944, Fred Wetzler and Rudi Vrba escaped from Auschwitz. They were two of the only five Jews who succeeded in doing so and survived. A few days later they managed to cross the border to their homeland, Slovakia, and quickly contacted representatives of the Jewish Council. Their dramatic feat was made all the significant by the momentous information they brought with them, comprising details of the mass murder procedures in Auschwitz, the record of numerous transports arriving from countries all over German-held Europe, sketches of the annihilation facilities, and an overall estimate of the total number of Jews murdered in the gas chambers during the previous two years. Their eye-witness account, they insisted, should be shared at once with the Jews of Hungary, for whose arrival in the camp and subsequent murder, preparations were being actively speeded up. But in fact, this information, later referred to as the Vrba-Wetzler Report or the Auschwitz Protocols, never reached its intended audience. A month later, nearly half a million Jews were deported to their deaths. None of them knew what was in store for them. As a result, Vrba and Wetzler concluded that their information had been suppressed. Vrba, for one, remains convinced that if the intended victims had been warned, they would have resisted or hid or fled. The tragedy of the Hungarian Jewry would have taken a very different course.

Ruth Linn, now Dean of the Faculty of Education at Haifa University, had never heard of Vrba’s exploits. Despite the centrality of Holocaust remembrance in Israel’s national consciousness, she only learnt about this escape while viewing Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. Several years later, however, she had an opportunity to meet Vrba personally and to read his autobiographical memoirs, written in English in 1963. This made her all the more curious as to why, fifty years after the Holocaust, the unique actions and memories of these Auschwitz escapees had remained completely unfamiliar to the average Hebrew reader.

It was only when she realized that the silence about Vrba’s life and writings was no accident that her curiosity turned to dismay and then to indignation. She made it her mission to break a thirty-five year silence by encouraging the publication of a Hebrew version of Vrba’s autobiography, and to urge Haifa University to grant him an honorary degree. These endeavors were opposed by Israeli scholars. But with this short book, she now seeks to restore Vrba’s name by probing the mystery of his disappearance not only from Auschwitz but from the Israeli textbooks and the Israeli Holocaust narrative.

This is not, as she admits, a balanced account. But her succinct and hard-hitting chapters seek to trace how Israeli historians have conspired to remove these participants from the Holocaust story by misnaming, misreporting, miscrediting and misrepresenting the secretive tale of their escape from Auschwitz.

The reason is simple. Vrba’s belief was and is that the information about Auschwitz was suppressed in order that leading members of the Slovakian and Hungarian Jewish Councils, could do a deal with Eichmann and his henchmen. In return for their silence, these men purchased survival for themselves, their relatives, a coterie of Zionists, and a number of wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs. In June 1944 these fortunate individuals boarded a train which eventually carried them to freedom in Switzerland. Many went on, subsequently, to hold prominent positions in the newly-established state of Israel. They were also responsible for the formulation of the heroic myth of Zionist resistance and rescue from their Nazi persecutors. Official Israeli historiography had no place for alternative interpretations of what had happened in Hungary, or for any analysis of the role of the Judenrat and their collaboration with the Nazis.

Ruth Linn incisively analyses how unwelcome critics, such as Vrba, have been silenced, and how the process of repressing, denying, or avoiding the charges they make has been put in place.

In the first place, the escapees from Auschwitz were reduced to anonymity and their names were never mentioned. As late as 1994, more than half a century after they fled from Auschwitz, Israel TV in a commemorative programme to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Holocaust did not give their true identity. To be sure, a version of their Report is displayed in the entrance hall of the Yad Vashem Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, but the names of its authors are not provided, and the Hebrew label on the wall refers only to “two young Slovak Jews”. The Report itself is not available in Hebrew to visitors, since the Museum only has a version in German or Hungarian.

Secondly, the credibility of the Report is challenged, and its factual accuracy disputed. Particularly the carefully-calculated total number of Jewish victims is considered by many Israeli historians as greatly inflated, though they have failed to provide convincing evidence of this contention.. Above all, Vrba’s legitimate questioning as to whether widespread distribution of the information about Auschwitz could have disrupted the deportations is dismissed as unrealistic. And his accusation that the Hungarian Zionist leaders’ failure to warn the Jews in the provinces made them complicit in the subsequent mass murders is dismissed as an outrageous calumny. For these reasons, energetic steps were taken for more than thirty years to prevent Vrba’s version of events from appearing in Hebrew.

Ruth Linn’s work is a long overdue act of reparation to rectify a historiographical injustice. But she also raises the wider issue of how to evaluate the rival interpretations, on the one hand of expert historians, or on the other of survivors whose testimony was derived from being eye-witnesses to the Nazis’ crimes in Auschwitz. She equally and rightly questions how the Israeli historical establishment has built up its own layers of national myths and explanations. They have succeeded in laying stress on certain events and individuals, but also have created a culture of forgetting others, like Vrba, whose witness they find not to be convenient. She seeks to pay tribute to an intrepid participant in the whole tragedy of the Hungarian Holocaust. At the same time, we can surely agree that her book is, as Professor Stephen Feinstein, Director of the Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, commented, “a first-rate treatment of a crucially important event that might be called an emerging black hole: Vrba’s escape from Auschwitz and the aftermath within the context of Holocaust history. The book is exceptionally important in its discussion of how a country can engage in critical thinking about a morally problematic past and its analysis of the political forces that try to control that past”. This still remains one of the most controversial chapters in the traumatic history of the Nazis’ war against the Jews.

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2) Journal articles: a) Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 17, no 1.

This journal, now being edited from Dresden by Prof. G.Besier, is the “founder father” of our enterprise. This latest issue is devoted to a comparative study of the national uprisings in Eastern Europe against Communist rule, namely, Berlin 1953, Budapest, 1956 and Prague 1968. Accounts, written in German, of the secular developments are matched by essays on the religious dimensions and consequences felt in and by the churches in these areas, which will be particularly illuminating for western scholars. Andrea Strubind shows that in East Germany the churches deliberately abstained from participating in the uprising, while in Hungary, as Jozsef Fuisz notes, the churches were seen as victims of Communist aggression. But in Prague, as described by Ladislav Benes, their spokesmen gave active support to the reform movement, and were consequently disciplined, but sought to preserve traditional Christian values for as long as possible. Only in the 1980s did the churches gain enough space to be able to play a more active role in combatting totalitarianism

2b) Susan Zucotti, Pope Pius XII and the Rescue of Jews in Italy: Evidence of a Papal Directive, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 18 no 2, Fall 2004. Susan Zucotti still believes, as she wrote earlier her book on the subject, that Pope Pius XII never issued directives to save Jews. She is now prepared to acknowledge that many Jews were indeed hidden and thus saved in church institutions, but affirms that this was likely due to individual initiatives. Since no piece of paper for a papal directive has been found, she concludes that none existed, even though other scholars have produced at least second-hand evidence that various priests claimed to have received such instructions

2c) Ray Sun, “Hammer Blows”: Work, the Workplace and the Culture of Masculinity among Catholic workers in the Weimar Republic in Central European History, Vol. 37 no 2, Summer 2004, p245 ff.

A stimulating examination of the Catholic propaganda towards young workers, especially in the Rhineland, following the disasters of the first world war. Finding themselves in direct competition with the Marxist parties, Catholic writers tried to adapt suitable themes for their specific audiences. The elements of struggle, strength and physical achievement were common to both groups, but Sun shows how Catholic writers gave a deliberate Christian slant to this literature. He quotes a number of poems, posters and songs used for this purpose.

3) Kirchliche Tourismus

C .Montgomery, The Last Heathen. Ghosts and Ancestors in Melanesia. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre 2004. $24.95 CAN.

The Vancouver writer Charles Montgomery’s great-grandfather was a missionary bishop. Over a hundred years ago he was sent out to Melanesia, a corner of the south-west Pacific Ocean, encompassing the area now known as the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. He was due to carry on the work of his predecessor, Bishop Patteson, who had been brutally murdered by the pagan inhabitants of a remote corral-reefed island. When the news of the Bishop’s martyrdom reached England, it resulted in a wave of support for the Melanesian Mission, and a demand that the British Navy intervene. Both actions were seen as part of the British imperial destiny to spread Christianity and civilization to the uttermost parts of the earth.

A hundred years later, Charles Montgomery shares none of these values. But the memory of an impressive family portrait, the finding of an envelope filled with sand from the beach where the bishop was killed, and his own talent for travel writing, all impelled him to seek out these far-away islands. Principally he hoped to find in Melanesia an exotic, primitive but enticing paradise, unspoiled by western commerce or religion. Where were the last heathen to be found?

This romantic image of the noble Melanesian savage was soon enough disabused. But he did find plenty of evidence of surviving traditions derived from the islanders’ ancestors, and incorporated into their “kastom” notions of tribal law, politics, magic and myth, which gave meaning to both their identity and behaviour. A century of Christian mission, to be sure, had overlaid this traditional world-view, but not entirely. Many of the islanders he met held both together, ambivalently but dualistically covering all bases.

The Christian missionaries themselves were ambivalent about such entrenched beliefs. The Anglicans, drawn from some of England’s best families and Oxford-educated, were remarkably tolerant about “kastom”. They have been described as “God’s gentlemen”. But Presbyterians, Methodists and Seventh Day Adventists took a stricter tone. All too often the result was a clash of discordant cosmologies which still remains unresolved.
Overall, Montgomery affirms, the central struggle in Melanesia is no longer the fight between Christian and pagan mythology. The Christian God has pretty well won the battle. Paganism is on its last legs. But the old way of thinking still remains and indeed flourishes within the Christian community. The rejection of sorcery and magic in favour of New Testament ways of living is far from complete.

It was basically the magic of the last heathen that Montgomery had hoped to find. But his search led to the realization that proof was not to be procured. Instead he needed to cultivate his imagination and to recognize the validity of myth. Melanesia is still filled with myths, both Christian and pagan. As one wise observer told him, miracles certainly happen, but the measure of their truth lies not in the accuracy of the event so much as in the quality of the faith they inspire.

To Montgomery, perhaps the most impressive witness to the newly-planted Christian faith was to be found among the Melanesian Brotherhood, a community of young Christian laymen, first founded some eighty years ago and still thriving.

These young Anglicans have a strong missionary impulse, are credited with the power of driving out evil spirits, and are highly regarded for their holiness So much so that their spiritual authority stands higher than any other source of moral influence.

In the last decade, the Solomon Islands have been in great need of such affective forces. The indigenous government virtually collapsed, corruption was rife, tribal rivalries between different groups of islanders produced a state of endemic civil war. But the reputation of the Melanesian Brotherhood and their efforts for disarmament and peacemaking proved to have a remarkably calming effect.

Until, that is, 2002, when a party set out for Guadacanal’s weather coast, the hangout of a particularly vicious war-lord. Seven of the Brothers were murdered there. But their martyrdom, as many Melanesian Christians now believe, was truly a witness to the power of suffering and rebirth, as testified in the New Testament. The war-lord gave himself up, the brothers collected guns from both sides, the Australians sent a peacekeeping force of efficient administrators. And Montgomery recasts the story of one of the murdered men, Brother Francis, to be the modern equivalent of Bishop Patteson’s sacrifice so long ago, to be remembered in the prayers of the Melanesians and passed down in stories told by firelight from one remote reef-protected island to the next.

As the Brotherhood’s chaplain testified, with their death the curse of violence has been lifted from the nation. And the Brotherhood itself had been allowed a glimpse through the mystery of things to the promise of the eternal. It is Montgomery’s hope that this example of transcendental love will become more powerful and more illuminating as the years go by. That is the way martyrdom works. Imagination can fill the expanse between the shores of historical fact and the truths of the soul. And this was the truth which Charles Montgomery, as a sometime unbeliever and sceptic in need of rescue, learnt on that far-away Melanesian shore.
With best wishes,
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

 

Newsletter — October 2004— Vol. X, no. 10

Dear Friends,

It is with regret that we learn of the death on August 11th of Dr Robert Ross, formerly of the University of Minnesota, the author of the significant book “So it was true. The American Protestant Press and the Nazi Persecution of the Jews”, (1980) which ably showed that the church press in the United States had reported about these crimes very fully to a largely apathetic audience.

Contents:

1) German Studies Association Conference, Oct. 7-10th, Washington, D.C.
2) Conference Report: Imshausen, Hessen, July 2004
3) Book reviews:

a) Gilbert, The Righteous; Benz, Uberleben im Dritten Reich
b) Weitensteiner, Catholic Parishes in Frankfurt

4) Journal articles.

a) O’Sullivan, Catholic Youth
b) Greschat, Protestant theologians on the wars
c) McDaniel and Pierard, Politics of appointments in Protestant Theological Faculties: E.Geldbach
d) Schneider, Oswald Spengler reception
e) Kracht, Fritz Fischer and German Protestantism
f) Ketola, Wartime Anglican visits to Scandinavia

1) The following sessions, which may be of interest to list-members, are being offered at the G.S.A. conference on October 7th-10th:
a) Session 44: The Dissolution of the Catholic Milieu, 1870-1960 (List-members: J.Zala, R.Sun,D.Hastings, M.Ruff).
b) Session 49: Religion and Politics- Churches and Politics in Germany,East and West (Marcus Meckel)
c) Session 154: German New Testament Research and Nazism
(G.Besier, G.Lindemann).

2) Conference Report: Die Oekumene und der Widerstand gegen Diktaturen, July 16 – 18th July 2004.

In 1986 a foundation was established to honour Adam von Trott, murdered by the Nazis because of his part in the plot to assassinate Hitler. Its director is now Joachim Garstecki, and its motto is “Remember the Past, Build the Future”. It is housed in Trott’s old family home at Imshausen, near Solz not far from Fulda in the rolling hills of Hessen. It is a pleasant and poignant environment, still intimately familial, but now also given over to public dialogue, debate, study and reflection. There are bedrooms for guests, each named after particular figures known to Adam von Trott himself, a well-stocked library, an elegant meeting hall, a subterranean chapel, and beautiful grounds. Nearby, a lay religious community, cordially linked to the house but separate from the foundation itself, lives in a further complex of buildings at the foot of the nearby hill. The purpose of Imshausen seems to be to clear the decks and to allow those who come to have an opportunity to reflect again with some quality of freedom and vision.

The purpose of this year’s gathering was in part to dedicate the guest house to the memory of Willem Visser’t Hooft, the first General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, and a plaque was accordingly unveiled on one of the outer walls. Many of the ‘t Hooft family were present, as were also many of the Trott family, including Adam’s widow Clarita.

Two services took place, on the first evening in the crypt chapel, and then at the open air chapel high on the hill beside the house on the Sunday morning, this service being taken by members of the community. We were given an opportunity to support the work of the Kreisau (Kryzowa) Foundation in Silesia, the former home of Trott’s close friends Helmuth and Freya von Moltke, which seeks to build the future on the basis left by independent thinkers in Nazi Germany. Guests who remained at Imshausen for the sixtieth anniversary of the 20 July 1944 plot returned to this site to find themselves in a congregation of at least 150 local people, for whom this anniversary is a annual observance.

The first day of the conference was committed to the Ecumenical Movement and Resistance in the National Socialist era, and was chaired by Otto von der Gablentz. Konrad Raiser, now retired as one of Visser ‘t Hooft’s successors as General Secretary of the W.C.C., discussed the development of the ecumenical movement itself in the context of National Socialism and total war, tracing connecting lines between historical developments and theological perspectives (and lessons). Andrew Chandler from Birmingham outlined the reputation of Bishop George Bell of Chichester as a ‘patron’ of resistance, with particular reference to his private diplomacy with the British Foreign Office and his public discussions with the virulently anti-German Lord Vansittart. Rolf-Ulrich Kunze from Karlsruhe discussed the work of Visser ‘t Hooft himself, placing his connections with resistance in Gemany and in the Netherlands within an overarching internationalism. Bjorn Ryman from Uppsala explored, on the basis of archival sources held in Sweden, the impact of the group of theologians who worked at Sigtuna and traced their relationship with resistance outside Sweden’s own borders, in both Germany and Norway. Jurgen Zeilstra from Hilversum gave an overview of ‘European unity in ecumenical thought in the period 1937-1948’. This was followed by a detailed reflection by Andreas Schott from Hamburg on Adam von Trott’s own European thinking. In the evening, Keith Clements, General Secretary of the Conference of European Churches, from Geneva discussed the extent to which Bonhoeffer’s resistance may be understood – if at all – as an expression of his ecumenism.

On the second day the conference was chaired by Joachim Garstecki and turned towards ecumenism and ‘anderen Diktaturen’, though what was now clearly in view was the East Germany of the Cold War. Now the talks were more often given by those who had themselves participated in the drama itself, and this produced a quite different dynamic. John Arnold from Canterbury, and Paul Oestreicher (whose name it is still hard to disconnect from Coventry, but who now comes from Brighton) discussed their own experiences and perceptions of the various imperatives which had fashioned their work. Katherina Kunter from Aarhus, who is one of the most important new voices to emerge from a maturing academic commitment to the history of religion in the Cold War, introduced her own incisive perspectives on this topic, before Laurence Hogebrink from Amsterdam reflected on lessons learnt, or not learnt.

One of the attractive features of this Imshausen conference was the fact that local pople attended individual sessions and participated freeely and generously in many different ways. In an age when academics are more than ever found to be talking only to each other, this imparted not only a sense of context for those of us who had come as guests, but ensured that the affairs of the weekend lived and worked in something better than an academic parallel universe. The conference was reported at length in the pages of the local newspaper.

There are plans for the publication of all the papers in Germany, edited by Benigna von Krusenstjern of the Max Planck Institute, Göttingen. In the meanwhile, three of these contributions will be published in the next number of the journal Humanitas: the Journal of the George Bell Institute.

Andrew Chandler, Birmingham, U.K.
3a) Martin Gilbert, The Righteous. The unsung Heroes of the Holocaust. Toronto: Key Porter Books 2003 529 pp ISBN 1-55263-512-0
ed. W. Benz, Überleben im Dritten Reich, Munich: Beck Verlag 2003. 350 pp ISBN 3 406 51029 9

Sir Martin Gilbert has added to his immensely impressive list of publications with this latest popular, but well-researched, study of a rather neglected aspect of Holocaust history: how Gentiles and non-Jews saved Jews from the persecution and annihilation launched by the Nazis during the second world war. This story has already been told earlier by the Israeli Mordecai Paldiel, and, for the Christian rescuers, by David Gushee, but Gilbert’s skillful presentation will undoubtedly reach a wider audience.

This topic is controversial, since many of the Holocaust Jewish survivors are very conscious that so little was done by their non-Jewish neighbours or fellow citizens to protect them in their hour of danger. Nevertheless Gilbert is convinced that, even if such rescue efforts were far too few, they should be suitably acknowledged and gratitude expressed to the individuals who risked their own lives in such a cause.
This is the view consistently practised by the official Israeli Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, which has devoted great energies in preserving the records of such rescuers, has granted them collectively the title of “the Righteous among the Nations” or “Righteous Gentiles”, and has planted a tree with a suitably named plaque for each rescuer along the avenue leading to the museum. Gilbert’s accounts are largely drawn from Yad Vashem’s archival holdings, though supplemented by his own researches and personal interviews.

His stance towards these unsung heroes of the Holocaust is highly positive, and has thus led him to refute the sweeping generalizations of such writers as Daniel Goldhagen. In his view, given the undoubted horrors of the mass murders, every act of rescue was remarkable, and deserves to be widely known. He also seeks to use these examples as a means of fostering a warmer relationship between Jews and non-Jews.
On the other hand, while praising the courageous initiatives of these individuals, Gilbert does not seek to exonerate the major institutions, such as the Christian churches, which so dismally failed to give a lead, or to support, these singular efforts on behalf of the Nazis’ victims.
Gilbert divides his material country by country, which enables him to provide useful examples of the settings in which the Nazi anti-Jewish campaigns took place, the extent to which the national authorities abetted or resisted these plans, and the responses of the local population. Needless to say, Gilbert’s survey has to be selective. Yad Vashem has already acknowledged nearly 20,000 persons as Righteous Gentiles, but, as Gilbert makes clear, the courageous acts of many more will never be known. So he can only provide examples to show the generosity of heart which could lead to such unparalleled altruism.

There were, however, many ambivalences in such situations, which Gilbert often overlooks. The rescuers had many and mixed motives for assisting Jews. Some were born-again Christians, others were moved simply by humanitarian sympathies, others acted on the spur of the moment when they saw a need and fulfilled it. Gilbert does not attempt to produce any overarching theory, but claims that collectively their behaviour made them all heroic.

Few of these rescuers have written about their rescue activities. Most, like the Protestant parishioners in the southern French village of Le Chambon, or the Catholic nuns in Poland, regarded their behaviour as the only decent thing to do. It is only in the testimonies of the Jewish survivors that the abnormality and bravery of these individuals comes to life. Inevitably Glbert’s narratives share this viewpoint and at times become somewhat repetitious. But he is clearly aware of the danger that certain well-known rescuers, like Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg, might loom larger than life, so he balances their achievements along with similar cases, being meticulous in giving names, dates and places.

Since Gilbert was so dependent on the records assembled at Yad Vashem, it was perhaps inevitable that he accepts their criteria for who was a Righteous Gentile. Yad Vashem has never recognized the efforts of non-Jewish spouses in saving their partners, nor those of any person paid to rescue Jews, nor the work of groups or networks of rescuers. Thus individual Mother Superiors are frequently mentioned, but we hear little about the work of their nuns. Furthermore, Yad Vashem has been notably sticky about acknowledging anyone connected with the German Resistance movement as “righteous”. They refused to grant this favour to the martyred German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was certainly involved in a successful plot to smuggle 14 Jews out of Germany. As a result Gilbert makes no mention of his name.
But even with these limitations, Gilbert’s narrative account is both heart-warming and heart-rending. His detailed record of what these Righteous Gentiles achieved has to be matched with regret that not more of them were ready to act in this heroic mould. But his comprehensive selection does serve to show that, from one end of the Nazi empire to the other, Righteous Gentiles were to be found, who rejected the dominant and vicious propaganda and upheld an alternative standard of values.

Gilbert avoids analytical comparisons between the various societies in favour of concentrating on the acts of heroic individuals. But the cumulative effect and the plethora of detailed case studies he provides allows the reader to make his or her own overall conclusions. Gilbert has also found a number of illuminating photographs, and has supplied useful maps, as is his wont. The bibliography is particularly helpful.
As Gilbert states: ” Recognition and remembrance continue into the twenty-first century, even as the number of those rescued, and the number of surviving rescuers, declines”. These stories, he affirms, should not be regarded merely as footnotes to the past, but as lanterns for all humanity. Nor is this legacy to be confined just to one ethnic group. Rather, when the challenge is greatest and the dangers most pressing, each of us, Gilbert believes, has to ask: “Could I have acted like this, in the circumstances would I have tried to, would I have wanted to?”
A similar theme runs throughout the collection of essays edited by the Director of Berlin’s Centre for Antisemitism Research, Wolfgang Benz. Most of the stories relating to how survivors managed to hide from their persecutors, or were assisted to do so by “righteous Gentiles” are set in Berlin, where the largest number of German Jews found some form of refuge. The contributors also make good use of the files of the office subsequently set up in West Berlin to honour the “unsung heroes and heroines” of those days. Again even on this more limited scale, the motives of the rescuers were so varied as to defy categorization. Each individual story is a remarkable feat, and luckily even now such valiant behaviour is being recognized both in Berlin and in Jerusalem. Remarkably, no mention is made of the now well-known but controversial protest in Berlin’s Rosenstrasse when several hundred non-Jewish wives gathered to demand the release of their husbands – the only known protest action of this kind to be successful.
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3b) Hans K.Weitensteiner, ‘Warum denn wir, immer wir . . . ? War dieser Stadt Frankfurt schuldiger als London?’
Katholische Gemeindeleben im Dritten Reich und während der ersten Nachkriegsjahre 1932-1950. Dokumente und Darstellung.
Frankfurt/Main: Haag + Herchen 2002 230 pp.

Local accounts of the struggles between the Nazis and the churches at the parish level can add useful details, even though the main outlines of the campaigns, both offensive and defensive, are well known. Most of these descriptions come from Protestant parishes, so it is a welcome addition to have this useful account of a Catholic dual-parish in a Frankfurt suburb. The priest, Fr Rudolphi, served there for more than twenty years during the whole Nazi period and beyond and most fortunately compiled a Parish Chronicle of some thousand pages in which he recorded all the main parish events, and added his own commentaries on the wider political scene, as well as some of his contemporary sermons and his personal reflections. All these were used by a school-teacher parishioner, Hans Weitensteiner, to provide an excellent portrait of this Catholic milieu.

Fr. Rudolphi was born just after the end of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, when German Catholics were fervently eager to demonstrate that they could be as loyal to the new state as their Protestant counterparts. His military service in the first world war only reinforced this ardent nationalism. Like so many others, he returned disillusioned by defeat, outraged at the iniquitous Versailles Treaty, alarmed by the dangers of Bolshevism and eager to see Germany’s reputation restored. It is not surprising that his initial reaction to the rise of Nazism was favourable.
The Catholics’ hopes that the 1933 Concordat would enhance their position in society were dashed on the rock of Nazi radicalism and intransigence. But for Fr. Rudolphi and so many of his flock, the Nazis’ true ambitions were obscured by their wishful thinking that they could simultaneously pledge support to their church and to the new political regime Only very reluctantly and very late did they realize the incompatibility of these divergent loyalties.

Fr. Rudolphi was an assiduous pastor. He had two new churches built, looked after his parishioners, especially after 1939, remained in contact with serving soldiers and evacuated families, and deplored the disasters brought on by the war’s events. His sympathies for the Frankfurt citizens bombed out in the devastating air raids were certainly genuine, and led to the frustrated question asked in the book’s title. But throughout he remained a staunch German nationalist. The sufferings of others, such as the Jews, gypsies, Poles or Russians were hardly mentioned. But the comments he jotted down of his own and his parishioners’ reactions in those traumatic years are interesting as a contemporary record.
It is noteworthy that, despite his strong nationalist feelings, Fr. Rudolphi did not succumb to the Nazi antisemitic propaganda, or allow this poison to be repeated in his parish. But there is no record of any more active measures to support the Nazis’ victims. Even after the war, he was reluctant to believe the evidence of the concentration camps, or the extent of Nazi crimes. In this he was not alone. And the Catholics’ sense of duty to support established authority prevented them from encouraging any idea of resistance to the Nazi state, even after their own first-hand evidence of the Gestapo’s ruthless high-handedness. In Weitensteiner’s view, it was just this blending of Catholic mythology and Germanic nationalist ideology which made German Catholics so susceptible to the Nazi allurements. Fr. Rudolphi, the conscientious priest and devoted nationalist, may be seen as typical. Hence the value of this memoir of his parish and his political positions.

