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Film Review:  Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Film Review:  Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin, directed by Todd Komarnicki (Angel Studios, 2024)

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, Continuing & Professional Studies

Introduction

On the morning of April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, age 39, was hanged on a gallows at Flossenbürg concentration camp. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and General Hans Oster, key conspirators in the military resistance against Hitler, met with the same fate that day, as did several others. Dietrich’s brother, Klaus, and brothers-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi – who had recruited Dietrich into the resistance – and Rudiger Schleicher were executed the same week. Almost from the beginning of Todd Komarnicki’s sincere but problematic new film, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin, Bonhoeffer’s end is in focus. This review centers on the film’s historical content and its narrative, but also includes an examination of controversies surrounding its marketing and message.

The Film’s “Bonhoeffer” and Bonhoeffer the Man

The film, which is beautifully shot and scored, but at times laden with clunky dialogue, begins with a glimpse into the domestic life of the Bonhoeffer family (warm and loving, and also tranquil until Dietrich’s beloved older brother Walter is killed in the Great War). Yet it largely focuses on Bonhoeffer’s involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, who became chancellor of Germany in 1933. The film flashes back and forth, from Bonhoeffer’s imprisonments in Buchenwald and Flossenbürg to the years preceding the war. It tells the tale of a young theologian whose participation in the 1944 plot to assassinate the Führer and overthrow the Nazi regime seems nearly inevitable. The flashbacks often muddle both the chronology and the film’s interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s de-contextualized words.

Bonhoeffer did provide nearly contemporaneous early details of the first deportation of Jews to “the east” and was involved in “Operation Seven,” an intricate and successful plot to rescue fourteen Jews. Yet the extent of his involvement in resistance efforts, including “Operation Valkyrie,” the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler’s life (but not the March 21, 1943 Gersdorff plot depicted in the film), has been debated extensively by Bonhoeffer scholars.[1] In any case, he was arrested in April 1943 for plotting to rescue Jews, using his travels outside of Germany for matters unrelated to German military intelligence, and abusing his position in the Abwehr to help Confessing Church pastors escape military service. He was initially imprisoned in the Wehrmacht’s Tegel prison in Berlin.

Though Bonhoeffer knew of efforts to topple the Hitler regime as early as 1938, his tangential involvement in Operation Valkyrie was the occasion of Dietrich’s ultimate demise. A couple of months after only one of the two planned bombs exploded near Hitler and injured but did not kill him, the Gestapo discovered documents implicating especially Dohnanyi but also Bonhoeffer. Shortly thereafter, Dietrich was moved to a notorious prison cellar at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin; in February 1945, he was transferred to Buchenwald, then moved to the Flossenbürg concentration camp.

In a pivotal sequence, the film cuts back and forth breathlessly between the aborted March 21, 1943 Gersdorff assassination attempt and Bonhoeffer’s imagined practice sermon at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem in 1939. The scene, which, as happens many times in the film, conflates various writings penned by the young theologian, highlights the famous quote from The Cost of Discipleship (1937): “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” One implication seems to be that Bonhoeffer was prophetic – or at least that he somehow had a sense, even before the war began, that participating in resistance against Hitler and the Nazis would lead to his own death more than five years later. Another takeaway is the central message that the film wants to convey: that Christians should be willing to die (or at least be willing to suffer greatly) for their faith.

Yet, while Bonhoeffer was indeed executed by direct order of Hitler in April 1945, it was Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff who carried explosives into the Zeughaus in Berlin; he intended to tackle Hitler just before the bomb, with its ten-minute fuse, was set to explode. The conspirators had expected Hitler to spend a significant amount of time at the Prussian war museum, but instead he hurried through the exhibition, prompting Gersdorff to defuse the bomb in the lavatory (he only had a couple of minutes to do so).[2] It was Claus von Stauffenberg who carried the bomb into the “Wolf’s Lair” in East Prussia on July 20, 1944.

This is not to say that Bonhoeffer lacked courage; his participation in the daring activities that he carried out as a spy for the resistance in the Abwehr was of course extremely courageous and led ultimately to his death by hanging. But the desire to put Bonhoeffer closer to the center of this story than he was distorts the historical picture even if it meets a perceived need to put Dietrich’s endorsement of violent means at the center of the narrative. This distortion also minimizes his efforts both to save the lives of European Jews as well as to discern and proclaim some theological meaning not only about martyrdom, but about what it means to live in the world as a follower of Christ.

The imagined Harlem sermon also includes a reference to the shooting of 33,000 Jews near Kyiv – the Babyn Yar massacre, which did not occur until September 1941. Dietrich’s sojourns in Harlem were indeed central to his thinking, especially about matters related to race. Yet, the conflation of events that took place closer to the height of the genocide (most Jews who were killed during the Holocaust died in 1942 and 1943) with occurrences and writings from the summer before the war downplays the development of Bonhoeffer’s theology; so much of his thought was a painstaking yet direct response to what he was witnessing with his own eyes (and hearing about from his contacts in the resistance).

Victoria Barnett, a leading authority on the life and work of Bonhoeffer and past editor for this journal,[3] thinks we should read Bonhoeffer in a different way than do so many films and books that insist on making him an uncomplicated hero; he was “one decent human being who understood better than any of us that in evil times, we must remain faithful … for the sake of future generations ….” Ferdinand Schlingensiepen urges that “Bonhoeffer did not want to be venerated; he wanted to be heard. Anyone who puts him on a lonely pedestal is defusing that which … makes a thoughtful encounter with him worthwhile.”[4] Bonhoeffer was a complex individual and theologian; he was also, above all else, a thinker and a writer. Bonhoeffer never justified his participation in the assassination plot on biblical or theological grounds – indeed, he believed he needed to ask forgiveness for it.

Historical Context

The film also gets some significant aspects of the broader historical context wrong. Crucially, as in Eric Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer biography, Hitler and the Nazi Party leadership are portrayed as taking over the German Protestant Church and, apparently, never relinquish their hold over it, creating a “Reich Church.”[5] Meanwhile, the Confessing Church – here led by Bonhoeffer and Niemöller – courageously fights the Nazis, especially their anti-Jewish policy and actions, including the Holocaust. This misleading narrative suggests that there were two sides of the Church Struggle: the (apparently fearless) Confessing Church and the “Reich Church,” which in the film represents the remainder of the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche (German Protestant Church, DEK) who supposedly had been coopted by Hitler’s “brute nationalism.”

This version of the Church Struggle fuses with the Reich Church the significant minority faction of the DEK, the German Christians, who eagerly embraced many aspects of Nazism and created and used “de-Judaized” Bibles and hymnals. Yet it omits altogether the majority of German Protestants, who chose not to affiliate with either the German Christians or the Confessing Church. It also elides the fact that Hitler eventually gave up on the idea of a Reich Church. In 2010, Victoria Barnett critiqued the similarly-misplaced portrait of the German Protestant Church during the Third Reich in Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer biography in this journal.

Further, as many scholars have demonstrated, the German Protestant myth of the Church Struggle as a courageous fight against Nazism, which was proliferated after the war chiefly by pastors and theologians determined to paint their actions and that of their churches in the most benign light, has been refuted. Many of the churches in fact cooperated with Hitler, in many cases promulgating Nazi ideology, including antisemitism.[6] Bonhoeffer’s evolving views about Jews and Judaism and certainly his later embrace of a (enigmatic but potentially very potent) “religionless Christianity” were held by very, very few Protestant Christians of his day. As our own Kyle Jantzen related in 2015, “For better or worse, Bonhoeffer has received more attention than his historical roles in the German church struggle, resistance, or ecumenical world would merit.”

Other inaccuracies in the film are characterized as intentional, with various reasons offered by the filmmakers (e.g., a depicted event being a “metaphor” or a means of condensing storytelling for a film). It is common for filmmakers to conflate events for the purpose of telling a story more efficiently. The scene with Bonhoeffer jamming in a jazz club with Black musicians, for example, did not happen; yet it is certainly the type of event that could have happened at the time and comports with what we know about Bonhoeffer: he was a skilled pianist and his time in Harlem really did expand his musical tastes (as well as his theology).[7]

Yet, other scenes are unintentionally inaccurate or “metaphorical.” When Martin Niemöller recites the (now famous) poem “First they came for the socialists …” he does so in a thunderous sermon in prophetic fashion, as if he uttered those famous words before the Nazis “came for him.” In the film, the sermon is apparently given in 1944 even though Niemoller was arrested in 1937 and would have been in Dachau in 1944. (the film’s Niemöller states during the sermon that he had been their pastor “for thirteen years”; Niemöller became a pastor at Berlin-Dahlem in 1931). What came to be known as Niemöller’s “confession” was not uttered until after the war, and thus after his seven-year incarceration in first a Berlin prison, then Sachsenhausen, and finally Dachau.

A staunch nationalist, the pastor of the Berlin Dahlem Confessing Church neither resisted nor even opposed the regime’s persecution of Jews and other minorities from 1933 to July 1937 (when he was arrested). Placing the words of the famous poem in his mouth in 1944 obscures the historical reality of a man who only realized his sins against Jews and other victims of Nazism after the Holocaust. This heroizing of Niemöller aligns with the film’s portrait of Bonhoeffer. The audience is robbed of the more complex picture of this complicated man with deep German nationalist sympathies who dissented against the regime in defense of the German Protestant Church, not Jews and other victims of Nazism, a man who recognized his sins against the latter only later in life (gradually, beginning at Dachau, but continuing for decades thereafter).[8]

Controversial Marketing

As the film was promoted in the weeks before yet another contentious US presidential and congressional election, and was released just weeks afterward, its marketing campaign engendered significant controversy. A post on X (formerly Twitter) by the distribution company, Angel Studios, still available as of this writing, reads in part “The battle against tyranny begins now! Watch Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. in theaters November 22! …”; the text appears above a poster with Bonhoeffer carrying a gun.

An international group of Bonhoeffer scholars wrote and circulated a petition condemning such abuses of Bonhoeffer’s legacy; it has to date garnered thousands of signatures. Similarly, many of the German actors in the film, the Board and staff members of the Bonhoeffer Haus in Berlin as well as members of Bonhoeffer’s extended family issued statements condemning misuses of Bonhoeffer’s life and work.

Misinterpretations or misuses of Bonhoeffer are certainly not confined to the religious right. In Charles Marsh’s biography, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bonhoeffer has a romantic attraction to Eberhard Bethge, a notion that, however close their friendship, is belied by weightier evidence to the contrary. In another Bonhoeffer biography, the authors contend that Bonhoeffer was a committed pacifist.[9]

Yet, Victoria Barnett argues that Bonhoeffer’s views on the quest for peace conflicted with his participation in the resistance in ways that he could never fully resolve. The coupling of an image of Bonhoeffer with a gun and the descriptor “assassin” in the film’s title is irresponsible, as it turns the Berlin theologian into someone he was not, at a time of heightened political polarization in the US and Europe and war in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Conclusion

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin has many flaws, not least of which is the last descriptor in its title. The portrayal of the German Protestant Church lacks nuance; the elevation of thematic messages over chronology leads at times to significant misinterpretations of Bonhoeffer, Niemöller, and the Holocaust. Its pre-release marketing campaign included some disconcerting messaging, especially as it coincided with a highly contentious US presidential election during which one of the candidates was the target of an assassination attempt. Thankfully, despite its imperfections, the film is infused with an unvarnished appreciation for its protagonist – who is indeed worthy of admiration – and its filmmakers clearly care about the perils of antisemitism and racism. We would all do well to imbibe these messages, however flawed their presentation.

If one is looking for a more accurate portrayal of Bonhoeffer’s life, including his political resistance efforts, the International Bonhoeffer Society has a good list of documentaries and films. Better still, one might get to know Bonhoeffer a bit better by reading Schlingensiepen’s excellent biography[10] or by delving into some of Bonhoeffer’s writings.

 

Notes:

[1] Lori Brandt Hale and W. David Hall, eds., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theology, and Political Resistance (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020)

[2] Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance, (Bloomsbury, 2010) 312-313.

