Letter from the editors: March 2011
ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2011
Letter from the editors: March 2011
By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University, and Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College
Greetings from the editors, and welcome to the March issue of the ACCH Quarterly. It is a true pleasure to be able to bring you this spring issue. Its contents are drawn from the annual meetings of the American Historical Association, under whose umbrella the American Catholic Historical Association and the Conference Group for Central European History sponsored their annual gatherings.
The panels discussed in this issue were particularly germane to this year’s larger theme, “History, Society and the Sacred.” Doris Bergen gives us a run-down of a panel entitled, “Christianity during the Era of Total War.” Two of the papers on this panel focused on Catholic military chaplains during the conflagrations which tore the European continent apart between 1914 and 1945. Mark Edward Ruff provides a synopsis of the panel, “German Catholics Negotiate National Socialism: Three Case Studies” which underscored the ambiguities and ambivalences of the relationship between church leaders in the Third Reich and the National Socialist movement.
This issue also features the repertoire of reviews to which you have long been accustomed. Heath Spencer reviews Jeremy Cohen’s book, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen. In a collective review of four books, John Conway takes on an equally massive subject – Christianity and Communism in East Germany. Robert Ericksen assesses a book written by a relative outsider to Holocaust studies, David Cymet’s History vs. Apologetics: The Holocaust, the Third Reich, and the Catholic Church, while John Conway reviews Antonia Leugers’ Jesuiten in Hitlers Wehrmacht. Kriegslegitimation und Kriegserfahrung.
It is also our pleasure to welcome Suzanne Brown-Fleming as a new member of the ACCH Quarterly editorial board. Dr. Brown-Fleming is the director of Visiting Scholar Programs at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She brings a wealth of experience not only in coordinating international scholarly programs on the Holocaust but also in carrying out research into the churches and the Holocaust. She is the author of The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Postwar Germany, which was published in 2006 by the University of Notre Dame Press. On a related note, it is with a mixture of sadness and gratitude that we announce the departure of Dr. Randall Bytwerk from the editorial board. For many years, Dr. Bytwerk faithfully archived the contents of John Conway’s monthly newsletter (forerunner to the ACCH Quarterly), which are still available at hisCalvinCollege website (http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/akz/). We would like to thank him for his service.
On behalf of all of the ACCH Quarterly editors,
Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University
Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College