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4a) Michael O’Sullivan, An Eroding Milieu? Catholic Youth, Church Authority and Popular Behaviour in North-West Germany during the Third Reich, 1933-1938 in Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 90. no 2, April 2004, pp.236ff.

Part of his work in progress on the Catholic response to the Nazi challenges, especially amongst youth.
b) Martin Greschat, Begleitung und Deutung der beiden Weltkriege durch evangelische Theologen in Erster Weltkrieg: Zweiter Weltkrieg. Ein Vergleich, ed. B. Thoss and H-E Volkmann, Paderborn: Schöningh 2002, pp 497-518.
Very well worth exploring these comparisons

c) C.McDaniel and R.V.Pierard, The Politics of Appointments in Protestant Theological Faculties in Germany: the case of Professor Erch Geldbach in Journal of Church and State, Vol. 46, no 1, Winter 2004 pp 55-82. An interesting analysis of the (mis)fortunes of one of our own list members at the hands of a stiff unyielding church bureaucracy in very recent years.

d) Jörg Schneider, Oswald Spengler’s ‘Der Untergang des Abendlandes’ in Journal for the History of Modern Theology, ol. 10, no 2, 2003, p.196-223.

This essay concentrates on the reception of Oswald Spengler’s book by Protestant theologians in the early 1920s, who were more susceptible to Spengler’s influence than were philosophers. Just after the first world war, for example, Werner Elert, Karl Heim and Ernst Troeltsch – not to mention Emanuel Hirsch, Friedrich Gogarten and others – had to cope with the deeply interconnected crises in faith, church, theology and nation. Spengler’s ideas of cycles in history seemed to help their understanding of Germany’s 1918 defeat, not as due to military exhaustion but to a sort of divine destiny. But it also gave hope that this destiny would help to overcome the crisis. These scholars drew on certain aspects of Spengler’s thinking to establish their theory of Christianity. However the influence of Spengler vanished soon enough. As a result the story of his reception is an example of the struggle to locate Christianity within post-first world war German society.

e) Klaus G.Kracht, Fritz Fischer und der deutsche Protestantismus in Journal for the History of Modern Theology, Vol. 10, no. 2, 2003, pp. 224-252.

The Fischer controversy of the early 1960s broke the widespread view among the German elite of their nation’s innocence for the outbreak of the first world war, and by implication their justification of the second. Instead, Fischer argued, the German leaders had actively sought opportunities to launch a crusade for imperial expansion.

As a young man, Fischer had joined the Nazi Party, but after a lengthy term of post-1945 incarceration, began his career as professor of history at Hamburg University. He was moved to oppose those who blamed the rise of Nazism on either the mob psychology of the easily moved masses, or on the spellbinding – and hence – demonized – character of the Nazi leaders and on their capacity for political manipulation.
Rather Fischer concentrated his fire on the unfortunate teachings of Lutheranism to blindly obey political authorities. This had led to the abandonment of the ideas of freedom or resistance. Only Calvinists had upheld these views. Ernst Troeltsch was the only theologian to support them after 1919. Instead a vast majority of Lutherans allowed themselves to be misled into regarding Hitler as a great leader and legitimate authority.

Fischer’s criticism of the tradional Lutheran-Protestant view of the state aroused enormous waves of opposition, but on the other hand his conclusions about the mistakes of the German leaders in 1914 received great support, especially amongst the young. His crucial point that Protestants had allowed their religious loyalties to be subordinated to their nationalist ambitions is now hardly deniable. This moral point of view was, however, largely lost to view by those who concentrated more on the details of the July crisis and its consequences.

f) Hanna-Maija Ketola, Teaching ‘Correct’ Attitudes: an Anglican emissary to Sweden and Finland in 1944 in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 55, no 1, January 2004, p. 75ff

Drawing on the journals and reports of Rev. Herbert Waddams, an ordained official of the British Ministry of Information’s Religions division, this article describes the British efforts to influence church opinion in these Scandinavian countries. Contacts with Sweden had continued throughout the war, notably through Bishop George Bell. But Finland had only just signed a peace treaty (mainly with the Soviet Union) and so Waddams was sent to try to induce ‘correct’ attitudes in future relations, especially towards Britain’s Soviet ally. The Swedes were an important link to European Lutherans and should be persuaded that Britain’s objectives in the post-war settlement would be beneficent.
Waddams’ pro-Soviet stance met with some hostility in Swedish church circles and even more in Finland. But Anglo-Scandinavian relations were a more promising field. The Finns he found to be rather parochial and narrow-minded, but the Swedes could lay a larger ecumenical role. Despite his over-optimistic assessment of Soviet religious policy, Waddams went on to become general secretary of the Church of England Council on Foreign Relations in 1945.

With best wishes to you all,
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

 

Newsletter — September 2004— Vol. X, no. 9

Dear Colleagues,
For those of you in the northern hemisphere, I trust you had a restful and
restorative summer, and are now ready to return to academic pursuits!

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) Ostmeyer, Evangelische Kirche und Juden in der DDR
b) Holtschneider, German Protestants and the Holocaust
c) Ziefle, One Woman against the Reich

2) Kirchliche Tourismus: Hale: Himmler’s Crusade
1a) (This review appeared first on H-German on June 24th 2004, and is
here reproduced by kind permission of the author.)
Irena Ostmeyer. “Zwischen Schuld und Suehne: Evangelische Kirche
und Juden in der SBZ und DDR 1945-1990”. Berlin: Institut Kirche und
Judentum, 2002. 400 pp. Bibliographical references, index. Euro 15.00 (cloth), ISBN
3-923-09575-9. Reviewed for H-German by Axel Fair-Schulz <lfair7@cogeco.ca>,
Department of History, State University of New York at Buffalo

Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” has triggered the latest incarnation
of ongoing debates around the theological and practical connections
between Christianity and Anti-Semitism. Irena Ostmeyer’s carefully
researched and well-written “Zwischen Schuld und Suehne: Evangelische
Kirche und Juden in der SBZ und DDR 1945-1990” offers a good overview
of the Protestant side of this debate within the context of former East
Germany. Her project, originally a Ph.D. dissertation at the University
of Potsdam under the supervision of Julius Schoeps (also director of the
“Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum–Europaeisch-Juedische Studien”), is a
cogent effort at reconstructing the reactions and approaches of the
mainstream Evangelical Church toward Jews and Judaism in the GDR. She
is sensitive to the obvious and more hidden dimensions of this complex
theme and takes into sober consideration the evolving views of East
German Protestantism, as well as various regional differences. Ostmeyer
includes theological, historical, as well as social features of the
relationship between Evangelical Churches and Jews in her book. Given that
reconstruction is this work’s strongest suit, Ostmeyer also offers
considerable analysis.

Further scholarship could render a more rigorously theorized synthesis,
integrating her findings into the larger body of work on the relationship
of Christianity toward Judaism and the long shadow of the Holocaust. It
might also be necessary for further scholarly efforts to integrate the
wealth of Ostmeyer’s material into the overall history of East Germany.
Ostmeyer divided her work into two major parts: the Evangelical Church’s
coming to terms with Judaism (in nine chapters) and the development of
new relationships between the Evangelical Church and the Jewish
congregations/Jews in the GDR (composed of three chapters). At the
outset, Ostmeyer provides a user-friendly overview of the scholarly
literature as well as explicating her definition of “Evangelical Church,”
composed of the eight independent regional Churches (Landeskirche
Anhalt, Evangelische Kirche in Berlin-Brandenburg, Evangelische Kirche
des Goerlitzer Kirchengebietes, Evangelische Landeskirche Greifswald,
Evangelisch-Lutherische Landeskirche Mecklenburgs, Evangelische der
Kirchenprovinz Sachsen, Evangelisch-Lutherische Landeskriche Sachsens,
as well as the Evangelische-Lutherische Kirche in Thueringen). Ostmeyer
excludes the Catholic Church because of its marginal influence in the GDR.
She also does not mention the various smaller Christian dominations, even
when they happen to be part of the general Protestant tradition. Given
how voluminous her material on the mainstream Evangelical Church is, this
choice of exclusion might be justified. Yet further research must focus
on a more comparative direction and probe whether and to what extent the
findings on the Evangelical Church are confirmed and/or complicated by
data from the other denominations

Ostmeyer’s definition of “Judaism” includes religious, cultural, and
historical features. The scope of her book focuses on Jewish life and
identity in Germany after the Shoah and founding of Israel. She has
acquired considerable expertise within Judaism and is, in her writing,
explicitly conscious of her own Christian background. Thus the concept of
a “Christian-Jewish,” rather than a “Jewish-Christian,” dialogue is not to
be understood as establishing a hierarchy. In addition, Ostmeyer also
draws attention to the relative passivity of the East German Jewish side
of the unfolding dialogue, locating the reasons for this within the small
number of Jews, their overall strong loyalty toward the “anti-Fascist”
state, the difficulties of the small Jewish congregations to accommodate
religiously very different members, fears and recollections of difficult
times (such as in the early 1950s), as well as the related wish to just be
among themselves in peace. This is augmented further by what Ostmeyer
somewhat harshly calls the “theological incompetence” on the part of the
majority of the GDR’s Jews (p. 304)\

Centering her narrative on the Evangelical perspective, Ostmeyer
identifies four major phases of Christian-Jewish interaction in the GDR.
The time period between 1945-60 is characterized by outrage toward Nazi
crimes, as well as compassion for the especially or obviously victimized
Jews. This however, went hand in hand with a stubborn refusal to accept
any tangible responsibility, particularly in the realm of theology. Yet
as time went by, this approach became increasingly nuanced. Several
voices within East German Protestantism worked toward a more critical
reflection on the relationship between Christian theology and
anti-Semitism. One such figure, Professor Heinrich Vogel, pushed for such
a re-orientation already in the spring of 1950. Nevertheless his efforts
were dwarfed because many Protestants feared that an ecclesiastical
admission of guilt would translate into demands for financial compensation
(p. 49). The major theological paradigm of the time period was still
informed by the notion that the Jews had rejected Jesus Christ and thus
would bear some measure of responsibility for their own fate. Thus, in
this mindset, Christians should try to convert Jews; this approach
essentially precluded any real dialogue based on a relationship of equals.
The author places the second phase of Christian-Jewish interaction between
1960-1961 and 1978. It is marked by a transformation of Evangelical
efforts, from the attempts to convert Jews (the so-called “Judenmission”)
to a more genuine dialogue based on mutual respect. This process was
pushed even further after 1978, impelled by the fortieth anniversary of
the events of November 9, 1938. The remembrance of “Kristallnacht”,
now seen as “Pogromnacht” (given the somewhat belittling implications of
the former term), jump-started further practical manifestations of dialogue,
commemoration, as well as theological reflections. Ostmeyer views the
last phase as being characterized not just by the Evangelical Church
admitting to human guilt but theological guilt as well, regarding
anti-Semitism and the Shoah. This phase coalesced around the
remembrances of the fiftieth anniversary of the “Pogromnacht” in 1988. It
required a new generation of theologians, Church leaders, and motivated
rank-and file membership to spur this development.

Overall Ostmeyer argues that it was not so much the Church leadership as
highly motivated individuals working for these changes. Perhaps more
detailed biographical sketches would have added to her excellent analysis.
Interestingly enough, the majority of East German Evangelical ministers,
vicars, and catechists remained uninterested in Jewish culture and
learning. Ostmeyer diagnoses the shortcomings in their theological
training, which amounted to only a very sketchy knowledge of Judaism.
Thus it was ultimately a numerically small group, within the Jewish and the
Christian communities, that actively pushed for genuine dialogue and some
measure of reconciliation.

The actions of Evangelical Christians toward developing a greater
awareness of Jewish heritage and experiences led, already in the 1950s,
toward taking better care of Jewish cemeteries, particularly the low
profile “forgotten cemeteries” not taken care off by the SED regime. This
combined with more spectacular actions, such as lobbying the Evangelical
Church on behalf of the beleaguered Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee,
led to tensions between the state and the Church. The SED regime had
planned, in 1982-83 and again in 1986, to build a highway right through
what constituted Europe’s largest Jewish grave site. The strong
opposition of the Church, among other factors, convinced the state to give
up on this design (p. 301).

Church groups that focused on Jewish matters also often lobbied on behalf
of a re-evaluation of the GDR’s hostile stance toward Israel, demanding
the establishment of diplomatic relations as well as offering an official
East German admission of guilt. This, however, collided directly with the
GDR’s claims of being the anti-fascist German state. Engaged Evangelical
Christians thus became direct competitors with the regime, frequently
pointing out its ideological blind spots.

Ostmeyer argues that in essence the East German Evangelical Church
voiced a position independent of the state’s point of view. While it seems
indeed the case, that they articulated alternatives to official GDR
positions, they also remained firmly grounded in the political,
socio-economic, and cultural orbit of their state. Thus future research
could explore in more detail the complex interconnections between the
regime’s perspective(s) and the alternative(s) offered by the Evangelical
Church.

Overall, Ostmeyer did a superb job of presenting and evaluating an
immense amount of archival material, combined with interviews and the
ever-expanding secondary literature. Her book is a very useful resource
for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars in
the field.
Axel Fair-Schulz,
Fort Erie, Ontario
1b) K. Hannah Holtschneider, German Protestants Remember the
Holocaust: Theology and the Construction of Collective Memory,
Münster: LIT Verlag, 2001

Hannah Holtschneider, a lecturer at the Centre for the Study of
Jewish-Christian Relations in Cambridge, UK, has produced with this book
a neat revision of her doctoral dissertation and, in the process, added
significantly to the ongoing debates regarding Holocaust remembrance.
Using the lens of collective memory theory as it has been applied to ‘secular’
sites of Holocaust remembrance – the Bitburg controversy, the
Historikerstreit and the Goldhagen debate – she has focused her attention on
the extent to which German Protestant theology has embraced the task of
remembering. As Holtschneider herself puts it, she seeks to explore whether
or not ‘theologies developed by the second generation of Germans after the
Holocaust facilitate the articulation of issues of Holocaust remembrance
pertaining to the third generation’ (p.9), of which she herself is part.
Holtschneider acknowledges the pioneering work of the previous
generation’s theologians. Nonetheless, she regards it as timely to review
their interpretive paradigms, especially in light of ‘social-historical
changes'(p.10) – most acutely, the reunification of Germany.
These generational differences in the processing of memory form the
explicit subject of the fifth chapter but are in fact ubiquitous themes
throughout the book, notably in Holtschneider’s choice of texts. The texts
she has chosen to consider are the 1980 Rheinischer Synodalbeschluß,
selected works by F-W Marquardt, and Britta Jüngst’s 1996 doctoral
dissertation. These particular texts date from 1980 through until the
late-1990s and thus represent both the current and previous generation of
theologians.

The first two chapters deal with the Rhineland Synod’s statement, and the
more secular debates regarding National Socialist/Holocaust memory
within German society, respectively. In both chapters, Holtschneider shows
that Jews are incorporated into German collective memory largely through
their exclusion from the narrative or by their designation as Other. The
1984 film Heimat, for example, ‘reclaim[ed] German history’ for the
Germans, but at the exclusion of Jewish voices (pp.69, 73). The Bitburg
controversy the following year universalized victimhood, by stating that
both the SS soldiers buried at Bitburg and the Jews they murdered were
victims – thus, by denying a qualitative difference, actually isolated Jewish
experience even further (p.79). Finally, the Historikerstreit and the
Goldhagen case excluded authentic Jewish remembrance by, in the first,
refusing to represent the Holocaust as such and, in the second, refusing to
grant Goldhagen the scholarly capacity to address the issues simply because
of his ethnic identification with the victims (pp.87, 96-97). Goldhagen, a
Jew, was incapacitated as a scholar of the Holocaust ‘because his heritage
[was] assumed to predetermine the conclusions he [would] draw…'(p.97).
Taken together, argues Holtschneider, these examples show that the
Holocaust ‘enter[s] German memory from the outside…’; it is remembered
as a crime committed against groups of people who were, by definition,
‘excluded from membership in German society'(p.103). The clear
implication is that they still are.

Holtschneider finds the same interpretive paradigm at work in the
Rhineland statement. While acknowledging that the statement ‘represents a
great theological achievement…[that] opened the floor for a
discussion’ (p.59), she nonetheless sees it as indicative of a hermeneutical
method within German Protestantism that typically instrumentalizes Jews.
Employing Stephen Haynes’ categories of ‘reformist’, ‘radicalist’ and
‘rejectionist’ paradigms of Christian interpretations of Jews/Israel,
Holtschneider argues that the Synodalbeschluß understands Jews merely as
‘signs’ of God’s action in history. They remain embedded within the
‘witness-people myth’, rather than being seen as a diverse and dynamic
community – real people! – in their own right. Holtschneider applauds the
Synod for emphasizing the ‘common ground between the two faiths'(p.53),
but points out that such an approach ‘identifies Jews only in religious
terms'(p.54) and thus fails to account for the variety of Jewish identities.
Moreover, it perpetuates the Christian hermeneutical principle that Jews are
rightly understood only from the perspective of their role in the drama of
salvation-history, of which Christians are (according to this principle) the
culmination. In other words, the Rhineland statement, though
well-intentioned, Christianizes the legacy of the Holocaust and reads the
future of Jewish-Christian relations as being the reintroduction of ‘the Jews’
into the essentially Christian narrative of Heilsgeschichte.

The chapter on Marquardt begins with a positive endorsement of his
contribution to Jewish-Christian dialogue. He is, argues Holtschneider, ‘the
most distinguished systematic theologian’ in Germany who has tackled this
issue, with Paul van Buren the only comparable scholar outside of Europe
(pp.105-106). When considered more closely, however, Holtschneider
argues that Marquardt perpetuates many of the hermeneutical myths about
Jews and Judaism that have long dogged Christianity.

Taking the Holocaust as his dogmatic starting point (p.105), Marquardt’s
work – a Dogmatik in Bußform – represents a significant theological
advance on the Rhineland statement. Reminiscent of Emil Fackenheim’s
concept of ‘rupture’, Marquardt regards Christian faith and theology as
essentially uncertain after the Holocaust; it is ‘questioned in an
unprecedented way'(p.109). Why this is the case is simply that, for him, the
relationship between Jews and God is paradigmatic for the history of all
humanity with God and thus foundational to Christianity. Thus, if the life of
Jewish people is endangered, so is the relationship of Christianity to
Judaism and, for that reason, to God. Consequently, Christian theology has
a future only to the extent to which ‘it recognizes a dependency…on Jews as
its presupposition'(p.111). Marquardt’s solution is, therefore, to develop an
‘Evangelical Halachah’ – a reorientation of theology from the perspective of
Jewish biblical interpretation, that is, from the perspective of the victims.
Holtschneider rightly criticizes this approach as a misappropriation of a
Jewish concept that serves both to universalize Jewish suffering – Jews do
not uniformly self-identify as ‘victims’, she says – and to Christianize
Judaism (pp.113-115). By introducing such an ontological distinction
between Jews and other people – and between the Holocaust and other
genocides – Marquardt denigrates the suffering of non-Jews and, once
again, resorts to a version of the ‘witness-people myth’.

Holtschneider is even more scathing of his use of survivor testimony. His
uncritical usage betrays an ambiguity ‘as to who Jews are…while at the
same time [he nonetheless holds] firm ideas as to what ‘Jewish
witness’constitutes'(p.131). By employing Jean Améry as his reference point
for discussing Auschwitz, Marquardt contradicts his methodological
intentions. In fact, Améry’s writing is directly opposed to what Marquardt is
trying to achieve. Why? Because Marquardt ‘derives his understanding of
the Holocaust from the writing of a Jew…who is not Jewish of his own
choice…who has been violently separated from his culture and
language…and who is not religious'(p.129). One consequence of this is that,
for Marquardt, the Holocaust becomes merely ‘a canvas which can be
inscribed with [one’s own] meaning’ (p.130). Another is that, by selectively
deciding what does or does not constitute authentic Jewish witness, his
dogmatic theology perpetuates ‘the silencing of Jewish memory'(p.131). All
in all, Marquardt’s good intentions notwithstanding, Holtschneider regards
his work as fundamentally flawed, and which at best contributes only
ambiguously to the inclusion of Jewish experience into collective German
Protestant memory.

Holtschneider’s final chapter explores Britta Jüngst’s Auf der Seite des
Todes das Leben, and immediately determines it to be a more promising
avenue for post-Holocaust Christian-Jewish relations than either of the
previous two texts. It is, she argues, ‘an important step in Christian
reflection upon Jewish-Christian relations’ (p.191), largely because it
deliberately tackles the intergenerational transmission of memory.
Jüngst does not entirely escape criticism. As a feminist theologian, she
suggests that feminist insights into the articulation of difference are
helpful in Jewish-Christian dialogue, because they aid the interpretation of the
variety of perspectives brought by the participants to the discussion
(p.175).

However, Holtschneider rightly responds that Jüngst’s paradigm is
susceptible to attack from post-structuralist feminism because it employs
the now-outdated privileging of women’s experience. Such an essentialist
concept of gender difference results in a ‘liberal pluralism’ that seeks to
integrate – that is, domesticate – the Other without changing the established
social order by which this Other was defined in the first place (p.177). In
other words, we are back to the Christianization of Jewish experience and
memory, exhibited previously in both the Rhineland statement and
Marquardt’s theology. Holtschneider is similarly critical of Jüngst’s ready
acceptance of the fundamental presupposition of post-Holocaust theology –
Christianity’s utter dependency on Jews – because it likewise betrays
Christianity’s essentially imperialist structure (p.180).

Nonetheless, Holtschneider’s overall assessment of Jüngst’s approach is
positive. Her exploration of the differences in the ways in which Holocaust
memories are transmitted by descendants of victims on the one hand, and of
victimizers on the other ‘moves Christian theological reflection onto a new
level’ (p.191). Moreover, the seriousness with which she takes these and
other (particularly generational) differences cautions her against
misappropriating Jewish tradition in the efforts to rewrite Christian
theology. In sum, Jüngst’s theology provides ‘concrete opportunities for
future growth and exploration of new areas for Christian-Jewish encounters
in Germany’ (p.191).

How then should Holtschneider’s book itself be assessed? Most obviously,
she provides a thoughtful and concise summary of three important German
Protestant contributions to Jewish-Christian dialogue after the Holocaust.
But she does much more than that. By using collective memory theory, she
highlights the deficiencies of much post-Holocaust theology that fails to
understand the mechanics of memory-transmission between generations.
Holtschneider thus orients the future of the discussion to the ways in which
the concerns of the third generation can be articulated and dialogically
incorporated. Further, by reference primarily to Stephen Haynes, she
critiques the well-intentioned but ultimately imperialist attitude of most
post-Holocaust Christian theology that still finds it hard to ‘let Jews be
Jews’, preferring instead to define Jews as a conceptual reality that exists
only in Christian terms.

The book is not, of course, without its shortcomings. Stylistically it still
reads, to my mind, too much like a dissertation, and the not-infrequent use
of ‘I’ in statements of claim suggests a slight defensiveness on
Holtschneider’s part. Structurally, the first two chapters could profitably
have been in reverse order which, while breaking the chronological
narrative, would nonetheless have provided a more thoroughly
contextualized introduction to the theological discussion. As for content, I
would argue that the chapter on Marquardt would benefit from a deeper
discussion of the many secondary critical texts. Holtschneider makes
passing reference in the footnotes to, among others, Hanna Lehming and
Susanne Hennecke but does not engage substantially with their analyses of
Marquardt. Moreover, there is no mention of Barbara Meyer, Andreas
Pangritz or Michael Wyschogrod, all of whom have written significant
studies of Marquardt. Similarly in the fourth chapter, ‘Generations of
Memory’, it was odd to find no reference to Martin Rumscheidt, a
German-Canadian theologian whose father was an employee of I.G. Farben,
visited Auschwitz in 1944 and who, in Rumscheidt’s own words ‘looked
away’. How Rumscheidt has approached the task of theological
remembrance, within this biographical context, is fascinating. A study of
his work would have added significantly to this particular chapter; instead,
his absence is a surprising and critical omission.

Overall, however, these shortcomings do not detract from the book’s utility
as an important contribution to the growing literature on third-generation
post-Holocaust theology. Indeed, Holtschneider should find herself
increasingly included on course book-lists. It is not an easy book to read,
and the language and concepts employed would put it out of reach of a
generalist audience. However, teachers of Holocaust and Religious Studies
courses could – and should – put it to great use.

Mark R. Lindsay, University of Melbourne
1c) Helmut W.Ziefle, One Woman against the Reich. Grand Rapids,
Mich: Kregel Publications 2003. 189 pp.

Professor Helmut Ziefle has written a brief memoir of his boyhood
days in Nazi Germany, with a sympathetic portrait of his mother, a devout
and dedicated member of the Württemberg Evangelical Church. Brought
up in a strongly pietistic tradition, the Ziefle family displayed both the
strengths and weaknesses of this kind of churchmanship when faced with
the challenge of Nazi political radicalism and social pressures.
On the one hand, Ziefle pays tribute his mother’s simplistic belief in
the Lord’s providence over all His faithful followers, to her strong sense of
family loyalty, and to the benefits of the daily practice of prayer and bible
reading. On the other hand these qualities were barely sufficient to meet
the constant onslaught of Nazi propaganda, or the aggressive social
pressures to give fervent support to the new regime and its Führer.
These pious church people were appalled by the rampant and noisy
anti-church and anti-semitic attitudes of many Nazi Party members,
especially in the Hitler Youth. They refused to go along with the constant
demands for vocal support of the Party’s slogans which offended their sober
orderliness drawn from their puritan background. Yet, at the same time,
they supported much of the Nazi programme to restore Germany’s place in
the world. Their resistance was therefore much more a moral than a
political one, with all the shortcomings of such a stance.

