Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 31, Number 4 (Winter 2025)
Review of Jan H. Wille, Das Reichskonkordat: Ein Staatskirchenvertrag zwischen Diktatur und Demokratie, 1933-1957. (Paderborn: Brill-Schöningh, 2024). Pp. 481.
By Martin Menke, Rivier University
This volume, the latest in the blaue Reihe published by the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, is a useful reference work for those seeking to understand the long-term effects of the concordat between the German state and the Holy See, concluded in 1933 and still in effect today. That said, the volume’s five parts vary in their scholarly richness. The author, Jan H. Wille, currently serves as an associate at the Helmut Schmidt University of the Armed Forces in Hamburg.
The work under review is his revised dissertation, which the late Thomas Großbölting supervised before his untimely death. Like most German dissertations, it begins with a lengthy discussion of existing literature and investigatory approaches. The author asserts that the concordat of 1933 was one of a series of treaties negotiated between churches and the German state in the twentieth century. Generally, the concordat is not considered a Staatskirchenvertrag, as those concluded by the German government and the Protestant churches are. Most historians of the concordat consider it a diplomatic agreement between two sovereign entities.
The author asks how the concordat with its strict agreements and flexible interpretations functioned under the Nazis, its questionable status under the Allied occupation regimes and the early Federal Republic, until the German Constitutional Court’s decision of 1957, which reaffirmed the validity of the concordat. The author seeks to discover the ways in which the concordat played a role in power politics in state-church negotiations. While the author correctly does not characterize the victory in the Bundesverfassungsgericht as such, given the court’s opinion that the states need not heed the federal government when establishing educational policies, he understands that the rejection of the suits against the Enabling Act and the concordat affects the future influence of the Catholic Church on public education.
Taking a closer look at the work and its structure reveals a well-planned argument. The first section of the work, which deals with the negotiations for the Reichskonkordat and its effects during the National Socialist era, heavily relies on the scholarly work of others. While the author faithfully cites all sources, his original archival work begins with the period after the foundation of the Federal Republic. In his helpful introduction, Wille discusses the vast body of scholarly work on the negotiations leading up to the conclusion of the Reich concordat and the period immediately thereafter. Wille offers his own understanding of the scholarly literature relevant to the period before the Enabling Act. He correctly argues that if more Germans had stood their ground in spring 1933, events might have unfolded differently. The author shows that, both in the interwar period and after 1945, much of the debate about the concordat had little to do with faith per se, but more with the control that church and state sought to exercise over the faithful.
The author claims a dearth of scholarly engagement with the post-war effect of the concordat, which remained valid after 1945. Given the work of Großböltung and others cited, one has to wonder how true this is. Indeed, quoting Mark Ruff’s assessment of the concordat as a political gambit demonstrates how, even recently, scholars have addressed the issue. There are histories of postwar Christianity and Catholicism as well as studies of the German supreme court proceedings around the concordat, and its selective implementation in the late fifties and sixties. The author’s primary interest in this period becomes clear as he devotes far fewer lines to the concordat’s genesis than to its role in the postwar era. Furthermore, in discussing the earlier period, the author paints the historical record in broad strokes, drawing on the existing scholarly literature, to which he adds little new.
When discussing the occupation period and especially the period after the founding of the Federal Republic, the author pays appropriate attention to the role of the churches in the shifting cultural landscape of the postwar era. He notes the contradiction between the church’s heavy political, cultural, and social influence during the postwar years and the increasing secularization of the population. While not the focus of the work, the author leads the reader through the relevant conflicts of the late sixties, seventies, and eighties.
This account of the post-war years provides excellent insight into the subtext of the questions affecting church and state. For example, the concordat provided a legal basis for the Federal Republic’s claims to represent all of prewar Germany. Also, the three-way conflicts between the Holy See, the federal government, and the German states (Länder) over the role the concordat’s provisions should play in regulating public education, a topic which the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) left to the states, represented the ongoing conflict between the authority of the national government and that of the states.
The author documents the extensive effort at all levels that the Catholic Church put forth to win public opinion on the concordat question. He also shows how the post-war demographic shifts caused by flight and expulsion weakened Germany’s traditional religious boundaries. Silesians, Ermländer, and Sudeten Germans changed the face of Protestant communities, as the arrival of refugees from Pomerania, East Brandenburg, East Prussia, and Lower Silesia changed Catholic communities in the west. Western Germany became more heterogeneous. Furthermore, by the early fifties, most Germans no longer considered religious differences as consequential as before, which lessened the demand for religiously divided schools as well as opposition to mixed marriage.
This work is a useful survey of the concordat’s fate after Germany’s defeat and recovery. As the footnotes show, the period before 1945 has been plowed thoroughly by historians. Discussing these sections, the author largely cites secondary sources. Discussing the period between the war’s end and the German Supreme Court’s decision on the concordat, however, the author gainfully relies heavily on federal, diocesan, Vatican, and foreign (US) archives.
Analytically, the study offers some new insights. In the discussion of the concordat’s role after 1945, the author convincingly points out that neither the Allied military governors nor the Parlamentarische Rat, the constitutional convention for the three western zones, sought to address the question of the concordat’s continued validity. The authors make clear the Holy See’s insistence on the applicability of the Reichskonkordat to the new Germany while documenting the reluctance of the immediate post-war authorities to support that view. He also shows clearly that the Adenauer government sought to maintain the concordat not only for reasons of faith but also to demonstrate Germany’s return to the diplomatic stage. Domestically, Adenauer sought to use the concordat to compel state governments to obey the federal government, but this ultimately failed.
Overall, the work is valuable, not only as a summary of the concordat’s roots in the Weimar era and its hasty conclusion in the first months of the NS-regime and that regime’s continuous violation of the treaty, but also as a study, based on archival research, of the concordat’s continued relevance after 1945 in West Germany.
