Thomas Großbölting in Memorium
Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)
Thomas Großbölting in Memorium
By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University
The fields of German history and religious history suffered a devastating and irreplaceable loss on February 11, 2025. The prominent German historian and Director of the Research Center for Contemporary History in Hamburg, Thomas Großbölting, who had generated headlines in Germany for having uncovered the sordid details of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic clergy in the diocese of Münster, died tragically in a train accident in Hamburg, Germany. He was the sole fatality in a collision between his high-speed ICE train with 285 passengers and a semi-truck at a rail crossing in Hamburg-Rönnenburg.
Dr. Thomas Großbölting
His death comes as a shock to all who knew him, and not least his wife of nearly thirty years and four children. Großbölting was a highly respected, if not revered figure for multiple reasons. The most obvious was his remarkable scholarly output that spanned thirty years and multiple subdisciplines in contemporary Germany history. He was the author of ten monographs, the co-editor of seven edited volumes, and the author of dozens of journal articles and chapters in edited volumes. His topics ranged widely in their geographical and chronological scope. He earned renown not only for his magnum opus on religion in Germany since 1945, which was translated into English under the title, Losing Heaven: Religion in Germany since 1945, but also for his exposé of the clerical sexual abuse scandal. He wrote about the Stasi, German society after reunification, the representations of societal order in industrial and trade exhibitions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and their role in popularizing consumption, the politics of memory in Italy after the Second World War, amongst many other topics.
Born in 1969 near Bocholt, Thomas Großbölting was a product of the flat western regions of the Münsterland, in Westphalia in northwestern Germany. He studied history, German, and Catholic theology at the nearby university in Münster. He spoke fluent English and Italian. But even while a student there, he exhibited that characteristic which would accompany him until his final minutes on a high-speed train: he was constantly in motion. He jaunted from one archive and center of historical research to another. These early years in Münster were filled with excursions to Cologne, Bonn, and Rome. Fittingly, his final undergraduate research broached a topic that would remain part of his scholarly journey over the decades: debates in the Catholic Church about reform following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). His dissertation, however, was about the history and fate of middle-class bourgeois society in the East German cities of Magdeburg and Halle during the Cold War. From there he went to Berlin, where he led scholarly investigation into the Stasi files. His more than five years of research culminated in a book about German society post-reunification, which appeared in print in 2020. His waystations as a professor began in Magdeburg, moved back to Münster following a detour to the University of Toronto, and concluded in Hamburg. He was involved in more scholarly nexuses, organizations, and associations than it is possible to list. He remained one of the best-connected historians – on both sides of the Atlantic – that one will find. An inveterate organizer, he mastered the fine art of bringing people together, delegating where necessary, and synthesizing.
His remarkably scholarly career aside, Großbölting was revered for a more important reason. As nearly of the testimonials and eulogies printed in Germany correctly note, he was that rare German academic with a combination of intelligence, ambition, and rigor – minus the vanity. As frequent a presence as he was on podiums across Germany and North America, he was equally a listener. He was never one to prescribe: serving as a mentor to dozens of budding scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, he was generous with his wisdom. He indeed was more than willing to offer constructive suggestions when his many students, research assistants, and co-workers needed them. He nonetheless never did so from an exalted or lofty position that sought to tell others what they needed to know or had failed to grasp. His assistance came instead from a position of trust and confidence. When taking part in a conference at Regent College in August 2013 to commemorate the Canadian church historian, John Conway, he offered many constructive suggestions for how to transform Conway’s newsletter that had focused on German church history and recent church developments into an electronic journal encompassing a broader range of topics and geographies.
Above all, Großbölting exuded optimism, radiated sunshine, and transmitted energy. Even when he was not traveling to another archive or to give another talk, he was always on the move. His favorite way of relaxing was to go jogging. I knew Thomas for almost thirty years, almost to the day. We met in early 1995 in a working group based in Münster whose focus appropriately was contemporary church history. The Arbeitskreis für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte in Münster was then under the direction of its founder, the renowned church historian, Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Damberg. Thomas and I were both 25-year-old graduate students; that we were from opposite shores of the Atlantic did not matter. We quickly developed a friendship that was equal parts scholarly and personal. We planned and led four seminars between 2014 and 2017 at the German Studies Association on the subject of religion in Germany between 1789 and the present. We also co-edited a volume, Germany and the Confessional Divide, which was published by Berghahn Books in 2021. While collaborating on these projects and seminars, we hosted each at other at our respective homes in St. Louis and until recently in Münster over the decades. Following conferences, we went swimming in the Pacific in San Diego and Vancouver Bay in British Columbia. Großbölting was at ease equally in discussing the vicissitudes of German Catholic history and the lives of our respective children. He was a devoted father to his four children, for whom he was an inspirational figure and his loss incomprehensible.
For me too, his untimely death remains inexplicable. It is akin to a rolling stone ceasing to move. In earlier eras, as Thomas knew all too well – and himself wrote about! – sudden departures from this world were more the norm than the exception. Theologians, hymnists, priests, and pastors all repeatedly spoke of the frailty and contingency of life. Here, today; gone tomorrow. In the words of one such German chorale, as rendered into English in The Lutheran Hymnal of 1941:
Who knows when death may overtake me!
Time passes on, my end draws near.
How swiftly can my breath forsake me!
How soon can life’s last hour appear!
My God, for Jesus’ sake I pray
Thy peace may bless my dying day.
That of all people, it was Thomas, the sunniest of optimists, who came to illustrate this age-old axiom is the bitterest of ironies. Yet in keeping with the spirit of the 17th century, this hymn also concludes on a note of solace:
And thus I live in God contented
And die without a thought of fear;
My soul has to God’s plans consented,
For through His Son my faith is clear.
In his book, Losing Heaven, Großbölting explicitly described how remote and incomprehensible the religious sentiment articulated in this chorale had become in the later years of the Federal Republic. If the Christian churches wished to contribute to the moral questions facing society in the 21st century in light of changing religious understandings, he wrote, they needed to show openness and enter into dialogue with those of all faiths as well as those of no faith. Yet as his untimely death also tells us, particularly in times of upheaval like ours, the task of church historians and theologians is to enter into a dialogue between past and present. The collective wisdom of the past and the needs of the present have to be in constant and constructive conversation. Thomas Großbölting would have agreed whole-heartedly.
I would like to close by extending my condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues who are suffering from this terrible loss.