But, even as non-participants, the Ziefle family was inevitably
drawn into the Nazi net. Their two elder sons had to serve in the Nazi
army, though both survived thanks to the Lord’s providence. As little
people, with conventional beliefs on the need to obey established authority
and a naive attitude towards politics, the Ziefle family had neither the
mentality, let alone the opportunity, to engage in resistance activities. The
book’s title is therefore somewhat inflated. Maria Ziefle kept her simple
faith alive and nurtured her family’s devotion. However, her success can
hardly be described as defiance of the Reich.

What is more revealing is Ziefle’s depiction of the family as victims.
The most graphic parts of his memoir are the reconstructions of the terrible
days of aerial bombardment of his home town, the family’s flight to the
country, the subsequent American occupation and the resulting deprivations
of the post-war period. But there is a singular absence of any reflection on
the root causes of all these disasters. Victimhood is a highly convenient
alibi in later years. Even so, Ziefle’s narrative reveals, but does not take
issue with, the kind of self-pity which so many Germans demonstrated after
1945, with the obvious, if perhaps unwitting, acceptance of Nazi
propaganda stereotypes about Jews, communists and foreigners. Their
pietistic fervour may have protected the Ziefles against Nazi fanaticism.
But from his own evidence, there is little awareness, even after sixty years,
of the drawbacks of such limited political horizons, with their authoritarian
and anti-democratic overtones. Ziefle’s failure to reflect on this legacy is
unfortunate. Filial piety, like patriotism, is not enough.

JSC
2) Kirchliche Tourismus:

Christopher Hale, Himmler’s Crusade, London: Bantam Press/ Hoboken
N.Jersey: John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2003. 422 pp ISBN 0-471-26292-7
Despite its title, this book has nothing to do with ecclesiastical
history. But it was so irresistible that I take the liberty of mentioning
it. In fact it is the true story, drawn from official records and later interviews
with survivors, of the mission of five SS officers despatched by Himmler in
1938-9 to remotest Tibet. Their object was to search for the roots of the
Aryan race, but was in fact a stew of delusions, dreams and dementia.
Their sundry adventures, which mainly involved eluding the British,
deluding the Tibetans, and preluding the Nazis’ 1000-year Aryan Reich, is
racily recounted by the British author in good John Buchan-ish style. The
whole expedition and its sinister aftermath was a dastardly and chilling
undertaking, but the story is darned well told.

Best wishes
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

 

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

 

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

 

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

 

Newsletter — July-August 2004— Vol. X, no. 7-8 

Dear Colleagues,
Contents:

Pius XII Revisited
1) J.Bottum, Essay: The End of the Pius Wars (These extracts from Mr Bottom’s essay in First Things, April 2004 are reproduced by kind permission of the author)

2) Book reviews:

a) Peter Godman, Hitler and the Vatican
M.L.Napolitano, Il Papa che salvo gli ebrei

3) Forthcoming publications
1) Joseph Bottom: The End of the Pius Wars

The Pius War is over, more or less. There will still be a few additional volumes published here and there, another article or two from authors too slow off the mark to catch their moment. But, basically, in the great argument that has raged over the last few years about the role of Pope Pius XII during World War II, the books have all been written, the reviews are all in, and the exchanges have all simmered down. It was a long and arduous struggle, vituperative and cruel, but, in the end, the defenders of Pius XII won every major battle. Along the way, they also lost the war.
Who, even among scholars in the field, could keep up with the flood of attacks on Pius XII that began in the late 1990s? John Cornwell gave us Hitler’s Pope, and Michael Phayer followed with The Catholic Church and the Holocaust. David Kertzer brought charges against Pius XII in The Popes against the Jews, and Susan Zucotti reversed her previous scholarship to pen Under his Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy. Garry Wills used Pius as the centerpiece of his reformist Papal Sin, as did James Carroll in Constantine’s Sword. So, for that matter, did Daniel Goldhagen when he wrote what proved to be the most extended and straightforward assault on Catholicism in decades: A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. . .

The champions of Pius had their share of book-length innings as well – although, one might note, never from the same level of popular publisher as the attackers managed to find. In 1999 Pierre Blet produced Pius XII and the Second World War According to the Archives of the Vatican and got Paulist Press, a small but respectable Catholic house, to publish it in America. Ronald Rychlak finished his first-rate Hitler, the War and the Pope, but this appeared in presses not quite at the level of distribution, advertising and influence enjoyed by Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin, Knopf and Viking, the large houses that issued books against Pius.
The commentator Philip Jenkins recently suggested that this disparity in publishers sends a message that the mainstream view is the guilt of Pius XII, while praise for the Pope belongs only to the cranks, nuts and sectarians. Jenkins’ suggestion is worth considering. Still, no one can say that Pius’ supporters were crushed or censored. In just six years, Margherita Marchione managed five books in praise of the Pope. [Her views were followed by Ralph McInerny. Justus George Lawler and Jose Sanchez].

But it was primarily in book reviews and responses that the defenders of Pius XII fought out the war – which is something of a problem. Every pope precipitates biographies, hagiographies and maledictions, like the dropping of the rain; it is part of the job to be much written about, and the works on Eugenio Pacelli that began when he became pope in 1939 seem innumerable.

But no supporter has yet produced a book-length biography in the wake of the recent years of extended blame. Even Rychlak’s excellent book is essentially reactive, devoting a thirty-page epilogue to a catalogue of the errors in Cornwell’s book. We have seen this pattern before. Hochhuth’s play The Deputy premiered in Berlin in 1963, and its picture of a greedy pope, concerned only about Vatican finances and silent about the Holocaust, immediately caused a firestorm of comment from the intellectual world. Everyone who was anyone felt compelled to weigh in. Hochhuth himself faded away when he tried to extend his censure to Winston Churchill, which led to a lost libel suit. . . .

Even without Hochhuth, the wide discussion about Pius XII he initiated in 1963 went on for several years. . . . The brouhaha also prompted the Vatican to begin releasing material from Pius’ pontificate, which appeared from 1965 to 1981 as the eleven-volume series Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale. In part by relying on these new documents, but even more by simply gathering their forces and investigating each of the incidents taken as the core of the indictment, the defenders gradually tamped down The Deputy’s claims about Pius XII and the Holocaust. Pope John Paul II was a consistent advocate for his predecessor, and even once-popular notions about Pius – that he was, for instance, the great reactionary opponent against whom Vatican II turned – gradually seemed to lose steam by the late 1970s and early 80s. It took more than a decade, but the reactive reviewers appeared to carry the day, and the popular magazine press and major book publishers lost interest.. . .

Most sceptical observers were unprepared when the criticism began again in the late 1990s. To journalists and
cultural commentators, Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope seemed almost to come out of nowhere in 1999, and it received almost entirely ecstatic reviews when it first appeared. . . . Time was needed for scholars to gin up the machine again, double-check the claims in Hitler’s Pope, and publish the reviews. Some of the results proved deeply embarrassing for Cornwell, particularly the falsity of his boast that he had spent „months on end” in the archives, when he visited the Vatican for only three weeks and didn’t go to the archives every day of that. The Italian letter from Pacelli that Cornwell placed at the center of his book as evidence of deep anti-Semitism had been, he claimed, waiting secretly „like a time bomb” until he did his research. In fact, it had been published in 1992 in a book by Emma Fattorini, who – an actual Italian, not working on a partisan translation – thought it meant very little. By the time all this came out, however, Hitler’s Pope had ridden out its time on the best-seller list.
Pius’ supporters were better prepared for Susan Zuccotti, and still better prepared for Garry Wills, and David Kertzer, and
James Carroll, and, particularly, Daniel Goldhagen, who was especially harried in late 2002. By then, the whole thing had turned into a giant game of „Whack the Mole”, with dozens of reviewers ready to smash their mallets down on the next author to stick up his head.. . .
Just as The Deputy moved the archivists in Rome to release Actes et Documents over the next sixteen years, so the current
Pius War has prompted an accelerated – by glacial Vatican norms – opening of a few new archives from the pontificate of Pius XI (1922-1939), whom Pacelli served as the Vatican’s secretary of state. Along with an Italian Jesuit named Giovanni Sale (who has been writing a torrent of articles for the Roman Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica), Peter Godman in his Hitler and the Vatican is among the first scholars to have used the new documents. And although he looked at only a handful – the title of his book is considerably overblown – he seems to have done so in a relatively reasonable and balanced way, particularly given the standard set by Cornwell and Goldhagen. . . .
In the public mind at the present moment, there is almost nothing bad you can’t say about Pius XII. The Vatican may end up declaring him a saint – the slow process of canonization has been winding its way through the Roman curia since the mid-1960s – but the general public has gradually been persuaded that Pius ranks somewhere among the greatest villains ever to walk the earth. . . .

The point is that there is simply no depravity one can put past the man. He suppressed the anti-Nazi encyclical that Pius XI on his deathbed begged him to release. He was deeply implicated in the Germans’ massacre of 335 Italians in the Ardeatine Caves. He expressly permitted, even encouraged, the S.S. to round up Rome’s Jews in 1943. At the root of all this lies the fact that Pius XII was, fundamentally, a follower of Hitler, a genocidal hater of the Jews in his heart and in his mind, and once we recognize him as a Nazi who somehow escaped punishment at the Nuremberg trials, we can see the origin of all the rest. He was Hitler’s Pope, etc.etc. . . . . In a 1997 essay, the widely published Richard L. Rubenstein concluded, „during World War II Pope Pius XII and the vast majority of European Christian leaders regarded the elimination of the Jews as no less beneficial than the destruction of Bolshevism.”

All of these claims are mistaken, of course – and more than mistaken: demonstrably and obviously untrue, outrages upon history and fellow feeling for the humanity of previous generations. But none of them are merely the lurid fantasies of conspiracy-mongers huddled together in paranoia on their Internet lists. Every one of these assertions has been made in recent years by books and articles published with mainstream and popular American publishers. And when we draw from them their general
conclusion – when we reach the point at which Rubenstein, for example, has arrived – then discourse is over. Research into primary sources, argument about interpretation, the scholar’s task of weighing historical circumstances: all of this is quibbling, an attempt to be fair to monstrosity, and by such fairness to condone, excuse, and participate in it. . . .

It was here that the Pius War was lost – and lost for what I believe will be at least a generation – despite the victories of the reviewers. . . . I am convinced that we will not achieve anything resembling historical accuracy until all present views have been cleared away – and thus, that the job for every honest writer who takes up the topic now is to correct the slander of Pius XII. A good example was set by Rabbi David Dalin, in an essay which was published in the Weekly Standard in February 2001. Dalin concluded that that Pius XII deserves recognition among Jews as a Righteous Gentile who saved hundreds of thousands of lives during the Holocaust. The reaction. . . was brutal, and the Weekly Standard found itself leading the parade only in the sense that a man running for his life leads the mob pursuing him. . . . The center-left New Republic immediately commissioned Daniel Goldhagen to interrupt the book he was writing and savage Pius XII instead – which he did in what is said to be the longest essay ever published in the magazine’s pages. The neo-conservative Commentary was so rankled that it did what it would not have done in nearly any other circumstance: it published a long rebuke of the Weekly Standard by a leftist author who had already made many of the same complaints in an article for Christian Century. . .

The attempt to sift through the endless stream of books about Pius XII in recent years was actually carried out by indefatigable reviewers in dozens of magazines and journals, responding to the texts one by one. The controversy also motivated additional research, and new material now seems to arrive every week. As far as I can tell, all this recent information tells in favor of Pius XII. A recently discovered 1923 letter to the Vatican from Eugenio Pacelli, then nuncio to Germany, for instance, denounces Hitler’s putsch and warns against his anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. A document from April 1933, just months after Hitler obtained power, reveals how Pacelli (then secretary of state) ordered the new German nuncio, Cesare Orsenigo, to protest Nazi actions. Meanwhile, newly examined diplomatic documents show that in 1937 Cardinal Pacelli warned A. W. Klieforth, the American consul to Berlin, that Hitler was „an untrustworthy scoundrel and fundamentally wicked person” to quote Klieforth, who also wrote that Pacelli „did not believe Hitler capable of moderation, and . . . fully supported the German bishops in their anti-Nazi stand”. This was matched with the discovery of Pacelli’s anti-Nazi report, written the following year for President Roosevelt and filed with Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, which declared that the Church regarded compromise with the Third Reich as „out of the question”. Archives from American espionage agencies have recently confirmed Pius XII’s active involvement in plots to overthrow Hitler. A pair of newly found letters, written in 1940 on the letterhead of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, give Pius XII’s orders that financial assistance be sent to Campagna for the explicit purpose of assisting interned Jews suffering from Mussolini’s racial policies. And the Israeli government has finally released Adolf Eichmann’s diaries, portions of which confirm the Vatican’s obstruction of the Nazis’ roundup of Rome’s Jews. There’s more, a regular flow of new material: intercepts of Nazi communications released from the United States’ National Archives include such passages as”Vatican has apparently for a long time been assisting many Jews to escape”; in a Nazi dispatch from Rome to Berlin on October 26, 1943, ten days after the Germany’s Roman roundup. New oral testimony from such Catholic rescuers as Monsignor John Patrick Carroll-Abbing, Sister Mathilda Spielmann, Father Giacomo Martegani, and Don Aldo Brunacci insists that Pius XII gave them explicit orders and direct assistance to help persecuted Jews in Italy. The posthumous publication this year of Harold Tittmann’s memoir, Inside the Vatican of Pius XII, is particularly interesting, for in it the American diplomat reveals, for the first time, that Pius XII’s wartime conduct drew upon advice from the German resistance. Out of all this, one might begin to build a new case for Pius XII. My own sense is that the anti-Pius books are coming to an end. . . .

What we really need now is a new biography of Pius XII during those years: a nonreactive account of his life and times, a book driven not by the reviewer’s instinct to answer charges but by the biographer’s impulse to tell an accurate story. Before that can be done well, I think, the archives of Pius XII’s pontificate will probably have to be fully catalogued and opened. Documents released here and there are useful, but useful is a dangerous word in this context, for the use is always in building an argument: a laying out of evidence to make or rebut a charge, rather than a knowledge of the Pope’s day-to-day actions. The Vatican has already begun to open some archives earlier than scheduled under the various time-locks, and it promises to open more. In the meantime, the reviewers’ contributions remain. But the reviewers’ dilemma remains as well: They won the battles, but how are they going to win the war?

Joseph Bottum, Arts editor of the Weekly Standard, poetry editor of First Things, and co-editor of The Pius War, an anthology of reviews forthcoming from Lexington Books.
2) Book reviews:

Peter Godman, Hitler and the Vatican. Inside the Secret Archives that Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church. New York: Free Press 2004. 285 pp. ISBN 0-7432-4597-0.

Matteo Napolitano and Andrea Tornielli, Il Papa che salvo gli ebrei. Dagli archivi segreti del Vaticano tutta la verita su Pio XII.
Casale Monferrato: Editizioni Piemma 2004. 202 pp.

Both of these new books may be described – to use Bottum’s phrase quoted aove – as post-war. Neither is likely to change the opinions of either the defenders or the critics of the man destined to become Pope Pius XII. But these authors’ contribution is to be the first to use some of the latest tranche of documents now made available for public scrutiny by the Vatican archives. These consist of only a part of the documentation for the reign of Pope Pius XI, (1922-1939), i.e. while Eugenio Pacelli was serving as Cardinal Secretary of State, and only those papers which deal with Germany. This move was undoubtedly due to the pressures put on the Vatican archivists after the failure, three years ago, of the ill-planned Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission. [See this Newsletter, Vol. VII, no 9 – September 2001]

Both books cover the same ground, namely the initial stages of the Vatican’s responses after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in January 1933, but do not extend their accounts to tackle the much more controversial period after 1939 when Pacelli was elected Pope and the Second World War broke out. Godman’s narrative has the merit of avoiding the kind of accusatory finger-pointing which marred several earlier works in English, and similarly does not indulge in the kind of wishful thinking which claims that history would have been so very different if only . . . .
Godman teaches at the University of Rome, while Napolitano does the same at the University of Urbino, and is here assisted by an experienced Italian journalist. These latter pair are more defensive, seeking to offset the torrent of aspersions, legends, accusations or downright lies which they, rightly, believe have distorted the picture of the Vatican’s pre-1939 diplomacy.

But in their haste to make use of the few, hitherto unseen documents from these new files, both authors fail to mention that, for the period of Pius XI’s reign, much is already known.The origins of the 1933 Concordat has been fully explored. The major documents subsequently sent from the Vatican to the German government, protesting against the breaches of this Concordat, were all published in Germany thirty years ago. And the background to the Papal Encyclical „Mit brennender Sorge” of March 1937 is also well known. So it is misleading, to say the least, for Godman or his publishers to suggest that his book Reveals the New Story from Inside the Secret Archives. And Napolitano and Tornielli certainly, in their short account, do not even begin to give us tutta la verita su Pio XII.

Godman’s title is equally misleading in that we are not given any information about Hitler, or his religious policies, or even about the planning and execution of the nefarious repression and persecution which the German Catholic Church suffered in these years. His focus is solely on the Vatican and its responses to the Nazi threat. Godman sees three different ways in which the papal authories tried to meet this challenge. The first was the conclusion of the diplomatic Concordat in the sumer of 1933, which Cardinal Pacelli regarded as the successful completion of his labours over the previous decade. But the disadvantages soon became apparent when the Nazis made clear their deliberate refusal to abide by the Concordat’s terms. The second strategy – though this is an overblown term – was advocated by a maverick Austrian bishop, Hudal, then Rector of the German College in Rome. He argued for a closer association with the new German regime in a joint campaign against Bolsheviks and Jews. But he found no support from the Vatican hierarchy and even less in Berlin.

The third strategy was deliberated by the Holy Office, namely to attack the doctrinal errors of Nazi totalitarianism ideologically, as was done in the above-mentioned Encyclical in 1937. The only trouble was that the German Catholics ignored its warnings, and continued to believe that they could be good Catholics and good Nazis at the same time.

For the record, Godman and Napolitano have salvaged a few new documents, but provide no startling revelations which could possibly support the claims of their sub-titles. Godman’s bibliography and footnotes are excellent and his prose style commendable. But his final chapter, which examines the Vatican debates, as to whether or not Hitler should be excommunicated, is a weak way of ending this brief account of the Curia’s deliberations. For their part, Napolitano and Tornielli offer repeated expressions of exasperation at the deliberate misrepresentations by the Vatican’s critics, especially the accusations that Cardinal Pacelli was anti-semitic or pro-Nazi. In this they are perfectly justified and correct. But they add nothing new to the already well-known accounts of Pacelli’s statements and attitudes on the Jewish question.
No final verdict will be possible until the papers of Pacelli’s own pontificate from 1939 onwards are released. So these preliminary accounts can do little more than set the scene. Whether or not Pacelli, as Pope, demonstrated an excess of diplomatic prudence or an excess of political cowardice still remains a debatable and unresolved question.
3) Forthcoming publications: (Contributed by William Doino)

a). The posthumous memoirs of Harold Tittmann Jr, the American Charge d’Affaires in Rome during World War II, have just been published by Doubleday (a major American publisher), under the title: Inside the Vatican of Pius XII: The Memoir of an American Diplomat During World War II, edited by his son (who was with his father during the German occupation of Rome). The book is one of the most important documents on Pius to appear in the last twenty-five years–at least since the publication of the last volume of the Holy See’s Actes et Documents of the Second World War (11 volumes, 1965-1981).Tittmann, assistant to Myron Taylor, was a first-hand witness to Pius XII’s conduct during the war–for which he expresses support, appreciation and admiration. It is a remarkable memoir, vital to the debate about Pius XII. Indeed, most of the arguments still made against Pius are analyzed and knocked down by Tittmann, one by one, in a restrained, persuasive manner. The fact that Tittmann was an Episcopalian, not Catholic, gives him added credibility– since he cannot be accused of being emotionally attached to the Church. Tittmann’s praise of Pius is striking because certain of the pope’s detractors (e.g., Saul Friedlander and John Cornwell) have quoted Tittmann’s dispatches out of context, suggesting Tittmann was frustrated by the Holy See’s wartime policy. But the memoir clarifies these dispatches, providing proper context, and makes clear that Tittmann believes that Pius XII “detested the Nazi ideology and everything it stood for” and that “the Holy Father chose the better path” and “thereby saved many lives.” (pp. 122-124).
b) Later this year, Lexington Books will publish The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII, edited by Joseph Bottum and David G. Dalin, which includes my [Doino’s] 80,000-word annotated bibliography. The entire book is close to 300 pages. Below is a link to Lexington’s website, announcing its forthcoming publication, followed by the comments of four distinguished Jewish scholars, involved in Catholic-Jewish relations.
Sincerely, William Doino Jr.

http://www.lexingtonbooks.com/Catalog/Reviews.shtml?command=Search&db=^DB/CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0739109065
“The contributors to this important volume have made judicious arguments in defense of the actions of Pope Pius XII before, during, and after the Holocaust. These arguments deserve an equally judicious hearing from non-Catholics–especially from Jews–who need to know how they are to judge this pope when they remember an unforgetable event in their own history and in the history of the West. Catholics, too, need to make equally judicious use of these arguments in their own deliberations about the possible canonization of Pius XII.”˜David Novak, University of Toronto

“Rabbi David Dalin’s omnibus review in the February 26, 2001, Weekly Standard . . .opened and changed my mind. To see it here at the center of this fine collection, buttressed by William Doino’s astonishing bibliography, is a great pleasure. David Dalin and Joseph Bottum are indeed friends of truth.”˜David Klinghoffer, author of The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism and Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History

“Stouthearted courage and vast wisdom are vital in those who come to denounce the grievous defamation of a good man. The result is The Pius War, this compelling book that deals a devastating blow to those who claim to be combating anti-Semitism yet descend into deceit, hate, and anti-Christianism. Read it and find yourself stirred to indignation at how the smear of secularism stained a righteous reputation, and be inspired by these brave authors who herein right a historic wrong. “˜Rabbi Daniel Lapin, President, Toward Tradition

“This volume provides a valuable corrective to the over the top “Pope bashing” so prevelant in politically correct academic circles.
Taken as a whole the contributors’ critique of the recent attacks on Pope Pius X11’s conduct during the World War 11 offers a compelling case for the defense. The annotated bibliography of the dispute is an indespensible vade mecum for future scholars.”˜Marshall Breger , Catholic University of America

With very best wishes for the summer holidays
Sincerely,
John S. Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

 

Newsletter — June 2004— Vol. X, no. 6

Dear Colleagues,

John Conway is on holiday this month, so he has asked me to
assist with the June 2004 Newsletter. I am very happy to do so,
and therefore take the opportunity to send you two book reviews
on the topic of contemporary Christian-Jewish relations. I should
be glad to have any comments you may care to send me to the
following address: mhockeno@skidmore.edu 16Sincerely,
Matthew Hockenos, Dept. of History, Skidmore College,
Saratoga Springs, New York, US

Contents:

Book Reviews

1) Marc A. Krell, Intersecting Pathways: Modern Jewish
Theologians in Conversation with Christianity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
2) Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jensen, Jews and Christians:
People of God (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans
Publishing, 2003).

1) Krell, Intersecting Pathways

Marc Krell’s Intersecting Pathways: Modern Jewish Theologians
in Conversation with Christianity (2003) is an insightful and
timely contribution to the growing number of studies on the
contemporary Jewish-Christian encounter. Krell analyzes the
theologies of four twentieth-century Jewish thinkers: Franz
Rosenzweig (1886-1929), Hans Joachim Schoeps (1909-1980),
Richard Rubenstein (1924-), and Irving Greenberg (1933-), and
concludes that each of these theologians developed his (Jewish)
theology in continuous conflict and conversation with Christian
thought and culture. “Ultimately, the works of these four
Jewish-Christian interlopers demonstrate that modern Jewish
identity is predicated in some way upon its ambivalent encounter
with Christianity” (11). Yet their willingness to reconstruct
Jewish identity and to reformulate Jewish theology through a
dialogue with Christianity did not resulted in a dilution of Jewish
identity. Rather, Krell argues, these four theologians continually
reestablish Jewish uniqueness through cultural and theological
interaction at the boundaries between Christianity and Judaism.
Krell’s methodology is that of cultural studies and his book
liberally employs the terminology and jargon of this field.

Theology for Krell is a cultural activity in that it is constructed in
the context of continuous socio-cultural interaction and power
dynamics. “Instead of being an indisputable and normative
discourse,” Krell writes, ” theology is socially and historically
conditioned just like all other human activities” (4). He believes
that the ongoing construction of modern Jewish identities is
generated by a unique dialectic between Judaism and Christianity
in which Jews define themselves through a simultaneous
attraction and repulsion to the dominant Christian culture. The
identity construction of both Christians and Jews by
twentieth-century theologians has involved the displacing and
realigning of borders traditionally associated with Jewish and
Christian identities. While acknowledging that the boundaries
between Judaism and Christianity are more defined today than in
late antiquity, Krell maintains that Rosenzweig, Schoeps,
Rubenstein, and Greenberg engaged in a theological discourse
with their Christian counterparts that blurred long-established
boundaries between Judaism and Christianity.

Of the four theologians Krell examines, Franz Rosenzweig was
the only one whose theology was developed in its entirety before
Hitler came to power and thus does not struggle at least to the
same degree as Rubenstein and Greenberg — with Christian
antisemitism. Rosenzweig was attracted to Christianity early in
his life in part because he viewed Judaism as an anachronistic set
of rituals and in part because he believed that the Christian
notion of divine revelation could provide him with a living
relationship to God. Although he nearly converted in 1913, he
decided to remain a Jew and went on to develop a theology that
reflected his love-hate relationship with Christianity.