[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, ed. Victoria J. Barnett, 16 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995–2014).

[4] Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945, xvii.

[5] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010).

[6] Christopher J. Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 10.

[7] See Reggie Williams’s insightful take on the film, which includes a thoughtful critique of its portrayal of Black and Jewish people. “The Tropes that Birth a Hero,” Christian Century, November 25, 2024, https://www.christiancentury.org/features/tropes-birth-hero.

[8] Matthew D. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, The Pastor who Defied the Nazis (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

[9] Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G. Siegrist, and Daniel P. Umbel, Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Publishing, 2013).

[10] Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945.

 

 

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Review of Manfred Gailus, Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit – Der Wuppertaler Theologe Helmut Hesse (1916-1943)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Review of Manfred Gailus, Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit – Der Wuppertaler Theologe Helmut Hesse (1916-1943) (Bremen, Wuppertal: De Noantri, 2019). 80 pp. ISBN: 978-3-943643-11-4.

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

The history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is bleak, a seemingly unrelenting litany of miseries. The Nazi regime and its collaborators murdered roughly six million Jews as well as hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma on the basis of their race. Gays and lesbians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Germans, and those the regime deemed physically and/or mentally handicapped were also subjected to unspeakable cruelties. As the horrors unfolded, very few Germans raised their voices to protest the brutality. For some, this was due at least in part to fear of the dire recriminations that could result from speaking out. Others simply lacked real sympathy for Jews and others who already lived on the margins of German society. Because opposition and outright resistance to the regime were so rare, we have come to know many of the opponents and resisters by name: Sophie Scholl, Martin Niemöller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Claus von Stauffenberg.

Yet, over the past few decades, scholars like Eberhard Röhm and Jörg Thierfelder, Manfred Gailus, and Gerhard Lindemann – whose body of work together generally affirms the consensus view that the German Protestant Church as a whole did very little to resist Nazism or to speak out publicly on behalf of the victims of the Shoah – have published works highlighting the exploits of individual Protestants who, to use Bonhoeffer’s phrase “[fell] into the spokes of the wheel.” These courageous Protestants include not only Niemöller and Bonhoeffer, but also Elisabeth Schmitz and Katharina Staritz. In Gegen the Mainstream der Hitlerzeit, Manfred Gailus offers a concise but nuanced biography of another such lesser-known Protestant “martyr,” the Wuppertal theologian Helmut Hesse. Because we have already published excerpts of Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit here, this review will focus on some of the book’s important contributions rather than a detailed summary of its subject’s life. Even so, a sketch of his biography is in order.

Helmut Hesse was born in Elberfeld (now Wuppertal) in 1916, the youngest son of the well-known Reformed theologian Hermann Albert Hesse. Helmut had three brothers and a sister (10, 15). Beginning in 1935, he undertook theological studies, which included several stints at an illegal Confessing Church seminary in Elberfeld, the University of Halle on the Saale, a winter term at an illegal Confessing Church seminary in Berlin, and, for two semesters, under Karl Barth at Basel (17-18).

In Sunday worship services on May 23, 1943 and again on June 6, Helmut prayed for persecuted Jews, read the names of detained Christians (including Niemöller and Heinrich Grüber, leader of the “Büro Grüber,”), criticized Protestant church politics and attitudes within the Confessing Church, and called for the church to resist antisemitism (49-50). On June 8, Helmut and his father Hermann Albert, were arrested by the Wuppertal Gestapo and imprisoned in Barmen, where they languished for over five months (57). On November 14, father and son were transferred to the Dachau concentration camp. Just ten days later, Helmut, having been denied essential medications for a previously diagnosed chronic renal insufficiency, died of post angina septicemia. He was just 27 years old (62-63). Gailus’s fascinating biography paints the picture of a rather cantankerous if principled and courageous young theologian who, for his public advocacy for Jews and persecuted Christians, paid with his life.

In his June 6 sermon in Elberfeld, Hesse, who had addressed ill-treatment of Jews by “Christian peoples” in a February sermon, addressed the matter of Jews and Judaism directly. He quotes liberally a petition about the church’s position on the persecution of Jews (54). The letter had been written to Bavarian bishop Hans Meiser by Ebersbach pastor Hermann Diem and some members of the Lempp Circle, a small group of men and women committed to the theology of the Confessing Church and opposed to the policies of the “intact” Bavarian Protestant church.[1] Bishop Meiser did not make it public, but passed it on to the Württemberg Bishop Theophil Wurm, who similarly refused to publish it (54).

As recorded by the Wuppertal Gestapo, Hesse proclaimed:

As Christians, we can no longer bear the fact that the Church in Germany is silent about the persecution of the Jews. What drives us to do so is the simple commandment of Nächstenliebe (love of neighbor). The Jewish question is a Protestant question and not a political one. The Church must resist any antisemitism in the community. To the state, the Church must testify to the importance of Israel in the history of salvation and resist any attempt to destroy Judaism. Every non-Aryan, whether Jew or Christian, has fallen under the murderers in Germany today. (55).

Hesse’s stark pronouncement closely mirrors some of the language in the Munich petition.[2] Perhaps for these words more than any others, Hesse’s fate was sealed.

One is left to wonder why Hesse’s remarkable story has not been publicized more widely. Perhaps one reason lies in a scandalous affair that Gailus’s research uncovers. During a house search, the Gestapo found some private letters of Hesse’s that suggested that he had had a romantic relationship with a married woman with a school-aged child whose husband was fighting in the war (58-59). The fact that the affair with the unnamed woman took place is not in question (the Gestapo bemoaned the fact that Hesse proclaimed that “God has already forgiven him for this adultery. There is no trace of a sense of guilt ….” (59); also, Hermann Klugkist Hesse (no relation to Hermann Albert and Helmut), an Elberfeld pastor and friend of the family, tried to deal with the fallout of the Gestapo’s discovery with Elberfeld parishioners and church leadership, as well as with Helmut himself (59-60); finally, according to Klugkist Hesse, gossip about the matter had spread through the Elberfeld Reformed community and beyond (60-62)).

Yet, as seriously as the matter of adultery was regarded in such a pious Reformed community, the lack of support that Helmut apparently received from his church community while in prison and the concentration camp might be regarded as more scandalous than Helmut’s sins. So great was “the matter with Helmut,” as the affair was called, that Klugkist Hesse bitterly relays that local church leaders did not once visit Helmut during his nearly six-month ordeal, despite having visitation rights (60, 64 – 65).

In the end, due to Helmut’s physical and psychological frailty, as well as his rigid Reformed upbringing, Gailus regards Helmut Hesse as a “difficult martyr” – but a martyr nonetheless (69-70). Gailus argues that, despite his idiosyncrasies and failings, because of his incredibly courageous advocacy for Jews especially but also for his fellow travelers in the Confessing Church who had dared to speak out against the regime, Hesse merits a special place in the pantheon of Protestant “heroes and martyrs.” In fact, his name belongs with those of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Friedrich Weißler, Elisabeth Schmitz, and Hans and Sophie Scholl (among others) (71-73). Given the case he has presented in this excellent study, it is hard to argue with this conclusion.

 

Notes:

[1] Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews, trans. Victoria J. Barnett (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 215-216; Hermann Diem, Ja oder Nein – 50 Jahre Theologie in Kirche und Staat (Berlin: Kreuz Verlag, 1974), 130; Walter Höchstädter, “Der Lemppsche Kreis,” Evangelische Theologie 48, no. 5 (1988): 468-473.

[2] Hermann Diem, “Wider das Schweigen der Kirche zur Judenverfolgung. Offener Brief an Landesbischof D. Meiser, 1943,” (Against the Silence of the Church on the Persecution of Jews: Open Letter to Regional Bishop Dr. Meiser, 1943) in Hermann Diem and Uvo Andreas Wolf, Sine vi- sed verbo: Aufsätze, Vorträge, Voten (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1965), 108-111, here 108.

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Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Christlicher Antisemitismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Der Tübinger Theologe und ‚Judenforscher‘ Gerhard Kittel

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Review of Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Christlicher Antisemitismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Der Tübinger Theologe und ‚Judenforscher‘ Gerhard Kittel (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2020), 276pp. ISBN: 978-3-8471-0996-9.

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

Even those with only a cursory knowledge of the history of the churches in Nazi Germany know the name Gerhard Kittel. The Tübingen New Testament scholar is as well-known for his anti-Judaic and antisemitic rhetoric in Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question; 1933) as he is for being the editor until 1945 of the influential Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament). Many may not be aware, though, that in 1930 Kittel participated in the conference of a Jewish mission society the goal of which included not only Jewish mission but also Jewish-Christian dialogue (Martin Buber gave a two-hour lecture titled “The Soul of Judaism”); or that in 1942 he gave an expert opinion in the show trial of Herschel Grynszpan, the Polish Jewish teenager who fatally shot Ernst vom Rath in November 1938, an event that was used as the pretext for the Reich pogrom (Kristallnacht) that followed. This volume of essays about the theologian and ‘Judenforscher’ provides nuggets such as these and fills in some gaps in his biography and bibliography.

In a wide-ranging introduction, the editors skillfully contextualize the issues surrounding Protestant anti-Judaism and antisemitism during the Third Reich. Gailus and Vollnhals use the national reactions to the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the German Protestant Reformation as a jumping off point. These 2017 commemorations included – for the first time in a Luther jubilee year – critical analysis of the reformer’s “Judenschriften,” of which the deeply anti-Judaic and antisemitic Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies) stands out. Very soon after these commemorations ended, a group of historians, church historians, theologians, and religion scholars met in Dresden to assess Kittel’s biography, work, and legacy (7), which occasioned the present volume. Though Luther and Kittel lived and worked in vastly different historical contexts, their oeuvres stir similar debates about animus toward Jews and Judaism in Protestant theology and their real-world effects (8). Despite some overlap and repetition, the essays that follow address these issues in a comprehensive and satisfying fashion.

In his fascinating essay, “Schweigen und Sprechen über den ‘Fall Kittel’ nach 1945,” (Silence and Talk about the ‘Kittel Case’ after 1945), Robert Ericksen both recapitulates the development, impetus, and major conclusions of his own seminal work on Kittel, which is well-known to our readers, and reflects with noteworthy frankness and humility on his conversations and scholarly dialogue with the late Tübingen church historian Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz, who contributed substantial scholarly works about the relationship between Kittel, Protestant theology, National Socialism, and Judaism from the 1970s until her untimely death in 1999. Contrasting his position as an American historian in the 1970s and early 1980s with hers as a church historian in the very same theology faculty to which Kittel had belonged several decades earlier, Ericksen intones, “Now I understand that she was right when she told me that a more critical, more comprehensive account on Kittel would not have been published and would have damaged her career” (38).

Clemens Vollnhals’s chapter, titled “Nationalprotestantische Traditionen und das euphorische Aufbruchserlebnis der Kirchen im Jahr 1933” (National Protestant Traditions and the Euphoric Awakening Experience of the Churches in 1933), sets the euphoric reactions of Protestants to the ascent to power of Hitler and the Nazi regime against the backdrop of longstanding Protestant traditions, especially the “close connection between religious and national feeling, the identification of emperor, empire, and Protestantism” (46) that had infused Protestant circles since the unification of Germany in 1871 and the “traumatization” brought on by the collapse of the German Empire in the wake of the First World War (45-49). The essay provides important context for an understanding of the changes brought about in Protestant circles during this momentous and tumultuous year, changes which had important ramifications for the twelve years of Nazi rule in Germany.

Gerhard Lindemann sketches Kittel’s family origins, education, and early years as a scholar. Gerhard Kittel’s father Rudolf, one of the leading Old Testament scholars of his time, rightfully looms large in this discussion. Lindemann’s conclusions are necessarily calibrated, as Kittel’s attitude toward Jews and Judaism in his early career was deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, he utilized a wide variety of Jewish sources and could often treat them in the 1920s with a certain degree of respect. On the other hand, he could accept racist categories and employ völkisch antisemitism in his analysis of a purportedly tainted “modern Judaism” (82). The essay demonstrates (as does Vollnhals’s) the importance of viewing Kittel and Protestant theology during the Third Reich through a wider chronological lens.