Just as the Reformed Swiss theologian Karl Barth and some of
his colleagues were critical of the secularization and historicism
of Christianity in the early twentieth century, so too was
Rosenzweig a critic of similar trends by liberal Jews. Before the
outbreak of the First World War Rosenzweig began to stress the
uniqueness of the Jews because they stood apart from world
history as God’s chosen people. The eternal, transcendental,
metahistorical, and divine predisposition of Israel became a
constitutive element in his theology. A second and
complementary element in Rosenzweig’s theology was the
crucial role of the Church in spreading the Word of God to the
pagan community. According to Krell, “Rosenzweig describes
the Jews as depending on Christians to eternalize or redeem the
world through proselytization” (33). Although Rosenzweig
acknowledges that Christians have an important role to play in
this-worldly redemption, he is also critical of the Christian claim
that their revelation is complete and that the Jews should join
them in recognizing the revelation of God in Christ the Messiah.

For this reason Rosenzweig does not leave the responsibility of
addressing the unredeemed world to Christians alone. Through
prayer, suffering, and ethical behavior, he contends, Jews can
also participate in bringing about redemption without following
Christ.

The complementary role that Christians and Jews play in
Rosenzweig’s theology does not, as some have argued, result in a
“two-covenant theology,” whereby Jews and Christians
acknowledge their connectedness but maintain their distinctive
covenants. Krell argues that Rosenzweig never pushes his
theology to this point. For Rosenzweig, Christian and Jewish
identities were constructed through “a judgment against the
other” (15). Krell writes, “Rosenzweig clearly illustrated the
dialectic between attraction and repulsion by Jews and Christians
for each other when admitting that there is a ëformal relation’
between Judaism and Christianity while also maintaining that
there is no ëliving relation’ between Jewish and Christian
theologies. [Rosenzweig] portrayed Judaism and Christianity as
being intimately bound together by God, while at the same time
claiming that God ëhas set enmity between the two for all time'”
(36). In short, Jews, not Christians, possess divine truth, and it is
the Christians’ role to recognize this and attest to it. According
to Krell, Rosenzweig neither crosses the boundary between
Judaism and Christianity nor does he reaffirm the existing
boundaries but rather “realigns those that are already shifting”
(41).

Hans Joachim Schoeps, on the other hand, does more than realign
the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity, he develops a
hybrid theology that both Jews and Christians have sharply
criticized. Perhaps even more than Schoeps’s amalgamation of
Jewish and Christian thought, it was his admiration for Prussian
politics and culture that earned him the wrath of many of his
Jewish colleagues. In 1933 he founded the Deutscher Vortrupp
(German Vanguard) to promote Prussian-German patriotism and
to work toward a Jewish-Nazi political rapprochement. Despite
Nazi antisemitism Schoeps remained steadfastly committed to
serving Germany as a Jew. “My own position concerning the
German fatherland remains unchanged,” he wrote after the Nazis
came to power. “I have no other fatherland than the one which is
called Germany; and I cannot serve it in any other meaningful
way than that as a full Jew . . . .”[1] The Nazis, of course, were
not interested in Schoeps’s love for the fatherland. Schoeps was
forced to flee to Sweden in 1938 after the Nazis had refused an
offer by members of his Vortrupp to serve in the German Army
in 1935 and had arrested Schoeps in 1936. Although the Nazis
had killed his parents in concentration camps, he returned to
Germany in 1946, accepted an appointment at the University of
Erlangen in 1947, and called for a return of the Prussian
monarchy. Until his death in 1980

Schoeps was dogged by Jewish critics, some of whom accused him of being a Nazi and others of being Protestant.
It is true that Schoeps’s theology drew more heavily on Protestant
and Lutheran beliefs than Rosenzweig’s. He even described his
own theology as a “critical-Protestant Judaism.” Karl Holl’s
interpretation of Luther and aspects of Karl Barth’s dialectical
theology were especially influential. But Krell insists that while
Schoeps borrowed from the theologies of Holl, Barth, and other
Protestants, he did so without losing his Jewish identity. Like
Rosenzweig, Schoeps believed that Jews and Christians had
distinct roles to play in the process of redemption, but unlike
Rosenzweig, he did not subordinate the role of Christians to the
role of Jews. Jews, Schoeps maintained, were as much a part of
the fallen world as Christians and each stood before God as
sinners. He also believed that both the Synagogue and the
Church had a mutual responsibility to proclaim God to their
unredeemed communities. He acknowledged Jesus as the Son of
God for Christians but countered that Jews were the sons of God.

In this direct comparison of the divinity of Christ and Israel, Krell
believes that Schoeps crossed over “the essential boundaries
constructed between Judaism and Christianity by his Jewish and
Christian contemporaries” (65). Schoeps did not, however,
abandon Judaism. He proclaimed after the war that “every Jew
today, as in the past, must reject Jesus as the Messiah of Israel. . .
. We are, however, prepared to recognize that in some way,
which we do not understand, a Messianic significance for
non-Jewish mankind is attached to the figure of [Jesus Christ].
We can go this far without transgressing against the absoluteness
of the revelation on Mount Sinai (valid only for Israel); we can
go this far and still remain wholly and authentically rooted in the
revealed truth of Judaism, which neither needs, nor is susceptible
to, any completion.”[2]

Although Schoeps was neither a Nazi nor a Protestant as his
critics had charged, he did develop a theology with many
similarities to twentieth-century conservative Lutherans, many of
whom had compromised with Nazism. In contrast to Rosenzweig
who maintained that because of Israel’s eternal status as God’s
chosen people they were independent from history, Schoeps
maintained that Jews had a crucial role to play in history. He
urged Jews to participate in the politics of the Prussian state,
which he characterized in classic Lutheran fashion as one of the
divine orders of creation. Since Schoeps believed that the
Prussian leaders represented God in this world, it followed that
Jews had a responsibility to serve Prussia for spiritual as well as
historical reasons. Although Jews and Christians both had this
responsibility, Jews had a distinct role because they possessed
sacred blood through God’s divine promise and as a result had a
“predisposition to salvation.” Although Schoeps would agree
with Rosenzweig that the Jewish people have an eternal
ahistorical status as a result of their chosenness, he differs from
Rosenzweig when he calls on Jews to consciously enter history
and thereby activate God’s promise. Krell writes, “by portraying
Judaism more as a religion than an ethnicity, Schoeps wanted to
show that Jews are members of the Prussian nation based on a
religious decision to work with the German people in the
universal process of redemption. . . . Schoeps encouraged Jews to
make a religious confession to the Prussian idea of societal order
as reflecting the order of creation” (52-3). Israel’s chosenness
gave it a special role in German history and in the process of
redemption. But it was a role that complemented the role of
Christians in a shared redemptive process.

Whereas the Holocaust seems to have had little affect on
Schoeps’s optimistic view of Jews and Christians working
together to redeem the world, the Holocaust is the central event
in Richard Rubenstein’s post-Holocaust theology. Rubenstein is
president emeritus and distinguished professor of religion at the
University of Bridgeport. He is renowned among Jewish and
Christian scholars for his controversial and thought-provoking
contributions to the Jewish-Christian dialogue and debate on the
meaning of the Holocaust for our understanding of God. In After
Auschwitz (1966) he asked: “How can Jews believe in an
omnipotent, beneficent God after Auschwitz?” He concluded
that they cannot because belief in God as the omnipotent actor in
history ultimately leads to the conclusion that the Holocaust was
part of God’s salvation plan. Krell writes, “Rubenstein would
rather interpret historical Jewish suffering culminating in the
Holocaust as tragic misfortune rather than a deserved punishment
from an autocratic God” (87).

Rubenstein reached this conclusion after reflecting on a
conversation he had had with Heinrich Gruber, a Lutheran who
had risked his life to save Jews during the Holocaust and had
worked tirelessly on behalf of Jewish-Christian reconciliation
after the war. Gruber had expressed the belief to Rubenstein that
the Holocaust was God’s way of punishing Israel for rejecting
and crucifying Christ. This interpretation of the Holocaust was
not uncommon among postwar German Lutherans and some
ultra-Orthodox Jews. The Gruber encounter prompted
Rubenstein to declare that the myths by which Christians and
Jews define themselves and one another were the root of the
problem and ultimately responsible for the Holocaust.

Rubenstein believed that the Christian myths that portrayed Jews
as Christ-killers and taught contempt for Jews created an
atmosphere in which the Nazis’ racial antisemitism found
widespread appeal. But more controversially he was also critical
of the excessively rigid expectations and punitive nature of
rabbinic Judaism. “[Rubenstein] portrayed the development of a
servile Jewish consciousness due to behavioral restraints imposed
by the Rabbis who, he argued, interpreted every misfortune as a
deserved punishment by an angry Father God” (72). Rubenstein
urged both communities to demythologize their religions in order
to open the way for a true dialogue. Both Jews and Christians
needed to rethink their images of Jews and see them as “neither
more nor less than any other men, sharing the pain, the joy, and
the fated destiny which Earth alone has meted out to all her
children.” Despite his call for the demythologization of
Christianity and Judaism, it is Krell’s contention that Rubenstein
perpetuates these myths in his critique of rabbinic Judaism.

In After Auschwitz Rubenstein proclaimed the death of the
omnipotent historical God and reconstructed the divine image as
“a God who unfolds in nature yet is ontologically distinct from
it” (86). Rubenstein stated in 1970, “I would like to offer my
own confession of faith after Auschwitz. I am a pagan. To be a
pagan means to find once again one’s roots as a child of Earth
and to see one’s own existence as wholly and totally an earthly
existence.”[3] Although Rubenstein denied the existence of a
historical God, Krell does not believe that Rubenstein separated
himself entirely from Judaism.

In Rubenstein’s post-Holocaust theology God is no longer an
omnipotent, transcendent, and punitive God but rather one who is
amoral, immanent, feminine, and transcends good and evil.
Gone is the God of biblical and rabbinic Judaism, which
Rubenstein associated with a wrathful God who judges and
punishes. Rubenstein’s post-Holocaust God of nature draws a
good deal on the Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich and
Rubenstein’s reading of the apostle Paul. Rubenstein’s theology,
according to Krell, sought to “transcend Jewish Christian
boundaries and achieve a universal oneness with all humanity in
a world immanently permeated by divinity” (100). By
deconstructing the dehumanizing myths so central to the
Jewish-Christian rivalry, Rubenstein attempted to build a
community that focused on shared human traits as opposed to
combative religions. Although Rubenstein challenged both Jews
and Christians to abandon their mutually destructive religious
myths, he employs anti-Jewish Christian myths in his critique of
rabbinic Judaism.

Irving Greenberg, like Rubenstein, believes that the Holocaust
marked a major turning point in Jewish-Christian relations. He
encourages both Jewish and Christian theologians to develop a
joint theological response to the Holocaust in conversations with
each other. In contrast to Rubenstein, whom he called an atheist,
Greenberg continues to maintain the belief, common to Jews and
Christians, that God acts in history. However, in his
groundbreaking essay, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism,
Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust” (1974), he
concluded that the covenant between God and the Jews had been
shattered in the Holocaust. God did not keep His share of the
covenant by protecting the Jews. The Holocaust then marked the
end of the covenant that had been established between God and
Israel at Sinai.

However, he interpreted the founding of the State of Israel in
1948 as a decision by the majority of Jews to voluntarily accept
the covenant again. According to Greenberg, the Jews have
responded to God’s call to take responsibility for themselves and
to actively work to prevent another Holocaust. In “Cloud of
Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” Greenberg wrote, “Israel’s faith in the
God of History demands that an unprecedented event of
destruction be matched by an unprecedented act of redemption,
and this has happened.”[4] In this act, Jews began to take control
of their own redemption and in doing so redistribute the power
relationship between Jews and Christians. Greenberg also
suggested that the Holocaust and the founding of the State of
Israel marked a shift in the locus of God’s presence to the secular
world. Greenberg referred to this as a “secular revelation” and
argued that it “shifted the balance of Jewish activity and concern
to the secular enterprises of society building, social justice, and
human politics” (111). Thus Greenberg sees the Holocaust as a
revelatory event that ushers in a new covenant and establishes a
new orientation between God and the Jews, on the one hand, and
Jews and Christians, on the other.

Greenberg’s theology offers a “new organic model” for the
post-Holocaust relationship between Jews and Christians. In
dialogue with Christian theologians A. Roy Eckardt and Paul van
Buren, Greenberg influenced them and was in turn influenced by
them. All three drew a direct connection between the Church’s
anti-Judaism and the rise of Nazi antisemitism. Rather than
combat anti-Judaism by calling for the demythologization of
Judaism and Christianity as Rubenstein did, Eckardt, van Buren,
and Greenberg interpreted the core myths in new ways. Rather
than interpret the crucifixion as a model for redemptive suffering,
they argued that after the Holocaust the cross had become a
symbol of degradation. In the wake of immeasurable suffering
Jews endured during the Nazi period Greenberg believed that the
redemptive nature of suffering had to be called into question and
he encouraged Christians to abandon their glorification of the
suffering servant model. Although Greenberg encourages a
dialogical relationship between Christians and Jews, Krell
believes he “unwittingly reversed the power relations between
Judaism and Christianity by attempting to make Christianity
more rabbinic or this-worldly after the Holocaust. Instead of
respecting the faith claims of Christianity, Greenberg appeared to
subordinate and incorporate them in a Jewish framework” (134).

It is difficult to dispute Krell’s overarching thesis that these four
theologians constructed their theologies through an unusually
high degree of debate and dialogue with Christian theologians as
well as deep reflection on the relationship between Christian and
Jewish identity. Krell, however, is not merely arguing that these
four thinkers deliberately sought to develop their theologies
through a conversation with Christianity, but rather that Jewish
theologians who seek to develop an all-encompassing theology
and who seek to formulate the basic characteristics of Jewish
identity will out of necessity come into intimate contact with
Christianity.

Endnotes

[1] Gary Lease, “Hans Joachim Schoeps,” in Yale Companion to
Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096-1996,
edited by Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997), 659.
[2] Hans Joachim Schoeps, “A Religious Bridge between Jew
and Christian: Shall We Recognize Two Covenants,”
Commentary (1950), 129, 131.
[3] Richard L. Rubenstein, “Some Perspectives on Religious
Faith after Auschwitz,” in
The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust ed. Franklin H.
Littell and Hubert G. Locke (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1974), 267.
[4] Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism,
Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Auschwitz:
Beginning of a New Era? ed. Eva Fleischner (NY: KTAV
Publishing House, 1974), 32.

2) Braaten and Jenson, Jews and Christians

Jews and Christians: People of God (2003), edited by Carl E.
Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, is a collection of eight scholarly
essays, which originated as presentations at a conference in
Minneapolis in 2001 organized by the Center for Catholic and
Evangelical Theology. For reasons of space only half of the
essays can be reviewed in detail here. In addition to the essays
by some of the most prominent Jewish and Christian scholars
engaged in the ongoing dialogue over the relationship between
Judaism and Christianity, the volume also includes a
mini-symposium on Dabru Emet (“Speak the Truth”), the historic
Jewish statement on Christians and Christianity issued in 2000
and signed by nearly 200 Jewish scholars, and a personal essay
by Reidar Dittmann in which he reflects on his experience in
Buchenwald. Although this extraordinary volume is highly
recommended for anyone familiar with the literature in this
rapidly expanding field, some of the essays are theologically
quite challenging and the collection offers neither a systematic
nor historical approach to the topic. Despite these drawbacks,
one is immediately struck by two impressions: the sophisticated
understanding that Jewish contributors have for Christianity and
Christian contributors for Judaism and the straightforwardness
and ease with which these Jewish and Christian scholars now
exchange ideas and opinions. For those who desire a more
systematic approach that emphasizes the work being done by
Jewish scholars, I would suggest Christianity in Jewish Terms
(2000) edited by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter
Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Singer. Christianity
in Jewish Terms consists of ten chapters with essays that address
key theological concepts in Judaism and Christianity, such as
commandment, worship, suffering, sin, and redemption. Each
chapter also contains responses by prominent Christian scholars.

A useful introductory chapter on “Christian-Jewish Interactions
over the Ages” by Robert Chazan sets the historical context.
Jews and Christians begins with a thoughtful essay by Robert
Jenson, the senior scholar for research at the Center for
Theological Inquiry in Princeton, which attempts to outline a new
Christian theology of Judaism. Although dramatic changes and
significant progress have taken place in Christian-Jewish
relations since the Holocaust and the founding of the State of
Israel, there is still a sense among some Christian and Jewish
scholars that Christianity urgently needs to rethink its theology of
Judaism. This volume in general and Jenson’s essay in particular
attempt to address this deficiency. For Jenson, “A Christian
theology of Judaism will be at its center an attempt to understand
Judaism’s claim and in so doing to understand its own better”
(3). But for Christians to understand Judaism’s claim is not a
simple matter. While Christian theologians have relied on the
theory of supersessionism — the claim that with the resurrection
of Jesus Christ the church has displaced or superseded Israel as
God’s covenantal partner — for their understanding of Judaism,
Jenson notes that supersessionism is increasingly out of fashion
as a result of the rethinking of Christian theology in the wake of
the Holocaust. “We see ever more clearly how Jewish the
Christian claims and fundamental patterns of understanding are,
indeed how very much the predominant gentile part of the church
is indeed grafted onto someone else’s tree.” To emphasize his
point Jenson offers the rather startling gloss on John 1:14: “The
Torah became flesh and dwelt among us” (6).

His more systematic attempt to replace the supersessionist
interpretation of Judaism involves reinterpreting the New
Testament claim that through the resurrection of Jesus God
marked him as the Messiah and the fulfillment of God’s promise
to Israel. Jenson acknowledges that “this claim can be
understood in a way that . . . takes Israel’s mission as concluded
with the life, death, and resurrection of this one Israelite” (6). In
contrast Jenson proposes that we understand the church not as the
fulfillment of the promises to Israel but as “a detour from the
expected straight path of the Lord’s intentions, a detour to
accommodate the mission to Jews and gentiles” (7). Since it is
quite clear that the resurrection of Jesus did not bring the
Kingdom of God in all its glory, it follows that the church is not
the kingdom but a detour on God’s way. Jenson then suggests
that the church may also see Judaism as a detour “taken by God
on his way to the final fulfillment” (8).

The rest of Jenson’s essay attempts to address why God would
ordain the Judaic detour alongside the Christian detour. His
answer is threefold. First, he proposes that God “wills the
Judaism of Torah-obedience as that which alone can and does
hold the lineage of Abraham and Sarah together during the time
of detour” (9). That is, if Jews had accepted Jesus as the Messiah
and had entered the church as was expected by the apostle Paul
and later Christians, it would have brought to an end a people
identified by descent from Abraham and Sarah. This could not
be the case because the promises God made to Israel, promises
not yet fulfilled, were promises based on the lineage of Abraham
and Sarah.

Jenson’s second proposal begins by observing that since the
church does not understand or adhere to God’s Law in the same
way as Orthodox Jews, Christians are not marked off as different
in the same sense as observant Jews. Should Jews join the
church and abandon their interpretation of God’s Law, the Jews
would “vanish from sight as Jews.” Thus Jenson recommends
that any Christian theology of Judaism acknowledge that God,
during the time after the resurrection of Jesus and before the final
fulfillment of his divine promise, wants a community that
appears different to the rest of the world because it studies and
obeys the Torah as Judaism does. During this time of detour “the
church is not able herself to bear such exegesis, and this is not a
failing” (11).

Jenson’s final explanation for the existence of two communities,
who simultaneously claim to be God’s chosen people awaiting
the fulfillment of God’s promises, is that God wills that “the
embodiment of the risen Christ is whole only in the form of the
church and an identifiable community of Abraham and Sarah’s
descendents” (13). The church traditionally teaches that it is the
body of the risen Jesus Christ. Jenson, however, is reminding the
church that the Word that became flesh in Jesus Christ is part of
the lineage of Abraham and Sarah. Thus: “the Torah became
flesh and dwelt among us.”

Many of the themes raised by Jenson, in particular the need to
acknowledge the distinctiveness of Judaism and Christianity
while at the same time recognizing their common roots, are also
addressed in this volume by Marvin R. Wilson in his essay “Our
Father Abraham: A Point of Theological Convergence and
Divergence for Christians and Jews.” He stresses the central role
that Abraham has played and continues to play for Christians and
Jews. Wilson, the author of a highly acclaimed text on this topic,
Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith (1989),
first establishes the importance of Abraham to both religious
traditions and then compares and contrasts Jewish and Christian
interpretations of central Abrahamic themes, including election,
covenant, and faith.

The importance of Abraham to Judaism is obvious; he is the
“first Jew,” the “founder of the faith,” and the one with whom
God enters a covenantal relationship. God continually tests
Abraham and Abraham passes all the tests. In the Torah
Abraham is referred to as a prophet, God’s friend, and God’s
servant. He is a symbol of hospitality, justice, nobility of
character, and loyalty. Wilson writes, “Judaism and the Jewish
people would not be as they are today without the revolutionary,
ground-breaking influence of father Abraham” (47).

Christians also praise Abraham and incorporate him and his
image into Christian theology. Although he is described in the
New Testament as the “founder of the church,” the “father of
all,” early Christian theology, beginning with the early Christian
controversy with Judaism, increasingly portrayed Abraham as
abandoning the Jews. Moreover, the supersessionist claim that
God cancelled his covenant with Abraham in favor of a new
covenant with the church “sought to remove [Jews] permanently
from salvation history” (51). Jews, of course, point to the eternal
covenant God established with Abraham and his descendants in
Genesis 15 and 17. God initiated the covenantal relationship
while Abraham was the passive beneficiary of God’s promise.
Wilson writes, “The unilateral, unconditional character of the
covenantal agreement assures Abraham and his posterity that
God’s relationship with his people is permanent” (54).

Circumcision was instituted in Genesis 17 as an active response
and external sign of one’s commitment to God’s covenant with
Abraham and the values and concepts associated with covenant
transcendence, redemption, and justice. Although Christians
abandoned the practice of circumcision, they did not entirely
abandon the concept. Wilson explains that Paul turned
circumcision into a metaphor or spiritual concept when he speaks
of a “circumcision of the heart.” For Paul and most Christians
this refers to the inward, faith-based commitment to Christ.
Those who put their faith in Christ are said to have been
spiritually circumcised. By abandoning the ritual practice of
circumcision — the so-called covenant of Abraham — “the church
was understood by the Jewish community to be saying that it no
longer considered itself part of traditional Judaism but rather
apart from it” (56). Nevertheless Wilson emphasizes that the
decision to establish a new covenant based on faith alone was not
a rejection of Abraham and in fact “resulted in significantly
advancing the Abrahamic promise” (56). In the end, there is
some difference in Christian and Jewish interpretations of
Abraham but ultimately both acknowledge and praise Abraham’s
eschatological role.

Richard John Neuhaus, editor-in-chief of First Things and the
president of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, also
reflects on the eschatological role of Jews in his essay on the
meaning of Jesus’s words in John 4:19-22: “for salvation is from
the Jews.” He points out that very few Christian theologians
have rigorously considered this striking statement and those who
have tend to play down its significance by interpreting it to mean
that salvation might proceed, as a point of departure, from the
Jews but the Jews are not the source of salvation.

Neuhaus, as one might expect, understands this statement
differently. For Neuhaus “salvation is from the Jews not as a
ëpoint of departure’ but as the continuing presence and promise
of a point of arrival a point of arrival that we, Christians and
Jews, together pray that we will together reach” (77). To be sure,
Neuhaus acknowledges that Christians believe that Jesus Christ is
the redeemer and that he has come and is with us now, yet he
also stresses the sense of expectation that Christians have in
common with Jews. He quotes approvingly from David Novak’s
Jewish-Christian Dialogue (1989) that, “From creation and
revelation comes our faith that God has not and will not abandon
us or the world, that the promised redemption is surely yet to
come” (76). Neuhaus would like to see the statement “salvation
is from the Jews” given a more prominent place in the
Jewish-Christian dialogue because it “nicely combines the ënow’
and ënot yet’ of life lived eschatologically” (76). Although he
does not want to collapse the distinctions between Judaism and
Christianity, he insists that the distinct traditions are reflections
of differences within a larger story. That story is the story of
witness to the one God of Israel and his one plan of salvation.
David Novak, one of the editors of Christianity in Jewish Terms
(2000) and the director of the Jewish Studies Program at the
University of Toronto, is a frequent and insightful contributor to
the discussion on the relationship between Judaism and
Christianity. In his essay in Jews and Christians, “From
Supersessionism to Parallelism in Jewish-Christian Dialogue,”
Novak argues that the rejection of Christian supersessionism and
Jewish counter-supersessionism, is a necessary precondition for a
more positive Christian theology of Judaism and a more positive
Jewish theology of Christianity. (Jewish
counter-supersessionism, according to Novak, is the Jewish claim
that the Christian denial of God’s covenant with the Jewish
people is equivalent to rejecting God.) Novak believes that this
precondition has largely been met and has finally opened the way
for Christian and Jewish theologians to talk theology with each
other without the accusations that marked the Christian-Jewish
dialogue in the past.

Novak asserts that it is in the best interest of Christians to
develop a positive theology of Judaism because they can learn
from Judaism, in particular the lesson that the Jews have survived
centuries of persecution because God does not break His
promises. For example, in certain parts of the world where
Christian spiritual and physical survival is precarious at best, an
understanding of the theological and physical struggles of the
Jews could provide a valuable example. Similarly, Novak
maintains that Jews must engage Christians theologically because
a positive theological understanding of the other’s religion
increases the possibility of effective partnerships in times of
need.

He uses the example of a small group of Canadians who are
demanding that the state make circumcision of infant boys illegal
because they believe it is a form of mutilation on an unwilling
participant. Although it is unlikely that such legislation would
ever be enacted, Novak wonders who besides Canadian Jews,
would come to the defense of the right of Jews to circumcise
their sons. Although Muslims also practice circumcision, they do
so as a cultural practice. Moreover, whereas Jews consider
circumcision to be a direct command from God and “the sign of
covenant,” Muslims do not practice a covenantal religion.
Additionally, Novak speculates, Muslims would not be
particularly supportive given the present antagonistic political
climate between Jews and Muslims. Christians, on the other
hand, are a far more likely ally because they “can fully
understand [circumcision’s] covenantal significance for Jews”
(106). Jews and Christians have something in common that Jews
and Muslims do not – the theological concepts of covenant and
election. The need for a Jewish theology of Christianity then
becomes particularly apparent when there is a need to call upon
another community that understands you and respects (even if
they disagree with) your religious practices and beliefs.
Jenson, Wilson, Neuhaus, and the other contributors to this
volume would most likely agree with Novak’s final words: “It is
best, both historically and theologically, to look upon ourselves
[Jews and Christians] as two traditions, related to the same
sources, which have developed, often in the same worldly
locations, with a striking parallelism” (112). This conclusion
represents what appears to be a growing consensus among those
who engage in the Jewish-Christian dialogue. In fact, one could
view this collection of essays as an attempt by a group of eminent
scholars to discuss a variety of these parallels.
Matthew Hockenos

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

 

Newsletter — May 2004— Vol. X, no. 5

Dear Friends,

A thought for the month:
“In the eyes of some commentators. the only correct view is
the view from Auschwitz. But it is in no sense to do injustice to the
millions who were murdered, and the survivors who continue to
suffer, if we describe this methodology as utterly unhistorical.
History is not a series of events laid down in advance: the fact that
they happened as they did does not mean they could not have
happened otherwise. If history is inevitable, or governed by laws – if
there are no partings of the ways and no mistaken decisions – then
what is the point of studying it?”
Irmtrud Wojak, reviewing Nicholas Berg
German History, Vol 22, no.1,2004, p.101ff

Next month’s issue is being compiled and edited by Dr Matthew
Hockenos, Skidmore College, New York. I am once again most
grateful for his help while I am on holiday in Europe. The
subsequent issue for July/August will be sent out in mid-July

Contents:

1) Book reviews

a) Williams, Holy Spy
b) Hein, Churches in Saxony 1945-49
c) Fennell, The Russians on Athos
d) Nehring, Orientalismus und Mission

2) Journal articles

a) Morris, Death of Christian Britain
b) Welinski-Kiehl, Reformation History in the GDR
c) Kenez. Hungarian Communists and Catholics.

1a) Alex Williams, Holy Spy. Student Ministry in Eastern Europe. 
Budapest: Harmat Publishing/Tain,Scotland:Christian Focus
Publication 2003. 207 pp.ISBN 963 9148 92 X / 1 85792 906 3

Twenty years before the collapse of the communist empire in
1989, a young Englishman began to tour the universities of Eastern
Europe as a member of the field staff of the International Federation
of Evangelical Students. Alex Williams’ mandate was to contact
Christian students, counsel and encourage them in their witness,
arrange camps, seminars and conferences, and act as liaison with
similar groups in other countries. Ostensibly touring Poland,
Hungary and Czechoslovakia as visitors, Alex and his Hungarian
wife exercised a peripatetic ministry with great enthusiasm and
dedication. Since none of the communist governments was in favour
of such activities, it is hardly surprising that Williams was suspected
of being engaged in espionage on behalf of some western power.
Even some of his friends thought the same. Hence the title of this
engaging book. In fact, he conducted a rather traditional itinerant
ministry along the lines of John Wesley, using a battered old English
car instead of a horse. But like Wesley, his object was to build up
the faithful in their devotion and service to Jesus Christ.

This ministry was much helped by the foresight of the then
General Secretary of I.F.E.S. who purchased a delapidated
mediaeval castle in the middle of Austria from an impoverished
nobleman. High up on the hillside above the town of Mittersill, the
Schloss has a grand panoramic view of the Alpine peaks to the
south, and fine vistas of the Pinzgau valley flowing below. It was
intended to be a meeting place where individual students from the
beleagured communist countries could come for short refresher
courses and retreats, and mix with other students, both East and
West. The Schloss still provides these same opportunities, even
though the political situation has now radically changed. Possibly
today such a centre would be more appropriately situated in the
Carpathian mountains, but the supporting churches and communities
in Eastern Europe are still too poor to launch such endeavours.
Instead, Schloss Mittersill continues, with the help of Alex Williams
and his wife amongst others, to educate younger Christians in the
paths of discipleship so that they may return to the East European
lands as church builders and planters. The emphasis continues to be
on good Bible teaching, the techniques of evangelism, and how to
write and lead Bible studies.

Williams describes the physical, political and spiritual
difficulties which so many Christians from Eastern Europe
experienced, but he also records their later testimonies to these
encounters with other Christians as being highly significant in their
subsequent careers. He was frequently thrilled by the vision and
enthusiasm of these young Christian leaders struggling against the
official doctrines of atheistic materialism. These were the rewards
of student ministry in Eastern Europe in those days.
There is of course a certain nostalgia in Williams’ memoir,
with his descriptions of the excitements and risks taken in
organizing semi-clandestine meetings under the noses of the secret
police. And there are also some characteristic Evangelical attitudes,
such as his surprise on finding that members of the Orthodox
Church were keen on studying the Bible and had a deep love of the
Lord. But throughout, his recollections reflect his warm sympathy,
his capacity for friendship, and his energetic undertakings in the
service of Jesus Christ through the establishment and
encouragement of student ministries in Eastern Europe. JSC

b) Markus Hein. _Die saechsische Landeskirche nach dem Ende des
Zweiten Weltkrieges (1945-1948). Jahrbuch fuer deutsche
Kirchengeschichte Sonderband. Leipzig: Evangelische
Verlagsanstalt, 2002. 327 pp. Documents,index. EUR 11.50 (cloth),
ISBN 3-374-01918-8.

(This review was first distributed for H-German, March 31st 2004,
H-GERMAN@H-NET.MSU.EDU and is reproduced with the
author’s permission).

This study, originally a dissertation submitted at the
University of Leipzig, takes Saxony as an example of the
organizational problems facing the Protestant Church at a regional
level in the immediate post-war period and analyzes the steps taken
there to build up a new Church structure in a situation where there
were no existing structures in May 1945. The sixteenth “brown”
Synod in Saxony had dissolved itself in 1934 and the first post-war
synod was not constituted until April 1948.

Saxony was an example of one of the provincial regions of
the Protestant Church in which _Deutsche Christen_ were in control
of the Church hierarchy from 1933. Although various challenges to
this control came from the _Bekennende Kirche_ and also from a
substantial group in the middle, by 1937 they had established their
dominance over the whole hierarchy. This meant that in 1945 the
established figures in the Church had lost all credibility or were still
in exile. Saxony was, however, in a unique position initially, since
it was the only Church area to set up three organizational structures
in 1945, in Leipzig, Zwickau and Dresden. It was also, like
Brandenburg and Thuringia, split between two occupying
powers, the Soviet Union and the United States. The Americans did
not withdraw from Zwickau and Leipzig until the last week of June
1945, thereby fulfilling the previous agreement on zone frontiers,
and allowing Soviet troops to occupy western Saxony. These
problems, combined with the logistical hurdles provided by a
transport system which had collapsed, meant that attempts to
establish any unified policy across the whole of the Saxon Church
region in this early period were impossible to realize, even leaving
aside the ideological differences between different factions
within the Church.

Hein has used a wide range of archival sources, including
some not previously available or insufficiently analyzed. He is
particularly concerned to put right the false impression given by the
edited edition by Georg Prater of the memoirs of the third Bishop of
Saxony, Hugo Hahn, on the period of the _Kirchenkampf_. The
deficiencies of this edition had first been highlighted by Wilhelm
Niemoeller’s review in 1969. Prater had, for example, completely
excluded any references to Franz Lau, who had been responsible for
the leadership of the Church in the first two years after 1945, before
Hahn returned as Bishop from exile in 1947. It is clear from
this book that the essential work to de-nazify the Church hierarchy
was done by Lau before Hahn’s return. Hein refuses to speculate
about Prater’s motivation for ignoring Lau’s role, but he uses the
unreliability of primary sources on this period to highlight the
problem of coming to an objective assessment of the measures taken
by a regional Church to overcome the mistakes of the Church
hierarchy during the Nazi period. Hein also underlines the
importance of Erich Kotte, who had belonged to
the Consistorium before 1933 and had then been a member of the
Bekennende Kirche. Hein shows that Kotte was the most important
figure in the personnel decisions made after 1945, but Lau, who was
not identified strongly with either side between 1933 and 1945,
enabled Kotte to reconcile the different factions and allow some
pastors who had supported the Church hierarchy before 1945 to be
integrated into the post-war structures. However, only one
Superintendent, Willy Gerber in Chemnitz, remained in office. Hein
leaves open the question of how many opportunists were able to stay
in post in this context, thereby inviting parallels with the post-1990
period. As a result of Lau’s role it was therefore not the Bekennende
Kirche which played the leading role in Saxony immediately after
1945, as it did in other Church regions. This was only the case after
Hahn’s return in 1947.

One area missing from the book, which I would have
expected to have been at least mentioned, concerns the fate of the
Sorbian pastors transferred from the bilingual parishes in eastern
Saxony during the Third Reich and the role played by the Church
hierarchy in those transfers. Sorbian pastors who survived the war
often had difficulties in returning immediately to their original
parishes, as they had been replaced by German pastors who were
sometimes reluctant to give up their parishes. They also faced
opposition and prejudice within the Church hierarchy to the creation
of special structures for the bilingual parishes, although after much
argument they did force the Saxon Church to set up a separate
Sorbian _Superintendentur_ in Bautzen in the late 1940s.

The main value of this book is its presentation of a large
amount of detailed information and primary documents about
different parishes and districts. In particular, Hein highlights the
differences between Zwickau, Leipzig and Dresden and the balance
that was struck between continuity and renewal in different areas.
Hein does not come to any final conclusions concerning a
judgement of this balance, but the material he presents provides the
reader with useful aids to make a judgment. Above all, he uses the
example of the Saxon Church to demonstrate the complicated nature
of the Protestant Church’s development after 1945.
P.J.Barker, University of Reading, U.K.

c) Nicholas Fennell, The Russians on Athos, Oxford, Berne etc:
Peter Lang, 2001, ISBN 3-906766-93-4, 348 pp.

For a thousand years, Mount Athos on its rocky peninsular in
the northern Aegean Sea has been the spiritual centre for the
Orthodox branches of the Christian Church. The influence of the
Holy Mountain is unquestioned; its remoteness, isolation and the
alleged saintliness of its inhabitants, where no female creature is
allowed, have been built up over the centuries. But in the nineteenth
century, the advances of travel technology made it more accessible,
and from the 1840s huge numbers of pilgrims came to call, and
some to stay. Many arrived from Russia, where the cult of the
Athonite monasteries proved very popular. The result was a vast
increase in the Russian presence. Before 1839 there had never been
significantly more than 200 Russians there. In the next seventy years
these numbers rose to about 5,000. Many were wealthy, and the
buildings they erected reflected their munificance. The inevitable
result was envy and resentment from the native Greeks, who now
began to suspect a deep imperial plot behind all this new-found
interest. The resulting controversies are the subject of this lively
study of the Holy Mountain’s affairs. They deserve notice because
of the intriguing interplay of politics, religion and nationalism on
what was supposed to be the very model of peace and sanctity
Nicholas Fennell is an English schoolmaster. But he has the
linguistic and theological qualifications to examine these matters
and does so with exemplary objectivity. He recognizes that the
potential for ethnic discord has always existed on Mount Athos. The
language and liturgical barriers did not help. The grandiose Russian
architecture with its brightly-coloured cupolas was a strong contrast
to the Greek traditional austerity. But in the late 19th century, the
wealth of the Russians was clearly used to enhance their position
which led to increasing friction with the Greek monks

These local quarrels were heightened by outside conflicts
promoted by an expanding Russian pan-Slavism and its attempts to
reverse the defeats of the Crimean War. These ambitions also led
to friction with the Greek Orthodox Church and the Patriarch in
Constantinople, as over the demand for a separate Slavic Exarchate
in Bulgaria. The Turkish rulers only encouraged this split in the
Orthodox ranks, which was soon enough reflected on Mount Athos.
In 1875 the large monastery of St. Panteleimon came under Russian
control, and subsequently large amounts of Russian money were
spent to expand it.

Thanks to skillful publicity and fund-raising, St. Panteleimon
became a source of spiritual renewal for Russia itself. Large
numbers of pilgrims, poor as well as rich, flocked to visit, especially
after the defeat of the Turks in 1877 and the visit of the Russian
Emperor himself a decade later. Many Greeks now began to fear
that Russian expansion would squeeze them out. Retaliation was
gained by freezing the status quo by which the 20 monasteries, in a
strict hierarchy, the majority of whom were Greek, were able to
prevent any major alterations.

In 1912, Mount Athos was forcibly liberated by the Greeks
from Turkish control, which led to further tensions with the Russian
monks, despite their wealth and backing from the Czarist
government. The outbreak of the first world war and the overthrow
of the Czarist regime in 1917 only made matters far worse. Contact
with Russia was cut off. No more visitors, no more novices, no
more funds. God, it was believed, was punishing the Russians for
their pride.On Mount Athos the monks suffered with dignity.
Spiritual amends had to be sought, but the remaining monks only
grew older and died off. In their new-found poverty, they were
exploited by the Greeks, and finally in 1992 the last few remaining
monks of one Russian priory were expelled.

The story of these holy monks, beset by external disasters
and internal ethnic clashes, is instructive. Too often the heat of
nationalist emotions detracted from Mount Athos’ reputation of
being a peaceful haven of Orthodox monasticism. It can only be
hoped that the evident revival of recent years will now enable the
monks to uphold their inheritance in a spirit of ecumenical
fraternity. Fennell’s balanced account will undoubtedly aid this
desirable goal.
JSC

d) Andreas Nehring, Orientalismus und Mission. Die Repräsentation
der tamilischen Gesellschaft und Religion durch Leipziger
Missionare 1840-1940. (Studies in the History of Christianity in the
non-Western world, Vol 7). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag 2003.
500pp.

The German propensity for producing large tomes of
thorough scholarship on exotic subjects has found a new recruit in
Andreas Nehring. His examination of a hundred years’ worth of
reports from Leipzig Lutheran missionaries based in the
Tamil-speaking areas of south India is a masterly piece of
scholarship, hitherto unresearched and unlikely to be revisited.
Furthermore this is no traditional approach to missionary history,
which was so largely occupied with the self-sacrificing heroism of
European missionaries, with regrettable overtones of cultural
arrogance, colonialist attitudes and theological exclusivism. Nor
does Nehring adopt the more current trend of emphasizing the local
responses to such attempted Christianization. Rather he seeks to
discover how much and how far these foreign sojourners were able
to understand and record the religious and social practices of the
majority populations amongst whom they dwelt

But, first, Nehring gives a lengthy introductory chapter on
the historiographical difficulties confronting Europeans writing
about India, and the so-called perils of “Orientalism”. Ethnographic
studies were often a means of asserting the cultural and political
superiority of India’s British rulers. Yet Nehring argues that the
Leipzig missionaries and their reports constitute a notable
difference. In the first place, as Germans, they were not part of the
Raj; secondly, they reported the views of the people they were most
closely associated with, namely the lowest castes. They were, of
course, convinced of the superiority of Christianity to Hinduism and
also of the need to overcome the caste system. Hence their approach
was fundamentally against the Brahman control of society, and
therefore against the British Raj’s tolerance of India’s injustices.
However, some of the Lutheran parishes still tolerated caste
segregation as an unavoidable survival. Furthermore, those whose
missionary strategy was aimed at the higher castes acknowledged
the need to be flexible on this matter

These differences of opinion led the Lutheran missionaries
to probe as deeply as they could into the background of Tamil
society, seeking to establish the roots of the caste system, either as a
home-grown development, or as an imposed structure forced on
Tamils by northern Hindus over the centuries. Such deliberations,
however, demanded a certain empathy, in contrast to the outright
condemnation which the majority of English-speaking missionaries
brought to their task. These Germans therefore were closer to the
rulers of the East India Company, who supported the caste system as
providing them with a ready-made hierarchical order of government.
Intense discussions ensued throughout the 19th century. Race,
language, culture, economic structures and political aspirations were
all debated as possible roots for the caste system, and hence the
most suitable platforms on which the missionary endeavour should
be built. There was plenty of room for divergent opinions, as
reflected in these Lutheran missionaries’ reports home. Nehring’s
able elucidation of these early debates shows the range of views
expressed. He also points out the relative neglect of these sources
amongst English-speaking scholars, including Indians.

The Lutheran missionaries encountered enormous
difficulties in attempting to comprehend the complexities of the
societies into which they were placed, or the underlying religious
structures of Hinduism and Buddhism they met on a daily basis. For
the most part they adopted a more positive approach than did many
of the British envoys who regarded all non-Christian religions as
“devil-worship”. But nonetheless the Germans also imported their
own presuppositions about the origins, development and character
of the strange doctrines and practices they observed.

Many of these missionaries were in fact engaged in the work
of integrating a vast collection of myths, beliefs, rituals and laws
into a coherent religion, and of shaping an amorphous heritage into
a rational faith. Others adopted the view that Indian religions were
participating in an evolutionary process, similar to that which had
happened in Europe in pre-Christian times. The raw primitive
religion of the lowest tribes, with their bloodthirsty sacrifices and
demon possessions, was being superseded by the higher forms of
Brahmanism with its elitist concepts and search for purity through
such practicres as vegetarianism.

All such endeavours by Europeans were however artificial.
In Tamil Nadu the varieties of folk religion encountered by the
missionaries were often too baffling to be systematized in this way.
Rival speculations and theories were rife as to what the true form of
Indian religion might look like. All too often these Europeans
interpreted Hinduism, both philosophcally or mystically, in their
own image. One of the most wayward interpretations, for example,
sought to prove the connection between the Indian aryan religion
and the new national spirit in Nazi Germany.

For the most part, the missionaries adopted a Protestant
interpretation of their experiences, by portraying the indigenous
faiths as being in a kind of pre-Reformation state, waiting to be
awakened by these earnest Lutherans. In expecting an eventual
fulfillment through Christianity, they were indulging in considerable
wishful thinking. But their recognition that, at least in the Tamil
area, there were other patterns than the supposedly normative form
of Brahman Hinduism, based on sanskrit literature, was an
important insight and advance.

So too their notable efforts at collation of the local
languages and literature, and their translations into comprehensible
German, were prodigious, eben if they have now been totally
forgotten. In all, as Nehring shows, the complexity of these subjects
imposed a heavy burden. Indeed this whole topic, and Nehring’s
account itself, is not for amateur Indologists. It can only be hoped
that this commendable rescue effort of past missionary scholarship,
and its attempt to understand and interpret the local religious and
social cultures of south India, will be appreciated both by
German-speaking mission historians, as well as by all scholars of
19th-century Tamil Nadu.
JSC

2) Journal articles: a) Jeremy Morris, The strange death of Christian
Britain. Another look at the secularization debate in The
Historical Journal, Vol. 46, no 4, December 2003, p.963-76.

Morris takes issue with Callum Brown’s assertion that Christianity
in Britain is dead ( see review of his book in our Newsletter, July
2003), even if this is defined only as the rejection of its traditional
moral and spiritual standpoints. Instead Morris reviews a number of
other accounts, and suggests that displacement might be a better
description “But for the time being, it is a strange sort of death that
leaves chuches still amongst the largest voluntary organizations in
the country, and Christianity still notionally the conviction of a
majority of the population. Secularization has indeed been
underway in Britain – but the final chapter has yet to be written”.

b) Robert Welinski-Kiehl, Reformation History and Political
Mythology in the German Democratic Republic, 1949-89 in
European History Quarterly, Vol 34. no 1, January 2004

This article examines how the communist rulers of the former GDR
sought to crush the Reformation into the Procrustean bed of Marxist
theory. To begin with they concentrated on such welcome radical
figures as Thomas Müntzer and the Peasants War, basing their views
on those of Engels a century earlier. Subsequently attempts were
made to depict Luther in the same framework of materialist history,
but increasingly during the ’60s and ’70s, his chief value was seen
as a national figure opposing foreign, i.e. papal domination. In 1983
the GDR officially encouraged celebrations of Luther’s 500th
anniversary, and a degree of accommodation with the churches was
reached. By contrast Müntzer was now depicted as a zealous
fanatic. By 1989 East German Marxists were focussing more and
more on the theological aspects of sixteenth-century history. Their
attempts to build such mythological histories necessarily ended in
1989 and in failure.

c) Peter Kenez, The Hungarian Communist Party and the Catholic
Church 1945-1948 in Journal of Modern History, Vol. 75, no.4
December 2003.

Kenez depicts the development of the stormy relationship between
the Hungarian Communists and the Catholic Church under Cardinal
Mindszenty in the immediate post-war years. He argues that this
confrontation was not planned in advance but grew incrementally.

Of course a highly conservative Catholic Church was bound to clash
with a political party dedicated to the eradication of feudalism.
Land reform was the first contentious issue. But already the Church
was not prepared to make any concessions. And the appointment of
Mindszenty, a junior bishop, as Primate seems to have been made by
Pius XII because of his reputation as an intransigent opponent of
Communism. Indeed he soon proved to be so. “No single
individual was such a thorn in the side of the Communist leaders as
the Cardinal”. Not for a moment was he prepared to collaborate
with Communists. His aim was to restore the monarchy, even
though this was totally unrealistic. Such a stance evoked a similar
intransigence from the Communist rank and file. Both were caught
up in the international rivalry between the Vatican and the Soviet
Union, then at its height. At the end of 1948 Mindszenty was
arrested and subjected to a show trial. Hungary had clearly now
fallen under Communist totalitarian rule. The open clash of 1956
was prefigured.

With very best wishes
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

 

Newsletter — April 2004— Vol. X, no. 4

Dear Friends,
A reflection for Lent —

On the virtues of inter-faith dialogue:
It is neither to flatter nor to refute one another, but to help
one another; to share insight and learning, to cooperate in
academic virtues on the highest scholarly levels, and what is even
more important, to search the wilderness for well-springs of
devotion, for treasures of stillness, for the power of love and care
for man. What is urgently needed are ways of helping one
another in the terrible predicament of here and now by the
courage to believe that the word of the Lord endures for ever as
well as here and now; to cooperate in trying to bring about a
resurrection of sensitivity, a revival of conscience; to keep alive
the divine sparks in our souls, to nurture openness to the spirit of
the Psalms, reverence for the words of the prophets, and
faithfulness to the Living God. Rabbi Abraham Heschel

It is with great sadness that we learn of the death on March 22nd
of Prof. F.Burton Nelson of North Park Theological Seminary,
Chicago at the age of 79. Although he had been in poor health
recently, he had continued a full teaching load to the last – a sign
of his devotion both to his subject and his students. Burton was
one of those recruited by Franklin Littell in 1970 to launch the
Annual Scholars’ Conference on the German Church Struggle
and the Holocaust, to which he made many significant
contributions. He was considered one of the top scholars on
the life and work of German Lutheran pastor and Nazi
opponent Dietrich Bonhoeffer and was a close friend of the
Bonhoeffer family. Several years ago, together with Geffrey
Kelly, he put together a lengthy anthology of Bonhoeffer’s
seminal thought, A Testament to Freedom, which was followed
by the publication last year of an important study, again with
Geffrey Kelly, The Cost of Moral Leadership. The Spirituality of
Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was also a leading member of the
English-speaking section of the International Bonhoeffer Society,
and served as a consultant for the 90-minute film
documentary on Bonhoeffer’s life that opened in Chicago in
March last year.

Burton was blessed with a cheery and welcoming personality. He
always seemed to have time for those who came to him for
scholarly or personal advice, and his Christian witness was
admired by friends and students alike. He will be greatly missed.

Contents:
1) Conference Report – Building religious communities
2) Present situation in the Czech republic
3) Book review: Roseman, Past in Hiding
4) Journal articles:

a) Stehle, Secret Vatican documents sold to Russia
b)Wacker, Pearl Buck and the waning of the missionary impulse
c) Wang, Protestant missions to Chinese immigrants in Canada, 1885-1923.
d) Buscher, The Catholic Church and refugees

1) Conference Report:
A conference held in Chicago last October for younger German
and American scholars took up the interesting theme of “Forms
of religious communities in 19th and 20th Century Germany.”
Herewith an abbreviation of the report submitted by Daniel
Koehler.

Once viewed as casualties of modernization, religion and
religious community have, in recent years, begun to resemble less
the victim than the hydra of modern European history. Where
historians formerly emphasized the decline of adherence to
traditional beliefs and practices, recent scholarship seems to
unearth the religious (often confessional) imagination
everywhere: in political discussions and symbolism, changing
gender roles, common notions of spirituality, and certainly in
new, informal communities of worship.

Noting the ever more fluid and informal participation
during this period, the conference sought to determine whether
‘religion in modern society’ might be understood best as an
on-going process of ‘re-communalization’, whereby new
religious groups and the sentiments that unite them are formed,
cultivated and dissolved. This approach is, in part, an attempt to
find more dynamic alternatives to a secularization paradigm that
appears to offer diminishing returns for further research. By
emphasizing religious diversity over decline, the conference
offered a starting point for evaluating processes that reveal the
limitations of this much-maligned theory.

But what is a religious community? Where do the
boundaries lie? For the purposes of coherent investigation, the
conference proposed looking at the means of differentiating
members from non-members; practices that engage members in a
search for transcendence; rituals and symbols that provide the
common basis for a common experience of worship; and the
development of organizations that ground these characteristics in
institutions.

The conference looked at new religious communities in
five thematic and chronological contexts. The first examined
non-conformist movements in post-Napoleonic Europe. The
second took up the theme of the gendering of religious devotion
during the nineteenth century. The third covered the expansion
of religious options at the end of the century, pursued mainly by
those estranged from the established churches. Both Catholic
anti-clericalism, and Protestant disaffection with dogmatic and
state-run churches played a large role, but did not mean that those
affected should be seen as ‘anti-religious’, or as turning to
secular forms of enchantment. It was argued, rather, that
movements associated with atheism or iconoclasm actually
worked to uphold religious worldviews.

Such views challenged the widespread opinion as to the
influence of Nietzsche, and were critical of the substitution
model of secularization. More pervasive, perhaps was the fourth
theme of urbanization, when the very lack of opportunity for
religious contact, because of a lack of churches and pastors in
growing cities inspired new forms of religious observance less
dependent on the traditional parish in answer to a pervasive crisis
of faith.