After sketching German Protestantism from the Kaiserreich to the Nazi era, Horst Junginger’s essay covers Kittel’s works on Jews and Judaism during the Third Reich and his lengthy 1946 “defense” of his actions toward both Jews and the Nazi regime. Junginger pulls no punches, describing Kittel’s output from 1933 to 1945 as “Judengegnerschaft in Wort und Tat” (Antisemitism in Word and Deed) (87-96). During this period, Kittel, for example, wrote Die Judenfrage, an occasional work that reached a wide audience and which combined scholarly – if often anti-Judaic – analysis with politicized and antisemitic speech (87-90); used his scholarly reputation to become a leading light of “Judenforschung” – the politically motivated denigration of Jews and Judaism via “scholarly” means (90-92); and gave an expert opinion in the show trial of Herschel Grynszpan, in which, despite the fact that Grynszpan wasn’t especially religious, Kittel portrayed his murder of vom Rath as “the act of a Talmudic Jew controlled by international Jewry” (95).

The Theologische Worterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, or TDNT) has been so identified with Gerhard Kittel that the multi-volume work of biblical and theological philology is often referred to by the shorthand “Kittel.” Martin Leutzsch’s critical appraisal of the work labels its anti-Judaism and antisemitism a “Wissenschaftliche Selbstvergötzung des Christentums” (Scholarly self-idolization of Christianity). Helpfully, Leutzsch offers a detailed discussion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Protestant re-evaluations of Christianity as a religion eminently superior to Judaism, indeed one that is more “enlightened” in the rational, Enlightenment-era sense of that term (106-110).

Indeed, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity was marked in this era of Protestant theology by a series of newly created oppositional concepts. For example, diaspora Judaism could now be reckoned as “Spätjudentum” (late Judaism) in opposition to “Urchristentum” (early Christianity) (108-109); Judaism as a “national religion (with a national god)” v. Christianity as “universal religion” (112-113). Seen in this broader context, Leutzsch’s conclusion about the content of the TDNT (for which he offers a significant amount of evidence) is unsurprising yet nuanced. “What the reading of TDNT shows throughout is the ideological functionalization of philology and comparison of religions for the thesis of the superiority of Christianity” (118). Because of this pre-determined and “self-idolizing” approach, a fair comparison of Christianity with Judaism (or any other religion) is made impossible in the work.

Oliver Arnhold examines the connection between Kittel’s students and the “Eisenach ‘De-Judaization Institute.’” The ostensibly academic Institute for Research into and Elimination of Jewish Influence in German Church Life was a group that sought a comprehensive de-Judaization of Christianity, as demonstrated by their constant attacks against the canonicity of the Old Testament and their publication of Bibles, hymnals, and catechisms that were stripped of their Jewish elements. Arnhold reveals that a significant number of Kittel’s students (and, e.g., students of Johannes Leipoldt) who worked on TDNT were also members of the Eisenach Institute (e.g., Herbert Preisker, Rudolf Meyer, Carl Schneider, Gerhard Delling, Walter Grundmann, and Georg Bertram).

Arnhold argues that Kittel did not participate in the Eisenach Institute at least in part because he affirmed the Old Testament while Institute members largely rejected it and affirmed the “Aryan” Jesus theory. These were bridges too far, even for Kittel (131). It is also worth noting that Kittel had experienced great success as a “Judenforscher” in Walter Frank’s Nazi-approved Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany). As the Eisenach Institute was not an officially approved institution of the Nazi State, Kittel might not have craved its imprimatur. Arnhold affirms Dirk Schuster’s interpretation – essentially, that Kittel and Grundmann affirmed a view of “the Jew” that was “allegedly” based in “race research” as well as other problematic positions and practices “in order to remove Christianity from its Jewish context and to make it compatible with the Nazi ideology” (131-132)

Lukas Bormann’s essay examines Kittel’s relationships with scholars outside of Germany and the international reception of his works, from his early career to his death in 1948. Bormann begins with an analysis of the state of the Kittel archives. Given the amount of ink that has been spilled about his life and work, it is perhaps surprising that there are significant gaps in the sources. Bormann notes, “While there are publicly accessible and archival estates for the other named personalities [Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Dibelius], there is no such estate from Kittel …” Further, archival collections at Leipzig, where Kittel taught from 1917 to 1921, and from Kohlhammer Press, which published the original German version of TDNT, were destroyed in the war (135-136).

Because of his support for the Nazi State, Kittel was able to travel more freely than, e.g., Dibelius or Bultmann. Because of these same political commitments, no British universities granted him an honorary doctorate, while they did so for Barth and Bultmann largely, so Bormann, because of British support for the Confessing Church (150). Yet, despite reservations about Kittel’s known anti-Jewish, pro-Nazi views, Bultmann’s support for TDNT lent it international credibility (151). From 1937 to 1939 especially, Kittel reached the highpoint of his international influence. Bormann avers, “He had known how to use the political and ecclesiastical conditions for himself in such a way that he was perceived and addressed at home and abroad, by friend and foe as the most influential and effective New Testament scholar in Germany” (155).

In the final essay of the volume, after summarizing the last three years of Kittel’s life, Manfred Gailus summarizes and analyzes the lengthy document “Meine Verteidigung” (My Defense; 1946), which Gailus regards as Kittel’s attempt at the justification of a “heavily compromised theologian.” Gailus presents the document in a generally nuanced fashion. Resisting the temptation to read the entire document as a cynical ploy, he notes that Kittel of course would try to defend himself – he was in a potentially dire position with “the court of public opinion” at least mixed, if not convinced of his guilt, at least about his antisemitism and collusion with regime-favored figures to advance Nazi anti-Jewish policies (172-174).

Yet, Gailus also notes Kittel’s use of self-serving language, his omissions of material from The Jewish Question that made him look guilty (in My Defense, he cites passages from the lecture version, rather than the subsequently published version, which included, e.g., citations of Hitler from Mein Kampf and Kittel’s personal embrace of an “antisemitic struggle” (175)). Kittel also tried to make his cooperation with anthropologists who really were racial “scientists” – e.g., Walter Frank, Wilhelm Grau, Eugen Fischer, Otmar von Verschuer – seem “harmless” while adopting their terminology in “numerous publications” from the late 1930s through the war (176).

In his conclusion, Gailus widens the net of culpability from Kittel to include the numerous Christians (Protestant and some Catholic) who came to his defense because of his supposedly “legitimate” anti-Judaism while affirming his self-styled “rejection” of “vulgar antisemitism.” Gailus argues that, in a certain sense, it was not only Kittel in the dock in 1948; there also was “the question of legitimacy of a Christian anti-Judaism in the early twentieth century, and its theological, moral, political and legal evaluation after Hitler and the Holocaust” (181). Such a question, so Gailus, “arguably would have overwhelmed any court to decide and … hardly seems judicial in the sense of criminal law” (181).

Though Gailus is right about the broader implications of Christian anti-Judaism in a post-Holocaust world, perhaps he has, with respect to this conclusion anyway, let Kittel – and the churches – off a bit too lightly where the preceding era is concerned. It is not as if Christian anti-Judaism (and antisemitism) had not been confronted (often with dire consequences) by, e.g. Eduard Lamparter, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the “Büro Grüber,” and Julius von Jan in the decades leading up to and including the Shoah.

The remaining third of the book consists of some tools and sources that will be especially useful for Kittel specialists. These include the text of Kittel’s advisory opinion regarding Herschel Grynszpan, an excerpt from My Defense that deals with “the question of Kittel’s indirect complicity in the persecution of Jews,” (195-202), a thorough biographical outline of Kittel in its political and ecclesiastical context, and a comprehensive bibliography of Kittel’s works.

This excellent collection of essays both presents Kittel through a wide chronological lens and answers some very particular questions about his life and work. Taken together, the work synthesizes existing research and fills historical lacunae about one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century German Protestantism. Students and scholars who study religion, theology, antisemitism, Jewish-Christian relations, and the Holocaust will find the volume extremely valuable; for Kittel specialists, it will be indispensable.

 

 

 

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Article Note: Andrea Hofmann, “Martin Luther in First World War Sermons”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Article Note: Andrea Hofmann, “Martin Luther in First World War Sermons,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 31, no. 1, Glaube und der Erste Weltkrieg/Faith in the First World War (2018): 118-130.

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

As I noted in my News Note in this issue, in 2017, Germans commemorated the five-hundredth anniversary of the German Protestant Reformation. Luther sites across the country, including Erfurt, Eisenach, and Wittenberg, played host to numerous events celebrating the anniversary. In the introduction to her analysis of the uses of Martin Luther in German Protestant sermons during the First World War, Andrea Hofmann notes that this anniversary provoked great academic interest as well. “In the academic discourse which accompanied the celebration,” Hofmann informs us, “Luther was not honoured as a solitary hero or lone fighter ….” Hofmann contrasts this with a “raft of popular academic publications and a flood of postcards which often depicted Luther as a hero” during the four-hundredth anniversary of the Ninety-Five Theses in 1917 (118-119).

In this rather brief but densely-footnoted article, Hofmann sets out to explore the image(s) of Luther portrayed by German Protestant clergy in their First World War sermons, especially those that were preached in 1917. The author’s aim is to “show the complexity of the image of Luther mediated through war sermons.” Yet, just as important to Hofmann is how, during the war (and after, during the “Luther Renaissance”), these preachers started to take Luther’s theology much more seriously (119-120, 129). The author ably details and analyzes Luther’s image(s) in the war sermons, offering the reader a considered approach to the topic that is based on substantial evidence.

Hofmann both frames the analysis and structures the article via three “analytical tropes,” providing evidence from some wartime sermons for all three (119). The first trope contributes to an image of Luther “in the context of the interpretation of history,” especially nineteenth-century German history. Here, according to Hofmann, pastors “placed the figure of Martin Luther in [the] narrative of a German nation-building” (120). Seen through this lens, Luther is portrayed as a national hero on par with Bismarck and even, as in the words of one pastor, a “powerful religious prophet” (121).

The second trope is that of “biographical and anecdotal references to Luther” (122-124). Here, the anecdotes and incidents from Luther’s life – e.g., his appearance before Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 – contribute to an image of the reformer grounded more on hero-worship than on instruction and nuanced biography. Courage, forceful energy, perseverance, defiance, and even a particularly encouraging variety of pastoral care are trotted out by pastors and chaplains as traits of Luther, the “ideal” German.

While the first two tropes are very helpful lenses through which to view these wartime sermons, the third and final trope, “themes from Luther’s theology and direct references to Luther’s writings,” may be the most substantive. This is implicit in the weight attached to it here: Hofmann spends as much time on it as she does the other two tropes combined. The most regularly cited topics in the sermons included Luther’s approach to just war, civic authority and the doctrine of justification (124-128). Here, Hofmann helpfully highlights sermon themes such as, e.g., Luther’s “two-kingdoms doctrine” and the differences between individual and state ethics during wartime.

The trope of Luther the national hero and “religious prophet” uncovered here by Hofmann ended up having a long and notorious life, as did the comparisons to German heroes and “prophets” such as Bismarck and Fichte. In this vein, the radical, pro-Nazi, antisemitic Stuttgart pastor Georg Schneider, in his 1934 book Völkische Reformation, included Luther together with Ernst Moritz Arndt, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Alfred Rosenberg in his list of “poets of the Redeemer.” He also described them as “representatives of a völkisch religion.”

Luther, Hofmann argues, was described in many wartime sermons as “a hero who, like Otto von Bismarck in 1871, had initiated a new epoch in German history …” (120). Over many decades, Hartmut Lehmann has traced the religious underpinnings of German nationalism in the nineteenth and centuries. In his incisive May 1991 German Studies Review article, “The Germans as a Chosen People: Old Testament Themes in German Nationalism,” Lehmann teases out a “chosen people” theme in German nationalism from the end of the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich.