In the fifth section, dealing with the post-1945 scene, this
crisis was obvious at the core of the noted theologian Dorothea
Soelle’s theological quest. Her attempt to close the gap between
atheism and God, and the political engagement that followed
from it, raised significant issues, such as whether secularization
is itself a product of Judeo-Christian principles; or whether
“Christian defensiveness” against elements of modernity has
played a substantive role in twentieth-century European
antisemitism. A more focussed paper on the German Catholic
Church during the 1960s attributed its decline not to the usual
suspects, but more to the collapse of the “integralist” Catholic
milieu after the war. As German Catholics were successfully
integrated into the cultural and political mainstream, its separate
structures no longer seemed relevant.

Where does this leave the concept of secularization now?
Although the conference participants had many questions, few
were prepared to relegate the notion to the dustbin of outdated
theories. But it should take account of the variety of religious
phenomena that take place outside the doors of the parish.
Furthermore, attention has to be paid to religious groups which
do not lend themselves to static narratives, and to the process by
which new communities are formed and stabilized. But all
agreed that pursuing the idea of the formation of religious
communities is a concept which deserves a more systematic and
thorough articulation.

2) The present situation in the Czech Republic.

A report from our
list-member, David Giesbrecht, recently visiting in Prague.
There are presently 10.2 million people in this country,
comprised of eight ethnic groups. Czechs are a relatively young
population with the median age being 38.4 years. They take some
pride that in recent history they have peacefully negotiated two
major political transitions: a “Velvet Revolution” ending
Communist rule in 1989; and a “Velvet Divorce” with the
partition of the country into two entities in 1993. Further in the
past decade the nation has learned with admirable dexterity to
build a market economy, run by a newly emerging set of leaders.

A Czech friend observed that upper management in business and
industry is disproportionately comprised of young leaders, since
those already at middle age have been so shaped by
authoritarianism that they find it difficult to take entrepreneurial
initiatives. Having now discovered relatively unfettered
capitalistic enterprise, Czechs are busy catching up on what has
for so long been withheld from them; and to an extent probably
doing so at the expense of spiritual reflection.

Given their turbulent history, it is not surprising that many
Czechs harbour a suspicion bordering on disdain towards the
institutional church. Two Czech writers, Petr Fiala and Jan Hanus
in a 2001 British publication, The Month, cite several studies
indicating that this nation “belongs among the least religious
countries in Europe”. In contrast to other East European
countries, occupied and controlled by the Soviet Union after
1945, Czechs exhibit “an unusually high degree of both
secularization and what can be called atheisation”. This latter
coinage is interesting, suggesting widespread denial of belief.
Several scholarly studies, indeed, indicate that 70% of Czechs
profess no religion at all. The 2002 CIA World Fact Book, on the
other hand, states that 39.8% of the population professes to be
atheist, 39.2% Roman Catholic and the rest a smattering of
Evangelical, Orthodox and that often undefined group “other”.
By contrast, 95% of Poles and 73% of Slovaks declare
themselves to be Roman Catholic.

An informative Internet document “The Czech Spiritual
Landscape in the Post-Communist Era” states that approximately
500,000 people, representing 5% of the population, attend Mass
regularly. The modern day Hussite Church, which has morphed
in several ways since its birth in the early twentieth century,
claims a membership of several hundred thousand, followed by
Lutherans with 50,000 and Orthodox with 20,000 members.
Evangelical churches (Baptist, Moravians, Brethren Church)
constitute one half of one per cent with some 50,000 members in
all. But there are reports that the Baptists are growing rapidly
and adding three new churches a year.

Within this milieu is a small Jewish community. A 1939
statistic indicted there were then 50,000 Jews living in Prague.
By the end of the war, and post-war emigration, only a few
hundred were left. Today that number is again increasing, with a
population now estimated at 7,000. Rather prominently, six
synagogues dominate the small Jewish quarter of this city,
suggesting a considerable socio-cultural if not spiritual revival.
One of these structures, the gorgeous Spanish Synagogue, also
contributes an elegant architectural monument to this already
beautiful city.

The degree to which ordinary Czechs appear to be
alienated from the church is intriguing. Some observers suggest
that the widespread religious disinterest can be attributed to the
Catholic Church itself. The nefarious martyrdom of Jan Hus on
July 6th, 1415 has not been forgotten. And the subsequent
success of the Catholics in expunging Hussitism created a lasting
rift. “It was a religious struggle between Hussites and the Roman
Catholic Church, a national struggle between Czechs and
Germans, and a social struggle between the landed and peasant
classes”. (Fiala and Hanus). Later with the conquests of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Catholic Church aligned itself
closely with the state, forming a alliance with central Europe’s
strongest power. But this affiliation led to the Czech
intelligentsia’s alienation which then declared itself openly to be
“anti-Church and anti-Catholic”. The forcible occupation of the
country by Nazi forces in 1939, and the equally oppressive
Communist takeover a decade later, hardly provided fertile
ground for the cultivation of a Christian spirituality. Increasingly
the stance of Czechs toward religion became a private matter and
not one that merited public advocacy or discussion. Indeed
some Czechs profess that they make little distinction between
Communist compulsion and Catholic coercion. Both are
therefore censured by locals.

There appears to be a widespread perception that these
entrenched anticlericalism and antichurch sentiments were
carried over even after Communism was overthrown. Indeed, it is
interesting that this decline of trust in the church seems to have
accelerated since Communism’s collapse, precisely at a time
when one might have anticipated an increased return to church
allegiance, on the grounds of its having been a focus of
opposition to Communist hegemony. According to Tomas Halik,
a philosophy professor at Charles University, the Church had a
brief opportunity to exert influence in the country following the
Velvet revolution but “failed because it was unable to hold its
ranks together and its words were not followed by sufficiently
tangible and credible actions”. In addition, the well-publicized
attempts of the Catholic Church’s leaders to regain control of its
confiscated properties seem to have engrossed all their attention.

As a result studies suggest that less than a quarter of the
population considers the Church authoritative or credible as a
source of moral guidance in political, social or family affairs.
Religious disenchantment has left its mark in another real
but perhaps less tangible way. A Czech citizen, Pavel Raus, in a
thoughtful analysis, notes that owing to a secular mindset, Czechs
rarely use religious language in ordinary discourse. For instance,
very few people will make comments about religious matters
such as prayer or faith. “Christian vocabulary is non-existent”
asserts Raus.

Several consequences flow out of such a deep spiritual
scepticism. Public interest groups which find religion irrelevant
or even offensive are putting pressure on government to limit the
influence of churches. Such negative perceptions have
undoubtedly hampered the Catholic Church’s recovery of its
property, prompting a spokesperson for the Czech Catholic
Bishops’ Conference to comment: “The resentments, prejudices
and lies they learned under Communist rule are still in the air
here”. Missionaries and Christian charities coming into this
country find it very difficult to proselytize, as for instance with
the attempts to launch a Christian radio ministry. Results in terms
of committed followers have been few. Some commentators
argue that the lack of a Christian spiritual moorage has resulted
in considerable social dysfunction, undermining especially family
stability. Compared to a group of 30 other European countries,
the divorce rate among Czechs was the third highest. So this
rather sweeping judgement would appear to have some statistical
backing. And whatever the cause, concern has been expressed
about the extent of “marital tension, economic pressure, problem
behaviour, depression and incidence of mental disorder”, which
may or may not be attributable to the evident consequences of
secularization.
David Giesbrecht, Prague

3) Mark Roseman, The past in hiding, (Penguin, 2001), xiii +
577 pp. £18.99 hb, £9.99 pb.

(This review appeared first in Humanitas, the George Bell
Institute’s international ecumenical cultural review, available
from achandler@queens.ac.uk Although not directly in our
field, Roseman gives such an excellent picture of Nazi Germany
and its victims that I include this review here for your
consideration).

In 1989 the English historian Mark Roseman received a
telephone call from the Ruhrland Museum in Essen. The museum
was beginning to put together an exhibition on life in the city
during the Second World War and had come across an article
written some five years before, by a woman who had been a
member of the Jewish community there. The author was
Marianne Ellenbogen, née Strauss, and she was now believed to
be living in Liverpool. Would Roseman be willing to read the
article and then to interview her?

Marianne Strauss had survived the war in what was
known in Germany as a ‘U Boat’. In short, she had lived secretly,
without papers and in constant danger, in the homes of
sympathizers, friends and allies in her own city and across the
country. The details of the story which Roseman now read
seemed to him so astonishing that he found himself at once
drawn into a succession of critical, even sceptical questions. The
two met soon after. This book is, in effect, the story of Roseman’s
own relationship with a woman he came to know, if briefly, at
the very end of her life. It is a work of detection inspired by the
myriad patterns and dissolving perspectives of her own memory
and the reflections of those who had known her and survived
with her. It is also the story told by the contents of a number of
heavy trunks, crammed with documents of all kinds, which were
found stowed away in her house after her death, a private archive
of extraordinary, even miraculous richness. As the author follows
a crowded path from Essen to Berlin and Düsseldorf and, after
the war, to England, he finds himself travelling across Germany
itself, but also to the United States, to Israel and even to South
America. Letters, meanwhile, pass between Canada, Australia,
the Czech Republic, France, Sweden and Poland. For in such a
way do the fragments of a single private life, caught in the vortex
of the Final Solution and the war itself, shatter again and disperse
across continents and oceans.

But then there are so many layers at work in this book,
and they interrelate so thickly – and often surprisingly. Roseman
excavates them with a dogged assiduity. In his preoccupation
with the truth of every detail there is nothing staid or hollow, for
in such things the life of Marianne Strauss – and that of a whole
people – lies. Accounts converge and diverge; holes yawn open
and then are filled, suddenly and astonishingly, with new light.
The fragility and also the power of the human memory is at once
tantalizing and painful. There is a good deal of awkwardness and
self-justification. Roseman places sources of one kind or another
alongside each other with a sharp critical eye for tensions and
contradictions, and they, in their turn, send him off in pursuit of
new forms of corroboration – sometimes official material,
sometimes new encounters.

This book brings to life, appallingly, the inexorable power
with which the policies of the National Socialist state bore down
on the private intricacies of personal life. Though they faced
threats and encroachments which grew increasingly severe and
dangerous, until 1943 Marianne Strauss’s family escaped
deportation because a number of officers in the Abwehr, the
counter-intelligence department of the German Wehrmacht,
decided to protect them. Here, though they could not have known
it, the family became a feature of a wider, ongoing contest
between the Abwehr itself, parts of which worked stubbornly to
save a number of Jewish families while pursuing their own plans
for resistance, and the Gestapo, which was doing its best to
eradicate every single German Jew. In a world of official papers
the Abwehr had the power to issue its own guarantees,
immunities, directives – but so did its critics, and still further
powers would be called upon to arbitrate between them.
Successive plans to emigrate came to nothing. Marianne’s
mother and father eventually confronted two local Gestapo
officials brandishing deportation orders at their door on 31
August 1943 (she escaped by slipping, literally, out of the door of
the house after exchanging a silent nod with her mother). They
would die several months later. Her fiancé, Ernst Krombach,
worked with a desperate courage to sustain some scheme of
orderly life under mounting pressure, even maintaining their
correspondence at risk to his life from the ghetto at Izbica before
losing his sight and disappearing to Sobibor with his parents. In
the letters which remain his own humanity acquires a luminous
worth, as he protects what he can in whatever ways are possible
to him, before he, too, is extinguished. In Marianne’s survival
rests, in a sense at least, his own too. For such letters as these
would surely otherwise have been lost in the maelstrom itself,
and yet here we have them and other relics, too: a single
photograph, an inscribed gold ring.

Once she had gone underground, Marianne Strauss was
hidden by members of a now hardly acknowledged Essen circle,
known as the Bund, the creation of two Berlin teachers, Artur and
Dore Jacobs. This was more of a circle of friends than an
organization, and one woman in it, Sonja Schreiber, took
Marianne Strauss under her wing, offering her hospitality,
sharing her food and keeping her out of trouble. Subsequently,
between October 1943 and February 1945, Marianne was
constantly in transit across Germany with a forged pass (another
gift from the Bund) travelling unobtrusively and sometimes
ingeniously. Some of her escapes were narrow indeed. The end
of the war found her in Düsseldorf, and safe.

Roseman is a modest and quiet – but determined –
presence in all this, patiently sifting and organizing his material;
confining himself to a few, sharp observations. He knows better
than to intrude, but he also knows when he is needed. A disputed
and dubious presence in the story, Christian Arras – possibly an
S.S. officer, perhaps a Wehrmacht officer – is for a while
suspended between an allegation of opportunism and the
possibility of startling altruism. For several months Arras
succeeded in bringing food parcels and letters into the Izbica
ghetto. But why? At first Roseman, too, shares the general
scepticism, but he is haunted by the sheer danger of these stealthy
enterprises. In time, Arras is vindicated; a genial, generous but
solitary figure, we glimpse him for the last time in another
source, haplessly turning up at the homes of Jewish families in
Essen, warning them of the realities of extermination, urging
them to escape, and – finding them suspicious and unmoved –
walking away from us all, shaking his head.

Roseman is never carried away by the emotional force of
what he has encountered. The book is, at every turn, a methodical
and restless pursuit of critical questions. Every participant is
placed with care in an environment of political contexts and
social currents. All the material is set down meticulously before
us and Roseman himself writes with a modest, even circumspect
style,placing himself entirely at the disposal of the subject. In
such ways is The past in hiding an eloquent exposition of the
historian’s craft. But it also offers an intricate evocation of the
human condition itself, as it emerges before our eyes on the
smallest and quietest scale, but also the greatest and the most
profound.
Andrew Chandler, Birmingham

4) Journal articles:

a) Hansjakob Stehle, Geheimes aus Bonn für
Moskau vom Vatikan in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte,
Vol 51, no.2, April 2003. 263 ff

A highly interesting article by a veteran German journalist
concerns the activities of a former Vatican official who obtained
documents from the Vatican files and sold them secretly to the
Soviet Union, having earlier been in the pay of the American
OSS. Monsignor Edoardo Prettner-Cippico had a murky career
and was even defrocked, but somehow returned to favour and
exploited his colleagues in the Vatican bureaucracy to give him
interesting material, copies of which survived in his Nachlass.
Stehle has picked out the reports sent by the Nuncio in West
Germany for the period 1966-1971, of which he prints 18.
Whether the Soviets learned much of value is doubtful, but this
publication is helpful in opening up for the general reader
documents which will probably not become generally available
in Rome for at least another 70 years.

b) G.Wacker, Pearl Buck and the waning of the missionary
impulse, Church History, Vol 72, no.4, December 2003, p.852ff
Pearl Buck was the most famous American writer about
missions in China. Grant Wacker’s able description of the
development of her ideas shows how she began with highly
traditional evangelical notions of the superiority of the
missionary and the difficulty of the task dealing with the
depravity of the heathen masses amongst whom she lived. After
the first world war, however, she moved to a much more liberal
stance, began to doubt the truth of Christian supernaturalism,
advocated a humanitarian social gospel, and took a much more
positive view of Chinese culture. Although she left China in
1934, and repudiated her own past, she remained fascinated by
China, a fact which is clearly replicated in her large output of
books and which won her the Nobel prize for literature.

c) Jiwu Wang, Organized Protestant missions to Chinese
immigrants in Canada, 1885-1923, Journal of Ecclesiastical
History, Vol. 54, no 4, October 2003, p.671 ff

This sprightly article concentrates on British Columbia,
where the majority of Chinese immigrants to Canada were
brought, mainly for building railways But from the earliest days,
the European immigrant majority was totally hostile. The
Chinese were accepted only as necessary for labouring jobs, or
later on as laundrymen or domestic servants. Despite the overt
social prejudices, Methodists, Presbyterians and Anglicans tried
to establish missions to the Chinese communities. But their
success was minimal, not so much because of the lack of
resources or Chinese-speaking evangelists, as because of the
endemic anti-Chinese sentiment. Other clergymen, for example,
led the way in promoting anti-Oriental hostility, which
culminated in the ban on Chinese immigration in 1923. Lack of
mutual trust in the missionaries, who were seen as outsiders
trying to dictate conditions for survival to the Chinese, certainly
doomed the early hopes of large-scale conversions. And even
sympathetic Protestants maintained an attitude of racial
superiority towards Asians, which, in 1942, turned into outright
hostility against the Japanese-Canadians.

d) Frank Buscher, “The Great Fear. The Catholic Church and the
anticipated radicalization of expellees and refugees in post-war
Germany” in German History, Vol 21, no.2, 2003 p.204-24.

An analysis of the records of the Archdiocese of Cologne dealing
with church attitudes and policies towards refugees and expellees
in the immediate post-war period. Follows much the same line as
Ian Connor (Ulster) in earlier articles.

 

With every best wish for a happy Easter,
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

 

Newsletter — March 2004— Vol. X, no. 3

Dear Friends,
Contents

1) Film Review: Bonhoeffer

2)Book reviews

a) Zasloff, A Rescuer’s Story
b) Klempa and Doran, Certain Women amazed us

3) Book notes:

a) ed. M. Raphael, Holocaust in literature and film
b) Boehm, Germans in Rumania

4) Journal Articles

a) Geschichte und Gesellschaft, October 2003
b) Davis, Russian Orthodox Church
c) Danielson, American pacifists
d) Gregor, Remembrance in Nuremberg, 1945-56
e) Protestantism in Russia

1) Film Review:

The newly released film Bonhoeffer, produced
and narrated by the American filmmaker Martin Doblmeier,
makes excellent and extensive use of archival film footage, home
videos and hitherto rarely seen photographs to depict the story of
the short, tragic but eventful life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In
contrast to such fictionally reconstructed productions as “Agents
of Grace”, Doblmeier sticks firmly and skillfully to the
historically verified events. He thus follows in the footsteps of
the similar earlier version of Bonhoeffer’s life made by Malcolm
Muggeridge in 1974. His excerpts from newsreels go back as far
as the first world war, bring to life a number of Bonhoeffer’s
more famous contemporaries, both in the political as well as
theological spheres, and hence give an authenticity to the whole
production. While film-clips – in black and white – of such
figures as Hitler or Goebbels are well known, we are also given
here contemporary and rarely-seen images of church leaders like
Martin Niemöller and Karl Barth.

Doblmeier’s narrative follows the line taken in the
magnificent biography written forty years ago by Bonhoeffer’s
closest friend Eberhard Bethge. He describes how the young man
in the 1920s, to the surprise of his rather non-religious but
distinguished liberal family, decided to study theology as a
possible clue to Germany’s ills. We see him going off to New
York in 1930, where he was greatly influenced by a fellow Swiss
student, and by the fervent devotion of the Abyssinian Baptist
Church – here very nicely depicted in ecstatic worship. He returns
to Germany fully committed to the cause of pacifism, which was
expressed most forcibly at an ecumenical conference in Denmark
in August 1934, from which remarkably enough film footage
survives. But in the subsequent years of Nazi rule, as he and his
family begin to realize the enormity of Hitler’s designs, he turns
away from pacifism to eventually join the ranks of the
conspirators against the dictator, and even to approve of the idea
of assassination of the head of state – for reasons of Christian
morality to prevent the continuation of Nazi crimes and
atrocities.

In early 1943 Bonhoeffer was arrested and put in prison
His romance with Maria von Wedemayer was thus cut short, and
his association with others connected to the July 1944 plot led to
his condemnation and eventual execution in April 1945.
Necessarily this latter period can only be reconstructed through
subsequent film shots of the places involved, but Doblmeier has
successfully built up his account to show both the courage and
the moral leadership of one who was not afraid to face to the very
tragic end the consequences of his Christian faith.
The historical footage is interspersed with short insightful
commentaries by members of Bonhoeffer’s family, including
both Eberhard Bethge and his wife Renate, as well as Maria von
Wedemayer’s sister. We are also given the views of three of
Bonhoeffer’s erstwhile pupils from the 1930s, and the pertinent
tributes of notable theologians, such as the Bishop of Berlin, and
Archbishop Tutu, as well as assessments of Bonhoeffer’s
significance in German history by historians such as Peter
Hoffmann, Victoria Barnett and your reviewer. Where these
testimonies are given in German, English subtitles are provided.
This kind of film footage is, of course, less able to convey
the development of Bonhoeffer’s theology and the genesis of the
remarkably prescient insights which he first wrote down in letters
and papers from prison, and which were to become the
foundation for much of the “liberation theology” of the post-1945
years. Nor can this media be successful in outlining what was
surely, at the time, his most significant teaching, namely his
views on suffering and discipleship, which consist in sharing the
sufferings of God in Christ in this tortured world, and thereby
finding, not release, but redemption.

But Doblmeier’s contribution is to repristinate the
historical setting and to show the course of events which led this
one faithful witness to Christ to become involved in the attempt
to free his country from the evils of Nazism. Its failure led to his
death and martyrdom in April 1945, but his legacy was
summarized in the message he sent to his friend Bishop George
Bell on the very eve of his execution: “Tell him that for me this
is the end but also the beginning – with him I believe in the
principle of our Universal Christian brotherhood which rises
above all national interests, and that our victory is certain”.
JSC

2a) Tela Zasloff, A Rescuer’s Story. Pastor Pierre-Charles
Toureille in Vichy France. Madison, Wisconsin: University of
Wisconsin Press 2003. 272 pp.

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a small holiday resort in
south-central France, whose French Huguenot Protestant
inhabitants during the Second World War turned it into a secret
sanctuary, successfully rescuing several thousands of Jewish
victims of Nazi oppression. Their story was subsequently told by
an American Jewish philosophy professor, Philip Hallie, in his
book Open Thy Mouth for the Dumb, and by Pierre Sauvage’s
brilliant film Weapons of the Spirit, both of which paid tribute to
the strengths of the Huguenot tradition of service to those in
need.

Now another American Jewish scholar, Tela Zasloff, has
given us a portrait of the French Protestant pastor, Pierre
Toureille, who also organized large-scale and clandestine rescue
missions in Vichy France, prompted by the same spirit of
humanitarian compassion derived from his Huguenot
background.

Huguenot Protestants are a small minority in France, only
slightly larger than the number of French Jews. But their
collective folk memory of the persecutions they suffered three
hundred years ago under Louis XIV has been etched into every
generation. Their congregations across the centuries have
inherited the conviction that resistance to unjust political
authority and the need to provide refuge to the oppressed is a
religious duty. So the Nazi persecution of the Jews brought forth
a collective determination to mobilize their spiritual resources
and to organize effective rescue measures.

Leadership in the Huguenot community has come from a
small number of distinguished families, and very often the
responsibility of being pastor has been handed down from father
to son for several generations. Pierre Toureille also had
numerous pastors in his background, so it was quite natural that
he should decide on this career. He brought to it a strong, a vivid
intelligence and an interest in the wider world, particularly the
Slavic peoples of eastern Europe. And it was hardly surprising
that, as a young pastor in the 1920s, he joined the World Alliance
for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches.
This ecumenical group sought to bind up the grievous wounds
caused by the First World War and to undertake a ministry of
international reconciliation. In 1930 Toureille was given the
responsibility of acting as joint Secretary for the World
Alliance’s Youth Commission, collaborating closely with his
German counterpart, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. At the time, both men
were strongly influenced by pacifist ideas and hugely admired
Mahatma Gandhi for his advocacy of non-violent resistance. But,
after the Nazis had seized power in 1933, both Toureille and
Bonhoeffer began to realize that idealistic pacifism was not
enough to combat the evils of Nazism and racism. A more active
stance was demanded.

After France’s humiliating defeat in 1940, Toureille was
appointed Chief Chaplain of Protestant refugees and internees in
France. This necessarily involved some co-operation with the
Vichy government and the French Protestant ecclesiastical
authorities. But increasingly Toureille’s indignation at the
injustices being imposed on these refugees compulsorily locked
up in internment camps across southern France led him to take a
much more confrontational stance. Furthermore he was not
willing to limit his efforts to Protestants, but extended his help to
the threatened Jews, whether converted or not. After 1942 when
the Nazi noose tightened around the refugees, especially the
foreign Jews, Toureille turned more and more to clandestine
activities designed to rescue these victims by arranging their
escape. Hiding places, new identity documents, courier sevice to
the frontiers of Switzerland or Spain, and contact with all sorts of
resistance groups, increasingly became Toureille’s pastoral
responsibility, with the consequent increase in his personal
danger. Frequently interrogated by the Vichy police and German
Gestapo agents, he nevertheless drew on his Huguenot heritage to
resist all attempts to compel his submission.

Zasloff’s skillful use of surviving records fills in the
background of Vichy France’s shameful collaboration with the
Germans, and the dilemma of the Christian churches, torn
between their loyalty to the French state, and their humanitarian
sympathies with those suffering at the Nazis’ hands. In addition,
Toureille’s widespread duties imposed a heavy burden on his
own family. Like everyone else they suffered from the appalling
food shortages and the spiritual horrors of war-time.
The summer and fall of 1942 was one of the blackest
periods of the war, when massive number of refugees were
deported from France to the death camps in eastern Europe.
Despite protests by both the Protestant and Catholic Church
leaders, the Vichy politicians capitulated to Nazi demands.
Toureille and his friends however refused to follow this craven
example. Their own tradition of solidarity with the oppressed,
their ideal of an international Christian conscience, and their
hatred of the evils of racism and tyranny, upheld their faith
throughout these dark days.

For another two years, the dilemma of weighing up the
personal risks as against the moral imperative for action
continued to plague refugee aid workers like Toureille. Had they
made the right choices? Could more have been done? How
could the evident evils of occupation and persecution by the
Germans be most effectively resisted and overthrown? For many
years afterwards, Toureille was to be haunted by a sense of
failure rather than by any satisfaction with his successful rescuing
of numerous Jewish individuals and families.

Years later, the Israeli Yad Washem Martyrs’ Memorial
honoured him by naming him a Righteous Gentile, and invited
him to plant a tree in commemoration. But Toureille himself
depreciated any recognition, convinced that he and his associates,
as in Le Chambon, had acted only as Christians should behave in
obedience to the call of his Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.
It was therefore left to Tela Zasloff’s well-researched
account to provide the wider world with a sensitive tribute to this
courageous, quirky and essentially God-driven Huguenot pastor.
JSC

2b) L.Klempa and R.Doran, Certain Women amazed us. The
Women’s Missionary Society. Their story 1864-2002.
Toronto: Women’s Missionary Society, 2002 446pp.

The Presbyterian Church of Canada may be counted as
one of the more conservative branches of the Christian
community. Not until the 1960s did its male-dominated hierarchy
agree to the ordination of women and subsequently admit women
to its governing councils. But a hundred years earlier,
Presbyterian women were already throwing themselves
energetically and devotedly into mission work on behalf of their
church. By the 1870s there were three major branches, one for
overseas missions, one for home missions, and one operating in
the Maritime provinces. Each strove to build up auxiliaries in the
local parishes, mobilizing and spending their own funds, and
determining their own policy. It took fifty years before the
church authorities persuaded them that rivalry and duplication
could be avoided by creating one combined Women’s Missionary
Society.

This book tells us of their efforts for nearly a hundred and
fifty years. To do so, the authors have used the bulky records
held in the church archives, its extensive publications, and some
personal reminiscences for the later years. From these sources we
are given a picture of the activities launched around the world,
particularly in India, China, Formosa, Korea, as well as in
remoter parts of Canada. The strength of the Women’s
Missionary Society lay in the close personal bonds, often
affection, between the local sending parishes in Canada and their
representatives in the field. In all these placements, evangelistic,
medical and teaching services were organized, and the dedicated
contributions of these women missionaries are here suitably
recorded.

The tone is predictably positive. These women’s stories
are shown to have often involved hardship, danger and shortage
of resources, but also endurance, courage and triumphant faith.
So the book emphasizes the dedication and self-sacrificing
devotion of the women missionaries and the long-lasting support
of their admirers and backers at home. In short, this is missionary
history of the old-fashioned kind, written to enhance future
efforts by praising those who have gone before in response to the
call to serve the Lord in his harvest around the world.

Sadly, these amateur writers seem not to be aware that
missionary historiography has developed in striking new
directions in recent decades. Today, the interest is on the
character and responses of the recipients of Christian
evangelism, the challenges and changes which these culture
contacts involved, and the impact on the mind-frames on both
sides. These were, however, not themes taken up in the pages of
such missionary magazines as the Presbyterian Glad Tidings,
from which these authors quote extensively. The result is that
nowadays missiography adopts a far more critical tone, often to
the dismay of the missionaries and their supporters. They often
still assume, as the editors of Glad Tidings always assumed, that
their well-meaning offering of the Gospel would be appreciated
and respected. But, as in the example shown here of the
survivors of the church-run residential schools for native
Canadians, the opposite could be true. The Women’s Missionary
Society of the Presbyterian Church too often reflected the white
man’s cultural mind-frame, and the same goes for the
hardworking authors who have detailed the Society’s notable
undertakings.

A sub-theme of the book is role played by the WMS is
seeking to achieve equality in the Presbyterian Church. Too
often it seems the male church leaders took women’s
subordination for granted, and refused to accept the notion of
partnership in leadership or decision-making. Yet., on the other
hand, when finally in the 1960s the women’s contributions were
recognized, pressure was placed on the WMS to amalgamate its
activities in the name of rationalization and economy. These
authors obviously share large doubts about the wisdom of this
move.

So too, very loyally, they downplay the shocking
disruption of the church of the 1920s, when 60% of the
Presbyterians left to join the new United Church of Canada.
Unfortunately we are not given any of the aguments expressed on
both sides at the time, let alone any theological analysis of the
reasons why the minority doggedly determined to continue in
existence, despite the crippling losses in both women- and
man-power, including whole mission fields abroad. But such an
account would require the talents of a trained
theologian-historian, and the evidence is clearly not to be found
in the WMS publications. The book closes with a chapter
questioning how the earlier spirit of dedication to missions can
be upheld in the context of the 21st Century.
JSC

3) Book notes:

a) ed. Marc Lee Raphael, The Representation of
the Holocaust in Literature and Film,The College of William and
Mary, P.O.Box 8795, Williamsburg, Virginia 23187-8795, USA
US $ 18.00

This is a useful collection of essays about a difficult theme. In
the view of its most noted practitioner, Elie Wiesel, “the
holocaust defies literature” The narrator/survivor does not
possess the language, nor his audience the imagination, to
comprehend the actual atrocities which took place. “The secret
must remain inviolate”. Nevertheless successive generations,
and not only Jews, are still trying to make sense of this
catastrophic experience, and these essays will be of help. Can
the terrifying truth about the fate of human beings in
Nazi-occupied Europe be conveyed, either in writing or still more
(less) on film, with the inevitable difficulty of this media to
create an adequate “suspension of disbelief”. How to make the
fate of individuals typify the fate of millions? And in which
language? To the dangers inherent in the incommensurability of
language, add the perils of communicating a minority’s
experience with radical evil to audiences almost entirely spared
such a history. These are the themes explored in these essays.
The discussion is certainly valuable, even if the basic dilemma is
unresolved, and probably unresolvable. Perhaps no event in the
past has been more fully documented. Yet the Holocaust does not
thereby seem more accessible to understanding. The Shoah
remains unimaginable and impenetrable. As these authors rightly
note, all attempts must be tentative, to be approached with the
greatest of care or awe or fear.
JSC

b) Johann Boehm, Die Deutschen in Rumänien und das Dritte
Reich 1933-1940, Frankfurt/Bern/New York: Peter Lang 1999
Boehm has written a trilogy about the German minority in
Rumania, of which this is the second, covering the years after
Hitler came to power. Amongst these Volksdeutsche, even those
settled in Transylvania for hundreds of years, the Nazi revolution
gave rise to enormous expectations, even that they would soon be
part of a new Grossdeutsche Reich. The deliberate and radical
politicization of the exiled community by Nazi agitators was of
course deeply disturbing to the established authorities, especially
those of the Lutheran Church, who had long played the role of
defending the interests of their people and assuring their legal
and linguistic rights against the inroads of the vibrant but often
corrupt Rumanian authorities, who themselves were intent on
nation-building of a different kind. The resultant squabbles and
tensions are here fully described, and the role of the church
analysed. Basically the Nazi demands for renewal in a völkisch
direction appealed to the younger members, while the old guard
of the church hierarchy sought to defend their positions and their
comunity’s place in the nation. But the rapidly changing political
scene throughout south-eastern Europe produced convulsive
developments, which were to boil over in the subsequent years of
the second world war.

4a) The whole of the October-December issue of Geschichte und
Gesellschaft, Vol. 29, no.4, is devoted to the topic
“Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus”. The contributions
are all summaries of the larger works of the authors, namely
Manfred Gailus, “1933 als protestantisches Erlebnis:
emphatische Selbsttransformation und Spaltung” – an analysis of
the Berlin churches and clergy in 1933, and of the factors which
produced so many “German Christians” there; Thomas Fandel,
“Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus in der Region” – the
Palatinate pastorate and the Nazi Party; Doris Bergen, “Die
Deutsche Christen: ganz normale Gläubige und eifrige
Komplizen?” – the reasons for their rise and fall; Gerhard
Lindemann, “Antijudaismus und antisemitismusin der
evangelischen Landeskirchen während der NS-Zeit” – a
description of the measures taken to exclude Jews from the
Protestant community.

b) Derek Davis, The Russian Orthodox Church and the Future of
Russia in Journal of Church and State, Vol. 44, no. 4, Autumn
2002

Derek Davis’ useful survey of the present state of
Orthodoxy in Russia examines whether the unlamented Soviet
repression is fully overcome. Only partly, he concludes.
Although the Russian Orthodox hierarchy early on staked out its
claim for leadership in the renewed nation, it is still suspect in
wide circles for its compromises and collaboration with the
former dictatorship. Nevertheless it is experiencing something of
a revival at the local level, though most Russians remain passive
believers. But the 1990 law declaring Russia to be a secular state
opened the way for the penetration of many other religious
bodies from abroad, and finally led to a restrictive decree of 1997
putting the brakes on, and favouring the Orthodox Church’s sense
of its primacy. Despite protests from the Pope and a group of US
Congress representatives, the law was passed, and the religious
freedom of minorities and foreign missions curtailed. Orthodoxy
has since taken up the unofficially acknowledged role of the state
church, evidently with President Putin’s support. Yet the
patriarch has discouraged any open political participation.
Rather the Church’s role is to seek cultural and spiritual unity –
hence the strong opposition to its rivals such as Catholics and
Protestants. Whether this stance will be enough to counter the
strongly secularist ideologies remains to be seen. In Davis’ view,
Russia needs time to see how best to treat religion and religious
institutions within an emerging democratic order.

c) Leilah Danielson, “In my extremity I turned to Gandhi”:
American Pacifists, Christianity and Gandhian non-violence in
Church History, Vol. 72, June 2003, no 2, pp 361ff. This lively
article examines the influence of Gandhi on American
Protestants. For some his message of peace and the resolution of
disputes by non-violent means was seen as a remedy for the
selfish materialism and class struggles of early 20th century
America. Gandhi was elevated to great heights. As one minister
stated: “few men in history have borne so striking a resemblance
to the Divine Galilean”. Others were more reserved, seeing in
him “a curious mixture of ancient superstition and modern
democratic aspiration”. Most American pacifists, especially the
more evangelical, nonetheless saw Gandhi in Christian terms, as
someone who had evolved beyond his oriental origins. This
saintly figure did not challenge their continuing view of the
superiority of Christianity over other religions, and his pacifist
example was held to be evidence of his, and their moral,
superiority over all war-mongers. But the pacifists’ case in the
1930s was punctured by events, and by the resolute debunking in
Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. However,
thanks to the valiant witness of A.J.Muste, and the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, Danielson believes, their influence can be seen in
the later struggle of the civil rights movements of later years.

d) Neil Gregor, “Loss, absence and remembrance in Nuremberg,
1945-56” in German History, Vol 21, no 2, 2003, p. 183-203.
“Rather than condemning the inability of West German society to
place the Holocaust in the centre of its concerns in a manner
which suits the cultural sensibilities of the post-Cold War era, we
should seek a proper historicization of the traumatic impact of
war and its aftermath in German society. To seek to persuade the
bereaved, traumatized and brutalized population who had
experienced what they had between 1941 and 1955 that their
suffering was a product of a uniquely destructive war and a
genocide for which they should regard themselves as directly
culpable was, arguably, to demand the impossible”.

e) Religion, State and Society, Vol. 31, no 4, December 2003,
has two interesting and informative articles about the revival of
Lutheranism in Russia since 1990, which make extensive claims
about the vitality and importance of this church. Mark Elliott’s
article on Orthodox-Protestant relations in the post-Soviet era in
Religion in Eastern Europe, Vol. XXIII, no 5, October 2003,
gives a critical assessment of the efforts made by Protestant,
mainly foreign, missionaries to establish relations with the
Orthodox Church, and also points to their failure to cooperate
with the indigenous Russian Protestant groups. Perry Glanzer’s
book The Quest for Russia’s Soul. Evangelicals and Moral
Education in post-Communist Russia (Baylor University Press
2002) examines the enormous push made by American
missionaries in the years 1992-1997, and its very mixed results.

With best wishes
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

 

Newsletter — February 2004— Vol. X, no. 2

Dear Friends,
Since this month marks the 98th anniversary of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer’s birth, I vary our contents somewhat with a short
piece on the dilemmas of trying to translate one of his prison
poems. Do let me know if you approve this variation. My
address is jconway@interchange.ubc.ca
Contents

1) Translators’ Travails
2) Journal Update
3) Book review: Greschat, Evangelische Christenheit
4) Journal articles:

a) Rhonheimer, The Holocaust: what was not said.

1) Translators’ Travails
On December 19th 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his bleak
underground prison cell, wrote a Christmas letter to his fiancée, Maria
von Wedemeyer which included a poem called Von guten Mächten. A
few days later he repeated the poem, “which has been running through
my head in the last few days”. with a few minor changes, in a letter to
his parents. It consists of seven stanzas in rhyming couplets and iambic
pentameters, and is probably, after Christen und Heiden, the best
known of his prison poems. And indeed, because it comprises both a
statement of faith and a prayer, and is couched in a traditional
evangelical vocabulary, the poem has become widely popular in church
circles. Since his letters were carefully saved, and survived the war,
there is no question about the authenticity of the text. It has been
reproduced in numerous selections of Bonhoeffer’s works, though not
all of these have drawn attention to the immediate setting and the
desperate circumstances of impending catastrophe in the 1944
Christmas season, when it was composed.

However, in the course of being translated into English, the
poem has undergone considerable transformation. Since each edition
or selection of Bonhoeffer’s works has been made by different editors
or translators, there have now appeared a large number of differing,
variant and possibly even rival translations. Which of them should be
regarded as the most authentic? Since these various translators have
not gone on record as to the criteria they chose for their selection of
words, phrases or rhythms, the reader can only hazard a surmise. Was it
poetic style, rhythmic balance, linguistic accuracy, theological
interpretation or personal fancy which guided their choices?
Take for example, the seventh and final stanza. The original
runs as follows:

Von guten Mächten wunderbar geborgen
erwarten wir getrost, was kommen mag.
Gott ist mit uns am Abend und am Morgen
und ganz gewiss an jeden neuen Tag.

In the most recent issue of the International Bonhoeffer Society
Newsletter, number 83, Fall 2003, the text of these lines is printed on
p.9 under the title “By the Powers for Good”:

The forces for good surround us in wonder,
They firm up our courage for what comes our way,
God’s with us from dawn to the slumber of evening
The promise of love at the break of each day.

(Apparently the Editor borrowed this item for the Newsletter from the
recently published book by Elizabeth Raum, Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
called by God: a biography (New York 2002), who in turn took it
from A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings Of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, ed. G.B.Kelly and F.B.Nelson, 1991 edition, with the
translation made by Geffrey Kelly.). The rhymes of lines 2 and 4 are
clearly meant to reflect the same in the original, but the tripping use of
dactylic metre gives this version a racy almost running speed, as though
the author was on horseback. Is this a suitable rhythm for such an
affirmation at a time of terrible disaster? The second line conveys
neither the idea of waiting/awaiting or of comfort. And does not the
conscious use of poetic terms such as dawn or the slumber of evening
give a too beautified impression?

By contrast, in the early paperback editions of Letters and
Papers from Prison, where Mr Geoffrey Winthrop Young is thanked
for the translation of the poem, the tone is much more sedate and
literal. The title is here given as New Year (1945), and the text –
surely deliberately – avoids wherever possible words of more than one
syllable:

While all the powers of Good aid and attend us
boldly we’ll face the future, be what it may.
At even, and at morn, God will befriend us
and oh, most surely on each new year’s day!

The effect is however awkward, since the lines barely scan. Line 2
ends as though contrived, and line 4, with its unfortunate caesura seems
to try to reproduce the emphasis of ganz gewiss in a wholly artificial
manner. No explanation is provided why the translator has given the
poem the title of the New Year (1945) or changed the last line to fit this
attribution. Presumably this was due to the fact that Bonhoeffer was
explicitly writing a Christmas letter, though it is surely possible that his
thoughts were derived from his Advent meditations, with their moods
of penitence for the past and expectation for the future.
Interestingly, by the time the new greatly enlarged edition of
Letters and Papers from Prison was published in 1971, changes had
been made. The title is now “Powers of Good” and the second line has
been amended to read

boldly we’ll face the future, come what may

which at least fits the iambic rhythm better. The fourth line is also
changed from new year’s day to newborn day which is more literal
but again seems contrived.

The poem has also been set to music as a hymn. According to
one source, no less than 17 composers have provided a musical setting,
the most available of which is to be found in the ecumenical
hymnbook, published by the World Council of Churches, Cantate
Domino. Turning the poem into a hymn inevitably brought other
rhythmic constraints, even with the flexible tune provided by Joseph
Gelineau. The translator of the version in Cantate Domino is given as
F.Pratt Green and the date of 1972 is supplied:

By gracious powers so wonderfully shelter’d
And confidently waiting come what may
we know that God is with us night and morning
And never fails to greet us each new day

No title is attached, and for singing purposes the last verse has been
transposed to be the first, while stanzas 1 and 5 of the original poem
have been omitted. The explanation for these changes is probably that
Mr Green was attempting to stress the universal, timeless character of
the hymn, and therefore omitted the personal and new year’s
references. The result is a more sentimental and predictable version,
even if, at least in this stanza, the simplicity sticks closely to the
poem’s intent. But, as Jürgen Henkys has pointed out, the omission of
the original first stanza makes the opening of the second awkward, and
Green has cut out any reference to the Christmas season or to the
terrifying predicament in which Bonhoeffer and his closest relatives
now found themselves. This hymn version therefore too often runs the
risk of being used as a form of spiritual band-aid, a piece of pietistic
pain-reliever.

A very different version is supplied in a more recent
publication, the exchange of letters between Maria and Dietrich,
translated by John Brownjohn, with the title Love Letters from Cell 92.
Here the poem is cited in the immediate context of Dietrich’s letter to
Maria of December 19th, though without any title. “Here are another
few verses that have occurred to me in recent nights. They’re my
Christmas greeting to you, my parents, and my brothers and sisters.”
The final stanza now runs:

By kindly powers so wonderfully protected
we wait with confidence, befall what may.
We are with God at night and in the morning
and, just as certainly, on each new day.

The phrase kindly powers is repeated from the first stanza and also
from Bonhoeffer’s accompanying letter where he speaks of kindly
unseen powers preserving him, as angels do. The attractiveness of this
wording certainly outweighs the more concrete image of the forces for
good. But does it do justice to the implied contrast with the forces for
evil, which were so brutally present in Bonhoeffer’s life at that very
moment? Evidently here too the German phrase ganz gewiss has
baffled the translator, and led him to the literal but ugly and
unrhythmic alternative. And in the second line the idea of comfort is
not fully superseded by the notion of confidence. Nor is it clear why he
had to make the inversion of the third line, when Bonhoeffer clearly
and deliberately asserts that the initiative comes from God, not the
other way around.

The theological content of this stanza seems simple and clear –
the assurance of God’s continuing daily presence. It stands perhaps in
contrast to the much more intense fervour of the prayer contained in
the earlier stanzas, with their strong overtones of Jesus’ own prayer in
Gethsemane. The note of suffering is introduced already in stanza 2,
with the reference to the evil times which oppress our hearts. All the
more heartfelt then is the prayer:

Noch will das alte unsre Herzen quälen
noch drückt uns böser Tage schwere Last,
ach, Herr, gib unsern aufgescheuchten Seelen
das Heil, für das Du uns bereitet hast.

(Maria’s version has the word aufgeschreckten in line three, and
geschaffen instead of bereitet in line four.)
Since, in the hymn version, Green altered the order of the stanzas, he is
also obliged to make a major change for the first line, and therefore
provides as his translation: Yet is this heart by its old foe tormented
still evil days bring burdens hard to bear;

O give our frightened souls the sure salvation
for which, O Lord, thou taught us to prepare.

Truer to the original intent is surely the LPP translation:

The old year still torments our hearts, unhastening;
the long days of our sorrow still endure;
Father, grant to the souls thou hast been chastening
that thou has promised, the healing and the cure.

It is surely notable that Bonhoeffer inverts the usual expectation of a
joyous salvation prepared for the faithful by God, but insists instead
that God prepares the faithful for the kind of salvation to be granted to
the souls thou hast been chastening (LPP). The translators must have
struggled with the unusual German word aufgescheuchten which
surely requires a more forceful term than Brownjohn’s troubled or
Green’s frightened usage.

This leads directly to stanza 3, where the echoes of the Passion
are clearest.

Und reichst Du uns den schweren Kelch, den bittern
des Leids, gefüllt bis an den höchsten Rand,
so nehmen wir ihn dankbar ohne Zittern
aus Deiner guten und geliebten Hand.

Here Kelly gives a very literal translation which seems to catch the
atmosphere of reluctant acceptance of a tragic imminent fate:

But should you tend your cup of sorrow
To drink the bitter dregs at your command,
We accept with thanks and without trembling,
This offering from your gracious, loving hand.

But Brownjohn’s more poetic translation surely captures the nuances
and accentuates the contrast between the flinching recipient and the
gracious donor:

If thou shouldst offer us the cup of sorrow,
the bitter brimming chalice we’ll withstand
and thankfully accept it, never flinching,
from out thy righteous and beloved hand.

We can only infer how prayer- and psalm-filled was the conscience of
one who so courageously faced, in the Gestapo’s main prison, the
imminence of his own trial and execution, without flinching, and still
affirming God’s goodness. Was this not a true example of how
Christen stehen bei Gott in seinem Leiden?

And this stanza can surely be seen as recalling the notable
passage from Bonhoeffer’s letter written on July 21st, the day after the
failure of the plot, with all the consequences that he could well
envisage that the powers of evil would soon inflict.

This then leads us back to the guten Mächten. Contrary to what
the religious man expects from God – namely his own preservation
from the perils and dangers of this world – Bonhoeffer explicitly
suggests that the role of these powers of good is to enable and empower
men to share God’s suffering at the hands of a godless alien society.
The message of the poem is not therefore to promote an other-worldly
pietistic escapism, but to call men and women to participate in the
sufferings of God in the secular life. As such it reflects and repeats the
sentiments expressed in the July 21st letter:

How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray,
when we share in God’s suffering through a life of this kind? . . .
That I think is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a
man and a Christian. (LPP. 1971, p. 370)

This brief example, I believe, shows the difficulties faced by
translators seeking to remain faithful to the author’s intentions. In the
case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his rich spiritual sensibility and
adventurous hypotheses demand the utmost care in preserving the
nuances and profundity of one whose insights have made him one of
Germany’s most influential theologians of the twentieth century. We
must remain grateful to all those who have attempted such a
formidable and challenging assignment.
JSC

P.S. A review of the new documentary-biography film, Bonhoeffer,
produced by Martin Doblmeier, follows in next month’s Newsletter.

2) Journal Update.

The journal Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, edited from
Dresden by Prof. Grehard Besier, is seeking to increase its readership
amongst English-speaking church historians. To this end, the current
issue, Vol. 16., no 1, has added an Anglicized version of its title,
Contemporary Church History, has the majority of its articles in
English, and is devoted to a theme of particular interest to this
audience, namely “Christian Teachings about Jews. National
Comparisons in the shadow of the Holocaust”. These informative and
scholarly articles extend our range of knowledge about Christian
attitudes to Jews beyond the usual field of Germany. Here we are
given descriptions of the churches’ teachings in Poland, Estonia,
Denmark and even Spain and Argentina, as well as a critical view of
how both anti-judaism and racist-tinged antisemitism were to be found
in the publications of the Vatican. These percipient but also
controversial discussions add to the value of this journal which
deserves to be more widely adopted, especially in North American
universities.

3) Book reviews:

Martin Greschat. Die evangelische Christenheit und
die deutsche Geschichte nach 1945. Weichenstellungen in der
Nachkriegszeit Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. 2002. 476pp.
(This review appeared first in German History, Vol 21, no 4, 2003)

Martin Greschat is possibly now the doyen of Protestant Church
historians in Germany. His many years of teaching have been
accompanied by a notable list of publications covering the period of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But he has also been the champion
of a new style of church history writing, which seeks to get away from
the narrow blinkered concern solely with its own institutional record.
Instead Greschat has joined with others to try and overcome the highly
unfortunate division between Kirchengeschichte and Profangeschichte.
This leads to a blending of the church’s activities into the wider
political and social picture, attempting to ensure that the church’s
contribution to wider history is not overlooked in the general
historiography. This same goal is clearly evident in Greschat’s new
synthesis of the first four post-war years, 1945-1949. This masterly, if
leisurely, account successfully surveys both the chief political
developments in Germany and the Protestant Church’s reactions and
responses.

Greschat begins with an analysis of the occupation policies of
the four victorious Allies. All of them took a surprisingly positive view
of the churches, crediting them with having resisted Nazism, and
seeking to use them as a vehicle for re-educating the German people.
In the Protestant churches, a remarkable group of leaders emerged to
take advantage of this situation. Their first task was to purge the church
of the notorious pro-Nazi cadre of bishops and pastors. Instead, under
the leadership of the 77-year old Bishop Wurm of Wurttemberg, and
inspired by Pastor Martin Niemöller, the survivor of seven years in
concentration camps, these men, most of whom belonged to the
anti-Nazi Confessing Church, resolved on a new beginning. But first
they had to deal with the past. To their credit, and in contrast to the
Catholic hierarchy, they recognized the need to accept for themselves,
for the church, and for the nation, a declaration of guilt for the sins of
the Nazi era. This was issued at Stuttgart in October 1945.
Greschat gives an excellent account of the origins and the
results of this initiative, placing it in the wider context of German
society. These church leaders, as indeed their constituents, were deeply
divided by their past. A few were prepared to admit their inadequate
opposition to Nazism; others, especially in the laity, adamantly refused
to accept any notion of German collective guilt. For this reason, the
Allied-imposed denazification met with strong resistance. Niemöller’s
incessant preaching of repentance fell on deaf ears. There was
virtually no sensibility to the feelings of the Nazis’ victims. So too
there was a strong refusal to accept the verdict of the war, especially as
imposed by the Russians.

This reluctance, Greschat correctly points out, was due to the
ingrained conservative nationalism of the Protestant establishment.
Moreover they were led by a cohort of senior men, all of whom had
grown up under Kaiser Wilhelm, and had been influenced by the ideas
on nation-building, as well as antisemitism, of Adolf Stoecker.
Bishops Wurm and Dibelius of Berlin followed Stoecker in believing
that the Evangelical Church was the guardian of Germany’s identity
and morality, in a way which Roman Catholics could never be.
Consequently, they took up this cause in the name of a
“re-Christianization” of German society, which soon enough differed
from either the western model of democratic secularism or the
Communist model in the east.