Despite the breadth of themes discussed in the article, Hofmann does not mention Luther’s understanding of Jews and Judaism – including his antisemitic pronouncements – as addressed in wartime German Protestant sermons. Perhaps this might be due to such material not being prominent in the evidence tranche utilized by the author. Yet, as Doris Bergen noted in her review of a book on a closely related topic, Dietz Bering’s Luther im Fronteinsatz: Propagandastrategien im Ersten Weltkrieg, such an omission is conspicuous. Volker Leppin demonstrated, in a fastidious study titled “Luthers ‘Judenschriften’ im Spiegel der Editionen bis 1933” (part of an edited collection that I reviewed in 2017), that Luther’s writings about Jews and Judaism appeared as part of collected editions of the reformer’s broader work and in individual editions alike from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. This means that, at the very least, German Protestant pastors had access to Luther’s ruminations on the matter.

Despite this caveat, Hofmann’s examination of this narrow but very valuable topic offers helpful answers to questions surrounding the image of Luther in nineteenth and twentieth century German history. The author’s conclusions should be contemplated carefully. Hopefully, they will provoke others to further research on the reformer’s immense but ambivalent impact on German Protestantism – and German society altogether – from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich.

 

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News Note: “Campaign posters in ‘Luther country’ raise specter of anti-Semitism”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

News Note: “Campaign posters in ‘Luther country’ raise specter of anti-Semitism”

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

Last September, religion scholar and journalist Ken Chitwood asked me to comment on an article he was writing about the use of Martin Luther’s image and legacy in campaign posters for a far-right party, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany, or NPD) in Thuringia. As Chitwood notes in the article, “instead of ‘Here I stand,’ the rebel monk is depicted saying, ‘I would vote NPD, I cannot do otherwise,’ alongside the party’s slogan ‘defend the homeland.’”

Together with Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia formed the heartland of the German Protestant Reformation. Luther undertook his university studies at Erfurt and also became a monk in that city. While hiding out in Wartburg Castle in Eisenach, he accomplished one of his seminal achievements when he translated the New Testament into what became High German. In 2017, Germans commemorated the five-hundredth anniversary of the German Protestant Reformation. Luther sites across the country, including Erfurt and Eisenach, played host to numerous events celebrating the anniversary. Many Germans, and Thuringians in particular, take great pride in the place that their Heimat (homeland) played in the Reformation.

In Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany, I demonstrated that a large number of Protestant pastors, bishops, and theologians employed Luther’s writings about Jews and Judaism – which were littered with antisemitic and anti-Judaic rhetoric – to buttress the antisemi­tism already present in significant degrees in Protestant circles during the era of National Socialism. Some contemporary German church historians and theologians, while recognizing that Luther attacked Jews and Judaism in stark and unseemly ways, have downplayed the impact of the reformer’s Judenschriften (writings about Jews and Judaism) in subsequent German history, including the widespread apathy toward Nazi oppression and murder of Jews exhibited by many German Protestants. Others, like Hartmut Lehmann, have highlighted this darker aspect of German Protestant history in their scholarly work.

The NPD poster includes a variation on the famous phrase “Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders” (Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise), which was uttered by Luther at the Diet of Worms in defense of his understanding of the Christian gospel. Yet, it also contains the slogan “Heimat verteidigen” (defend the homeland). During the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933, SA members stood menacingly in front of Jewish-owned storefronts holding signs that read “Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!” (Germans! Defend yourselves! Do not buy from Jews!) The NPD posters no doubt resonate with some who both revere Luther and – unlike the great majority of Germans, including German Protestants – have no place for “foreigners” in their homeland.

The employment of Luther in NPD’s campaign did not bear fruitful results in Thuringia, as the party finished with less than 1% of the vote. Yet, in this same election, the larger far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD) won roughly 23% of the vote, overtaking Angela Merkel’s CDU as the second-largest party in the regional assembly. Chitwood’s article highlights the unsettling reality that, in Germany (as in the United States), xenophobia and racism, far from being relics of the past, have penetrated the body politic in ways not seen in decades.

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Review of Horst Junginger, The Scientification of the “Jewish Question” in Nazi Germany

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

Review of Horst Junginger, The Scientification of the “Jewish Question” in Nazi Germany (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2017), 456pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-34107-4.

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

Horst Junginger’s ambitious and weighty history of an exceptionally ugly aspect of Christian scholarship during the Third Reich begins with a dedication to a Jewish woman from Karlsruhe named Sophie Ettlinger. Ettlinger “accidentally” made her way into Junginger’s meticulous work of scholarship “because she possessed a typewriter with Hebrew letters that was of service to National Socialist ‘Jew research.’” The heartrending and galling narrative about Sophie’s fate (and that of her typewriter), to which we will return shortly, illuminates not only Judenforschung during the Third Reich, but also Nazi theft of Jewish property and, ultimately, the murder of six million European Jews.

A few key conceptions and realities are at the forefront of Junginger’s study, which is a translation of a revised version of the author’s Habilitation thesis. First, the author seeks to demonstrate that Nazi-era “Jew research,” which purported to pose scholarly answers to the “Jewish Question” but in fact aimed at supporting anti-Jewish policies – was carried out at German universities in a manner that mutually reinforced religious and racial antisemitism. Thus, the book focuses on the religious aspect of modern antisemitism – even while recognizing with great care that “religious stereotypes coalesce with a racial explanation of the world” (ix). Second, the University of Tübingen’s centuries-long role as “an intellectual stronghold against Judaism” (x) culminating in its essential function as a locus of Nazi Judenforschung, is emphasized. Finally, theoretical and practical antisemitism converged during the Holocaust, as typified here by Junginger’s examination of the biographies of roughly a dozen war criminals who, the author demonstrates, were responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand European Jews during the Shoah.

The book is presented in nine chapters. Chapters one and two set out the intellectual framework for the rest of the work, demonstrating how problematic were Nazi efforts to define Jews by means of their race or religion. The fact that baptismal records were a key means of identifying whether one was an “Aryan” or not speaks both to the crucial role played by the churches in this certification (and thus, by extension, the persecution, expropriation of belongings and property, ghettoization, and murder that followed for “non-Aryans”) and to the confusion brought about by the Nazi classification system. Junginger notes astutely, “National Socialist laws and their accompanying political commentaries could concentrate on blood and genealogical succession as much as they liked; apart from religion the state had absolutely no other means to ascertain the race of its citizens” (7).

Chapter three traces the history of the University of Tübingen’s long and tortuous history as a place of exclusion for and condemnation of Jews and Judaism. A key consideration here is how such ideas survived into the post-Enlightenment and post-emancipation eras. Junginger finds the answer, in part, in the work of the social historian Jacob Katz, who argued that, even in a far less religious epoch, Christianity was still a defining aspect of the European outlook. The pre-modern image of “the Jews” metamorphized “into a seemingly rational one” (68). Yet, even in the modern era, lingering and “antiquated” Christian prejudices still contributed to a multifaceted post-emancipation antisemitic milieu.

In chapter four, Junginger demonstrates that the University of Tübingen’s institutional bias against Jews and Judaism did not reverse during the era of the Weimar Republic, which he calls “the zenith of Jewish emancipation.” Quite to the contrary, and despite the fact that the Weimar constitution guaranteed full civil rights and access to civil service employment for all, regardless of religious affiliation, the university consciously undermined such a policy so thoroughly that, when the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service came into effect in April 1933, the university had the lowest quota of dismissals of any German university. While other reasons for this include the national malaise in the wake of the First World War, Junginger places greater emphasis on Tübingen’s centuries-long “all-encompassing nationalist Protestant consensus,” which included antisemitism (111).

Chapter five deals largely with the case of Gerhard Kittel, who became Chair of New Testament Studies at Tübingen in 1926. Thanks to the work of scholars like Max Weinreich, Robert P. Ericksen, Alan Steinweis, and Anders Gerdmar, Kittel is now a well-known and notorious case of Protestant scholarship in service of the Nazi regime, including its anti-Jewish policy. Still, Junginger’s deep dive into both primary and secondary sources offers the reader some new or lesser known aspects of Kittel.  One is the revealing and harrowing account of a Jewish scholar named Charles Horowitz (1890–1969). In March 1928, Gerhard Kittel applied to the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Association of German Science) for funding of a planned collection of rabbinic texts. In his application, Kittel stressed how vital the participation of young Jewish scholars would be. The project was approved and funded handsomely (122).

As one of the Jewish scholars hired for the project, Horowitz began working in the winter semester of 1930–1931. While working at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (College for the Study of Judaism) in Berlin, Horowitz collaborated during the early 1930s on the Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament), which was edited by Kittel. He apparently received no remuneration for this work. Horowitz also translated the Talmud treatise Jeruschalmi and proofread the Talmud references in Adolf Schlatter’s commentaries during this period. For his work overseeing a small working group for rabbinic texts in the summer of 1930, work which continued until March 1933, he received the paltry monthly stipend of 25 Reichsmark (124).

In April 1933, just two months after Hitler came to power, Kittel notified the rector’s office that Horowitz’s salary would be discontinued immediately, adding in June that Horowitz’s work as a tutorial assistant was to be taken over by Karl Georg Kuhn (1906–76) after Horowitz’s “retirement.” Just a few days before Horowitz was summarily dismissed, Kuhn had held the official boycott speech for the Nazi Party on Tübingen’s market square. Even before the National Socialists came to power, Horowitz had been the target of antisemitic hostility in Tübingen. He often found menacing letters and antisemitic notes on his desk and all of his documents were stolen from his study (125).

Horowitz’s misery would only increase, of course, with the onset of Nazi rule. Not long after his dismissal from work at Tübingen, he and his family fled to Amsterdam and then, in 1937, to Dijon, France. After the German invasion and occupation of France, in 1941, the Horowitz family fled across the demarcation line to Valence. Despite taking every precaution, including moving from place to place, in August 1942 Charles’s wife Lea was arrested and deported after a denunciation. While Charles and his children barely survived the war and the Shoah, Lea was murdered in Auschwitz (125-126).

Chapters six through eight cover the efforts of Kittel and like-minded others to transform existing confessional studies about Judaism into purportedly scholarly antisemitic studies; the extent to which such efforts were effective; the conversion of such theoretical studies into concrete action directed against Jews (that is, ghettoization, theft, violence, and murder); and the “ultimate consequences” of the antisemitism theorized at Tübingen but promulgated and executed throughout Europe during the Holocaust – that is, the aforementioned hundreds of thousands of murders carried out and/or ordered by war criminals influenced by their studies at Tübingen.

Among other things, we learn in these three chapters how Kittel was called upon in 1942 to give an expert opinion in the show trial of Herschel Grynszpan, the desperate, stateless Polish Jewish teenager who fatally shot German Legation secretary Ernst vom Rath in November 1938, an event that was used as the pretext for the Reich pogrom that began on November 9 (261ff.) and that Kittel provided both written materials and ancient Jewish caricatures for the notorious antisemitic propaganda exhibition called “Der ewige Jude,” which ran initially in the German Museum in Munich from November 1937 to January 1938 (230-231).

Though these three chapters offer a dire array of examples of words and deeds offered up by the purveyors of antisemitic Judenforschung during the war and the Holocaust, perhaps no example ties the threads of the study together quite like that of the aforementioned Sophie Ettlinger. In keeping with the increasingly common Nazi practice of theft of Jewish goods and property (made legal ex post facto) Sophie’s brand-new, very valuable portable typewriter – which contained Hebrew letters – was stolen and offered by the Reich Ministry of Education for sale to the University of Tübingen in September 1941. Though the rector at Tübingen replied favorably a few weeks later, noting that both the “research unit on the history of Judaism” and its Protestant faculty of theology would find the typewriter very useful, he received disappointing news, as it had been sold instead to the Frankfurt-based Institute for Research on the Jewish Question, whose head was Wilhelm Grau. Junginger notes the irony that an official Nazi organ for antisemitic research would thus take possession of the stolen (and re-sold) typewriter rather than “Judenforscher” Karl Georg Kuhn or another member of the faculty of Protestant theology at Tübingen.

Together with several family members, Sophie Ettlinger had been deported in October 1940 to the Gurs internment camp. Between August 5 and September 1, 1942, four deportation trains left Gurs for the extermination camps in the East, with a stop at the transit camp at Drancy along the way. Sophie was present with the more than 2,000 Jews from this group that went to Auschwitz, where Sophie was murdered (258-259).

The concluding chapter recapitulates the main emphases of the work but also reminds readers that most of the war criminals discussed in chapter eight—all of whom had significant ties to the University of Tübingen and/or its Jewish research unit and had blood on their hands by way of direct participation in the murder of European Jews—either received light jail sentences or had their sentences later reduced, enabling them to live the rest of their days in freedom and comfort.

Junginger’s work illuminates how the University of Tübingen, especially those members of its Protestant faculty of theology involved in research on the “Jewish Question,” made key contributions not merely to a broadly antisemitic atmosphere in Württemberg but to the murder of hundreds of thousands of European Jews during the Holocaust. While historians and scholars of religion will find it particularly useful, patient lay readers, too, will benefit from its sophisticated but clear argument about the nexus between antisemitic words and deeds in Nazi Germany.

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Review of Harry Oelke, Wolfgang Kraus, et. al., eds., Martin Luthers “Judenschriften”. Die Rezeption im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Review of Harry Oelke, Wolfgang Kraus, et. al., eds., Martin Luthers “Judenschriften”. Die Rezeption im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 338 Pp. ISBN: 978-3-525-55789-1.

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

On October 31, 1517, the irascible yet erudite German monk Martin Luther is said to have posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, touching off a massive theological and political controversy that has come to be known as the Protestant Reformation. Outside of this, his most famous exploit, Luther also (in conflict with the norm of clerical celibacy) married Katharina von Bora and translated the New Testament into German. Yet, it is his deeply antagonistic relationship with Jews and Judaism, as evidenced in his writings about them—the so-called “Judenschriften”—that, on the eve of the 500th anniversary of the events at Wittenberg, provoked the academic conference upon which the present volume is based.

The volume is a product of the conference “The Reception of Luther’s ‘Judenschriften’ in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” which was held at Erlangen University in October 2014. The contributors, who number more than a dozen, represent fields that include Protestant church history, Protestant systematic theology, religion, Jewish studies, and Catholic theology. As the book’s title suggests, the collection of essays covers a broad chronological range; the thematic terrain is wide as well. This breadth is one of the volume’s greatest strengths. The essays addressing nineteenth-century reception of Luther’s Judenschriften are especially welcome, as are Christian Wiese’s insightful treatment of Jewish and antisemitic Luther lectures in the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic and Volker Leppin’s analysis of Luther’s Judenschriften in the light of the editions prior to 1933. Yet, there are some problematic elements as well, including some of the conclusions reached about Protestant reception of the Judenschriften during the Third Reich. These will be addressed (together with the volume’s strengths) after a summary of the contents.

A thoughtful introduction by Harry Oelke sets out three elements addressed in the work: 1.) the volume’s “hermeneutical balance” between the original historical context of the Judenschriften and the history of their reception and impact in the era of the modern German state, 2.) the intention of the work, which is driven in part by the need to address historical lacunae on the reception history of the Judenschriften, and 3.) its conceptual structure. This structure consists of six parts. The first part, comprising two essays, provides a material overview of two fundamental areas of Luther research: the reformer’s life (Anselm Schubert) and his work (Volker Leppin). The second section deals with the reception of the Judenschriften in the era from the Restoration (or, the Vormärz) to the end of the Kaiserreich. Martin Friedrich addresses the theme of “Luther and the Jews” in Prussia until 1869, while Hanns Christof Brennecke deals with the reception of the Judenschriften in the era of the Erweckungsbewegung and Bavarian Confessionalism. Christian Wiese examines the interplay between Jewish interpretations of Luther and antisemitic reception of the Judenschriften in the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic.

In the third section of the volume, the thorny issue of Protestant reception of Luther’s Judenschriften during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich is addressed. Gury Schneider-Ludorff’s essay analyzes the theme “Luther and the Jews” in its theological perspective in the era between the two World Wars. Essays on reception of the Judenschriften in the Confessing Church (Siegfried Hermle) and in the German Christian movement (Oliver Arnhold) follow. The fourth section of the book examines German Protestant discourse on the Judenschriften in the era following the Second World War. The reception of the Judenschriften in the field of church history is examined by Harry Oelke, while Reiner Anselm analyzes the theme in ethics and systematic theology. A third essay by Stephen G. Burnett addresses the reception of the Judenschriften in the Anglo-American context; Burnett reminds us that these writings did not become an issue in this context until the second half of the twentieth century.

In the penultimate section of the book, the lens is widened to include Catholic and international ecumenical contexts. Lucia Scherzberg examines Catholic perceptions of “Luther and the Jews” while Wolfgang Kraus analyzes the theme as it has been addressed in official church pronouncements since the Second World War. The final section of the book features two thought-provoking summary analyses of the conference proceedings and the volume (Berndt Hamm and Johannes Heil).

Several essays stand out for their contributions to the history of the impact of Luther’s Judenschriften in modern German history. Volker Leppin’s essay is especially valuable. It demonstrates, through fastidious attention to detail, that the Judenschriften appeared as part of collected editions of the reformer’s broader work and in individual editions alike from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. Notably, Leppin corrects the faulty notion forwarded by some twentieth-century German church historians that Luther’s Judenschriften somehow were not readily available to German Protestants during Weimar and the Third Reich. Leppin’s conclusion is clear and emphatic: “What effect Luther’s Jewish writings actually had on the adaptation of antisemitic racism in ecclesiastical circles cannot be decided on the basis of the editorial position. But this much is clear: the texts were available at any time—even on the eve of the Third Reich” (37). He provides a trove of evidence to this effect, including a list of dozens of primary sources that demonstrate the point. Thus, the Judenschriften were most certainly read by many German Protestants from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Christian Wiese’s incisive essay on Jewish and antisemitic Luther lectures during the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic demonstrates that Jewish scholars working in the early twentieth century—Hermann Cohen and Leo Baeck are placed at the center of Wiese’s analysis—offered, yes, a historical critique of those aspects of Luther’s theology that were hostile to Jews and Judaism, but also a picture of the reformer as a “symbolic embodiment of a tradition of tolerance and emancipation” (110) (i.e., an embodiment of those elements of the Enlightenment tradition that were not only laudable but vital to Jewish life in the public square). Jewish intellectuals, who “were looking for positive links to the central figure of the Reformation so central to the German-Protestant cultural consciousness,” thus forwarded an image of Luther that would enable them to integrate more fully into German culture and society (119-120). Tragically, this portrait of the reformer “was almost completely ignored by contemporary Protestantism and remained therefore tragically ineffective” (110).

Berndt Hamm’s summarizing analysis of the volume’s content is both thoughtful and, in places, problematic. Hamm highlights and expounds upon eight salient points raised in the conference and the volume. While taken together, they are all relevant and meaningful; a few, in particular, are worth examining closely. The first point reads, “Luther’s Judenschriften are evidently both present and not present in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” As the volume’s essays demonstrate, there certainly are periods during which, and pockets of German society in which, the Judenschriften are less present than one might expect, including in the work of some Jewish intellectuals during the nineteenth century. Yet, they are more present in the Confessing Church during the Third Reich than either Hamm or Siegfried Hermle would have us believe. While the virulence of the application of Luther’s recommendations to, for example, burn down Jewish synagogues and confiscate sacred Jewish writings is certainly more pronounced and vulgar in the writings of the radical German Christian wing of the Protestant church, the generally more urbane application of Luther’s anti-Jewish recommendations is more than “hardly” present (315) in the writings of Confessing Church figures. There is also little recognition here of the fluid Protestant “middle” or “neutrals,” who represented roughly a third of the German Protestant clergy during the Third Reich.

Hamm’s third point is especially valuable. He notes that, until fairly recently, scholarly research on the Protestant Reformation and Luther has not emphasized enough the “theological connections between the aggressive exasperation in Luther’s late Judenschriften and the apocalyptic-anti-satanic fundamental character of his theology since 1520 …”, which included, for example, his view of the pope as the antichrist (317-318). The Dutch Reformed church historian Heiko A. Oberman was the first to make this important observation, which was a crucial step toward Protestant Reformation and Luther scholars more directly recognizing and confronting the antisemitism in Luther’s works.

The fifth point contains both cogent analysis and a very curious conclusion. Here, Hamm confronts the prickly problem of the terminology that should be employed when discussing hostility and hatred toward Jews and Judaism. In other words, should scholars use the term “anti-Judaism” or “antisemitism”—or, perhaps, both? Or, a different term altogether? Kyle Jantzen reflected on this problem in a previous issue of CCHQ. The present author also discussed it (Probst, Demonizing the Jews). Hamm rightly notes that the term “antisemitism” is, in a sense, absurd, because, in its application it always refers not to hatred toward Semites more broadly, but to Jews. In the late nineteenth century, when the term was coined by Wilhelm Marr, antisemites connected language and culture to race, resulting in a term that, ironically, sounded “respectable” to these less vulgar (but still no less hateful) proponents of anti-Jewish animus.

In modern scholarship, “the term ‘antisemitism’ has now been established in such a way that it defines a judenfeindlich attitude [an attitude of hostility toward Jews] which socially excluded and legally disadvantaged members of the Jewish religion or their descendants, or at least intended such exclusion” (319). Because Luther (and others) often used theological or religious arguments to denigrate Jews and Judaism, many scholars, including many church historians, have argued that Luther was “only” engaging in anti-Judaic thought, not antisemitic agitation. Hamm acknowledges this problem. Yet, curiously, he suggests as a solution—one that he rues as “unrealistic”—that scholars “renounce the linguistically misleading concept of antisemitism and replace it in general with the concept of anti-Judaism” (320). The problem of terminology is indeed very real. But, as the term “antisemitism” was originally meant to signify hatred of Jews on the basis of their race while “anti-Judaism” has predominantly been used to connect anti-Jewish hatred to religion, it is likely that neither term will satisfy those examining the issue in a scholarly fashion. It is also true that understanding the precise motivations for anti-Jewish hatred—while valuable to scholars and laypersons alike—is cold comfort to the historical victims of such hatred.

While discussing his seventh point, Hamm opines that Luther’s Judenschriften “did not produce this new racial-biological antisemitism” and that the Nazi regime carried out the mass murder of millions of Europe’s Jews “without any argumentative support from the authority of Luther.” In short, so Hamm, “For the masterminds of the crimes, Luther’s writings on the Jews were only a completely marginal aspect.” This logic is problematic on more than one level. First, here as elsewhere, Hamm reduces Nazi antisemitism to its “racial-biological” variety. For two decades, Burleigh and Wippermann’s thesis about the Nazi “racial state” has largely held as the most accurate characterization of what the Nazis created in Germany. Yet, Alon Confino argued convincingly in A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide that the Nazis imagined a world in which the very memory of Jewish existence, including their culture and religion, would be eradicated. This is why Nazis burned Hebrew Bibles and synagogues in November 1938. If Confino is correct, then the starkest aspects of Luther’s antisemitism, including, but not limited to, the burning down of synagogues and the confiscation of the sacred writings of Judaism provided for many German Protestants a vision of the world that had affinities with the one envisioned by the Nazi regime. This is something more than merely the “disturbing parallelism” suggested by Hamm (321).

Did the Nazis base their murderous plans for the Jews of Europe on Luther? No. But, did the Nazis need the support of Protestants, who represented roughly sixty percent of the German population, not only to gain and retain power, but also to lend, together with other vaunted cultural institutions, a certain moral legitimacy to their repression of Jews and other persecuted groups? Actually, in important ways, they did (Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany). It is also important to recognize, as Leppin’s essay demonstrates, that Luther’s Judenschriften were readily available in numerous editions to German Protestants during the Third Reich. Further, a significant number of German Protestant pastors, theologians, and Luther scholars—including, for example, Erich Vogelsang, Wolf Meyer-Erlach, Georg Buchwald, and Walter Holsten—interacted in significant ways with the Judenschriften in their published work (Probst, Demonizing the Jews). Luther’s writings about Jews and Judaism were certainly not the driving force behind Nazism and the Holocaust. But, they were no small part of the German Protestant cultural milieu.

The strengths of the present volume include its chronological and thematic depth and its inclusion of scholars working outside the boundaries of German Protestantism, namely, scholars working in Catholic theology and Jewish studies. Given its weaknesses, it will no doubt engender debate among lay readers, but perhaps especially among Luther, Reformation, and Holocaust historians.

 

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Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “Were the National Socialists a Völkisch Party? Paganism, Christianity, and the Nazi Christmas”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “Were the National Socialists a Völkisch Party? Paganism, Christianity, and the Nazi Christmas,” Central European History 47, no. 4 (2014): 760-790.

 By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

As Kyle Jantzen noted in our most recent issue, Samuel Koehne has published over the last several years a series of articles that offer significant insights on National Socialist views of religion. This study is no exception. Koehne offers nuanced conclusions based on meticulous research. The article is especially valuable for the light it sheds on the interaction between “the völkisch world of thought,” (764) which he dubs the “strange worldview out of which Nazism emerged,” (767) and Nazi views on religion as illuminated by their celebrations of Christmas in the early years of the Weimar Republic.

Koehne’s main argument is threefold: that “the Nazis were clearly a part of the völkisch movement, that they reflected the movement’s diverse religious trends, and that there is an urgent need for historians to reconnect the Nazi Party to the milieu from which it emerged” (762-763). While major histories of the Third Reich have examined the role played by antisemitism, eugenics, and Social Darwinism in the broader völkisch subculture in which the Nazis operated, he avers, “there is a need for a deeper analysis of the intellectual roots of National Socialism with respect to its religious beliefs—and to how those beliefs connected with earlier völkisch religious trends” (763). Koehne’s emphasis on the syncretistic interaction between Nazi ideology, the völkisch milieu of the early twentieth century, and Christianity is both welcome and thoroughly elucidated here.

Koehne’s conclusions are also threefold. First, he concludes that there was no “cohesive meaning” to “positive Christianity,” a much discussed phrase used in Point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Program. Instead, the fact that this “positive Christian” party both promoted and reported its own Christmas celebrations as “the Germanic pagan festival of winter solstice” demonstrates both that leading Nazis (including Hitler) were not concerned about appearing as traditional Christians and that a wide array of religious views existed within the party (787). Second, he contends that “the early Nazi Party was immersed in the völkisch movement, including its pagan trends and traditions” (787). Koehne demonstrates that the party both promoted and was influenced to a significant degree by the ideas of people like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Theodor Fritsch, and Arthur Dinter. Third, Koehne concludes both that there is no “inherent dichotomy” within the Nazi Party between its pagans and its Aryan Christians and that—because of the context and meaning poured into the terms by their Nazi adherents—references to Jesus Christ, Christianity, and the Bible do not necessarily exclude paganism (788). The picture that emerges here is one of a wide diversity of beliefs and indeed a great deal of syncretism between Christianity, Germanic paganism, and völkisch ideology.

Koehne’s study of a rather narrow topic—early Nazi views of the celebration of Christmas—offers tantalizing answers to much bigger questions, including the one posed in the article’s title. The study is extremely meticulous. The author’s nuanced conclusions are worthy of careful consideration and will no doubt propel others to plow further ground in this relatively fallow area of scholarly research.

 

 

 

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Film Note: Nazi Law: Legally Blind (2016)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Film Note: Nazi Law: Legally Blind (2016)

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

Nazi-LawIn post-WWI Germany, law had been  a most respected entity, with the country thriving thanks to its most capable lawyers and judges, many of them Jewish. In 1933, no law could inhibit the Third Reich’s political and military rise to power. In a step-by-step process, the National Socialist government dismantled constitutional law, usurped justice and created a lethal totalitarian system that soon engulfed Germany and all of Europe. Redefining the nation as a pure political and biological organism, the Nazi government imposed legislation that reinforced its ideological program in all aspects of German life, with a focus on race, business, religion and medicine. Filmed at Boston College during a conference on Nazi law, as well as  in Nuremberg, Munich and Dachau, this documentary relies on the expertise of scholars from Germany, France, Israel and the US. They come from the areas of medicine, law, Jewish Studies, theology and other disciplines.

The film is co-produced by John J. Michalczyk and Susan A. Michalczyk. For more information, please see the Etoile Productions website or contact Professor John J. Michalczyk.

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Review of George Faithful, Mothering the Fatherland: A Protestant Sisterhood Repents for the Holocaust

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of George Faithful, Mothering the Fatherland: A Protestant Sisterhood Repents for the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), xvii+270 pp.

Reviewed by Christopher J. Probst, University College at Washington University in St. Louis

This review appeared originally in Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 10 (2015), available at http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/scjr/article/view/8852. It is reproduced here with permission.

Faithful-MotheringMothering the Fatherland is a focused and sympathetic study of the life and work of a unique group of women who were so haunted by the Holocaust that, in the wake of the Second World War, they formed a Protestant sisterhood focused on intercessory repentance by the “true” Christians of Germany for the sins committed by the nation during the Third Reich. It is an absorbing work of historical theology that is especially significant for the effective manner in which the author situates the theology and practice of the sisterhood in their historical and intellectual contexts and for the author’s thoughtful analysis of the theology of the sisterhood’s co-founder.

George Faithful argues that the Ecumenical Sisterhood of Mary (Ökumenische Marienschwesternschaft), which was founded in 1947 by Klara (later Mother Basilea) Schlink and Erika Madauss (later Mother Martyria), sought to prevent via intercessory prayer the judgment of God on Germany, which both believed would come unless the nation repented for its sins, chief of which was its involvement in the Holocaust. The idea that Germans, much less Protestant Germans, should repent for the Shoah, was not widely shared in the early post-war era. This fact alone makes the sisterhood a fascinating case study. That the sisterhood also exhibited affinities with elements of German Pietism and (later) with the Charismatic movement enhances the curiosity all the more.

As Faithful recognizes, many Protestants held views that were consonant with some crucial aspects of Nazi ideology, including ardent nationalism and antisemitism. During the Third Reich, a substantial, outspoken minority of Protestants avidly and openly supported the Nazis in their reprehensible goals concerning the Jewish Question. Even so, open resistance to Nazism and secret assistance for Jews living under Nazi oppression and threat of murder were found among small groups of German Protestants. The “Büro Grüber” (Grüber Office), based in Berlin, provided Jews (in­cluding Jews who converted to Christianity) who were under dire threat from the Reich with advice about emigration, finding employment abroad, social assistance, legal matters, and educational support. For example, in Württemberg (in southwest Germany), a group of pastors and parishioners sheltered at least seventeen Jew­ish refugees in sixty church parsonages in a so-called “Rectory Chain.”

Though Schlink published numerous theological works after the war, including books that emphasized the collective guilt of the German nation for the Holocaust, she does not seem to have viewed her work as part of a broader theological discussion that might have included participants in such war-time Protestant rescue groups. Despite their differences, where the Holocaust and Jewish-Christian relations is concerned, there is a congruence of views between groups such as the Büro Grüber, the Württemberg rectory chain, and the sisterhood. A comparative scholarly study of such groups would be welcome.

The most intriguing chapter of the book is titled “Schlink’s Pseudo-Judaic, Germanic Vision of Nationhood,” in which Faithful examines, among other things, Schlink’s theological outlook on peoples (Völker), in particular “Germans” and “Jews.” Faithful finds that Schlink’s views of peoples, nations, and ethnicities were derived in the main from the Hebrew Bible and from (chiefly nineteenth and twentieth century) German views of nationalism. Ironically, for Schlink, Faithful writes, “To be a Jew was to be a member of a God-ordained, uniquely blessed people whose long centuries of suffering were over. To be a German was to be a self-professed Christian and a Gentile. For Schlink, Jew and German were two mutually exclusive categories, and this, more than any of her ideas, resonated with the worldview of the German nationalists. … That Schlink so comprehensively inverted which pole was positive, elevating the Jewish people to a status above what even many German nationalists had claimed for Germany, marks her thought as definitively anti-Nazi” (p. 132). Faithful highlights here incisively some of the ironies inherent in the thought of a remarkably unique woman – a philosemitic, anti-Nazi theologian and Protestant nun.

On occasion, the main argument is hampered by assertions that are a bit too tentative. Yet, this is mitigated by succinct chapter conclusions and helpful sub-headings within chapters, both of which make the book very readable. Mothering the Fatherland will be of interest to anyone engaged in the study of the Holocaust, twentieth-century German Protestantism, Jewish-Christian relations, and, more broadly, historical theology in the modern era. Caveats aside, this work substantially deepens our knowledge of a previously unknown and fascinating corner of German Protestantism.

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Review of Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Review of Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2014), 284pp. ISBN: 978-0-300-18854-7.

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis

Review of Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2014), 284pp. ISBN: 978-0-300-18854-7.

Every so often, a work of historical scholarship appears that alters the trajectory in its field of research. Where the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is concerned, Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland was one such work, as were Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann’s The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 and Saul Friedländer’s majestic two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews.[1] Alon Confino’s examination of “the Nazi imagination,” a thoughtful, eloquent, and provocative work of intellectual and cultural history, plows substantially new interpretive ground and may change the state of play in Holocaust studies for years to come.

Confino-WorldThe core of Confino’s argument is that Nazi antisemitism was based in fantasy, not reality. For Confino, “a key to understanding this world of anti-Semitic fantasies is no longer to account for what happened – the administrative process of extermination, the racial ideological indoctrination by the regime, and the brutalizing war – because we now have sufficiently good accounts of these historical realities.” Instead, “a key is to account for what the Nazis thought was happening, for how they imagined their world. What was this fantasy created by Nazis and other Germans during the Third Reich, and the story that went along with it, that made the persecution and extermination of the Jews justifiable, conceivable, and imaginable?” (6) The Nazi regime was trying to re-write the origins of German and European history and civilization. This main argument gives shape to the book, which Confino offers in three parts.

Part I covers the first five years of the Third Reich, from the appointment of Hitler as chancellor in January 1933 to the months leading up to the so-called Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass”) in November 1938. Here, the “common denominator” for German ideas about “the Jew” was the motif of the Jews as “creators of an evil modernity that soiled present-day Germany” (31). In Part II, Confino analyzes the attempt by the Nazi regime to eradicate the idea of the Jew as “the origins of moral past” in the period from Kristallnacht to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in late June 1941. In a chapter titled “Burning the Book of Books,” Confino poses (and answers persuasively) the question “Why did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible?” The chapter rightfully appears at the heart of the book, as it represents the core of Confino’s main argument. This is significant, as it moves religion, a crucial component of culture, from the margins of the historical argument closer to the center.

Part III examines the culmination of the Nazi genocide against the Jews of Europe from the onset of the Final Solution to the end of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Here, the Nazi regime attempted to expunge the idea of the Jew as “the origins of history”; they did this via mass murder, an attempt to actually remove them from history (and, perhaps – though Confino does not emphasize this – from the future).

Confino gets underneath the actions of the Nazis, offering an interpretation of what the Nazis thought was happening and what kind of world they wished to create. In so doing, he goes beyond thick description of life in the Third Reich, positing why the Nazis did what they did. Students in my courses on the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust often ask in understandably perplexed tones “but, why did the Nazis attempt to exterminate the Jews?” Implicit in this question is another, deeper question, one that historians are not often sufficiently poised to answer – why did Nazi hatred of Jews so consume them that they felt compelled to kill them all? Confino posits an elegant, incisive and credible answer to these questions.

Despite the originality of Confino’s conclusions, nowhere does he suggest that previous scholarship on these matters is either worthless or misguided. In fact, his work can be seen as building upon the current consensus of a “modified intentionalist” or “modified functionalist” position on the genocide against the Jews of Europe. Further, one can read Confino’s account not as a complete departure from the idea of Nazi Germany as a “racial state” but as a new direction in historical interpretation of the Shoah that perceives the pervasiveness of racial ideology in Nazi Germany as an outworking of the Nazi imagination of a world without Jews. Confino also recognizes more recent trends in Holocaust historiography, maintaining that the Holocaust “should be placed within a history of Nazi war and occupation, empire building, and comparative genocide. The Holocaust was not unique.” Even so, “it was perceived during the war as unique by Germans, Jews, and other Europeans, and if we want to understand why the Holocaust happened, we ought to explain this” (13).

In trying to build a world without Jews, so Confino, the collective Nazi imagination was immersed in irrational fantasy. “In persecuting and exterminating the Jews, Germans waged a war against an imaginary enemy that had no belligerent intentions toward Germany and possessed no army, state, or government.” (6) Confino’s work demonstrates that, while fantasies operate on a deeper (more unconscious) level than ideologies, they also have concrete expressions – including the burning of Hebrew Bibles and synagogues in November 1938, an outburst of violence that Confino does not believe can be explained by the ubiquity of racial ideology alone.

The emphasis on the irrational aspect of Nazi antisemitism is welcome. “The view of Nazi beliefs as guided by modern racial science gave Nazi anti-Semitism a rational slant, even though it was all fantasy. In fact, Nazi racial science, similar to every science, had an element of mystery, a poetic side, that the Nazis themselves were aware of” (7). Here, Confino rightly underscores the irrational and nonrational elements of Nazi thinking. Yet, in describing Nazi hatred of Jews as “all fantasy” (as he does more than once), Confino may be, on occasion, overstating this aspect of Nazi thinking (and of thinking in general).

As I have argued elsewhere, following Gavin Langmuir, irrational thought conflicts with rational empirical observation while nonrational language, which lies at the heart of religion, is the language of symbol, the kind of language found in art and affirmations of belief. Crucially for Langmuir, much of our thinking is “so ha­bitual, so much a reflex, that most of the time we are not aware of which way we are thinking.”[2] Further, Shulamit Volkov argues, “Any interpretation of reality is an independent, creative product of the human mind, and it is often all the more powerful for being partially or entirely false.”[3] Though Volkov was applying this rationale to nineteenth-century German antisemitism, it certainly applies to Nazi fantasies about purportedly “Jewish” Bolshevism, capitalism, criminality, and degeneracy. Such nuance in describing Nazi antisemitism occasionally eludes in Confino’s otherwise lucid and elegant account.

This sole caveat aside, Confino’s original and provocative interpretation gives historians and other specialists working on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust a welcome and penetrating jumping off point. It is bound to provoke discussion among historians and lay readers alike. Even more importantly, it might spur helpful new directions and methodologies in Holocaust studies.

Notes:

[1] Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993); Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany And The Jews: The Years of Persecution (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998); Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945: The Years of Extermination (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008).

[2] Christopher J. Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 3–5.

[3] Ibid., 23.

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Letter from the Editors: September 2012

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Letter from the Editors: September 2012

 

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to present you with this new issue of the ACCH Quarterly.   In this issue, we cover much ground – thematically, temporally and geographically.

With respect to Germany, John Conway reviews both a collection of essays about the Christianity of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and what it may offer in terms of both politics and theology and an edited collection on völkisch religious movements in Germany during the Nazi era.  Lauren Falkner, a welcome new addition to the editorial team, reviews Sascha Hinkel’s examination of the church politics of the influential and controversial Adolf Cardinal Bertram during the Kaissereich and the Weimar Republic.  My contribution is a review of Hansjörg Buss’s fine study of the Lübeck Protestant church’s approach to Jews and Judaism from 1918 to 1950.

Covering a wider reach, both geographically and thematically, we have contributions about relations between the Church of England and the Russian Orthodox Church during the Second World War (John Conway), important developments in European and global Christianity during the twentieth century (Heath Spencer), and the resurgence of religion as it relates to global politics (Steve Schroeder).

Also included are several conference and seminar reports, including a Bonhoeffer conference in Sweden (Keith Clements), a seminar on the complicity of churches in the Holocaust (Lauren Falkner), and a conference on the memorialization of the Church Struggle in contemporary Berlin (Diana Jane Beech).

We hope that these and other contributions to the journal will continue to promote a deeper understanding of contemporary church history.

On behalf of all the ACCH Quarterly editors,

Christopher Probst, Saint Louis University

Table of Contents

From the Editors

Letter from the Editors: September 2012 – Christopher Probst

Announcement: Important Changes to the ACCH Quarterly – Kyle Jantzen

Reviews

Review of Florian Schmitz and Christiane Tietz, eds., Dietrich Bonhoeffers Christentum. Festschrift für Christian Gremmels – John S. Conway

Review of Uwe Puschner and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Die völkisch-religiöse Bewegung im Nationalsozialismus. Ein Beziehungs- und Konfliktgeschichte – John S. Conway

Review of Hansjörg Buss, “Entjudete” Kirche: Die Lübecker Landeskirche zwischen christlichem Antijudaismus und völkischem Antisemitismus (1918-1950) – Christopher Probst

Review of Sascha Hinkel, Adolf Kardinal Bertram. Kirchenpolitik im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik – Lauren N. Faulkner

Review of Hanna-Maija Ketola, Relations between the Church of England and the Russian Orthodox Church during the Second World War, 1941-1945 – John S. Conway

Review of Katharina Kunter and Jens Holger Schjørring, eds., Europäisches und Globales Christentum/European and Global Christianity: Herausforderungen und Transformationen im 20. Jahrhundert/Challenges and Transformations in the 20th Century – Heath Spencer

Review of Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, Timothy Samuel Shah, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics – Steven Schroeder

News and Notices

Seminar Report: Annual Seminar for Seminary and Religious Faculty, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., June 18-22, 2012 – Lauren N. Faulkner

Conference Abstract: “Confessions of a Protestant Past: The Memorialisation of the Kirchenkampf in Contemporary Berlin” – Diana Jane Beech

Conference Report: XI International Bonhoeffer Congress, Sigtuna, Sweden, June 27-July 1, 2012 – Keith Clements

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Review of Hansjörg Buss, “Entjudete” Kirche: Die Lübecker Landeskirche zwischen christlichem Antijudaismus und völkischem Antisemitismus (1918-1950)

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Review of Hansjörg Buss, “Entjudete” Kirche: Die Lübecker Landeskirche zwischen christlichem Antijudaismus und völkischem Antisemitismus (1918-1950). (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2011), 559 Pp. ISBN: 978-3-506-77014-1.

By Christopher J. Probst, Saint Louis University

Hansjörg Buss’s comprehensive, fascinating study of the machinations of the Protestant church in Lübeck during the Weimar, Nazi, and immediate post-war eras is a highly original work that takes seriously predominant social, cultural, and intellectual currents over a tumultuous three-decade period of German history. With a focus on the views of Lübeck’s Protestants toward Jews and Judaism, the author manages to weave together “sacred” and “secular” threads of history in seamless and effective fashion. In the process, numerous important issues are addressed, including: the question of continuities and ruptures, the interaction between local and national issues and points of view, and the nature of anti-Jewish hostilities and how their various manifestations should be understood.

While the political ruptures of the period under study are obvious—Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the dissolution of the Kaiserreich, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the ascent to power of Hitler and the Nazis, the collapse of the Third Reich at the end of the Second World War, the Allied occupation of Germany in the wake of the war—Buss rightly and deftly emphasizes the nationalprotestantische Mentalitäten that were consistently present during these troubled times. The divinely-sanctioned “inextricable connection” of church, Volk, and nation espoused by many Lübeck pastors during the Kaiserreich (50), a complex of ideas embraced by scores of their theological descendants during the succeeding decades, is just one example of this phenomenon. The prevalence of anti-Judaism and antisemitism among German Protestants, beginning especially with the rise to prominence of the Berlin court preacher Adolf Stoecker, is another.

One of the most significant contributions of the book is its regional focus, which, to Buss’s credit, is set firmly within the broader national context. After a prologue in which he examines the church, civil (especially bourgeois) society and nationalism during modern German history prior to 1918, he devotes significant space to each of the three most relevant timeframes (Weimar, the Third Reich, and the early post-war period). For each era, we are made intimately familiar with important areas of Lübeck society, including demographics, economics, and politics. Those seeking only a narrowly focused examination of Protestant views of Jews and Judaism from 1918-1950 will be disappointed. But, those who are patient enough to follow Buss on this thoroughly contextualized journey will be rewarded handsomely.

The ways in which Lübeck Protestants dealt with Jews and Judaism is at the heart of the book. Fearing a deeper descent into secularization and immorality—not to mention their perceived drift into irrelevance—during the Weimar era, most Lübeck Protestants, like many of their co-religionists in other parts of Germany, espoused conservative, anti-democratic, and anti-Jewish views. The outcome of the Church Struggle in Lübeck, according to Buss, was a church government take-over by “radical” German Christians. The radicals who led this regional church ardently supported the Nazi State, the National Church Movement of German Christians (NDC), and the virulently antisemitic Institute for Research into and Elimination of Jewish Influence in German Church Life (commonly called the “Eisenach Institute”).

Yet, all of this masked the fact that the Confessing Church in Lübeck, together with other Protestants who, despite their initial enthusiasm for the Hitler regime, largely rejected National Socialist incursions on Protestant autonomy (but did not openly protest anti-Jewish measures promulgated by the regime), actually represented a majority of Lübeck Protestants. As a result, from April 1937 to the end of the war, there were in Lübeck essentially two independent churches, joined only administratively (485).

On the one hand, Buss argues that a striking feature of the history of the Lübeck Church during the Nazi period was a radical antisemitism, which led under Bishop Erwin Balzer to adopt the goal of creating a “Jew-free” church to correspond to the “Jew-free” state that the Nazi Party was striving for (490). Buss suggests that this radical antisemitism was most prevalent among the leaders of the Lübeck church government.

On the other hand, however, he asserts that antisemitism and the state persecution of Jews was a non-issue in parish life. For the most part, Lübeck Protestants explicitly recognized and welcomed the state regulatory authority to limit the influence of Jews in politics, society, and culture. “There also were no reactions to the increasing restrictions on the Jewish community, to the open exclusion of Jewish Lübeckers, to the November 1938 pogrom, and finally to the beginning of the deportations.” There is simply little evidence, Buss argues, to suggest that these exclusionary policies aroused special concern among knowledgeable Protestants, even in the Confessing Church (493).

This lack of expressed concern was based at least in part on the “totalitarian” nature of the Nazi government and the “theological-ideological orientation” of the Balzer church government, both of which would have inhibited significant Protestant protest. Yet, he stresses that a lack of consciousness for the plight of Jews and Protestant “anti-Jewish resentments” (as well as some other church-political dynamics) played the greatest role.  These conclusions are nuanced, but there may be some reluctance here to attribute antisemitic attitudes to Protestants who were not aligned with the German Christians and/or the Nazis. At the national level, certainly anti-Judaism and xenophobia seem to have been more prevalent in the Confessing Church and the Protestant “middle.” Yet, antisemitic ideas can be found in those camps as well.  It is a bit surprising that such attitudes were seemingly less prevalent in Lübeck.

In the post-war era, cautious rapprochement between Protestants and Jews predominated in Lübeck, as elsewhere in Germany. Despite all that had transpired, Lübeck Protestants were not ready to welcome their Jewish neighbors with open arms. The differentiated description of events at the local level over three decades presented here helps to nuance our prior understanding of Lübeck Protestantism as a purely German Christian stronghold.

Buss’s inclusion of the experience of Lübeck Jews is commendable. Rather than a one-sided conversation featuring the dim views of Jews and Judaism purveyed by most German Protestants, Buss deals with the lived experience of Lübeck’s tiny Jewish minority during all three eras. He also consciously sets the actions and attitudes of Lübeck Protestants in their context; that is, he is careful to demonstrate the marked contrast between their often narrowly constructed abstract theological arguments about Jews and Judaism with the horrific terrestrial events being perpetrated against Jews in Europe at the same time.

This excellent study significantly broadens our previous knowledge about the Lübeck Protestant church. Buss’s judgments are measured and his analysis acute. He is also cognizant of the sensitivities involved in the issues being discussed. “Entjudete” Kirche is important reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century German Protestantism, and would be similarly useful for those interested in the history of Christian antisemitism.

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Review of Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3, September 2011

Review of Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann. Studies in Jewish History and Culture, Vol. 20 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2009), 675pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-16851-0.

By Christopher Probst, Saint Louis University

Anders Gerdmar’s study of the approaches of German Protestant biblical scholars toward Jews and Judaism from 1750 to 1950 is a compelling work of biblical scholarship cum intellectual history. The author captures the ambiguity of the attitude toward Jews and Judaism of many of the exegetes discussed with Habermas’s moniker, “the Janus face of the Enlightenment.” The book is an interdisciplinary tour de force in which the author blends (often seamlessly) biblical theology, church history, and the history of antisemitism. It is an ambitious work, one that is both needed and well executed.

The book is presented in four parts bracketed by a thoughtful introduction and a thorough conclusion. Gerdmar takes a roughly chronological approach, beginning with eighteenth century Enlightenment exegetes and ending with National Socialist interpreters of Christian Scripture. Yet, each of the four sections of the book corresponds with a particular trajectory in biblical exegesis. Thus, for example, Adolf Schlatter, whose life and career reached into the National Socialist era, is included in Part II, “Salvation-Historical Exegesis and the Jews: from Tholuck to Schlatter.” At the close of his discussion of each exegete, Gerdmar provides a helpful short conclusion. Part I, “Enlightenment Exegesis and the Jews,” includes analysis of the work of Semler, Herder, Schleiermacher, F.C. Baur, and Ritschl, among others. Part II includes Delitzsch, Strack, and Schlatter. In Part III, “The Form Critics and the Jews,” Gerdmar analyzes the work of Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Martin Dibelius, and Rudolf Bultmann. Part IV, “Nazi Exegesis and the Jews,” is the longest section of the book and includes in-depth analysis of Kittel and Grundmann.

The author analyzes the work of these exegetes along three lines. First, he examines how each characterizes Jews and Judaism. Second, he frames the exegesis of each scholar within their symbolic world, that is, “the world of thoughts, values and ideologies” (9). Finally, he discusses whether each scholar’s representation of Jews and Judaism legitimized or delegitimized discriminatory attitudes and practices toward Jews. This approach in toto lends balance and perspective to the study. Gerdmar’s analysis of the characterization of Jews and Judaism of the exegetes provides for the reader the data pertaining to their theology of Jews and Judaism in the context of their biblical scholarship overall. The second aspect of the author’s approach is a crucial bridge from his characterization of the work of the exegetes to his discussion of whether their work would have legitimized or delegitimized Jews and Judaism in their historical context. The final aspect gives the author the opportunity to demonstrate the link between religious legitimation/delegitimation and social action (12).

Gerdmar explains that his idea of symbolic world essentially accords with Peter Berger’s symbolic universe. He applies this notion to the modern scholars examined in the book, noting that “since Jews and Judaism are an important part of the symbolic worlds of these scholars, either as positive or negative entities, I observe how they construct Jews and Judaism. I call this ideological construction of Jews the ‘symbolic Jew’ …” (11). Throughout the book, he demonstrates indeed that “it is possible to hold elevated views of the ‘symbolic Jew’, yet regard the ‘real Jew’ next door as a nuisance, or speak of ‘that Jew’ in a pejorative manner” (11).

When Gerdmar gets to Gerhard Kittel and Walter Grundmann, of course, the picture gets a bit grimmer than the one painted of the work of the earlier exegetes. Rather than a Janus-faced approach to Jews and Judaism, here we have German Protestant theology in the service of the Nazi racial state. The author develops a careful argument about Kittel’s evolution from a credible scholar with a complicated but not overtly antisemitic approach to Jews and Judaism to a racist theologian who publicly supported Nazi racial policies. Despite Kittel’s complexity, Gerdmar might be a bit too cautious when he discusses the Tübingen theologian’s odious 1943 article “Die Behandlung des Nichtjuden nach den Talmud” (The Treatment of Non-Jews According to the Talmud). Written for the Ministry of Propaganda’s Archiv für Judenfragen (Archive for Jewish Questions), it includes the charge, based in passages ripped out of their contexts, that the Talmud grants Jews the freedom to kill non-Jews. Gerdmar avers that Kittel “probably did not take pride in this article, since he does not include it in his own documentation of printed works in his defence” (495). While this conclusion seems too cautious, Gerdmar rightly condemns Kittel’s distorted presentation of Judaism, especially as evidenced by his writings during the Third Reich.

Gerdmar’s is a thoroughgoing scholarship; it is dense and heavily footnoted. While specialists might quibble with minor points here and there, the weight of the scholarship is as a whole very impressive. The book assumes at least a modicum of understanding of biblical scholarship. A working knowledge of biblical Greek is helpful for understanding some of the author’s arguments, but not essential for appreciating the work as a whole.

Gerdmar’s study demonstrates the need for scholars of religion, biblical scholars, and historians working on issues of theology and biblical studies to read and incorporate into their scholarship works from across the disciplines. It is a mature work, one that recognizes that the works of biblical scholars should be, indeed must be understood in their historical contexts. With his very competent handling of a vast array of historical literature covering the sociological and historical settings of biblical exegetes who lived in three successive centuries, Gerdmar sets an example for his fellow biblical scholars. Historians working in the area of Christian antisemitism or, more generally, those whose area of expertise is the history of religion, would do well to follow suit by immersing themselves in the theological literature of the subjects of their historical studies.

Eschewing easy answers and trite generalizations alike, this superb study significantly expands our previous knowledge about the outlook of German Protestant biblical scholarship on Jews and Judaism since the Enlightenment. The force of Gerdmar’s study rests in the weight of its measured and acute analysis. It is a must read for anyone interested in German Protestant biblical scholarship during the modern era, and would also be helpful for those interested in the history of antisemitism.

 

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Review of Tanja Hetzer, “Deutsche Stunde”: Volksgemeinschaft und Antisemitismus in der politischen Theologie bei Paul Althaus

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2010

Review of Tanja Hetzer, “Deutsche Stunde”: Volksgemeinschaft und Antisemitismus in der politischen Theologie bei Paul Althaus (Munich: Allitera Verlag, 2009), 296pp.  ISBN: 978-3-86520-328-1.

By Christopher Probst, Howard Community College

Tanja Hetzer’s in-depth study of the widely published, genteel Erlangen theologian Paul Althaus originally appeared as the author’s Ph.D. dissertation for the University of Sussex.  It is a work of intellectual history in the finest sense of that term.  In addition to shedding new light on his personal development and career, Hetzer mines a broad range of Althaus’s works, providing rich analysis of his thinking about Jews and Judaism over the course of a career that spanned many decades.  The fullness of the biographical information is woven together with Althaus’s developing thought, giving the reader a full-orbed picture of this crucial but bleak aspect of his life and work.

During the Nazi era, Althaus self-consciously occupied a place in the Protestant “middle.”  That is, he did not align himself formally with either the generally Nazi-wary Confessing Church or the largely pro-Nazi German Christians.  Even so, argues Hetzer, the Protestant middle propagated many of the same völkisch and antisemitic tropes and cultural codes as did their counterparts in the German Christian movement.  This realization is heightened by the fact that Althaus sought consciously to build bridges between the middle and the more “moderate” members of the German Christian movement (17, 241).  In impressive fashion, Hetzer situates Althaus’s urbane and theologically sophisticated antisemitism in the intellectual environs of neo-conservative Lutheran theology but also in the broader cultural currents of anti-egalitarianism, anti-liberalism and the “Wilhelmine mentality of authority, power and severity” (40).  The author thus forwards the picture of a theologian who traded in antisemitic stereotypes, but whose worldview was nonetheless fairly complex.  This was no rabble-rouser on the margins of Protestant Christianity.  Althaus was a gifted and revered theologian with a public face.

Althaus maintained that the Protestant churches “greeted the German turning point of 1933 as a gift and miracle of God,” ascribing theological significance to the ascent of the Nazi regime, and marveling that the German people had been saved from both “the abyss” and “hopelessness” (23).  He also co-authored the Erlangen Opinion on the Aryan Paragraph (1933), in which he and his colleague Werner Elert called for the implementation of the Aryan Paragraph in the church, demanding that Jewish Christians refrain from taking “official positions” in the Protestant church.  In the early postwar era he at first chaired the denazification committee at Erlangen, then was suspended from his university post (largely due to his anti-democratic, pro-Nazi pronouncements in Die deutsche Stunde der Kirche (The German Hour of the Church, 1933) and Obrigkeit und Führertum (Authority and Leadership, 1936)), and finally was re-instated to his chair approximately one year later (20).  Such important biographical details are coupled with detailed analysis of his theological writings and represent the book’s greatest strength.

Another strength of the book is the author’s convincing portrayal of Althaus’s long-term ideological development.  Crucial to this is her discussion of Althaus’s Weimar-era writings.  Hetzer demonstrates convincingly that “his worldview solidified far before the seizure of power of the National Socialists” (11).  A key component of this worldview is Althaus’s theologically sophisticated concept of the “orders of creation” (Schöpfungsordnungen).  In his 1934 work Theologie der Ordnungen (Theology of the Orders) Althaus described these orders, which include family, Volk and nationality, as divinely sanctioned forms which represent “essential conditions of the historical life of mankind.”  Hetzer demonstrates both that Althaus’s orders of creation theology was well-established by the time the Nazis came to power and that the Erlangen theologian connected the orders to his refined system of theological ethics (17, 143).

In the mid-1920s, German Protestantism’s relationship to the “völkisch question” was “still in many respects unsettled” (149).  Due in large part to Althaus, the issue moved from the margins of the Protestant discussion to the center.  His experiences with the German völkisch movement while he served as a military chaplain in occupied Poland during the First World War had helped to shape his views about the Volk.  Then, in 1927 the 39-year-old Althaus delivered a lecture titled “Kirche und Volkstum” (“Church and Nationality”) to a church congress at Königsberg.  The lecture, argues Hetzer, signified a “caesura” with respect to Protestant attitudes toward the Volk and indeed toward the so-called “Jewish Question” (151ff.).  Here, Althaus offered a carefully constructed new political theology in which he complained of an “invasion by foreigners” (Überfremdung) in the areas of the arts, fashion and finance which he believed had led to a disintegration of the national community (Volksgemeinschaft).  The present distress of the German Volk, he railed, was due to the “Jewish threat.”  Even while generally avoiding open and direct antisemitism, Althaus “theologically legitimized and stylized” hatred of Jews (154).

The author includes an insightful discussion of the heated controversies engendered by Althaus’s antisemitic “entanglements” during the Third Reich (15-18).  It appears that this dark facet of Althaus’s past did not really begin to come to light until at least the late 1970s.  Also included is a very helpful and thorough bibliography of Althaus’s works, arranged chronologically (266-278).

This excellent study substantially augments our previous knowledge about the Erlangen theologian – and by extension the Protestant “middle” – during Weimar and the Third Reich.  There are no radical interpretive departures from previous literature on Althaus (e.g., Robert Ericksen’s Theologians Under Hitler).  Yet, the beauty of Hetzer’s book lies in its richness, depth and breadth – all of which enhance considerably our understanding of the anti-Judaism and antisemitism present within the Protestant church during Weimar and the Third Reich.  An English translation would enable students and others without facility in the German language access to this work, which is essential reading for anyone interested in German Protestantism during the first half of the twentieth century.

 

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