In particular, the Evangelical leaders sought to preserve the
unity of the nation, and hence were opposed to the divisions within the
victorious Allies which eventually led to the country’s partition. Only
reluctantly did they accept Adenauer’s Catholic-dominated Bonn
republic, and never granted legitimacy to the Marxist-led German
Democratic Republic. For several years after 1949, their leaders such
as Niemöller and Gustav Heinemann campaigned in vain for a
neutralized but united country bridging the Iron Curtain.
Greschat also succeeds in placing the reconstruction of the
Evangelical Church’s national structures in the wider context. Here the
die-hards of Lutheran confessionalism sought to dismantle the
nineteenth century Prussian settlement and were only rebuffed by
vigorous opposition from those segments of the church who heeded
Karl Barth’s call for a more open and democratic polity. These
quarrels were backed by the conviction on both sides that God and
history backed their interpretation. Only by forcing through a pragmatic
compromise could the national church be established.
Greschat shows very clearly that the church hierarchy followed
the same ambivalent path as other leaders after 1945 with regard to the
nation’s past and future. Their conservative stances contributed to the
resulting stability of the Bonn Republic. But it was left to the next
generation to adopt new political options in the much changed
conditions of the 1960s.
JSC

4) Journal articles:

a) M.Rhonheimer, “The Holocaust: what was not
said” in First Things, November 2003.

The Nov. 2003 issue of First
Things contains an important article by the Swiss Opus Dei priest,
Martin Rhonheimer, professor of ethics and political philosophy at
Rome’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross: “The Holocaust: what
was not said” (pp. 18-27). This discusses “the astonishing fact that no
Church statement about Nazism [between 1933 and 1945] ever
mentioned Jews explicitly or defended them.” R. rejects the arguments
of critics like John Cornwell and Daniel Goldhagen as “so devoid of
historical foun-dation that they range from the absurd to the
outrageous. …The Church was indeed a powerful bulwark against Nazi
racism. Was it, however, also a bulwark against anti-Semitism?” In
addressing this question R. is conscious of a double loyalty: he is a
Catholic priest, but also a member of a three-quarters Jewish family,
pained both by unfair Jewish attacks on the Catholic Church, and
equally by a one-sided Catholic apologetic that minimizes the injustice
done by Christians to Jews in history.

Despite clear and repeated rejections of the Nazis’ insane racial
theories by Church spokesmen, the same leaders repeatedly stated that
Jews exercised a harmful influence on society; and that measures
restricting their public role were not only lawful but mandatory, always
with the proviso that Jews must not be hated, persecuted, unjustly
expropriated, or killed. Church condemnations of racism defined
anti-Semitism thus very narrowly: as hatred (and only that) of “the
people once called by God” ˆ but now suffering because of their
rejection of Christ. In a day in which the Catholic Church promoted the
idea that Jews were a harmful influence on society, the Catholic
rejections of anti-Semitism cited by Church apologists today did not
have at all the broad significance we attach to them today. “That we
read [such statements] as condemnations of anti-Semitism in any form
is an indication of the distance we have traveled since the Second
Vatican Council, and especially during the pontificate of Pope John
Paul II.”

Careful analysis of Church condemnations of racism, including the
1937 Encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, shows that they were defenses
not of Jews as such but of Church teaching, in particular Catholic
insistence that baptized Jews were no longer Jews but Christians (a
position never conceded by the Nazis). The principal author of Mit
brennender Sorge, Pius XII, confirmed on June 2, 1945, that its
purpose was the clarification of Church teaching. “Astonishingly, there
is not a single reference in this allocution, delivered a month after the
end of the war in Europe, to the slaughter of millions of Jews. Instead
the Pope, with his vision still limited to Catholics and Church concerns,
lamented the killing of thousands of priests, religious, and laypeople.”
At the same time, this “in no way diminishes the fact that many
Catholics ˆ priests, religious, laity, and above all Pius XII ˆ helped
many Jews, sometimes at the risk of the rescuers’ lives.”

“Does this make Church leaders ‘guilty’? We are not called today to
stand in judgment over the consciences of others ˆ especially when
they were subject to pressures we have never experienced.” At issue is
not the guilt of individuals but “recognition that the Catholic Church
contributed in some measure to the developments that made the
Holocaust possible.” The “official Church” was “certainly not one of
the causes of the Holocaust. And once the trains started rolling toward
Auschwitz, the Church was powerless to stop them. Yet neither can the
Church boast that it was among those who, from the start, tried to avert
Auschwitz by standing up publicly for its future victims. … The real
problem is not the Church’s relationship to National Socialism and
racism, but the Church’s relationship to the Jews. … The Catholic
Church’s undeniable hostility to National Socialism and racism cannot
be use to justify its silence about the persecution of the Jews. It is one
thing to explain this silence historically and make it understandable. It
is quite another to use such explanations for apologetic purposes.”
“Christians and Jews belong together,” R. concludes. The “purification
of memory and conscience” which the Church urges today involves
“the ability to speak openly about past failures and shortcomings. This
is true, of course, for both sides. But in view of all that Christians have
done to Jews in history, it is Christians who should take the lead in the
purification of memory and conscience.”

No summary can possibly do justice to the abundance of sources cited
by R. in support of his arguments. The article is especially noteworthy
coming, as it does, from a member of a far-right group in the Catholic
Church, whose members are not normally found among the critics of
Church authority.

NOTE: A longer German version of the article, with footnotes, is in the
new book: Andreas Laun (Hg.), Unterwegs nach Jerusalem. Die Kirche
auf der Suche nach ihren jüdischen Wurzeln (Eichstätt: Franz Sales
Verlag, 2004).
John Jay Hughes, St. Louis

With all good wishes
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

 

Newsletter — January 2004— Vol. X, no. 1

Dear Friends,Today, on my 74th birthday, I have pleasure in sending you the
first issue of Vol. X of our Newsletter to usher in 2004. I am of course
delighted to hear from any of you with any comments you would like to
share. Do contact me at: jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Thought for the month:
“The pursuit of history requires of its practitioners that vital
minimum of ascetic self-discipline that enables a person to do such
things as abandon wishful thinking, assimilate bad news, and discard
pleasing interpretations that cannot passs elementary tests of evidence
and logic. . . .Genuine historical scholarship is painstaking: it builds
detail upon detail, avoiding casual inference and thin deduction. This is
the difference between real history and politically or religiously
motivated propaganda.”

Contents:

1) Book reviews

a) M.F. Coady, biography of Fr. A.Delp
b) ed. G.Besier, Zwischen nationaler Revolution und militarischer Aggression
c) H.Schmidt, Hilde Schneider – biography

2) Journal articles:

a) Herderkorrespondenz 57 (2003) no 8: K-J. Hummel, Catholic research today – continued.
b) D.Goodhew, The rise of C.I.C.C.U.
c) A.Chandler, Quest for historical D.Bonhoeffer

1a) With Bound Hands: A Jesuit in Nazi Germany. The Life and
Selected Prison Letters of Alfred Delp. By Mary Frances Coady.
(Chicago: Loyola Press. 2003. Pp. xv + 239. Paperback $13.95.)

Well known in Germany, where numerous streets and schools bear his
name, the German Jesuit, Alfred Delp, is known in the
English-speaking world chiefly through Thomas Merton’s edition of
Delp’s Prison Meditations, published in 1963, now largely forgotten.
Delp was born in 1907 to an unmarried Catholic mother and a
Protestant father (they married shortly thereafter). He was raised as a
Protestant, receiving Lutheran confirmation in 1921. After a quarrel
with his Lutheran pastor, the headstrong teenager sought refuge with
the local Catholic priest, who prepared Delp for first communion and
confirmation in the Catholic Church. He entered a minor seminary the
year following and, at age eighteen, the Society of Jesus.

Delp’s fierce independence, his overdeveloped critical faculties, and
his indifference to the opinions and feelings of others soon caused
difficulties with peers and superiors. Following ordination to the
priesthood in 1937, Delp received permission from his superiors to
pursue a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Munich. When the
Nazi authorities refused him admission, Delp was assigned to the
editorial staff of the respected Jesuit monthly Stimmen der Zeit. In
April 1941 the Nazis suppressed the journal, and Delp moved to a
suburban parish where, among his other activities, he became “an
address” for Jews fleeing on the underground route to Switzerland.
In 1942 Delp was recruited into the “Kreisau Circle” organized by the
Protestant Count Helmuth von Moltke. This was a group of German
intellectuals who met secretly, mostly at the Moltke estate in East
Prussia, to discuss plans for a “better Germany” following Hitler’s
removal or defeat. Delp was valued for his expertise in the areas of
labor and social justice. This activity was to prove his undoing.
In January 1944 von Moltke was arrested and sent to a concentration
camp. A week after the July 20, 1944, unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s
life by the Catholic army officer Claus von Stauffenberg, Delp (who
had met with Stauffenberg shortly before but knew nothing of the plot)
was arrested at his parish near Munich. The ostensible reason was his
supposed knowledge of Stauffenberg’s plans. “The actual reason,” Delp
would write from prison following his death sentence, “was that I
happened to be, and chose to remain, a Jesuit.” This was a reference to
the Nazis’ offer to spare his life if he would renounce his Jesuit vows.
Delp was hanged at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin on February 2, 1945.

Coady’s account of Delp’s life is straightforward. It is enriched by
many of the letters he wrote, with manacled hands (hence the book’s
title), during his six months’ imprisonment. These show him
alternating between hope and despair, while clinging always to his
unflinching faith. In addition to his difficulties from the Nazis, Delp
suffered from his Jesuit Provincial’s refusal to permit him to take final
vows. He was considered, Coady writes, “too independent, tending to
act without proper permission,” with “an extravagant manner” which
gave “the impression of unseemly worldliness.” Delp was overjoyed,
therefore, to receive on December 8, 1944, a visit from a Jesuit brother
authorized to receive his final vows in prison.

One of his most poignant prison letters, written January 23, 1945, to the
newborn son of close friends in Munich, contains the spiritual fruit of
his terrible six-month ordeal: “Only in adoration, in love, in living
according to God’s order, is a person free and capable of life.” Before
his walk to the gallows, Delp told the Catholic prison chaplain: “In half
an hour I’ll know more than you do.”

His Jesuit confreres would remember him, Coady writes, “as an enfant
terrible: a maverick, and at times a Jesuit superior’s headache.” Their
concise and fitting epitaph: “He lived as a sinner and died as a martyr.”
John Jay Hughes, St. Louis.

1b) Zwischen “nationaler Revolution” und militärischer Aggression.
Transformationen in Kirche und Gesellschaft 1934-1939.
Edited by Gerhard Besier. ‘Schriften des Historischen Kollegs.
Kolloquien 48′. Munich: R.Oldenbourg Verlag. 2001.
xvii + 276 pp. ISBN 3-486-56543-5

(This review appeared in German History, Vol 21, no 3)
The prestigious Historisches Kolleg in Munich every year
invites its Research Fellows to organize a Colloquium around the
subject of their researches. So in 1998 Professor Gerhard Besier
(Heidelberg) brought together a distinguished group of international
colleagues to share their investigations on the topic of the initial stages
of the German Church Struggle between Hitler’s coming to power and
the outbreak of the second world war. These Colloquium papers are
now reprinted in full. In the meantime Besier’s own comprehensive
narrative of the years 1934-37, which is the sequel to two earlier
volumes written by the late Professor Klaus Scholder, has been
published under the title Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich. Spaltungen
und Abwehrkämpfe 1934-1937 (Berlin: Proplyläen Verlag, 2001).
Together these volumes provide us with a valuable guide to the
present state of research. Particularly helpful are those contributions
which place the German Church Struggle in the wider international
context, a perspective not hitherto treated systematically.

Over the past fifty years, the historiography of the German
Church Struggle has gone through various phases. The initial defensive
and apologetic accounts sought to portray heroically the Churches’
reactions to Nazi persecution, culminating in the outspoken resistance
of a Bishop Galen or the martyrdom of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But the
second phase was much more critical, pointing to the widespread
accommodation of the church authorities, or even support for the
Nazis’ extremist ideological goals. Now a more balanced and nuanced
approach is evident, which has the added value of adopting a
comparative dimension whereby the Nazi harassment of and the
developments within the churches are not seen in isolation. Thomas
Fandel’s study of the local area of the Palatinate, showing how both
Catholic and Protestant priests fared, is an excellent example of this
trend. Hans Mommsen and Julius Schoeps contribute thoughtful essays
on Nazism as a secular or political religion, and attribute much of its
success amongst church members to its skillful propaganda techniques
using religious vocabulary for nationalistic and racist goals.

Klaus-Michael Mallmann’s detailed analysis of the Gestapo and secret
police intelligence services , and their policies towards the churches,
confirms the picture, both of intense competency conflicts within the
Nazi hierarchy, as well as of the escalating radicalization of Nazi
policy. The resulting inconsistencies, when for instance Pastor Martin
Niemöller was sent to a concentration camp, but Bishop Galen
remained free, only added to the confused picture of the German
Church Struggle prevailing abroad.

Both Andrew Chandler on British Church attitudes towards
Nazism and Ingun Montgomery on the Swedish reactions point out the
many conflicting and ambivalent stands, affecting church members in
these countries, even those most closely involved, like Bishop George
Bell of Chichester. Sympathy for fellow Protestants, outrage at Nazi
violence, belated but insufficient assistance to the Nazis’ victims, and
fervent longings to do all they could to prevent another war,
characterized these responses between appeasement and condemnation.
So too in North America, the initial pacifist and pro-German mood of
the early 1930s was eventually replaced by a reluctant awareness of
Nazi intolerance and racial persecution. This ‘metanoia’ did much to
justify the post-1939 readiness to take up arms again in order to combat
the evils of Nazi domination. So too the essays describing the
churches’ reactions in France, Austria and Czechoslovakia add
valuable new material to the wider picture.

But as Gerhard Besier pertinently points out, the crucial factors
were the German churches’ own willingness to accommodate the Nazi
regime and to applaud its amazing successes between the so-called
‘National Revolution’ of 1933 and the outbreak of deliberate military
aggression in 1939. The German church leaders’ nationalist
sympathies and their desire to retain their positions as members of the
establishment prevented them from facing the realities of the Nazi
ambitions. For these reasons no coherent or compelling Christian
resistance to Nazism was ever developed. The central issue of how
Christian churches can deal with totalitarian regimes still remains
unresolved. But this volume gives us an excellent case study of the
problems and issues involved. The German Church Struggle was
indeed exemplary of the churches’ dilemmas in many societies during
the twentieth century. We can confidently say, however, that no
comparable situation has been so fully or comprehensively researched
as Germany’s. This volume adds yet again to the large corpus of
historiography on this topic, bringing with it significant findings from
new points of view.
JSC

1c) Hartmut Schmidt, Zwischen Riga und Locarno. Bericht über Hilde
Schneider, Christin jüdischer Herkunft, Diakonisse, Ghetto- und KZ
Häftling, Gefängnispfarrerin. Berlin: Wichern Verlag 2001. 298 pp.
ISBN 3-88981-127-2

There has recently been a surge of interest in the German
Evangelical Church about the careers of those pioneer women who, in
the course of the last century, resolutely sought to obtain the
qualifications and status of professional clergy. For decades their
progress was blocked by the male-dominated ecclesiastical
bureaucracies. Only in the last few years have women gained senior
positions in the various provincial churches.

This process, of course also happened in other countries. But in
Germany, the period of Nazi rule had a particularly deleterious impact.
The Nazi Party was well known for its antipathy to professional
women. But, even more fatefully, the Nazi supporters in the
Evangelical Church, known as the ‘German Christians’, pursued their
own vision of anti-feminism by propagating their ideas of a ‘manly’
church devoted to national and military goals, in which women’s roles
were clearly subordinate. No less traumatic was the fate of the small
number of Christians converted from Judaism, who were often
abandoned by their fellow Christians to the full horrors of Nazi
persecution.

Such was the situation of Hilde Schneider, who is apparently
now in her late ‘eighties, and whose remarkable reminiscences have
been ably written and researched by Hartmut Schmidt, a senior member
of the Evangelical Church’s press service. His achievement is to bring
to our attention the story of this lengthy and often painful odyssey by a
bravely courageous but self-effacing woman in her struggle to become
a pastor for the sake of the neediest of her sisters.

Although both her parents had much earlier been converted and
joined the Evangelical Church, Hilde was treated by the Nazis as
“fully” Jewish. Her early upbringing and her training as a nursing
sister in the largest Evangelical Church hospital in Hannover counted
for nothing. After the November 1938 pogrom, all the hospital director
could do was to advise her to emigrate as quickly as possible. The lack
of sympathy for her plight even amongst the sisterhood was notable.
The outbreak of war, however, put an end to her hopes for
escape. When the Nazi net closed tighter in 1941, Hilde was deported,
along with 1000 Jews from Hannover, to the specially created ghetto
for German Jews in the slums of Riga. Only 40 were to survive.
Hartmut Schmidt’s reconstruction of the cruelties and sadism of the
oppressors, as of the humiliations, degradations and sufferings of the
ghetto’s inmates, is both painful and shocking, even though soberly
recalled. He has skilfully and convincingly interwoven Hilde’s own
memories of this appalling experience with surviving documents of the
Riga and Latvian Holocaust.

Hilde’s survival was only accidental. But throughout she was
able to keep her Bible, from which she drew consolation, especially
from the psalms. For years afterwards, however, her health remained
damaged.

In 1945 she finally got back to Hannover, resolved that she must
put her personal sufferings at the service of others, by becoming a
pastor for women prisoners. Hartmut Schmidt notes very clearly the
obstacles she and other women would-be pastors faced at that time. It
took her years to get the necessary training and experience, very often
over the dismissive attitudes of church officials. Finally in 1959 she
obtained the post she most desired in the women’s prison in Frankfurt
and served fourteeen years until her retirement. Her sincere dedication
to Christ, her instinctive sympathy for women in trouble and her
readiness to stand by them in their suffering, are here well described.
The title of the book comes from the depth of her own
sufferings in Riga to the joyous openness she shared in Locarno at an
ecumenical guesthouse, supported by the World Council of Churches.
But only at the end of her career has she found a diligent and
supportive biographer and has been able to overcome the barrier of
silence imposed after the war by the reluctance of so many Germans to
acknowledge what crimes were committed in their name. Hilde
Schneider’s witness throughout is both instructive and inspiring, and
we must be grateful to Hartmut Schmidt for his enlightening
commentary.
JSC

2a) The German Catholic Church’s researches: Nazi dictatorship and
the Second World War – Part II, translated by Olav Zachau

The debate over the Catholics’ relationship to the Jews during the Third
Reich is closely linked to the controversy over Pope Pius XII. The
shining picture of this pope’s conduct during the Third Reich painted by
Christians and Jews alike was turned completely upside down by
Hochhuth in 1963. On the stage, Pius XII turned into a Nazi
collaborator. The two positions could not have been more
contradictory, and both views continue to find supporters.

The scope of judgements ranges from “Hitler’s Pope” (John Cornwell,
1999) to “Il Papa degli Ebrei” (“The Pope of the Jews”, Andrea
Tornielli, 2001). The discussion seemed to have bogged down into a
ritualized exchange of the same tired arguments. The examination of
the role of the Vatican in the Second World War has increasingly
narrowed to the relationship between the church and the Jews and in
turn, turned this debate into a stalemate.

New insights may be gained by expanding the perspective beyond the
personality of Pope Pius XII through international comparisons. This
means looking at the conduct of the Church and its representatives at
all levels of the hierarchy as well as reconsidering the standard of
values according to which the Pope should be measured. Was he, above
all, the protector of the Catholics all over the world? Was he a diplomat
acting on the same level as the governments of other states or was he
even the personified conscience of this world? The answer to these
questions and the question of how Pius’ positioned himself within this
spectrum will produce quite different judgements and interpretations.
The answer to these questions, however, can only be found by way of
interdisciplinary and international cooperation. It is, first and foremost,
absolutely essential to work with church historians who have the
necessary theological knowledge to understand these internal debates.

It is equally necessary to broaden the perspective towards a
international, or at least a European, perspective, which is only possible
by working with historians from abroad.

The question of the perspectives and weak spots of the research on
Catholicism 1933-1945 leads directly to the question of the sources
available and the overall conditions in the archives.

Since February 2003 new archival material from the Vatican has
opened far reaching new possibilities, and large scale work on them has
already begun. Files from the Vatican’s State secretary, the nunciatures
of Munich and Berlin, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith are now available for the years until 1939 and allow new insights
into the much debated relationship between the Catholic church and
Nazi Germany. The papers of Cardinal Faulhaber, which have been
prepared to an exemplary standard, were made available in Munich a
year ago, and in Rome the analysis of the influential and controversial
Austrian Bishop Alois Hudal has begun. Even if this work will not
revolutionize previous results, new source material may
yield findings that will further clarify the internal process of decision
making, the working process and internal connections; older
conclusions will be confirmed or explained in more detail. Surprises,
however, cannot be ruled out, by any means. Nuncio Cesare Orsenigo,
for instance, always seemed to be a weak figure, who was not recalled
apparently only because that the Vatican was afraid it would not be
allowed to appoint a successor. In the nunciature’s reports, he appears
as a reflective, clear-sighted analyst with surprisingly sound political
judgement.

The files from the reign of Pius XII (1939-1958), however, are still
unavailable. The newly available files only tell us about Eugenio
Pacelli, who was to become Pius XII, as nuncio in Munich and Berlin,
and as State Secretary. A further opening of the archives, propably in
2006, is not only desirable from a scholarly point of view, but also
regarding the transparancy in dealing with the history of the church.
The public still thinks that those who hide something have reasons for
doing so.

Even a full opening of all archives will not be able to silence
conscious ignorance and prejudice. Critics will still bring forward the
accusation that the files have been previously purged, which could
hardly be disproved. Still, science must do its duty and make it possible
that all who want to know better can know better.

The wish for free access to more archival material is a legitimate one.
However, the research deficits until now are not only due to the
problematic situation in the Vatican archives. First, materials on the
Catholic church are to be found not only in the Vatican. Numerous
American, European and Israeli archives contain materials that could
shed light on the role of the Pope during the Second World War and the
Holocaust from several perspectives. In particular, archives in East and
Southeast Europe have not been used to the fullest extent.

Since the 1960s, there had been an important exception concerning
the Vatican’s documents for the period of the Second World War. Pope
Paul VI. authorized the publication of the momentous, because
unprecedented, 11 volumes of the edition “Actes et documents du Saint
Siège relatifs a la Seconde Guerre mondiale”. The first appeared in
1965. This series contains a representative selection of documents from
the time of the Second World War, as edited by four Jesuit priests who
had been given access to the files. These volumes have now
been supplemented by the comprehensive editions of other
documentary sources that have been published by the Commission for
Contemporary History in Germany since the 1960s.

The abundance of information on various aspects of Catholic life in
Germany and the relationship of the German bishops to the Vatican
seems, however, to have had a rather intimidating than encouraging
effect. Apart from sheer volume of the material, language barriers have
until now prevented these materials from being better received. Large
parts of the “Actes et documents” are in Italian ( the working language
of the Curia), as well as numerous documents in English, French, and
Latin, and therefore present difficulties to scholars who only function
in German.

Language barriers have also been the main obstacle for greater
international cooperation in research on Catholicism. Many recent
publications, especially on the American market, have ignored the
German literature and present results as new that have been available in
German for some years. On the other hand, even German standard
works have not been translated into English. The paradoxical result,
e.g. in the case of the controversy over the treaty between the German
Reich and the Vatican (Reichskonkordat) (Scholder/Repgen) is that
American scholars draw a different conclusion than the Germans, in
part because Klaus Scholder’s contributions were translated into
English, while those of Konrad Repgen’s were not. It is imperative to
fill this deficit.

Since the summer of 2000, having been provoked by Klaus Bednarz’s
research on the use of forced labour in Catholic institutions during the
Third Reich, which left much to be desired, scholars in all German
dioceses have begun delving into this history of forced labour for the
church at the request of the German Bishops’ Conference (Deutsche
Bischofskonferenz). And they have discovered a number of other
unresolved questions relating to the history of the two major Christian
churches during the war. One of these questions involves the use of
church facilities by the Nazi state; this question is directly connected to
the problem of moral judgement and reparations payments to the
victims. Research into the history of the Churches during the second
half of “these twelve years” has begun and will be a focus not only of
future research on Catholicism but also of studies that cut across
denominational boundaries.

The debate on forced labour, for which scholars of German
Catholicism were so unprepared, makes clear that they will not only
have the task of carrying out their long-term research on church history,
but also of dealing with more immediate and pressing issues that will
arise. They have to ask themselves whether more “time bombs” are
ticking like the forced labour question, how they could disarm them in
advance, and they have to develop strategies of communicating to the
public and of limiting the damages, in case one of these bombs does
explode.
K-J.Hummel, Bonn

b) D. Goodhew, The Rise of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian
Union, 1910-71 in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol 54, no 1,
Jan. 2003, pp.62ff. Fifty years ago when I was a student in

Cambridge, the religious scene was preoccupied by the rivalry between
the Student Christian Movement and the C.I.C.C.U. The former was
liberal, ecumenical and open to new ideas; the latter was conservative,
evangelical and rigorous in its doctrinaire stance. The competition for
the souls and minds of the undergraduates was intense, and is now
brought to life in this excellently researched article by David Goodhew.
He rightly makes the point that C.I.C.C.U.’s strength was its adherence
to a fixed evangelical line, which could be traced back to the Clapham
Sect, Wilberforce, and Rev. Charles Simeon. In the post-1945 period
they had the advantage of attracting a host of excellent speakers, such
as John Stott, and held missions led by Billy Graham. They were far
better organised than other student societies, and so had a greater
impact, as they still do.

c) A Chandler, A quest for the historical Dietrich Bonhoeffer in
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol 54, no 1, January 2003, p.89-96.

This sprightly account of the present state of the Bonhoeffer legacy
shows that very solid memorials of this young German theologian now
exist. On the one hand, his statue is placed on the portal of Westminster
Abbey in London, as one of the 20th century martyrs; on the other
hand, the publication of his Werke is now complete in seventeen
volumes, luckily finished shortly before the death of his most noted
champion, Eberhard Bethge. (The English translation, which has now
seven volumes in print, continues, and will presumably eventually be
complete.) Chandler rightly points out that Bonhoeffer’s appeal was
in part due to his provocative remarks in the paper-back edition of
Letters and Papers from Prison, and in part from the fact that he was
murdered by the Nazis at the very end of the war. He also shows that
some exaggerated claims made about his role in the Church Struggle or
the German Resistance Movement need to be modified, but that
shouldn’t distract from the important insights he gave us, especially in
the field of ethics.

With all my good wishes for the start of the New Year. I trust you all
had a blessed Christmas holiday.

John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca