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August 1997 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter August 1997 – Vol III, no 8

1) Niemoller debate

2) Conference paper precis

– Bergen: “Military chaplains . . .”

– Munro: “The Reich Church Ministry . . . ”

3) Book reviews:

Carpenter, Robert Runcie

Misselwitz, Nicht laenger mit dem Gesicht nach Westen

Swoboda, Revolution of the Candles

Holmes and Keele, When Truth was Treason

4) Journal articles:

R.Sun, “Catholic-Marxist competition . . .”

R.Birn, Goldhagen review

5) Book note: Mission Matters

1) Niemoller’s most famous quotation: “First they came for the Communists . . . ” In the June issue of this Newsletter, I drew attention to an article by Ruth Zerner on this subject in the book “Jewish-Christian Encounters”. Drew Kadel of the Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary, New York has now sent me a response he published in the Journal of Religious and Theological Information, Vol 2 (2) 1996, which disputes Zerner’s findings. Instead, Kadel asserts, this quotation was probably first made during the Cold War of the 1950s, and did not include any reference to Jews. He bases this claim on his view that the purpose was to point to the failure of organised groups to co-operate together in resisting evil. Hence the inclusion of the Communists, Socialists and the Trades Unions, but also the omission of the Jews who were in no position to mobilize resistance He believes the quotation stems from the time of Niemoller’s active opposition to Adenauer’s anti- Communist and pro-armament policies, i.e. any time between 1950 and 1959. He therefore disputes Franklin Littell’s long-held view that this quotation was first and frequently used during Niemoller’s visits to the United States in 1946-7. Littell recalls conversations with the staff member of Church World Service at the time, Marlene Maerten, affirming this earlier date. Kadel dismisses this as the “somewhat equivocal report of an eyewitness many years after the fact (which) should not be regarded as entirely authoritative”. Littell, he avers, only put his view in writing in 1986 i.e. “forty years after Niemoller’s American tour – a longer lapse of time than between the crucifixion and the writing of Paul’s epistles”. But Kadel himself blatantly claims as his authoritative source a letter from Niemoller’s daughter written in 1991! To be sure Kadel is right in saying that such famous and evocative quotations take on a life of their own, and get adapted and adopted for different purposes. But the fact that they have not (yet) found written documentation from the 1940s does not prove Littell and Zerner’s view incorrect. As a librarian, Kadel should know that just because a book is not on the shelf does not mean it doesn’t exist. Furthermore I find Zerner’s explanation of the saying’s origins more convincing, i.e. that Niemoller listed the Nazis’ victims in the order in which they were attacked. First the Communists, then the Socialists and the Trades Unions, and then the Jews. This also explains the omission of the Catholics whom Niemoller always believed had compromised any possible resistance by signing the Concordat. (It is all the more curious to find the Catholics included on posters and cards being sold at the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum!) Niemoller emerged from seven years of concentration camp deeply impressed by the sufferings of those oppressed by the Nazis, and hence it was only to be expected that he should mention them in his immediate post-war speeches. Even though he had earlier held traditional anti-Judaic prejudices, his experiences in prison opened his eyes to the enormity of the Nazi antisemitic persecution, as clearly proved by the Kristallnacht, the news of which shocked even the inmates of Sachsenhausen. In my view, identification with the victims, and regret at the indifference of the bystanders, rather than the need to organise political resistance in the 1950s, was the main purpose of this quotation. JSC

2) Conference Paper Precis. a) The following is a digest of Doris Bergen’s presentation at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in May on the topic of “Between God and Hitler: German military chaplains and the crimes of the Third Reich”. Scholarship over the past decades has exploded the myth that the German military had little to do with the crimes of the Third Reich. But what about the Wehrmacht chaplains? What roles did they play? My paper used military and ecclesiastical records, chaplains’ memoirs and papers, and soldiers’ letters to address this question. I focussed on two points: first, that German military chaplains, whether they embraced Nazi ideology or not, were eye- witnesses to atrocities against civilians, including genocide of the European Jews. Secondly, the chaplains’ presence and overwhelming silence was not neutral. Instead, the moral prestige of their office, together with their ties to the historic Christian churches, helped to legitimate the Nazi war of annihilation in the eyes of its proponents. Contemporary evidence allows us to situate specific chaplains in locations where it was impossible not to witness the mass murder of civilians. Moreover, hostile Nazi authorities required chaplains to place themselves in areas of heavy fighting (the so-called Uriah law). About a thousand German clergymen, Protestant and Catholic, served as military chaplains throughout the war. Their responses to German brutality varied: some echoed Hitler with their own crusades against Jews, Communists, and Slavs; many sought to deflect criticism from a heavily propagandized military by downplaying or denying Christianity’s Jewish roots. Some tried to obstruct the crimes of the regime. But even combing archives and published sources uncovers fewer than ten such heroes. And on close examination, only one of these cases of resistance involved official military chaplains. I recounted in some detail that one case – Belaya Tserkov, Ukraine, August 1941 – where two chaplains tried but failed to stop the slaughter of Jewish children. Two factors, I suggested, help explain the weakness of resistance among military chaplains. The first was the selection procedure. Candidates were carefully screened by military authorities, church officials, and the Gestapo. All three agencies worked to keep out potential trouble-makers. Secondly, chaplains themselves were acutely aware of their precarious situation as representatives of the church in the hostile Nazi cause. Afraid of confirming anti- Christian views that they were traitors who softened up the troops, they insisted instead on their manliness, anti-Judaism, and ability to boost morale. In the process, they replicated in their own work the very Nazi ideas that threatened Christianity. Doris Bergen. Notre Dame University

b) Gregory Munro teaches at the Australian Catholic University, Brisbane. His paper was given at the Australian Conference of European Historians, July 1997 “The Reich Church Ministry in Nazi Germany 1935-1938.” By the beginning of 1935, Nazi church policy was in serious disarray. Within the Nazi leadership fears were held concerning the adverse impact on domestic and foreign policy of the volatile relationship between Church and State. In 1933 Hitler had given his support to the formation of a single unified Protestant church, dominated by the German Christian Faith Movement,under a Reich Bishop. But this had been frustrated by the opposition of the Pastors’ Emergency League and by the 1934 Barmen Declaration’s theological resistance to any such attempt to reduce the Churches to a mere instrument of Nazi policy. Since the latter half of 1934 negotiations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Reich government for the implementation of the Concordat had largely broken down amidst accusations of bad faith on both sides. In this situation Hitler summoned Hanns Kerrl (1887-1941) to be Head of a newly-created Ministry of Church Affairs in July 1935. Kerrl was the only Minister with an explicit commitment to reach a synthesis between Nazism and Christianity. Much to the ire of leading Nazis, Kerrl maintained that Christianity provided an essential foundation for Nazi ideology and that the two forces had to be reconciled. In the short term, at least, it appears that Hitler hoped to recover the initiative in the Church Struggle by returning to the official NSDAP policy of neutrality. The available documents suggest that Hitler temporized between two approaches to the question of the Churches. On the one hand, the predominant radical elements in the Party wanted to reduce clerical influence in German society as quickly as possible – and by force if necessary. On the other hand, Hitler clearly had much to gain from any possible peaceful settlement whereby the Churches would give at least implicit recognition to the supremacy of Nazi ideology in the public realm and restrict themselves solely to their internal affairs. In 1935 Kerrl scored some initial successes in reconciling the differing parties in the Church Struggle. However, by the second half of 1936, his position was clearly undermined by NSDAP hostility, and by the refusal of the churches to work with a government body which they regarded as a captive or stooge of the Nazi Party. Hitler gradually adopted a more uncompromising and intolerant stance, probably under the growing influence of ideologues such as Bormann, Rosenberg and Himmler, who were loathe to entertain any idea of the new Germany having a Christian foundation even in a token form. This paper is based on the records of the Reich Church Ministry, formerly in the GDR and now available more readily to western scholars. This material allows a more detailed investigation into the functions and objectives of the Reich Church Ministry than has hitherto been possible. Greg Munro

3) Book reviews:

a) Humphrey Carpenter, Robert Runcie – The Reluctant Archbishop, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996

Humphrey Carpenter, the son of a former Bishop of Oxford, the chronicler of J.R.Tolkien and his coterie, and the biographer of Benjamin Britten, would seem well-qualified to write an archiepiscopal biography. However, this attempt is highly disappointing, consisting largely, as Carpenter admits, of transcriptions of taped interviews, spiced by unsubstantiated speculation about the Runcie’s private lives. One chapter is devoted to the adventures of Terry Waite, and another to the unfortunate suicide of an Oxford don – neither of which adds much to any understanding of the archbishop’s career. It is hardly surprising that both Runcie and his wife were stringently caustic and disappointed with the result – a sentiment shared by this reviewer. Carpenter does however point out correctly that the job facing every Archbishop of Canterbury is an impossible one. His hugely varied levels of involvement in both Church and State, his primacy among the world-wide Anglican Communion, and his pastoral responsibilities in an often divided and fractious Church of England have to be carried out with only the slenderest of staff appointments. The expectations placed on one man’s shoulders are horrendous, and frequently competing. It is small wonder that Runcie’s skill lay in steering a middle line and avoiding too strong a stand on issues, such as the ordination of women, until at least some sort of consensus had emerged. Carpenter spends too much time tracing how this equivocal stance was due to Runcie’s use of multiple script writers whose services were infrequently acknowledged, but whose contributions enabled him to keep the Church on an even keel. But any deeper analysis is lacking. This is more of a gossip column than a biography. As such it is an opportunity missed, and fails to meet the standard set by George Bell’s life of Archbishop Davidson. Scholarship has suffered, but presumably the documents remain available for another and a better attempt later. J.S.C.

b) Hans J.Misselwitz, Nicht laenger mit dem Gesicht nach Westen: Das neue Selbstbewusstsein der Ostdeutschen, Berlin: Dietz Verlag 1996, 128 pp. Hans Misselwitz, director of politische Bildung for the Land Brandenburg, left a career as a biochemist to study theology in the mid-1980s at the Protestant church seminary in East Berlin. He and his wife organized one of the most important peace groups in the East German church. After the “Wende”, he served in the first freely-elected East German Parliament and helped to negotiate unification with West Germany. Misselwitz describes the political and economic demoralization of East Germans since unification, as West Germans take the lead in transforming East German society. He argues that East Germans too often see themselves – or let themselves be defined – as victims of history. He calls on them to draw on their experience of living under Communism and participating in the “Wende”, and to become active political agents seeking a more just and socially- conscious political order. Key to the future, he argues, is that the two Germanies remember their common history. The division of Germany followed from the rise and fall of Nazism. Germans now need to make common cause in representing “the other Germany”, i.e. those who opposed Hitler and his totalitarian ideology, the Communists, Social Democrats and members of the Confessing Church. This book will be of particular interest to historians who wish to trace the aspirations and frustrations of East Germans who helped to bring about the “Wende” and who now try to find their own voice in a new country. John Burgess

c) Jorg Swoboda, The Revolution of the Candles: Christians in the Revolution of the German Democratic Republic, ed. Richard Pierard, trans.Edwin Arnold, Macon,Georgia: Mercer U.P. 1996 pp xxxii + 203. The cover to this book, a Dore etching of the New Jerusalem, is misleading. As a translation, abridgement, and revision of a book first published in Germany in 1990, this work draws on diaries, letters, and other first-person accounts of East German Baptists, who participated in the “Wende”. Of particular interest is a chronicle of events from the end of 1987, when the state began to clamp down on alternative groups meeting in the church’s free space, to the beginning of 1990, when church leaders helped to organize and moderate the Round Tables that ran the country until free elections were held in March. This book persuasively demonstrates that events in Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden took place independently, yet came to a head at the same time. The American editor, Richard Pierard (who personally experienced some of these events) provides an excellent overview of key developments in East German politics and church-state relations. The book also documents the church’s response to the emigration question, police mistreatment of peaceful demonstrators, and the hope, as well as the ambivalence, that characterized East German reactions to unification. A set of concluding reflections by Pierard touches on issues which have emerged with greater clarity since the “Wende”, such as whether or not the church accommodated itself too much to the state. No other book in English captures the East Germans’ own voices so well, though scholars will desire access to German materials that provide a more complete picture. John Burgess

d) ed. B.R.Holmes and A.F.Keele, When Truth was Treason. German Youth against Hitler. The story of the Hellmuth Huebener Group. Based on the narrative of Karl-Heinz Schribbe, with documents and notes. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois Press 1995. 425pp

The short tragic life of Hellmuth Huebener was notable for two reasons: he was probably the youngest person sentenced to death for high treason by the notorious Nazi Volksgerichtshof and executed at Ploetzensee on October 27th 1942. He was also the only Mormon to suffer this fate. Subsequent attempts by some American Mormons to depict Huebener as a heroic example of Mormon resistance to Nazism foundered on the fact that the German Mormons quickly and decisively dissociated themselves from the actions of this17-year old member of their community. And the evidence clearly shows that most German Mormons supported the Nazis’ political programme, and like other American-derived sects, with the signal exception of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, were at pains to adopt a low profile about their religious affiliations for fear of repression. Huebener and his three friends were representative neither of German youth nor of German Mormonism. Nevertheless the story deserves to be better known of how they secretly listened to BBC broadcasts for several months, and subsequently distributed translations of this anti-Nazi propaganda in leaflet form in and around the working-class districts of Hamburg. The evidence makes it clear that Huebener was a precocious youth whose scepticism about Nazi propaganda drove him to tell the real truth – as revealed by the BBC. There is little to show that he was impelled to undertake this foolhardy action because of his Mormon upbringing, not that his small group of friends had any coherent idea of resistance or what it entailed. Neither theological nor political justifications seemed to be uppermost in these teenagers’ minds. Yet they paid a terrible price when telling the truth was treason. Huebener was guillotined, the other sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment. But even afterwards the German Mormon community was most reluctant to discuss their fate, or the lack of personal support they received in their hour of need. Holmes and Keele have now compiled as full an account of this episode as possible, on the basis of the memoirs of one of the group, Karl-Heinz Schribbe, who survived and later emigrated to Utah. Schribbe’s memoir is more of a personal narrative than an account of Huebener’s significance. But the editors have added useful notes to fill in the background, and have collated and translated surviving trial records in a valuable documentary section, which includes the texts of several of the incriminating leaflets. Making this material available in English to a wider audience is to be welcomed, even if the attempt to put Huebener into a larger context is rather strained. JSC

4) Journal articles: Raymond Sun, “Catholic-Marxist Competition in the Working-class districts of Cologne during the Weimar Republic,” in The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. LXXXIII, no 1, January 1997, p.20-43. Ruth Birn, Chief Historian, War Crimes Section, Canadian Dept. of Justice has written an incisive and highly critical review of Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners in The Historical Journal, Vol 40, no. 1, March 1997, p.195 ff.

5) Book note: eds, L Price, J. Sepulveda and G.Smith, Mission Matters, (Studies in the intercultural History of Christianity Vol 103) Frankfurt, Bern, New York: Peter Lang. 1997 232 pp This book is a collection of 16 essays, mostly by postgraduate researchers at the University of Birmingham and the Selly Oak Colleges under the supervision of Werner Ustorf, Professor of Mission. Section 1 is entitled ‘Mission History: Reassessing some Legacies’, and includes Ustorf’s own chapter on the inner history of the German Protestant Mission Boards from 1924-1949, drawn from the minute books compiled at the time. In this percipient chapter Ustorf discusses the problematic attitudes of German Protestant missionaries towards the Nazi movement and subsequent regime. Almost all missionaries were caught up in the excitement of 1933 and believed that here was a great opportunity to bring the nation back to God. But the accent on Germany’s special character and destiny under Hitler clashed with the whole ecumenical emphasis of the International Missionary Council. The result was an increasingly unresolvable dilemma of having to choose between contradictory loyalties, a struggle of distinguishing between God’s mission and a specific German-Protestant syndrome. The German missions headquarters had little hesitation in co- operating with Nazi organisations preparing for the return of the German colonial empire, while at the same time working with the IMC, which was still largely paying for the “orphaned” German missions seized during the first world war. But they were highly ambivalent about the ideas of giving independence to such “younger churches”. Equally ambivalent was the mission attitudes towards the Jews. Antisemitic sentiments were evident, but mission to the Jews could not be abjured or considered dispensable. The solution was to approve of the Nazis’ task of keeping the Jews in check, but only by Christian means i.e. trying to convert them. But even this provoked sharp reactions from the Nazi authorities. None of the German missions abroad survived the second world war unscathed, but nevertheless attempts were made after 1945 to revive the old pattern with stress on how much theses missionaries had suffered (by expulsion from the field or internment) and a good deal of self-pity for their being inextricably involved in the fate of their nation, but in the belief that their grave experiences under Nazism gave them “something very special to offer to the younger churches”. It was a good many years before a new climate appeared in Germany, and a recognition that the day of colonial foreign missions had ended. Only in 1994 was the former Berlin Missionary Society dissolved, and the old imperial ideas faded away. JSC

With best wishes to you all

John S.Conway

jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

July 1997 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor.

University of British Columbia

Newsletter July 1997 – Vol III, no 7

1. Conference announcement

2. Book reviews

Hope, German and Scandinavian Protestantism
Chandler, Brethren in Adversity
Davidson, Selwyn’s Legacy

Dear Friends,

I have been in UK for most of June, and had the pleasure of meeting some of you there. It is always nice to be in visual as well as electronic contact. I hope your summer of researches goes well, and look forward to hearing about your progress. Doris Bergen was last heard of deep in a Moscow archive, while John Moses is moving to Armidale, NSW. My thanks to those who have supplied contributions. Do keep sending them, if you have read anything which you would like to share with our members.

1. Conference announcement

The 1998 meeting of the Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte group, under the leadership of Gerhard Besier (Heidelberg) will be held near Lund, Sweden from 27th August to Sept.1st 1998. Conference arrangements are being made by Prof Ingmar Brohed (no address yet given). If you want more information, I can supply some.

2. Book reviews

a) Nicholas Hope. German and Scandinavian Protestantism 1700- 1918. (Oxford History of the Christian Church). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp.xiii, 685. $120.00

(This review appeared in German Studies Review, Vol XX, N.1, February 1997, p.143-4)

Nicholas Hope’s extensive longitudinal survey of Protestantism in the lands around the Baltic presents a graphic picture of a mainly- rural churchscape, far from the seats of power, and set in its old, poor, customary, contemplative and unhurried ways. He is concerned not so much with theology and politics, although the latter intrudes frequently, given the anomalous religious situation left over from the Thirty Years War. Essentially he seeks to describe the situation of the local parishes, from the end of the disastrous seventeenth century until the equally disastrous collapse into a politically-dominated war culture from 1914-1918.

In 1700, war, disease and famine still stalked these lands. Life was undoubtedly nasty, brutish and short; and the people turned either to pagan rituals or to the church for consolation. Two major issues preoccupied the rural clergy for most of the eighteenth century: how to win their parishioners over from the powers of darkness and how to comfort the suffering multitude overcome with grief. But, even after two centuries, the Lutheran inheritance was everywhere in danger. Pastors were repeatedly urged to pray not only for deliverance from Papist aggression and the infidel Turk, but also to guard against the heretical influences of Calvinists and other sectarians, seeking to distort, falsify or suppress the true Gospel.

In the eighteenth century, the situation improved, largely due to the seminal work of the “Pietists” – a term Hope dislikes. The influence of Spener and Francke stressed the need for warm pastoral care, drawing extensively from models in Holland and England. Despite conflicts with the establishment clergy, this new enthusiasm spread rapidly and was soon popular especially in the smaller courts and amongst the lesser nobility. Vernacular preaching and the spread of devotional literature became significant vehicles for disseminating these ideas. Count Zinzendorf’s Moravians laid great stress on lay leadership. And as W.R.Ward in his Protestant Evangelical Awakening (1992) has already pointed out, the growth of trade and travel enabled the widespread propagation of well-edited and cheap devotional literature, so that Puritan classics like Pilgrim’s Progress in numerous editions and translations became staple influences for generations in many humble homes. They were also the principal armament of the missionary movement which spread the word from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strands.

Nevertheless, despite attempts to centralise and rationalise the anomalous variety of church orders or to improve the training of the parish clergy, resistance to change from historic ways remained strong. Even with the abolition of serfdom in the eastern areas, and the spread of enclosures, parish habits seemed immune to reform. The wretchedly paid rural clergy remained dependent on the local gentry’s favour, and often dictation, as to how services were to be conducted. Edicts from above, most notably the Prussian King’s attempts to impose religious uniformity on Lutheran and Reformed congregations by the formation of a United Church, ran into overwhelming resistance.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the state’s desire to use the clergy as minor civil servants prompted, as in England, a countervailing movement to restore the Church’s more ancient patterns of authority, ritual and values. The universities too continued to value their traditions and ceremonies rather than concentrate on practical training. The impact of Protestant revivals led to an increasingly conservative clerical and lay tone. At the same time, both Protestant and Catholic romantics sought to revive older traditions in church music and architecture. Here lay the roots of opposition to a more liberal or national Protestantism seeking a new relationship to the nation-state after German political unification took place. It was strong enough to prevent the emergence of any national Protestant church, and to cling on to the local autonomy of the past in the individual Landeskirchen. Vigorous debate about the character of the Volkskirche continued for years, up to and including 1933.

For its part, the state sought to maintain the Protestant clergy as minor officials, even when bureaucrats took over many of the their secular duties; the clergy sought to maintain their historic privileges, even when population changes eroded their authority in providing social cohesion and moral education. Neither side before 1918 wanted disestablishment, or recognition of Germany’s plural denominational character. The resulting compromise was profoundly unsatisfactory; in David Diephouse’s phrase, the clergy found themselves in a state to which they could only partially relate, and a society they could only partially control. The pastoral problems caused by rapid urban and industrial growth proved too much for the essentially rural-based church structures in all of northern Europe. A deepening sense of crisis over the churches’ role as moral guardians of society was one of the reasons why the German clergy tried to recapture lost ground by embracing militaristic patriotism so enthusiastically in 1914. But the patriarchal patterns of the past no longer sufficed, and in Germany they were abolished for ever in 1918.

Hope’s multilingual erudition is formidably impressive. So too is his judicious impartiality on topics which have aroused fiercely sectarian strife. Such comparative surveys necessarily leave gaps, but this work can be highly commended as an informative work of reference, and as a thoughtful analysis of the Protestant place in modern European history.

JSC

b) Andrew Chandler, ed., Brethren in Adversity.

Bishop George Bell, The Church of England and the Crisis of German Protestantism, 1933-1939, Church of England Record Society U.K 1996 L35/$63 (Dr Chandler is director of the George Bell Institute at Queen’s College, Birmingham)

Scholars intensely interested in the church-state struggle in the Nazi era will welcome enthusiastically this collection of documents taken mainly from the papers of Bishop George Bell of Chichester and Archbishop Cosmo Lang, which treat this dark period in the history of the Christian Church and its relations with the evil powers of Nazism. It is also of considerable interest to know that there now exists a ‘George Bell Institute’ hopefully established to mine the voluminous collection of his and other papers at Lambeth Palace.

Dr Chandler indicates (p.14) that “This book is essentially about information and interpretation”, and it is ideally organised to fulfil this purpose, for from Chandler’s long introduction the reader gets a firm grasp of the issues highlighted by the documents, and a solid, reliable interpretation to guide one through the original sources. On the German church crisis he also analyses closely the differences between several main British protagonists, especially Bishop Bell and Bishop A.C.Headlam of Gloucester.

Notable is the extent of the contacts these British churchmen entertained with “official” Germans, from Hitler to Hess, Ribbentrop and even Alfred Rosenberg. One is also impressed by the degree to which British churchmen attempted to see the Nazi and German leaders in as positive a light as possible. For example, illustrative of this is Bell’s rather sympathetic portrayal of Ribbentrop’s attempts to have his youngest child baptised (pp 89- 92), as is the Bishop’s description of the controversial bishop of Hanover, August Marahrens, whom he called a “fine, godly old man” (pp.100-101).

Appeasement is a predictable leitmotiv in these documents with Dr. A.J.Macdonald, ‘librarian’ of the Church of England’s Council; on Foreign Relations and its head, Bishop Headlam, as outstanding examples of this tendency. It is perhaps somewhat curious that, in the light of Headlam’s rather wrongheaded views amply attested to in this documentation, Chandler feels his “experience as an ecumenical thinker and politician incontestable” (p.11). Another valuable contribution is to illustrate the good deal of British confusion about the German situation. For example, Headlam, Macdonald and Bell all seem to have thought that German girls belonged to the Hitler Youth (p.151, Headlam; p.110 Macdonald; p. 138 Bell). Even more remarkable were Headlam’s allegations that the theology of the extreme German Christians was closer to the Church of England than that of the oppositional and persecuted Confessing Church (p.152). These documents also underscore the well-known fact that neither Bell nor the bulk of British observers had any real mastery of the German language, which certainly harmed their ability to get a first-hand impression of the situation even though they took great pains to visit Germany at the time.

What is perhaps mildly disappointing about this collection is that it tends to repeat in places information which is already readily available. For example, the collection reproduces almost verbatim from Canon Jasper’s biography of Bell the famous memorandum on the German situation at the end of 1938 (p144-49). Moreover, my impression is that occasionally rather too much appears here that is well known, and too little is included of fresh insights, especially from Bell’s most extensive and valuable papers. Here I was particularly struck by the gaps surrounding some of the major German crises of those years, especially those connected with the persecution of the Jews in Germany. While the German Protestant struggles of 1933-34, and again 1937, are rightly given extensive coverage, no documents are included which would more immediately reflect the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and especially the aftermath of the 1938 Sudeten crisis and Kristallnacht. Indeed this crucial year receives attention in only two, albeit longer, documents, while the 1939 entries are unfortunately confined to a brief wartime (!) exchange of two letters between Bell and Karl Barth. Yet for Bell 1938-9 was the critical and dramatic period of his activity, especially his eleventh hour rescue of ‘nonaryan’ German pastors before the Nazi invasion of Poland.

It is encouraging to see that this collection makes an attempt to provide useful biographical information. At the same time it is to be regretted that the dates of the persons mentioned are sometimes incomplete, even though these could easily have been ascertained. It is also mildly regrettable that some important international church figures, such as the president of the United Lutheran Church in America, Dr Frederick Knubel (in Chandler’s defence he is called ‘Nubel’ in the document – p 147) are not identified, that Dr Franz Hildebrandt is relegated to a brief footnote (p.156), and that the ‘nonaryan’ refugee pastor ‘Gordon’ mentioned on p 128 is not identified as Ernst Gordon, with whom Bell had an extensive correspondence.

In conclusion, this is nonetheless an encouraging beginning, and one can be confident that in his new directorial function Chandler will continue to provide insightful interpretations and primary material for both the scholarly and generally interested public. Indeed given the fragmentary and dated nature of the several studies extant on Bishop Bell, it is to be hoped that Chandler will consider tackling an up-to-date comprehensive biography of this fine man and Christian.

Ronald Webster, York University, Toronto, Ontario.

c) Allan K.Davidson, Selwyn’s Legacy. The College of St John the Evangelist 1843-1992, Auckland, N.Z. 1993, 412 pp.

Antipodean church history is little known, because little of it has yet been written. It is therefore most welcome to have Allan Davidson’s well-researched, insightful and splendidly illustrated history of St John’s College, Auckland, the premier institution for the Anglican Church in New Zealand. It is all the more welcome because the problems and issues he so deftly describes were and are very similar to those experienced by parallel institutions in other parts of the British Empire, as the Church of England sought to replicate its institutional life and ideas around the globe. So too his survey of the main features involved in training the clergy over the past 150 years will be easily recognisable by many members of our Association.

George Augustus Selwyn was appointed to be the first bishop of New Zealand in 1840, at the early age of 32. He had all the right credentials and connections, and had already developed comprehensive and visionary ideals of how a missionary bishop should carry out his responsibilities. His was the task of bringing episcopal authority to the scattered efforts of the Church Missionary Society which had already initiated a series of mission stations for the Maori inhabitants, but also to provide for the welfare of the increasing number of British settlers eager to establish themselves in the remote but promising fertile lands of the new colony. Selwyn’s view of training for the priesthood was in part shaped by his vision of the mediaeval period, and in part by his conviction that the bishop and his cathedral should play a central role in the life of the new church. He believed that the bishop should have a small group of young men associated with him, living in his house and under his spiritual direction, benefiting from his library and learning, and then ready to be sent out to undertake whatever pastoral duties he saw as a priority. Just as Augustine and his monks had come from Rome to Christianize England so long ago, so his successors should emulate his example in the far-flung Southern Ocean. The vastness of his diocese, the multiplicity of the tasks he resolved to embark on, and his somewhat imperious, if likeable, personality all combined to fashion the early Church of England ministry in New Zealand and Melanesia. To his credit, Selwyn was eager to build a partnership between the Maori and the settlers, and resolved to have both sets of young men integrated in his newly-founded College. But difficulties soon arose over the different visions of the future entertained by each group, which were not helped by Selwyn’s own clear preference for the high- minded Oxford style of learning he knew best. Unfortunately too, while he was able to attract some wealthy donors to provide funds for a few initial buildings, and successfully obtained a tract of land at some distance from the centre of white settlement in Auckland, immediate funds for the day-to-day running of this training college were lacking and remained so for decades. Placing the College under a succession of Wardens, all of whom were brought out from England, put an almost intolerable burden of inadequate resources on these men, whose term was often regrettably short. In addition the clashes between high-church and evangelical emphases were soon enough repeated in New Zealand, and the College was often regarded with suspicion by one side or the other. Selwyn’s attempt to build a monastic-like centre with frequent daily services was hardly suited to the pioneering style of rural ministry desired by the growing number of sheep ranchers. Furthermore the still scattered communities in both the North and South Islands resented attempts to centralize all ministerial training in or near Auckland in the far north. Successive bishops elsewhere wanted their own local seminaries. So the grand attempt to build one structure for the whole province never really succeeded.

As settlement grew, so did the complications of having rival churches and rival theories of ministry. Attempts to affiliate St John’s to the new university in Auckland, in order to raise the level of academic training, met with strong opposition from the advocates of secular education (as in western Canada), as well as from bishops still adhering to Selwyn’s ideas of personal instruction and example. Assimilationists argued in favour of brining Maori candidates to St John’s as a means of unifying the country on the British model, with the result that specific training in the Maori language virtually disappeared for decades. Personality difficulties led to frequent clashes between the Wardens’ interpretation of their responsibilities and those of the Board of Governors, which itself was divided over regional or churchmanship alignments, Above all, it is notable and hardly surprising that Anglicanism in New Zealand was totally derivative, since most of its leaders continued to be imported from England, or more latterly trained there.

For its first hundred years St John’s had a very chequered existence. Geography, the lack of financial resources, and strong diocesan identity fostered parochialism, and prevented the emergence of one viable national theological college. As late as the 1950s the ethos was still that of a sedate cathedral institution, a male, celibate enclave, complete with mortar boards, and gowns, Sung Eucharist and Compline.

But over the past thirty years, new winds of change have been felt. In the 1960s a plan of union with the Methodists was proposed, which later, as in other places, proved abortive. But their training institutions found a near-merger on St John’s campus, which opened some new horizons. In 1976 women were admitted to ordination, leading to a striking change in the composition of the college community. New sympathies arose for the Maori heritage and new approaches for Maori ministries and liturgies were tried out. The author, Davidson, an ordained Presbyterian, became the first non- Anglican to be appointed to the teaching staff in 1972, and has since written extensively on the church in New Zealand. At the same time, the rapid spread of Auckland’s suburbia led to a dramatic rise in the value of Selwyn’s trust lands, and hence at last to much increased resources for the Trust’s educational activities. But, as elsewhere, the lively debates about priorities in the training of ordinands were felt in New Zealand too. The need for contextual relevance, cross-cultural sensitivity, regard for gender issues and partnership between Maori and Paheka all added and still add to the complexity of theological education. It was impossible to get the balance right to satisfy all the contending voices in the churches. Davidson’s comments on developments in the most recent years are understandably restrained. His service is really to have brought to life the variety and vigour of those high-minded English clerics who inherited Selwyn’s legacy and sought to transplant his ideas and practices into the exotic lands of the southern seas. This is a splendid record of the part St John’s has played in fostering Anglicanism, and now ecumenism, in all its various forms, throughout Aotearoa New Zealand, Melanesia, the Pacific and beyond.

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All the best to you all,
John Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

June 1997 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway,Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter June 1997 – Vol III, no 6

Dear Friends.

1) New books

2) Journal article: Minkenberg, Civil Religion and German Unification

3) Book reviews:

Gilbert, The Boys
McLeod, Piety and Poverty

4) Holocaust Conference in Russia

5) Bonhoeffer Website.

1) New Books

a) Those interested in the post-war reconstruction of German universities may like to note the excellently factual and critical account by Peter Respondek, Besatzung, Entnazifixierung, Wiederaufbau. Die Universitaet Muenster 1945-1952, Agenda Verlag, Muenster 1995,

b) The Legacy of the Holocaust: Two separate collections of essays drawn from the proceedings of the Second Remembering for the Future Conference held in Berlin in 1994, but edited by the same people, have recently appeared. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science dedicates its November 1996 issue to this theme, published by Sage Periodical Press, Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi, and _From Prejudice to Destruction: Western Civilisation in the Shadow of Auschwitz_ is published by LIT Verlag, Muenster. Both contain articles by several of our Association’s members. giving a thoughtful analysis of the events and consequences of the Holocaust, with numerous references to the impact of Christian antisemitism, and the need to take remedial measures. Luckily, and thanks to the editing of Jan Colijn and Marcia Littell, there is no overlap between the volumes, and both deserve to be studied as an excellent commentary on the present state of Holocaust enquiries in its widest international context.

c) A similar work in the same area of studies is _Jewish-Christian Encounters over the Centuries. Symbiosis,Prejudice, Holocaust,Dialogue_ American University Studies, P.Lang, New York 1994, edited by Marvin Perry and Frederick Schweitzer. Their aim is clearly to present this topic in a positive setting, in the hope that “two millenia of strife can be replaced by a new era in which common interests and shared commitments can be the basis for our relationships, even while recognising the deep divisions which divide us”. “If in fact Jews and Christians are really members of the same family, who have suffered a long and painful estrangement, reconciliation should be possible”. In any case, “Christians and Jews must now, more than ever, share sentry duty against evil”. One of our members, Susannah Heschel, contributes an informative article on “The Image of Judaism in New Testament Scholarship in Germany (in the 19th Century)”, and John Pawlikowski ably sums up the present state of research on the Vatican and the Holocaust, finding himself much in agreement with the judgements of Michael Marrus. Ruth Zerner has a nice short piece on the origins of Martin Niemoller’s famous dictum about the indifference of the bystanders, and Michael McGarry evaluates the positive impact of Nostra Aetate #4 in 1965 which he believes moved Catholics from a position of ignorance to interest, from contempt to appreciation, and from proselytism to dialogue. This Declaration is to be taken as a striking example of the most significant change in Christian doctrine in this century. The essays in this book provide excellent witness to this hopeful development.

2) Journal Article:

Michael Minkenberg’s interesting paper given to the GSA in Seattle last October on Civil Religion and German Unification is now printed in German Studies Review, Vol XX, no 1, February 1997, p.63-81.

3) Book reviews:

Martin Gilbert, The Boys. Triumph over adversity, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1996, 511 pp.

The most horrifying book I have read this year is Martin Gilbert’s newly-published The Boys, an account of the Holocaust by child survivors. In the summer and winter of 1945, 732 teenagers, mostly from Poland, were brought to England under the auspices of the Committee for the Care of Children from Concentration Camps. Nearly fifty years later more than a hundred of them were persuaded to set down their reminiscences, and from these Martin Gilbert has skilfully compiled a collective biography, whose cumulative impact cannot fail to have a sober, even shattering effect.

The first half of the book is a chronological description of the waves of suffering and adversity which engulfed these children as the Germans began their deliberate and systematic campaign to eradicate the Jewish communities of eastern Europe. From September 1939 they were successively and irrevocably deprived of their of their childhood security, their schooling, their possessions, their relatives and their immediate families. Each chapter describes in detail the infamous process which overwhelmed these children – the ghettoisation, the deportations, the slave labour camps, the transfer to Auschwitz, Buchenwald or Belsen, the death marches, and, for this handful, their often miraculous survival in the midst of mass murder and brutal exploitation. Deprived of their parents and siblings, often at the flick of an SS guard’s truncheon, the majority were also forced to endure a constant regimen of fear and hunger. Necessarily they developed survival skills, even when survival seemed pointless. But somehow they endured to the end. Incident after incident from these memoirs is collated into a collective picture of atrocity and horror. Gilbert’s skill lies in fitting together each interlocking instance into the larger picture in order to let the recollected stories stand as a factually accurate record with a minimum of connecting commentary. At the same time his sensitivity and sympathy for these orphaned victims shines through.

The second half of the book which gives details of their rehabilitation and adapting to British life is necessarily anti- climatic. At first the Home Office granted them a two-year temporary stay, expecting them all to emigrate further. But the Mandatory authorities in Palestine blocked the way until 1948 for those who desired to share the Zionist-inspired goal of Aliyah. The majority opted to stay in Britain and were finally allowed to do so. The Central British Fund which paid their expenses worked hard to integrate them as quickly as possible and to find opportunities for gainful employment despite their lack of schooling for so many years. For those who came to London, a thriving club was established which provided them with the comradeship so desperately sought as an antidote to the burden of the past. The ’45 Aid Society, later called the Primrose Club, enabled many to find their way in this new setting, and still brings them together for an annual banquet. Most have since become extraordinarily well settled, and lovingly record their success in rebuilding their lives with children and grandchildren, who form a replacement, though never a substitute, for the families they so horrendously lost. As their chairman recently remarked: “On the one hand we have recovered. On the other hand we have been damaged, a damage that is not outwardly visible. We have integrated so well that even our own families are not aware of our trauma. Yet there is not a day that goes by that does not evoke some painful memory of the past. Nothing, but nothing, has eased the suffering. We have enjoyed the luxury of living. But we lost our parents when we were young, and the family life that could have been ours was denied us. That is why the memory is so painful. It gets worse. I do not talk about it, but I feel like screaming: Why?, Why?, Why?”

This tribute to the collective will to survive by this small handful of youngsters is not only a valuable historical account but a striking record of their ability to triumph over adversity. It will rightly take its place in the large body of survivors’ testimonies, so that those fortunate enough never to share such appalling tribulations will be enabled, indeed obliged, not to forget.

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Hugh McLeod, Piety and Poverty: Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York 1870-1914. New York: Holmes and Meier 1996, US $45.00

(The following review appeared first on the H-Net list H-PCAACA)

High McLeod challenges the widespread assumption that members of the industrial working class are likely to be alienated from religious life. McLeod’s three case studies offer abundant evidence of varied religious practices and attitudes among sections of the working classes in Berlin, London and New York from 1870 to 1914. Yet the author is not content to criticize theoretical approaches that cannot account for this diversity. Instead, he offers useful models for the analysis of working-class religion beyond the three cities he has studied.

To explain complex patterns of religious belief and practice, McLeod examines the social, ethnic, and intellectual environments in which working-class religion developed. In Berlin, close links between the conservative elites and the dominant Lutheran church inspired liberal and bourgeois hostility to religion and this influenced working-class estrangement from the church. An “extensive and deep alienation, not only from the church, but from Christianity in general” (107) developed further as socialists created an alternative working-class culture in the city. In contrast, religious pluralism in London encouraged strong religious commitment among middle-class liberals and provided politically attractive religious environments for some workers. While most others spurned regular church attendance, London’s working-class culture was usually not hostile to Christianity. In New York, churches became the focus of identity for many members of the ethnically fragmented working class, particularly the Irish. The most exciting sections of the book for students of popular culture are the last two chapters, investigating the fabric of working-class religious life beyond church attendance. McLeod rejects the view that working-class religious life was an exclusively female phenomenon. Relying mainly on evidence from London, he argues that working-class men participated in some religious activities, including debates, church-affiliated sports activities, and services led by particularly notable speakers. Women embraced different religious practices, such as mothers’ meetings and life- cycle observances. Though in Berlin conflict between secular men and their more religious wives was relatively common, in London – and to some extent in New York – “male and female forms of religiosity” coexisted, though women’s religious activity was often more “intense” (173).

In all three cities, religion played a role in working-class peoples’ lives. Observances with religious content often marked rites of passage, including baptism, confirmations or bar-mitzvahs, and in some places weddings and funerals. Working-class celebrations of holy days also reveal a vital religious sense, and in London and New York, McLeod suggests, private prayer was common among the working-class, even if regular church attendance was not. Many of the strengths of this book come from its comparative approach. This methodology is ideally suited to testing existing conceptual approaches and developing more viable ones with broad applicability, which McLeod does impressively. But, as he notes, the availability of different kinds of sources for each case complicates his task. The richest material comes from London, and oral histories are used to particularly good effect. The sources on Berlin are more institutional, which makes it difficult to study less formal religious practice in that city. While religion appears less important in the Berlin working class, perhaps the kinds of sources McLeod exploited so profitably in London would have revealed a more complex picture in the German capital as well. Overall, Pity and Poverty is a useful and interesting book. It challenges simplistic approaches and offers a range of compelling factors to consider in thinking about working-class religion. This reader found the rich evocation of religious belief and practice among working-class people – who attended church only rarely – particularly valuable.

Pennsylvania State University
Andrew August

4) Holocaust Conference in Russia

Gordon Mork, Purdue University, sends this personal report:

In Russia it is spelled with an X. From May 4-7th the Second International Symposium, “The Lessons of the Holocaust and Contemporary Russia” took place in Moscow, sponsored by the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Centre and the Marc Bloch Centre of the Russian State University for the Humanities. There were over sixty speakers on the programme. most of whom were from Russia and the former USSR, but also from Israel, France, Poland, and the USA. It was an amazing experience.

The opening session coincided with a Yom Hashoa commemoration, which overflowed the auditorium of the “Central House of the Men of Letters”. Russian friends noted the irony of holding the ceremony there; as the seat of the “official” writers’ organisation in Soviet times, it had secluded all dissidents (including many Jews) prior to 1989. Participants that evening included survivors of both the Nazi camps and the Soviet gulags, the chief rabbi of Moscow, the ambassador of Israel, a men’s chorus, and a very upbeat children’s choir. Representatives of Christian rescuers were honoured. We ended by rising to sing the Israeli anthem.

The presentations over the next three days included a combination of scholarly papers, personal recollections, calls of concern about antisemitism today, and models for Holocaust education. The keynote address was by a dynamic woman. A.E.Gerber, the president of the Holocaust Centre in Moscow and a former member of parliament.

Only one of the papers focussed directly on religious issues of special interest to our Association. James N.Pellechia and Jolene Chu, of the Watch Tower Society, presented a well-crafted paper “Teaching Tolerance: A Case Study”, which explained the role of Jehovah’s Witnesses as “a second witness to the Shoah” in the Nazi camps. Much of the material was drawn from the documentary video entitled “Jehovah’s Witnesses Stand Firm against Nazi Assault” (See review in Newsletter no 24, Vol II, no 12 – December 1996), though this video was not shown in Moscow.

Other presentations dealt with themes familiar to scholars of the Holocaust, themes which implied much about the underlying relationships between Christians and Jews. Was the Holocaust “unique”? Was it exclusive to Jews? Did Christians help Jews, or did they support the Holocaust? How and to whom should the Holocaust be taught? It is clear that the opening of archives. and the new freedom to publish documents, monographs, and teaching materials will provide many rich (and often disturbing) sources for historians and educators.

One of the major points made was that there is a continuity of antisemitism in Eastern Europe, rooted in religious and economic prejudice. Antisemitism was officially suppressed during the Soviet period but in reality was still prevalent. It was vigorously and brutally promoted by Nazi propaganda during World War II. Now, in the post-Soviet world, it is becoming manifest again. Some of the same antisemitic authors who wrote for the Nazis are being published again in the 1990s. One of the most interesting exchanges was between a scholar who defended Christian peasants in the Ukraine who sheltered him and his family during the Holocaust. He could not have survived without such help, he emphasized, and he did not want to hear that all Christians in the Ukraine were antisemitic!

A Polish scholar, Dr. Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, spoke on attitudes in Poland about the Holocaust in particular and Jews in general. She touched on the links between Polish nationalism and the Catholic Church, but did not fully analyse them. Other papers implied a relationship between the upsurge of Slavic nationalism (including antisemitism) and Orthodox Christianity, without exploring the issue in depth.

Overall there was a sense of exhilaration that issues, so long suppressed in Russia, were now open for full discussion. Another Symposium is planned, but a date has not yet been set. Inquiries can be sent to Dr Ilya A Altman, of the Russian Holocaust Centre in Moscow. = altman@glasnet.ru

5) Bonhoeffer Website

This has been revised and can now be found at
http://www.iscn.com/bonhoef/ [Update: This no longer works]

With every best wish,

John S.Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca e

May 1997 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter May 1997 – Vol III, no 5

Dear Friends.

1) Vancouver Symposium: Christians confronting the Holocaust

2) Churches in the G.D.R.

3) Book reviews:
Franklin Littell, Hyping the Holocaust
Donald Crosby, Battlefield Chaplains

1) “Christians confronting the Holocaust” (Contributed by David Stewart, Associate Librarian, Regent-Carey Library, Regent College, Vancouver)

This symposium, sponsored by Regent College, Vancouver, was held on April 4-5th, 1997 and included lectures by John S.Conway – “Jewish-Christian Relations since 1945” and by David Gushee of Union University, Jackson, Tenn – “Characteristics and Motivations of Christian Rescuers” and “Glimpses of Light: Christian Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust”. At the conclusion of Saturday evening’s session a panel consisting of three Holocaust survivors and one Gentile “rescuer” offered their highly compelling reminiscences.

This two day event was organized to mark the official opening of the John S.Conway Research Collection at the Regent College Library. Over the past several years Dr Conway has gradually been donating books and files to the Library, and with the approach of his retirement over the past year this transfer has accelerated. The Collection is kept separate from the main holdings of the Regent- Carey Library, which serves an enrollment of some 350 FTE students in theological studies.

At present the Conway Collection includes between 400 and 500 monograph titles, and files and pamphlets in even greater numbers. There is a great quantity of resources on the German Church Struggle, Ecumenism, the Holocaust and its many aspects, and major troves of biographical material on Bonhoeffer, Niemoller and especially Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, including an almost full run in original copies of the noted journal “Die Eiche – 1913-1933”. Having worked extensively with John’s collection in preparation for this Symposium, I believe that the conference seems to have accomplished at least two things: a) it provided a fitting tribute for John’s distinguished career, as well as his generous gifts to the Library; b) it served remarkably to establish points of contact and mutual respect between persons of the Jewish and Christian communities.

To mark the occasion, the Regent College Bookstore has re-printed (in an attractive paperback edition) Dr Conway’s book “The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-1945”, which was duly presented during the proceedings – to the author’s complete surprise and subsequent delight! Copies are now available at Can $25.95 and can be ordered from the Regent Bookstore, 5800 University Boulevard, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 2E4 (call 604-228-1620 or 1-800-663-8664; Fax: 604-224-3097. Visa and Master Charge accepted)

Dr David Gushee’s book “The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust: a Christian Interpretation” (Fortress Press 1994) is also available at Can $24.75.

The weekend’s lectures were recorded, and audiotapes can be ordered from the Regent Bookstore.

It is the hope of the Regent-Carey Library that this event will foster further dialogue, and that the Conway Collection will prove to be a valuable resource for research in the future. Do feel free to contact us if we can be of assistance to you. (Ivan Gaetz, Librarian, email – rgtig@unixg.ubc.ca; David Stewart, Associate Librarian,email – rgtds@unixg.ubc.ca). David Stewart, Associate Librarian

2) Churches in the G.D.R.

The Landtag of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has recently published three volumes of verbatim transcripts of the proceedings of its own Enquete Commission, under the title “Leben in der DDR, Leben nach 1989 – Aufarbeitung und Versoehnung”. These contain several statements about the role of the churches by such noted figures as Prof. Martin Onnasch. (These volumes can be consulted at Regent College Library, Vancouver).

3) Book reviews:,

a) Littell, Hyping the Holocaust
b) Crosby, Battlefield Chaplains a) ed. F.H.Littell, Hyping the Holocaust. Scholars answer Goldhagen. East Rockaway,N.Y.: Cummings and Hathaway Publishers. 177pp $20 US

Early last year Daniel Goldhagen’s book _Hitler’s willing executioners_ appeared with tremendous publicity and exaggerated claims for its novelty and uniqueness. Its thesis of a wholesale addiction by Germans to a so-called “eliminationist antisemitism” as the single cause of the Holocaust seemed to appeal to a large number of young Germans now resolutely looking for ammunition to attack their parents and grandparents, or to elderly non-Germans eager to find reinforcement for long-held prejudices. By contrast, academic critics almost universally found much to criticize, particularly in the broad generalizations about the relationship of Germans and Jews. The book received numerous reviews in both the United States and Germany, but has since disappeared from the best-seller lists. In the wider setting, one could argue that the only answer to bad history is better history. But Professor Franklin Littell, who has spent a generation building up a significant forum of scholarly conferences on the Holocaust and the Churches, had a particular concern for joining this debate. He recognized the danger that, if Goldhagen’s views were to find wide coverage or acceptance, these endeavours to heal the wounds of the past and to create a new climate between Christians and Jews might well be endangered. He has therefore assembled a distinguished coterie of experts from Israel, Canada, Germany and the United States to refute the most blatant and unrestrained of Goldhagen’s claims, thereby seeking to restore the damage done to relations between Christians and Jews, between Germans and Israelis and other nations.

These scholars are prepared to be fair. The doyen of Israel’s Holocaust scholarship, Yehuda Bauer, for instance, is ready to agree with Goldhagen that the Holocaust is explicable and not essentially a mystery as Elie Wiesel believes.. He praises as “powerful and convincing” Goldhagen’s description of the death marches of 1945. He is however all the more critical of the indiscriminate stereotyping of German history or Nazi society in particular. In Bauer’s view, which is shared by other Jewish conservatives,Goldhagen blurred what is truly distinctive about the Holocaust by diverting attention away from the industrialized and bureaucratic character of the Nazis’ mass murder onslaught And his principal argument making endemic German antisemitism uniquely responsible is undercut by his throwaway admission in a footnote that since 1945 Germans have become model democrats. Rabbi Jacob Neusner chides his fellow Harvard graduate for his unwillingness to engage in comparisons with other antisemitic societies and for his lack of logical consistency. So too, Hans Mommsen, one of Germany’s leading historians, remains unconvinced by Goldhagen’s adoption of the extreme “intentionalist” view of the Holocaust’s origins, and is unimpressed by the first sections of the book and the “comprehensive elaborations for which there are no archival or other unpublished sources and for which the secondary literature is only called up from time to time”.

Another German contributor, Erich Geldbach, newly appointed Professor of Ecumenical Theology at the Ruhr University, Bochum, challenges Goldhagen’s claim that Germans en masse abandoned ethical norms when they killed Jews. It seemed only “natural” to ordinary Germans to “exterminate” European Jewry. But such a view, in Geldbach’s opinion, by regarding pre-Nazi Germans as already predisposed to an “eliminationist antisemitism”, not only downplays the impact of the Nazis’ extremely effective propaganda and indoctrination machinery. It also partakes of a kind of predestination theory which disallows all possibility of holding individuals morally responsible for their acts. And if the vast majority of Germans were so predisposed, why did Hitler and his closest advisers take such pains to keep the whole process secret? Goldhagen’s simplistic reductionism can only serve to lend support to those who, despite all the evidence, still refuse to face the fact of their complicity. His book therefore runs the risk of being counter- productive.

Wolfgang Gerlach, a German pastor well known for his highly critical study of the Confessing Church’s failure to support Jews during the Holocaust, is drawn to protest against the undifferentiated polemic against all Christians, and to take issue against the charge of “striking impassiveness” which ignores the historical fact that heated debates did take place, even if many Lutherans still remained trapped in their anti-Judaic theological positions, which however were bent on converting, not murdering, Jews. To be sure alert personalities of the church took refuge in a disconcerting, shocking and paralysing silence. But the few Christian martyrs such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer at least deserved a mention, and are obviously omitted because they contradict Goldhagen’s picture of an “indifferent” and “eliminationist” majority.

Three other members of our Association contribute significant essays. Hubert Locke, co-founder with Littell of the Scholars’ Conference, criticizes Goldhagen for denouncing well known Holocaust scholars when they fail to engage in his favourite method: reaching grand conclusions where the evidence is weakest. Peter Hoffmann rightly points out that revulsion against the Nazi murderous antisemitic policies was one of the principal motives for the German Resistance’s attempt to overthrow Hitler, for which so many of them sacrificed their lives. And Dick Pierard contributes a useful summary of American right-wing reactions to Goldhagen’s views, which points out that his arguments can be used to advance agendas which he clearly had not anticipated or intended. The more extreme American “deniers’ of course have condemned Goldhagen’s thesis outright, but his specious generalizations have only provided them with a further opportunity to denounce the whole Holocaust mythology lock, stock and barrel.

In summary, Eberhard Jaeckel, another distinguished Holocaust scholar, to his regret finds that the book is not a penetrating revision of previous scholarship, which might have added significant new findings. Rather it is simply a bad book, little more than a retreat to out-distanced positions, and a reversion to the most primitive of all stereotypes, “by a young man who has gained public attention but at the cost of sacrificing all scientific standing”.

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b) Crosby, Battlefield Chaplains a) ed. F.H.Littell, Hyping the Holocaust. Scholars answer Goldhagen. East Rockaway,N.Y.: Cummings and Hathaway Publishers. 177pp $20 US

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b) Donald F.Crosby,SJ., Battlefield Chaplains: Catholic Priests in World War II, University of Kansas Press, 1994

During the Gulf War, a Catholic padre found himself beside the body of an American female soldier mortally wounded in a vehicle accident. In an action as ancient as the office itself, the padre bent over the soldier and led her through the Act of Contrition and the prayers for the dying. His reward was a faint squeeze of the hand before she died.

Donald Crosby’s study of battlefield ministry to the armed forces of the United States in the Second World War explores the similar work done by thousands of Catholic clerics overseas. He vividly portrays the intensity of this ministry and the devotion most padres felt for their men, as well as, for better or for worse, their complete identification with the crusading cause of the United States. Crosby has undertaken wide and exhaustive research in Catholic newsprint, army archival and chaplain memoir literature. He also benefited from a 1983 questionnaire sent to former military chaplains, asking them to reflect on their service and to evaluate it for

April 1997 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter April 1997 – Vol III, no 4

Dear Friends,

I trust you are enjoying a blessed and relaxed Easter season.

1. Conference Reports – Tampa, Bensheim

2. Precis of paper – M.Lindsay: Barthian Dogmatics

3. New journal articles

4. Book review: J.Hutchinson: Champions of Charity by John S. Conway

1. 27th Annual Scholars Conference on Holocaust and the Churches, Tampa,Florida, March 1-4th 1997 David Diephouse reports: This was apparently the largest conference to date,attracting more than 300 attendees. There was a predictably lively session on l’affaire Goldhagen; Elie Wiesel gave a memorable address; Michael Berenbaum presented a fine assessment of Richard Rubenstein’s thought, and Michael Marrus gave an engaging paper on the never-issued Papal Encyclical on anti-semitism of 1938-9. Beyond that, papers on specifically (church-) historical topics were relatively few and far between. Among the more effective was Mark Lindsay’s making a cogent case for Barth’s Dogmatics. (See below). The program was ambitious to a fault, with as many as six papers packed into some sessions, and the resulting time constraints meant that individual presentations inevitably varied in quality. Dick Pierard sends the following additional note: At the Tampa Conference, a new book on the Goldhagen controversy was introduced and it was a brisk seller. This collection of thoughtful essays by scholars from four countries pulls no punches in critiquing Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners.Entitled Hyping the Holocaust: Scholars answer Goldhagen, and edited by Franklin Littell, it is available from the Philadelphia Centre on the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights, P.O.Box 10, Merion Station, PA 19066, ISBN 0-943025- 98-2, $20.00. This is a ‘must’ volume for anyone interested in the controversy, but Goldhagen’s admirers will find little comfort in it. (To be reviewed here next month) The German book on the debate is also worth mentioning. Julius H.Schoeps, ed., Ein Volk von Moerdern? Die Dokumentation zur Goldhagen-Kontroverse um die Rolle der Deutschen im Holocaust,Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe 1996, DM 25.00. It contains several translated major US and British reviews and essays and even more of the German ones.

Bensheim, Rhein. The 41st annual conference of theological professors met on Feb 27th-Mar 1st to consider “Angenommene Geschichte. Kirchenkampf in Deutschland 1933-1990“. Prof. J.Mehlhausen, Tuebingen, led off with a splendid account of the Protestant historiography of the Church Struggles of this century. He made the valid point that after 1945, church historians took a very positive view of the church’s stance during the Nazi years, stressing their steadfastness in resisting the Nazi ideology, their sufferings at the hands of Nazi oppressors, and their resolute defence of the Gospel. But by the 1960s a more critical revisionist approach appeared, based not least on a fuller access to the documentation, so that the church’s failings in the Nazi period, hitherto passed over in silence, now became clearer. By contrast, after 1989, many accounts of the church’s role in the unlamented GDR were negative in tone. Mehlhausen hoped that a similar revisionist process will eventually lead to a more balanced and fairer assessment of the years under Communist rule. Heinrich Missalla gave an equally valuable account of Catholic historiography, and critically pointed the numerous “white pages” still untackled by Catholic historians, so that such subjects as the Catholic reactions to the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews are still unexplored. Similarly he was critical of the received version of the Catholic experience in the GDR, suggesting that the notion of Catholic abstention and insulation from the Communist rule doesn’t tell all the story. I presented a paper comparing the historiography of both churches from an outsider’s point of view. Luckily this meeting was organized in the best possible way. Only three papers were given in two whole days, so that there was ample time for a full discussion, which was much enhanced by the long memories of those present, including one gentleman who had been a student in Tuebingen in 1934-5! A very rewarding experience. JSC

2. Conference Paper Precis: Mark Lindsay, U of Western Australia: “Covenanted Solidarity: Barthian Dogmatics as a theological basis of union between Christians and Jews”.

It has been widely acknowledged that Karl Barth, as the principal author of the Barmen Declaration of 1934, and as a leader of the Bekennende Kirche, was a resolute opponent of the Nazi regime, particularly in regard to its policy of Gleichschaltung and its impingement on the Church. What is less freely acknowledged is Barth’s opposition to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Indeed, some scholars such as Wolfgang Gerlach, Dick Gutteridge, and Daniel Goldhagen, have accused Barth of, at best, a passivity in the face of the Holocaust and, at worst, a theology that was sympathetic to it. That this was manifestly not the case is shown by a consideration of his dogmatic theology as it was formulated and taught during the Nazi years. As early as 1931-2, Barth was positioning himself against the predominant voelkisch politics and theology of the day. In Church Dogmatics I/1, which was written before the Machtergreifung, he consciously rejected any and every racial misappropriation of the Word of God, thus distancing himself from the presuppositions of the antisemitic Deutsche Christen. He was dismayed at the contemporary “intoxication of Nordic blood and . . . the political Fuehrer. . ” and insisted that Church proclamation must not be aligned with the features or interests of any one race, people, nation or state. This opposition to the racial-voelkisch (and therefore antisemitic) perversion of Christian doctrine was later expanded. For example, in CD I/1 -II/1, Barth located the revelation of God solely in the incarnation of Christ, which he viewed through the lenses of the orthodox an-/enhypostatic Christological formula. In contrast to his 1922 commentary on Romans, he was thus able – indeed compelled – to focus on the historicity and, therefore, the Jewishness of Jesus. As early as 1934, Barth was saying that “anyone who believes in Christ, who was himself a Jew, simply cannot be involved in the contempt and ill-treatment of Jews which is the order of the day”. Later, in December 1938, just after Kristallnacht, he declared that the decisive reason why the Church must reject Nazism lay in the latter’s antisemitism. Barth’s view of the Bible also tied him to solidarity between Christians and Jews. In contrast to Krause and the Deutsche Christen, Barth insisted that the biblical witness to revelation came to us in the inseparable form of both Old and New Testaments. The God of the Jews is the same as the God of the Christians – Yahweh-Kyrios – and his one covenant of grace permeates the entire Bible (in contrast to the Marcionite severing of the two testaments, and therefore of Christian-Jewish unity). The second major theme running through Church Dogmatics is that of election. In 1942 (CD II/2) Barth affirmed that both Israel and the Church “together in their unity” constitute the One People of God. The Church cannot be spoken of as elected, while Israel is spoken of as rejected. Rather, both together are elected, with the election of Israel being confirmed “to the present day”. Moreover, Barth insisted, if and when the Church forgets its union with the Jews, it ceases to be the Church. In this he was reaffirming Bonhoeffer’s comment of 1933 that the Church’s response to the Aryan Paragraph was the ‘articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae‘. It is true that Barth did not ignore the sins of Israel which he saw to be evident in the Old Testament, and he even accused Israel of having rejected the revelation of God. It is crucial to note, however, that Barth passed exactly the same judgment on the Church – so that even this solidarity of sin binds the two together. Even when he spoke ‘negatively’ of Israel, Barth always circumscribed this with a similar statement to the Church of his own day. Finally, it is worth noting that, once in Switzerland, Barth became actively involved in relief agencies engaged in aiding and rescuing Jews. From 1936, he was financially supporting those in the Confessing Church who were helping the persecuted Jews. In late June 1944, after receiving a terrifying account of the conditions in Auschwitz, he petitioned the Swiss authorities to rescue the Hungarian Jews. Both theologically and practically Barth was a keen defender of the Jews and an advocate of the need for a practical hic et nunc solidarity between Christians and Jews. Mark Lindsay

3.New journal articles: a) Chris Clark, “Confessional Policy and the limits of state action: Frederick Wilhelm III and the Prussian Church Union 1817-40” in The Historical Journal, Vol 39, no 4, December 1996, p 985- 1004. This examines the reasons for, and the failure of, F.W.III’s attempts to unify the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia, revealing the limits of government power and authority in the sensitive area of confesssional policy. b) Stefan Samerski, “Der Hl. Stuhl und der Vertrag von Versailles”, in Zeitschrift fuer Kirchengeschichte, Vol 107 no 3, (1996),p 355-75. An excellently researched study of Papal diplomacy 1917-21, mainly drawing on Vatican and German diplomatic papers. c) Gary Lease, “Denunciation as a tool of ecclesiastical control: the case of Roman Catholic Modernism,” in Journal of Modern History, Vol 68, no 4, December 1996, p 819-30. This short essay makes for distressing reading. Not only does Lease cite some most unfortunate behaviour by earlier ecclesiastical hard- liners, but also describes how he personally suffered the same fate at a Southern California university as recently as 1971 when “spies” were placed in his lectures to trap him into “heretical” opinions which were then delated to opponents resulting in his dismissal. d) R.Gellately, “Denunciations in Twentieth-Century Germany,” in Journal of Modern History, Vol 68 no 4, December 1996, p.931-967. Compares the Gestapo and Stasi use of denunciations, and although not specifically about the churches, makes it clear that denunciations and institutionalized informing had a devastating effect on all forms of disobedience, much less resistance.

4. Book review: John R.Hutchinson, Champions of Charity. War and the rise of the Red Cross, Westview: Boulder, Colorado 1996, $35.00 (Although not immediately about church affairs, the themes of this book seemed to me to be relevant to our concerns, and appropriate to the Easter season. Ed.)

The Red Cross has for so long been a symbol of devoted humanitarianism that its record has rarely been subject to critical evaluation by secular historians. Everyone knows that the inspiration came from the young Swiss evangelical philanthropist, Henry Dunant, after witnessing the carnage on the battlefield of Solferino in 1859. But few know what happened next. John Hutchinson, of Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, has now remedied this gap with an account of the Red Cross’ first sixty years up to 1921, which is well-argued, original and iconoclastic. His skilful handling of multinational sources is exemplary, and his account carries conviction just because he avoids the usual hagiographical approach. Indeed, supporters of the Red Cross may find it hard to accept his major thesis, which is that the original idealistic humanitarian impulse of the 1860s only too easily got subordinated to the military and political rivalries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The champions of organised international charity, instead of making war more civilized, became advocates of a different and more ominous sense of war-mindedness. How and why this happened is the core of Hutchinson’s finely-crafted “political economy” of the Red Cross.

Dunant’s original idealistic appeal was taken up by Gustave Moynier, whose management skills gave institutional shape to the organization which he guided for more than forty years. Moynier called the first multinational conference to consider how aid could best be provided to the wounded in war. He proposed a corps of devoted civilians whose safety and neutrality was to be guarantied by all governments and symbolized by a white armband embroidered with a red cross. Together with four colleagues he set up an International Committee of the Red Cross and skilfully lobbied all the European states and the USA, for support for his aims. The wars of 1864-70 confirmed the desirability of such an idea, bringing together both the idealism of philanthropists and the more calculated interest of military leaders. As Hutchinson shows, there was always a continuing tension between those who regarded the Red Cross’ mission as a civilizing force leading eventually to the abolition of war, and those who more narrowly aimed to mobilize these volunteers behind their militaristic and nationalist ambitions. Since it had no divisions of its own, the Red Cross could only hope to exercise moral influence on states by appealing to the nobility of its ideals. Hutchinson shows very clearly how this situation was exploited. But at the same time, the price was an increasing closeness between armies, states and their Red Cross societies, which less and less challenged the dominant trend towards the militarisation of charity. Moynier’s original belief in the Red Cross’ universal moral mission paving the way for peace was progressively abandoned. Instead by 1914 the Red Cross was regarded by peoples and governments as a valuable auxiliary for war. This trend became more pronounced as the national Red Cross societies became more respectable, enjoyed the support of aristocrats and royalty, and readily saw themselves as mobilizing support for nationalistic aims. The paradox became blatant in 1901, when one of the first Nobel Peace Prizes was awarded to Henry Dunant, who had been dismissed from the ICRC in 1867 after a financial scandal, had played no part in Red Cross activities for more than thirty years, but had finally been rescued from poverty by the sentimental wing of the highly unrespectable pacifist movement, led by such mavericks as Baroness von Suttner. This was a bitter blow to the largely-unknown Moynier, who had devoted his life to the cause. Coincidentally both men died within a few months of each other in 1910. The outbreak of war in 1914 doomed the pacifist cause. By contrast it evoked in the supporters of the Red Cross enormous, if mutually antagonistic, waves of patriotic fervour. All social classes united in wanting to serve the war wounded, as millions of men and women saw Red Cross work as an opportunity to make their personal contribution to their nation’s victory. The clash this fervent patriotism and the older ideal of impartial medical service was often glaring. Like so many of the churches, the Red advocates fell into regarding war as an ennobling adventure, believed that military action would have beneficial moral results for the whole race, demonized the enemy and even justified death in battle as a heroic and glorious sacrifice. Inevitably in the aftermath disillusionment and cynicism set in. Hutchinson skips over the details of the military events of 1914-8, but instead looks at the later attempts to rescue the cause of humanitarian charity from such distortions. Readers who want to study subsequent developments will find many of the same themes recurring in the second world war, as described in the books by Jean-Claude Favez and Dieter Riesenberger, in French and German respectively. Hutchinson’s conclusion is that the development of the Red Cross was fashioned as much by the self-interest of military and political hierarchies as by the noble ideals of its founders. The abolition of war is no nearer now than in 1863. Disease and disaster still stalk the globe. The Red Cross has played only a mitigating role, however much such a sombre finding may distress its numerous well-wishers. But the historian has no mandate to encourage wishful thinking. In this respect, Hutchinson has written a first-rate and persuasive contribution. JSC

We now have 120 subscribers from Western Australia to Poland. If you know of anyone else interested, please send their name and E- mail address. May I again invite all of you to submit contributions to this Newsletter. And if anyone has a comment on its contents which they would like to share with other members, just send it round via the collective address = kirzeit-l@unixg.ubc.ca

With very best wishes,
John Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

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March 1997 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter – March 1997 – Vol III, no 3

Dear Friends,

This issue is coming to you a little late, since I have been away in Germany to attend a Colloquium in Bensheim on the Rhine, about which I hope to give you a short resume next month.

1) Web-site change

2)Congratulations

3) Obituaries: Heiner Grote, Jorgen Glenthoy

4) New issue of journal: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Vol 8, no 2, 1996

5) Video review: Hanged on a twisted cross.

6)Book reviews: Bishop Galen of Muenster

1) Gordon Mork, Purdue (gmork@purdue.edu) reports that our Web-site has been changed to:

index.htm

2) Congratulations to our colleague Gerhard Besier, Professor for Church History in Heidelberg, on his being nominated for membership at the prestigious Historisches Kolleg in Munich for 1997-8. This distinguished appointment brings together two or three German historians, and one foreign scholar, for a year’s sabbatical in Munich, so that they can finish their on-going researches without any teaching burdens. Dr Nicholas Hope of the Dept. of History, Glasgow, another of our members and the author of an impressive study of German and Lutheran Protestantism in the 18th and 19th centuries, has been appointed to take over Besier’s responsibilities in Heidelberg for next year. I see this as an excellent example of international collaboration. Now, if only the Scots would select a Canadian! We are all delighted by this news, and wish them both a very successful tenure.

3) Obituaries:

Heiner Grote: 1934-1996

Those of us who were privileged to have known Heiner Grote will be greatly saddened to learn that he passed away on Oct 23rd 1996, after thirty years as a scholarly expert at the Konfessionskundliches Institut, Benheim, Germany.

As a result of a swimming accident, Heiner was paraplegic since his teens, but overcame the myriad difficulties beyond those dictated by his condition: leaving behind his beloved Leipzig for West Germany in the late 1950s to become an ordained pastor and social historian, and to devote his professional life to the questions tangential to German Protestantism in our times. Among essays on such subjects as Christian-Jewish relations or Luther, Heiner Grote wrote several volumes, making a valuable contributionto our understanding of the relationship between Socialism and Religion in the Bismarck era (Sozialdemokratie und Religion: eine Dokumentation fuer die Jahre 1863 bis 1875, Tuebingen 1968); to the history of the ‘Evangelischer Bund’ (Protestanten auf dem Wege. Geschichte des Evangelischen Bundes, Goettingen 1986 – co-authored with Walter Fleischmann-Bisten) and shortly before his early death, to an important interpretation of the pronouncement of the Roman Church from Pius IX to the present (Was verlautbart Rom? Eine Dokumentation fuer die Praxis, Goettingen 1995).

Firmly committed to, but just as often equally critical of the role of Protestantism in German history, Heiner, along with his wife Nora, was a most tolerant “Gespraechspartner” and gracious host to many of us over the years. My own dialogues with him go back to the 1970s, and I am sure a number of other scholars will also have lively recollections of some of the many discussions held in his Bensheim office, and equally of valuable correspondences over the years. It is moreover a measure of the man that, in the face of determined opposition of his church superiors, including their special dispensation to marry (Frau Grote is of Jewish origin), his ecumenical spirit, his pronounced sense of independence, his formidable intellectuality, all vanquished such impediments, making his ideally suited to participate in an open debate with men and women of many persuasions on both sides of the Atlantic. His friends and colleagues will miss him very much.

Ronald Webster, York University, Toronto, Canada

Jorgen Glenthoy: 29.11.1922 – 24.10.1996

Jorgen Glenthoy’s Interesse fuer das Zeitgeschichte wurde in seinen Studienjahre geweckt. Als Student der Theologie waehrend der deutschen Okkupation verfolgte er mit Befriedigung das Heranwachsen einer nationalen Gegenwehr gegen die Besatzungsmacht. Ein Schluesselereignis war dabei die Rettungsaktion fuer die daenischen Juden im Oktober 1943. Jorgen Glenthoy lebte in einem Wohnheim in unmittelbarer Naehe der Synagoge und wurde direkt an der Planung und Durchfuehrung der Flucht beteiligt. Mit gleicher Anteilnahme reagierte er empoert auf die Nachricht von der Ermordung des daenischen Dichterpfarrer Kaj Munk am 5 Januar 1944. Mit solchen Erfahrungen als Hintergrund nahm Jorgen Glenthoy wenige Jahre spaeter, als er inzwischen Pfarrer in Jutland geworden war, ein wissenschaftliches Studium der kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte auf, insbesondere Leben und Werk von Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In der fuenfziger Jahren fuehrte er mehrere laengere Archivreisen in Deutschland durch. Damit leitete er eine enge Freundschaft und Zusammenarbeit ein mit Pioniergestalten wie Wilhelm Niemoeller und Eberhard Bethge. Die ersten Ergebnisse seiner Forschung waren Aufsaetze wie “Bonhoeffer und die Oekumene” (Mundige Welt II) sowie Uebersetzungen ins Daenische von Bonhoeffer- Werken wie “Widerstand und Ergebung” u.a. Sein wissenschaftliches Hauptwerk was indes “Dokumente zur Bonhoeffer-Forschung 1928-1945” (mit auswertenden Kommentaren und Analysen), 1969 erschienen und als Lic. Abhandlung von der Theologischen Fakultaet der Universitaet Aarhus angenommen. Jorgen Glenthoy war an der Herausgabe von der neuen Ausgabe von Bonhoeffers Werken massgeblich beteiligt, insbesondere Bd 16: Konspiration und Haft 1939-45. Dieser Band ist kurz nach seinem Tod in Herbst 1996 erschienen. Aber ueber die Bonhoeffer-Forschung hinaus uebte Jorgen Glenthoy eine umfassende Taetigkeit als Schriftsteller aus. Nicht zuletzt widmete er sich Fragen der daenischen Kirchenpolitik wie Widerstand gegen die Ordination von Frauen, gegen Zuege einer staatskirchlichen Politik oder einer “Entsakralisierung” der gottesdienstlichen Liturgie. Seine erbitterte Oppositionshaltung gegen die mehrheitliche Tendenz in der Volkskirche brachte ihn zunehmend in die Rolle des Aussenseiters, wobei er eine leitende Verantwortung fuer eine hochkirchlich orientierte Minoritaet uebernahm und darin eine Paralellitaet zu dem deutschen Kirchenkampf in den Jahren der Hitler-Herrschaft erblicken wollte. Jens Holger Schjorring, Aarhus

4) The latest issue of KZG is devoted entirely to South Africa, with articles by A.Boyens, G.Besier, R.Mayer and Keith M. Zondi, along with a useful bibliography on this area, as well as the usual 100 page bibliography of recent books in our area of study.

5)Video review: Hanged on a twisted cross: The Life,Convictions and Martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, produced by Lathika International Film and Entertainment Inc, distributed by Vision Video, Box 540, Worcester, Pennsylvania 19490,USA 120 mins/color 1996 US $29.95 approx

This new American video, with a script loosely based on the book “Bonhoeffer: A life in Pictures” edited by Bonhoeffer’s biographer and closest friend Eberhard Bethge, has the merit of presenting Bonhoeffer’s life and death through a skilful collage of family photographs, interwoven with news-reel clips from the 1930s, mainly of Nazi rallies, and too frequently of Adolf Hitler at his bombastic worst. The tone throughout is one of the struggle between one individual’s Christian conviction and the intimidating power of a totalitarian dictator, determined to wipe out all opposition. So the emgmorksis is placed firmly on Bonhoeffer the political martyr with full illustrations of the prisons and concentration camps in which he was incarcerated and finally murdered. His early life and theological training is well depicted to show the importance of his family connections, and rightly suggests that it was these, and his international and ecumenical friendships, which led Bonhoeffer in 1933 to oppose the enthusiastic support given by the majority of the German Protestants for the new Nazi regime. His participation in the Confessing Church’s struggle to preserve the truth of the gospel against all nationalistic and racist perversions and propaganda is equally well stressed. On the other hand, despite extensive quotations from his writings – in voice-over translation – the significant influence of Bonhoeffer as a theologian is underplayed. Only limited excerpts from the later “Letters and Papers from Prison” are read, and none of his more challenging pronouncements on the future on the church are mentioned. As a result Bonhoeffer’s enormous and world-wide influence in the 1950s and 1960s is left unmentioned and unexplained. The film seems designed to honour a dead conspirator rather than a living theologian. One can only assume that this political, untheological bias arises out of the compilers’ aversion to Bonhoeffer’s challenges to their kind of theology. It is also not helped by an American commentator who glaringly and unnecessarily mispronounces names, which can only offend the purist.

Trying to cover all the political events in a short two hours also gives a rather rushed and breathless impression. The awful dilemmas and ambiguities of intelligent Germans are hinted at but not fully developed, even though the tragedy of the man Bonhoeffer is well portrayed.

I preferred the shorter but deeper compass of the earlier BBC film produced some years ago by Malcolm Muggeridge. Viewers of this video would do well to go on to tackle Bethge’s magnificent and more thoughtful biography, or turn to the latest editions of Bonhoeffer’s works, now being translated and published by the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. John Conway

6) Book review

A Catholic Bishop in Nazi Germany

(This review appeared earlier on H-German)

ed. P. Loeffler, _Bischof Clemens August Graf von Galen: Akten, Briefe und Predigten 1933-1946 _ , Vol I: _1933-1939_, Vol II: 1939-1946_, Second revised and enlarged edition (Veroeffentlichungen der Kommission fuer Zeitgeschichte, Reihe A: Quellen, Vol. 42) Paderborn: Schoeningh 1996 1476pp DM ISBN 3-7867-1394-4 (cloth), 3-506-79840-5 (paper)

These two volumes are a second, revised and enlarged edition of a work first published in 1988 (also in two volumes), and edited by the former archivist of the Muenster diocese, Freidrich Loeffler. The enlargement, in fact, consists only of 12 additional documents, amounting to forty-two pages in all, none of which substantially changes the picture we already have. Although admirably edited, as before, to the commendably high standards of the Catholic Commission for Contemporary History, the horrendous cost of this work, despite undoubted subsidies from the Catholic church in Germany, will make it unlikely to be a best-seller. But, presumably for the sake of completeness, this now appears a second time in order to include a few more items which have turned up since 1988, as well as adding an updated bibliography of the most recent publications relating to the career of the subject. Given the enormous initial task of reconstructing this material, much of which was lost when the diocesan archive was almost totally destroyed by British bombing during the war, the editor’s perseverance is to be commended.

Bishop Galen is now best remembered for his outspoken sermons of July and August 1941 denouncing the crimes of the Gestapo, especially the murder of thousands of German mentally- handicapped patients in specially controlled mental hospitals during the so-called “euthanasia” programme. These sermons were delivered at the very moment when the Nazi course of military aggression was at its peak, and, if Goebbels had had his way, would have led to the bishop’s being strung up on a lamp-post outside his own cathedral. He only survived because Hitler decided to delay vengeance until the war was won.

It was this act of defiance which presumably led Pope Pius XII to create Galen a Cardinal at his first Consistory after the war in late 1945 – the first time the diocese of Muenster had been so honoured. Unfortunately Galen died suddenly only a few weeks after returning from receiving his red hat in Rome.

Clemens August Graf von Galen came from a highly aristocratic Westgmorklian family, which had been accustomed to holding high office in both church and state. As such, Galen could not be described as having sympathies for the democratic Weimar Republic, and was even more staunchly opposed to the threat of communism. His disdain for Adolf Hitler and his mob of rowdy thugs was equally obvious, though in 1933, when the Nazis achieved power, Galen’s antipathy was tempered by the fact that a fellow Westgmorklian aristocrat, Franz von Papen, was to become Vice-Chancellor. Neither of them could foresee how rapidly Papen’s influence was to be eroded.

Galen was appointed bishop, at the age of fifty-five, in September 1933 (which is where the documents in these volumes begin), and set himself the task of building up his diocese, with the result that Muenster became even more the heartland of “black reaction”, as his Nazi opponents viewed it. Nazi ideologies like Alfred Rosenberg were determined to challenge this citadel, and many of the documents provided here outline the fierce controversies caused by Rosenberg’s provocative appearance in Muenster in 1935. They also show how soon and how vigorously the Nazis’ campaign to dominate the public scene, especially all aspects of education, was launched, in the expectation that their frothy brew of ultra-nationalist, racist, anti-communist and anti-clerical rhetoric would capture the hearts and minds of most Germans. Galen’s untiring and energetic responses to this flagrant attack are here fully documented.

It is clear that Galen saw himself as the defender of traditional Catholic doctrine and of the autonomy of the Church, which he mistakenly thought had been safeguarded by the newly-signed Concordat of July 1933. His stature as a prince of the church and his family background led him to tireless attempts to reject any interference by the Nazi upstarts, seeking to control or limit the operations of the church. He was especially vigorous in upholding the heritage of the Christian past of Muenster and Westgmorklia against the pseudo-pagan ideology of the Nazi extremists. But at the same time this appeal to the rich heritage of Germany’s saints and heroes of the past led him to being susceptible to the allurements of other, more political, aspects of Nazism, such as the restoration of Germany’s dignity and honour after the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler’s promise to restore Germany’s national honour therefore met with his warm approval.

One clear trend is evidenced from many of the internal documents covering his correspondence with other members of the Catholic hierarchy. In defence of the church’s position, Galen found the conduct of his superiors, especially the aged Presiding Bishop, Cardinal Bertram of Breslau, to be far too reticent and diplomatic. He never shared the Cardinal’s belief that the Nazi government would willingly uphold the terms of the 1933 Concordat if sufficiently lengthy remonstrances were forwarded to Hitler’s office. Instead, Galen insisted, this kind of secret negotiation only baffled the ordinary Catholics suffering from the innumerable pin- pricks of Nazi officialdom, while unable to see that any improvements were forthcoming. Galen wanted a much more forceful and public confrontation against these encroaching impertinencies, and sought to rally the faithful of his diocese to be on their guard against all such attempts to strangle church life and institutions. But his advice was not accepted by Bertram, and every time he urged a stronger line to be taken, the Cardinal backed down. Clearly Galen, who rather enjoyed the epithet of “The Lion of Muenster”, was frustrated by such pusillanimity, and even courted persecution in order to defend his diocesan territory. But he was unsuccessful in getting any more challenging line adopted.

When war broke out in 1939, Galen, like so many other German conservatives, was prepared to believe that Germany was only attempting to break the stranglehold imposed on her by encircling foes, and was quite ready to endorse the war effort in religious terms, being anxious not to allow the Nazis to accuse Catholics of displaying less fervour for the war effort than other members of the community But at the same time, he was not at all prepared to allow war-time necessity to be used as an excuse to cripple the church by further curtailing its activities or associations, or commandeering its buildings. The confiscations of monasteries and nunneries, the closing of church schools and the refusal of paper supplies for church publications were, as we now know, all part of the Nazis’ deliberate plot to demolish the church’s bastions, and it is clear that Galen was very much aware of the damage being done. Still he went on believing that such actions were just the work of underlings in the Nazi Party, and that Hitler, had he known of them, would have corrected these excesses – again a very typical attitude found among German conservatives.

But by 1941 Galen had had enough. He decided to ignore the advice of his colleagues and to launch a very public demonstration in defence of the rights of the church. His feelings of outrage were only strengthened by the growing number of representations made to him by parishioners concerned about the fate of their relatives in mental hospitals, whose sudden and mysterious deaths shortly after being transferred in Gestapo-organised buses from church hospitals to those run by the state, aroused waves of panic and alarm. Unfortunately these volumes do not give us any indication of the sources of information about these murderous policies which Galen was receiving at the time. Nevertheless he resolved to “go public” in the most demonstrative manner, even if this brought about his immediate arrest, or even banishment from his diocese. He therefore prepared three sermons of protest, which included full details of the Gestapo’s lawless iniquities, and ordered them to be secretly printed and circulated even before he spoke. To gain effect, he delivered these sermons in his own cathedral, dressed in the full insignia and vestments of a bishop, so that, if arrested as he stepped down from the pulpit and taken away by the Gestapo, the whole town would know of this insult to the majesty of his office. In fact, the Nazis were taken by surprise, and were unable to prevent the very wide circulation of these outspoken denunciations of the regime, which were quickly spread from hand to hand, and even appeared in other parts of Europe, and also were used as very effective propaganda by the BBC. But, of course, Galen denied having any political intentions. He still apparently thought that the Nazis could be recalled by fervent exhortations to uphold the concepts of German law and traditional Christian moral values.

Courageous as these actions were in defence of the Church’s traditional concerns for its flock, it has to be noted that these documents contain not a single instance of Galen’s being ready to make similar protests against the even more heinous Nazi crimes against the Jews. Indeed it would seem clear that Galen, like so many other German conservatives, shared much of the prevalent anti-semitic attitudes of his day, especially the widespread assumption that the Jews were powerfully represented in the Communist leadership of the Soviet Union. Consequently, his ardent support for the Nazis’ war of liberation against the “godless atheism” of the Bolsheviks, as expressed in a pastoral letter of September 1941, no doubt influenced him in remaining silent on the events of the Holocaust. Such was the ambivalence, or the dilemma, of this section of the German populace. His national loyalties remain firm to the end. Germany’s defeat by the Allies was a major disaster, and in no way could be celebrated as a liberation. In fact, as the American troops advanced into his diocese Galen withdrew to a remote country convent to avoid the coming of the “barbarians”.

Subsequently, after May 1945, he was at pains to make it clear to the officials of the British Military Government installed in Muenster, that he was not prepared to collaborate in this renewal of Germany’s shame. He denied any idea of German collective guilt, readily enough supported the view that the Catholic church had been the first victims of the Nazi onslaught, and sought to retrieve all the church’s privileges and possessions from earlier days. Not surprisingly he was highly critical of the whole de- Nazification process, and caused all sorts of difficulties for the British, who in return tried to block his being allowed to go to Rome for his installation as a Cardinal. While these documents provide us with Galen’s side of the story, it is not difficult to see how intransigent a conservative nationalist he remained, despite all. In this stance, he was in fact not untypical of his class and caste, and his legacy was in fact to be reflected in the stubborn defence of these clerical positions during the immediate post-war years when the new German government was established.

The value of these documents will be to allow a clearer picture of the extent to which Catholic apologists are justified when they argue that the bishops’ stance during the Nazi years was successful in preventing the whole-scale apostasy of the Catholic population, or that any more open protest would have endangered needlessly the lives of millions of Catholics. On the other hand, they also show how the bishops’ illusions about the character of the Nazi regime prevented any mobilization of Catholic resistance, especially on the most vital issue of the persecution of the Jews. When it came to the rights of the Catholics, Galen showed what could be achieved, and his stance has been fully lauded by Catholic historians ever since. But his upbringing and experience did not lead him to recognise that, under the demonic rule of Nazi racial totalitarians, a much broader sense of compassion and commitment was called for. This was the tragedy of German Catholicism, which it is only now seeking to overcome.

John S.Conway.

With ever best wish to you all,

John S.Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

February 1997 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter (Vol III, no 2) – February 1997.

1) New Web-site

2) Conference announcement

3) Gordon Mork, “Situation update – Oberammergau Today”

4) Book Reviews:

a) Peter Hoffmann, Stauffenberg reviewed by John S. Conway

b) Theodor Thomas, Women against Hitler reviewed by Doris Bergen

Dear Friends,

1) New Web-site: Thanks to the kind efforts of Gordon Mork, Purdue, our Association’s Newsletters are being “archived” on the following web-site, and can be retrieved from

http://omni.cc.purdue.edu/~pha/akz/

2) The 27th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches: “Hearing the Voices: Teaching the Holocaust to Future Generations”, will take place at the Tampa Airport Marriott Hotel, Tampa, Florida from March 2nd-4th. Not many sessions are devoted to our theme, but our members Mark Lindsay, Perth, Australia and Robert Levy, Eastern Washington are due to give papers. We shall look forward to their report on the proceedings.

3) Situation Update:

Oberammergau Revisited

by Gordon Mork

Throughout 1996 controversy continued in the village of Oberammergau over the Passion Play. In March the town council was elected, and the future of the Passion Play was the major local issue; the council will have a major role in preparing and presenting the play in the year 2000. Local elections in Oberammergau are complex because, in addition to the well-known Christian Social Union and Social Democratic Parties, there is a proliferation of local parties with names like “Dorfpolitik neu ueberdacht”, “Fuer unser Dorf” and “Freie Waehlergemeinschaft”. The March election created a divided council, with some members whom we might call “traditionalists”, some “reformers” and a shifting “moderate” group which holds the balance of power. In key test votes for leadership positions in the new council, the traditionalists won, 14 votes to 7.

Among the town councillors elected were Dr Rudi Zwink and Christian Stueckl, each of whom had ambitions to be the play director for 2000. Zwink, a practising dentist, had portrayed Chrust in 1980 and 1984. He led the list “Fuer unser Dorf”, which ran under the banner “auf den Wurzeln bewaehrter Traditionen”. Stueckl, employed as a theatre professional in Munich, was on the list “Dorfpolitik neu ueberdacht”. His position was “auf dem Vergangenen aufbauend neue Wege suchen, die den Menschen von heute gerecht werden”. As a long-haired young man in his 20s, Stueckl had been elected play director for 1990 by a council vote of only 9 to 8. Over substantial local objections he had introduced several significant reforms, seeking to purge the play of antisemitism and allow women a wider role, while retaining the basic framework of the play.

In the council election Zwink appeared to be the most popular man in town, winning his seat with the largest popular vote of any candidate.

In an attempt to settle the situation once and for all, a group of citizens used the new Bavarian initiative and referendum procedure to force a decision on whether or not the traditional 19th century text and music by Othmar Weis, Joseph Daisenberger and Rochus Dedler would be used again in 2000. The referendum took place on April 1996, when an overwhelming majority, 74%, supported the traditional form.

Traditionalists and reformers each then began competing initiative petitions for another referendum to name either Zwink or Stueckl as the new play director, which proved to be hotly contested, both men making public presentations. Each mounted their own exhibition in the community centre, showing their theatrical experience. Numerous handbills were mailed to all households.

Zwink wrote: “Als einer der Christusdarsteller von 1980 und 1984 ist mir das Daisenberger-Dedler Passionspiel so sehr ans Herz gewachsen, dass es mein grosstes Anligen ist, dass unser Passionspiel in der Form erhalten bleibt, wie wir es kennen und lieben gelernt haben. . . ”

Stueckl responded: “Sollten sich die Oberammergauer mehrheitlich fuer mich entscheiden, werde ich meine berufliche Erfahrung und meine ganze Kraft dafur verwenden, dass die Passionspiele im Jahre 2000, auf den Erfolg von 1990 aufbauend, noch aussagekraftiger, ueberzeugender und erfolgreicher werden”. Stueckl’s new photo showed a shorter haircut, and he announced that he would appoint experienced men from prominent local families as his co-workers.

The campaign was vigorous, but not as bitterly divisive as some of the controversies of previous years. Neither side claimed that “outsiders” were trying to manipulate “their” play. Both contenders agreed to observe the guidelines set forth by the town council, and both pledged they would turn over all intellectual property rights to the town.

On Sept. 29th the election took place, all votes being cast at the local schoolhouse. Christian Stueckl won with 1449 votes against Rudi Zwink’s 1150. In the local paper, Stueckl was quoted as saying “ich freue mich, dass es mit der Passion weitergeht und nicht still steht. Dieses Ergebnis ist auch ein Votum dafur, dass sich das Spiel weiter entwickeln soll.” On both sides individuals called for “reconciliation”.

The result is therefore something of a surprise. Apparently the majority of Oberammergauers favour moderate reforms, as long as the framework and the musical score handed down from the 19th century remain the basis of the play.

4) Book reviews:

a) Peter Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A Family History, 1905-1944, Cambridge University Press 1995, 424 pp.

Peter Hoffmann is without doubt the leading English-speaking authority on the German Resistance movement against Hitler. He now adds to his numerous publications on this topic with this revised and translated edition of his biography of the Stauffenberg brothers, which first appeared in Germany in 1992. Claus, Count von Stauffenberg’s crucial role in the unsuccessful plot to murder Hitler on July 20, 1944 has, of course, been exhaustively researched and argued about. Hoffmann’s present objective is to put him into his family setting and background, and to give as true a picture as possible of the Stauffenberg brothers without distorting the evidence.

Readers of this Newsletter will be looking for the moral or spiritual roots of the anti-Nazi conspirators. To what extent were they religiously motivated? Hoffmann states that Stauffenberg, as a good Catholic, was led to his decision to undertake the plot, not by the prospect that Germany would lose the war, as some critics have mistakenly claimed, but by his revulsion against the Nazi atrocities, especially the mass murders of Jews and Poles on the eastern front. The proclamation he helped to prepare for the day after Hitler’s overthrow emphasised the persecution of the Jews as a major reason for the insurrection by including it in a general condemnation of the Nazi crimes.

Stauffenberg and his two brothers, Berthold and Alexander, were born as aristocrats and educated as elitists. When in 1918 the institutional support for such values was overthrown, these young men turned instead to the kind of elitist and esoteric nationalism espoused by the elderly poet Stefan Georg, whose mystical dreams about national and philosophical rebirth were sufficiently vague and romantic to attract an idealistic following. Under his auspices these brothers saw themselves as modern knights in armour, ready to defend their country against all its foes. Hoffmann’s account of Stauffenberg’s involvment in this circle, which has never before been described in depth, is very welcome Undoubtedly this was a powerful and lasting bond, but Hoffmann does not suggest that Stefan Georg’s ideas, more than other factors, led to the July plot. Nor does he enter at all into the delicate debates about the homosexuality or at least homo-eroticism of the Georg circle.

From the absence of any sustained reference to the Stauffenberg wives, one can only assume these relationships were not too significant.

Inevitably the central chapters, covering the preparations for and the execution of the July plot, re-tell this sad story, as revealed often before. But Hoffmann adds significant new details, culled from his latest researches. These in fact only show more explicitly the dilemmas and problems such an insurrection faced For example, it is clear that, in the midst of war, the idea of radically altering the nation’s leadership by violence must be both personally and politically risky. To obtain the support of the army’s generals, the conspirators had to show that Hitler was a dangerous criminal. But any challenge to Hitler’s authority could be accused of stabbing the nation in the back in its hour of danger. At the same time, to obtain a hearing abroad, these men had to declare themselves opposed to all Nazi gains, but to gain support at home, they could not offer less than the Nazis. So too, the only opportune time would come when the populace, as well as the generals, were sufficiently disillusioned by the war, but before the enemy armies enforced capitulation. In the eyes of several commentators, such as Patricia Meehan in her book “The Unnecessary War: Whitehall and the German Resistance to Hitler”, the British and Allied Governments were greatly to blame for their failure to support the resisters, as equally they had been culpable in not calling Hitler’s bluff in 1938. This debate is, in my view, wrong-headed in its over-estimation of British capabilities, and Hoffmann is surely right to show, on the basis of his most careful assessment of all the evidence, that the conspirators were aware that there was no chance of getting such support from abroad. But they nevertheless felt compelled to carry out their plot even without any realistic prospect of success, as the only way of showing to the world that there were men in Germany who opposed the Nazi evil and staked their lives upon their opposition. As Berthold Stauffenberg said: “the most terrible thing is knowing that we cannot succeed and yet that we have to do it, for our country and our children”.

The strength of this book is the meticulous detail, especially about Claus Stauffenberg’s military career. His brother Berthold is a more shadowy figure, while Alexander played almost no role. Claus was attracted to the professional army for the noblest of reasons His upbringing naturally taught him that service to the state was the aristocrat’s true and highest destiny. Of course, it helped to have connections in the establishment. Hoffmann rightly points out the extent to which antagonism to the Nazis was caused by their anti-aristocratic radicalism. But Stauffenberg belonged to the younger set of the conspirators, disappointed by the caution of the old guard, and looking for more than a return to the good old days of Weimar or even of the Empire. Hoffmann is unrelenting in giving an unexpurgated account of Stauffenberg’s betrayal by some of his fellow-conspirators. But the question still remains as to why, even given his undoubtedly courageous resolve, was he, as a heavily-injured man, the only one offering to carry out the assassination attempt?

Hoffmann’s excellent re-telling of the fateful developments on July 20 is as gripping as before. The technical difficulties of the plot were enormous, the political difficulties even more so. He guides us through these events, making clear his admiration for the plotters’ heroism even in failure. He is surely correct that Stauffenberg had little hope of success or survival, but believed it imperative that Germany should attempt to liberate herself from the criminals who governed her. This account will undoubtedly help to clarify some of the fifty-year old debates about the political realism of the plot, though there will still be those who wonder whether, given the probability of failure, and the subsequent execution of at least two hundred leading individuals who would undoubtedly have played a prominent part in rebuilding Germany after the war, the conspirators would not have been more prudent to wait until the Nazis were defeated anyway. Hoffmann is however critical of those who have cast doubts on Stauffenberg’s integrity, and of those plotters who so hastily tried to dissociate themselves. In his view, “the impulses which made the Stauffenberg brothers mortal enemies of the National Socialists arose from their views on service and justice.” Their hopes for national regeneration and a renewal of Germany’s honour was to be cruelly thwarted; yet “their deliberate self-sacrifice presents a continuing challenge to contemporaries and successors alike”. This well-crafted tribute to their memory will undoubtedly help to keep alive this aim.

John S.Conway

John Conway

b) Theodore N.Thomas, Women against Hitler: Christian Resistance in the Third Reich, Westport CT; Praeger/Greenwood 1995 261pp, $US 49.95

(This review appeared earlier on H-German)

Theodore Thomas’ book pays tribute to the women of the Confessing Church. Through his attention to these women and their roles, he puts a human face of the Church Struggle – the much documented contest for control of institutionalized Protestantism in Nazi Germany. Thomas’ argument has two main parts. On one level, he seeks to recover the presence of women for the record of the Protestant church under Nazism. To that end, he demonstrates the ways in which women played active and indeed “crucial roles in the Confessing Church, although historians have ignored them” (p.23). The second component of his argument is more speculative. He suggests that the post-war “emergence of women as recognized, official leaders within the Protestant Church” in Germany was a direct result of women’s engagement in the cause of the Confessing Church (p.xxiii) Unlike their predecessors in the Reformation, Thomas maintains “the Confessing women succeeded in establishing the social and ideological gains they won during the Church Struggle” (p.115). He summarizes his findings and his focus in three words: resistance, persecution, and emergence.

The first chapter, giving an overview of the Church Struggle, draws on standard accounts by John Conway and Klaus Scholder. The rest of the book relies heavily on information gathered through “eyewitness interviews” with 28 participants in the Confessing Church. The result is both intimate and very readable. His “narrative introduction”, for example, sets a poignant tone by telling stories of three Confessing Church women – Felicitas Veder, Tabea Immer, and Emmi Hof. Use of oral testimony and personal correspondence enables Thomas to examine aspects of German church life in the 1930s and 1940s that are invisible in the written records. Chapter Two on “Confessing laywomen in the church struggle” identifies some of the church secretaries, patronesses, and teachers who made the Confessing Church function at the local level. The third and most personal chapter deals with pastors’ wives. Here his efforts generated numerous and detailed accounts. Chapter Four, on “Theologinnen” in the Confessing Church, necessarily involves a much smaller group of women and hence a narrower source base. In this case too oral sources are imperative.

Thomas’ energy in identifying these women and in conducting interviews with them is commendable. But his use of these findings is somewhat problematic and even misleading in places. There appears little effort made to verify the information received. Studies of human memory reveal its malleability and mutability. The best historical studies using interviews as sources test them against other voices or address issues of believability up front. Thomas does neither. As a result, some of the intriguing information he provides loses credibility. For example, he repeats the claim by Irmgard Vogel’s children that their mother, a pastor’s wife, regularly altered church records to conceal Jewish grandparents in people’s family trees (p.62). If this is true, it is a stunning example of a kind of resistance to the Nazi regime that is conspicuously absent from existing accounts of the German churches. But Thomas’ single sentence on this matter gives readers no way to assess the validity of this claim. How old were Vogel’s children at the time? How often did she commit such acts? Given the many reasons that either Vogel or her children might fabricate or embellish such a story, it is difficult to accept Thomas’ acceptance of their version of events at face value.

Throughout his study, Thomas emphasizes resistance. The title makes the point twice. But do these phrases accurately describe the situation he depicts? He shows how women furthered the cause of the Confessing Church, but is such activity tantamount to opposing Hitler? Loyal German nationalists and even committed Nazis were numbered among the Confessing ranks. The scholarly works by Uriel Tal and Wolfgang Gerlach have demonstrated that members of the Confessing Church were by no means immune to the antisemitism typical of many circles in German society. Although Gerlach’s book appears in the bibliography, Thomas nowhere acknowledges these findings. Instead, through his silence on the subject of complicity, he implies that the Confessing Church and its adherents, male and female, were resisters pure and clear. Sadly, that claim does not hold. Thomas scoured the cities and towns of Germany for the moving accounts of heroism that he presents. These stories are crucial, but in order not to mislead readers, they must be presented in the context of the indifference, passivity, and even active co-operation of the majority of Germans in the Third Reich. Thomas would have done well to heed John Conway’s warning against “hagiographical” accounts of the church struggle which try to demonstrate Protestant resistance, even if it means “suppressing certain facts”.

Thomas’ empathetic discussion of women’s struggle for official standing within the church is admirable, and his contention that advances made during World War II furthered the cause of women’s ordination is convincing. But he suggests that this progress towards equality occurred only within Confessing circles. In fact, women played very similar roles within the so-called German Christian movement, the pro-Nazi antagonist of the Confessing Church. Women served a German Christian vicars too, and wives of pastors in the movement also filled in for their husbands during wartime. Lay women were secretaries, publicists, organizers and patronesses of the German Christian cause. It may be tempting to assume that commitment to women’s rights went hand in hand with opposition to pro-Nazi variants of Christianity. But the facts do not bear out that assumption. As Claudia Koonz has shown, women, their traditional roles, and even their efforts to circumvent or expand these roles, could all be enlisted in the Nazi cause. Thomas knows Koonz but does not test his hypothesis against her conclusions.

An intriguing aspect of Thomas’ book is the attention he pays to so-called non-Aryans in the Confessing Church. Certain Confessing women, he observes, were defined as “non-Aryans” under Nazi law or took action on behalf of Jews and “non-Aryan Christians”. He attributes state and police measures against these women to the fact that they were Christians. But is this claim justified? His own evidence suggests probably not. For example, he claims (p.41) that “women as well as men sat in German prisons for their faith during the Church Struggle”. However, the people he goes on to discuss were not arrested for activities connected to the Confessing Church. Instead, they were charged with “conspiring to falsify documents, deal in grocery coupons on the black market, and transfer identification papers to Jews in hiding”. The director of the operation died for his activities. He was a “Jewish-Christian Physician”, Thomas tells us. In general the “martyrs” he describes are overwhelmingly people defined by the Nazis as “non-Aryans” – whom Thomas calls “Jewish-Christians”. Friedrich Weissler, Anneliese and Hans Kauffmann, Inge Jacobsen and Hildegard Jacoby, five of the six martyrs of the Confessing Church named (p.43-5), were all officially ‘non-Aryan”. Can they simply be counted among those who gave their lives for the Confessing Church? Without evidence to the contrary, it seems more accurate to describe them as victims of the Nazi assaults on Jews, Judaism and so-called Jewish blood.

Thomas has performed a valuable service with this book. The photographic essay alone provides a moving testimony to the women who gave so much to the Confessing Church. But readers who approach this book in isolation may come away with a somewhat skewed perception of the role of the Protestant churches in the Third Reich. “Resistance, persecution and emergence” are catchy and appealing. But they fail to capture the complex and often painful reality of Christian responses to National Socialism.

Doris Bergen,

University of Notre Dame

With best wishes

John S.Conway

jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

January 1997 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter – January 1997 Vol. III, no.1

Doris Bergen, “The Goldhagen Debate”

Ranier Laechele, “Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Kurt Nowak, eds, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte. Urteilsbildung und Methoden. (Konfession und Gesellschaft, Beitraege zur Zeitgeschichte), Vol 8, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1996”

Kurt-Victor Selge, “Theological Studies in Berlin”

Dear Friends,

A very joyous and successful New Year to you all! I am most grateful for all the contributions which have reached me, as you will see by the attributions enclosed. Please keep them coming.

The Goldhagen Debate:

We are much obliged to Doris Bergen for sending us the text of an address she gave on the recent book by Daniel Goldhagen, which I thought would be interesting for church historians to share.

Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Knopf, New York 1996, 619pp

Goldhagen’s new book focuses on the perpetrators of the Holocaust. His questions are simple. Who were the killers? What motivated them? How did they perform their murderous deeds? The answers he offers are just as straightforward. The killers were first and foremost Germans, motivated by a uniquely German variety of “eliminationist antisemitism”. Far from reluctant or indifferent, he argues, they were “willing executioners”, enthusiastic and even eager to perform their grisly tasks.

Goldhagen describes his book as a “radical revision of what has until now been written” about “why the Holocaust occurred” Probably no single work could live up to such a claim, and Goldhagen too falls short of his ambitions. Nevertheless he has done more than stir up another round of debate in the often fractious field of Holocaust studies. His insistence on the centrality of antisemitism is an important corrective to some recent trends. However, a propensity to overstate and oversimplify his case and to dismiss the work of others makes him vulnerable to criticism.

In the first and least compelling part, Goldhagen argues that antisemitism was both the necessary and sufficient condition for the Holocaust. He dates what he considers the uniquely German variety of eliminationist antisemitism back to the 19th century, and contends that, as soon as conditions became propitious, what had been a latent murderous urge burst forth into genocidal reality. He is right to point out that some studies of the perpetrators have played down or ignored antisemitism altogether. But the sweeping overview of German history that he offers is not likely to convince sceptics. Other scholars – people like Uriel Tal, Robert Wistrich, James Harris and Donald Niewyk – have written more carefully and subtly about German and European antisemitism. Readers interested in the role of Christianity and the churches are likely to be particularly frustrated by Goldhagen’s sweeping generalizations and failure to make crucial distinctions, between confessions, regions, eras and individuals. In general, his tendency to repeat himself, lapse into social science jargon and make inaccurate, sometimes unsubstantiated claims can turn reading these early chapters into a chore.

In Part II, Goldhagen establishes himself as a member of the “intentionalist” historiographical camp. In this section, he opts for finer distinctions, and refers repeatedly to the specific Nazi leaders who devised an ideology of death and developed the agenda for its implementation, even if the specific means toward that destructive end evolved in response to changing conditions. Readers in the field will find little new here.

Parts III, IV and V present the core of Goldhagen’s original research. These sections examine three “case studies”: the police battalions, Jewish “work”, and the death marches. His detailed look at the police battalions posted in eastern Europe is powerful and brutally graphic, but much of the material is familiar since the 1992 publication of Christopher Browning’s acclaimed “Ordinary Men”. Goldhagen does make two important correctives: unlike Browning he does take seriously the antisemitism of the killers, and he tries to give a clearer picture of what these men did when they were not slaughtering Jews. His reconstruction of the off-duty life of the killers makes for chilling reading. He juxtaposes their bowling matches, theatre events, and spousal visits with their sadistic, vicious killing of Jewish children, women, and old people. The result is a view of the members of the police battalions as perpetrators of a genocide embedded in specific social and cultural contexts.

His discussion of the brutal, murderous “work” used to kill Jews is passionate and draws our attention to conditions in some lesser- known camps. Work was not a productive relationship but a means of torture, humiliation and death. Nevertheless this depressingly familiar view brings little new to anyone who has read even a small part of vast memoir literature written by survivors.

Goldhagen’s most significant contribution may be his description and analysis of the forced death marches. Survivor testimony and memoirs, such as those of Elie Wiesel and Gerda Weissman Klein have given us many powerful accounts of these atrocities. But Holocaust scholarship has been largely silent on this aspect of the Shoah, perhaps because of the lack of documentation. Goldhagen brings this part of the story to the centre and raises important questions about how we explain the tenacity of the killers, even in the face of certain defeat. His answer, not surprisingly, is to point to the eliminationist antisemitism identified in the opening pages of his book. It was the Germans’ “lust” for “Jewish blood”, Goldhagen would have us believe, that drove them to continue hounding, torturing and killing their victims even when that carnage meant violating orders rather than obeying them.

His evidence is compelling, and his use of photographs deepens the emotional impact of his discussion. His focus on the forced marches of women is especially valuable in a field sometimes characterized by a restrictive gender-blindness. But does the moving story he tells us in this section really substantiate his claim of a uniquely German eliminationist antisemitism? A more nuanced reading of the evidence might find additional – and perhaps complementary – explanations for the Germans’ persistence: a desire to destroy the evidence of their criminality, rage at the Jews for refusing to die and let Nazi war aims be realized, a desperate need to retain control of some part of the once massive Nazi “empire”, a pathetic attempt to prove their own usefulness in the safety of the home front rather than risk despatch to zones of combat either on the eastern or western front. After these vivid case studies, the last section seems rather anticlimatic and even redundant. His tone becomes more tempered and cautious, and he softens some of his introductory claims. In fact, these final chapters suggest that some additional editing of the earlier material might have reduced the amount of controversy and misunderstanding he aroused. Still, he ends on a confident note which conceals the many questions left unanswered and even unaddressed. How did German antisemitism fit into the network of interlocking prejudices – against people deemed handicapped, Gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs and so many others – that constituted Nazi ideology? Was “eliminationist antisemitism” really uniquely German, or commonly found elsewhere also? Or did the specific German contribution lie rather in the success in mobilizing the entire society in pursuit of this genocidal goal? Did the “excess” brutality and sadism of the killers reflect nothing but an unflinching hatred of Jews, or might it also have stemmed from a wider perverse attempt to purge the remnants of more universal moral instincts?

The book leaves us with much to ponder. It is all the more regrettable that there is no bibliography, which could guide readers to those questions here left open or outside the scope of his inquiry.

Doris Bergen, University of Notre Dame

Methodology in Contemporary Church History – the German view

Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Kurt Nowak, eds, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte. Urteilsbildung und Methoden. (Konfession und Gesellschaft, Beitraege zur Zeitgeschichte, Vol 8, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1996 288pp DM 79.-

Die mittlerweile zehn Baende der Reihe “Konfession und Gesellschaft” lassen klar erkenned, dass die Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte eine eigene, ernstzunehmende Disziplin innerhalb der Kirchengeschichte ist. Herausgegeben von A.Doering- Manteuffel, M Greschat, J-C Kaiser,W Loth und K.Nowak stehen diese Baende fuer eine ueberkonfessionelles Forschungskonzept, das die fortdauernde Durchdringung von Konfession und Gesellschaft, Kirche und Gemeinwesen, Theologie und allgemeiner Wissenschaftsentwicklung in den Blick nimmt.

Die dreizehn Aufsaetze dieses Bandes erfuellen in ihrem Bereich das Ziel der Herausgeber, naemlich eine Zustandsbeschreibung der Kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte im internationalen Zusammenhang zu liefern. Acht Beitraege widmen sich dabei zunaechst den Theorien in der deutschen kirchlichen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung. Wie ein roter Faden ziehen sich durch diese Texte die Fragen nach dem Verhaeltnis zwischen kirchlicher Zeitgeschichte und allgemeiner Geschichtswissenschaft sowie nach der Rolle der Kirchengeschichte im Zusammenhang der Universitaetstheologie.

Ueberaus lesenswert und abgewogen beschreibt der Erlanger Historiker Werner K.Blessing in seinem einleitenden Aufsatz, ‘Kirchengeschichte in historische Sicht’ den Erkenntniswert derselben fuer die ‘saekularisierte’ Welt des 19 und 20 Jahrhunderts. Auf dieser Spur kann dann der Leipziger Kirchenhistoriker Nowak am Phaenomen der ‘Zivilreligion’ klassische Themen zeigen, die der interdisziplinaeren Forschung noch harren. Thematisiert wird in diesem Band auch eine seit Jahren schwelende Auseinandersetzung in der deutschen Kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte zur ‘klerikalisierung’ der zeitgeschichtlichen Forschung im Umfeld der Zeitschrift “Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte”.

Doering-Manteuffel nimmt in seinem Beitrag ‘Griff nach der Deutung’ eine sozialgeschichtlich orientierte Kirchengeschichte in Schutz und wirft dem Heidelberger Kirchenhistoriker Gerhard Besier vor, in seinen Publikationen zu den Kirchen in der DDR moralischen Verurteilungen vor wissenschaftlichen Befunden der Vorzug zu geben. Besier wiederum weist in seinem stellenweise polemischen Text mit dem Titel ‘Methodological Correctness’ dies zurueck und belegt Doering-Manteuffel mit dem Vorwurf der ‘Etikettierung’.

Jenseits dieser Auseinandersetzung belaesst es der Giessener Kirchenhistoriker Greschat nicht bei der theoretischen Eroerterung von Kirchengeschichte und Sozialgeschichte. Vielmehr loest er das Postulat der Interdisziplinaritaet am Beispiel der Barmer Synode der Bekennenden Kirche von 1934 ein. Dabei kann er konkret die Gefahr einer Theologisierung von Themen der Kirchengeschichte beschreiben. Dass sich Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte auch erfolgreich mit der Geschichte des eigenen Fach beschaeftigen kann, zeigt der spannende Beitrag von J-C Kaiser, der schildert die Entstehung der Kirchenkampfkommission der EKiD wie auch deren Verwicklung in personal- und kirchenpolitische Querelen.

Eine ‘Diskussionsbeitrag’ will Ute Gause mit ihrem Beitrag ‘Geschlecht als historische Kategorie’, leisten. Auf dem Hintergrund der wichtigen Positionen der Geschlechtergeschichte fordert sie eine feministische Kirchengeschichtsschreibung, die die Frauen als ‘Subjekt der Geschichte’ ernst nimmt. Dass die katholische Seite nicht zu kurz kommt, zeigen die drei Beitraege von A.Holzem, K.Gabriel und W.Schroeder. Holzem stellt gaengige Theorien im Umfeld der Katholizismusforschung vor, wobei dem Rezensenten der Abschnitt zur Froemmigkeitsgeschichte besonders anregend erschien. Gabriel und Schroeder wiederum wenden sich konkreten Forschungsvorhaben in Gestalt des deutschen Katholizismus der fuenfziger Jahre zu. ‘Katholische Milieu’ und ‘katholische Gewerkschaftsbewegung’ lauten hier die Stichworte.

Die ‘Perspektiven des Auslands’ schliesslich nehmen J.M.Mayeur, Hugh McLeod und D.Diephouse wahr. Der tour d’horizon des Pariser Historikers zur histoire religieuse folgt die ausserordentlich anregende Studie McLeods, der seinen Blick auf die kirchlich- religioesen Verhaeltnisse in London, New York und Berlin richtet. Differenziert und selbstkritisch praesentiert der Verfasser ein Stueck urban history, dass so manche liebgewordenes Klischee zerbrechen laesst. Zum Schluss, prasentiert Diephouse, ungeruehrt von den hiesigen Auseinandersetzungen, ein gelungenes Beispiel dafuer, dass in der Vielfalt der Ansaetze eine ‘creative combination of ideas’ liegt. Anhand der Biographie des wuerttembergischen Landesbischofs Wurm benutzt er Ergebnisse der modernen Sozialgeschichte, um den Kirchenfuehrer in seinen Widerspruechen zu verstehen.

Alles in allem liegt hier ein gelungenes Buch vor, das eine ausgezeichnete Basis fuer die weiteren Bemuehungen im Bereich der Kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte darstellt und zugleich zum Nachdenken ueber das Verhaeltnis von Theologie und Geschichte anregt.

Rainer Laechele, University of Giessen

Theological Studies in Berlin by Prof. Kurt-Victor Selge (translated by JSC)

1) When the Berlin Wall came down, there were four separate Protestant theological faculties or institutes in Berlin:

a) the “Theological Section” of the Humboldt University, heir to the great tradition of Schleiermacher and Harnack, with 70 students, but under state control

b) the “Sprachenkonvikt” in East Berlin, with about 120 students, a church-run facility, which after 1961 developed into a full Faculty, but did not have state accreditation for its degrees.

c) the Kirchliche Hochschule in West Berlin-Zehlendorf, founded first in 1935, and refounded in 1945, with around 700 students

d) the Protestant Theological Institute of the Free University, mainly for the training of teachers of religion.

2) With the reunification of the country, there was a clear desire to reunify theological studies in Berlin. In fact, the only feasible solution was to unite them all under the umbrella of the Humboldt University, which from 1812 to 1935 had been the only and widely- respected Faculty. This process took two stages: first, in October 1990, on the same day as political unification took place, the Sprachenkonvikt was united with the Theological Section; in July 1992, the Kirchliche Hochschule moved from Zehlendorf and was similarly incorporated in the Humboldt University, bringing with it its fine library, now housed at Waisenstrasse 28, 10179 Berlin. Several Professors and lecturers from the ‘Section’ were dismissed as former agents of the Stasi, while a larger number from all three institutions retired on age grounds. The new Faculty has 22 professors (reducing by 2002 to 18) and some lecturers. At the moment the Faculty has some 700 students. Lectures and seminars are held in the old university building on Unter den Linden, in the Theological Seminar rooms in the Burgstrasse, in a tower of the Berlin Cathedral, and in the Faculty Library, which is 15 minutes away. This is where the future development will take place when a new building is erected, and the Burgstrasse building, where the Dean now is, reverts to other purposes.

3) In the seven years since the reorganisation of the Faculty, it is still possible to notice the differences between the students coming from West or East. The Faculty is one or the four or five largest in Germany, but many students come there just because it is in Berlin. Financial pressures affect all of Berlin’s three universities: the chair of Ancient Church History is, for example, still not filled. Nevertheless the example set by this Faculty shows how unification can be achieved successfully, and a great deal of money saved thereby. Its academic strengths lie in the field of patristics and early Judaism, as well as in Protestant history from the Reformation to Schleiermacher. Prof-Dr.K-V. Selge

With every best wish for your endeavours in 1997

John Conway

jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

December 1996 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter no 24 Vol II, no 12 – December 1996

Contents “Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Colloquium, Heidelberg”

Friedl Lang, “Hitler’s visit in 1934 to the Oberammergau Passion Play – an eye-witness account”

Review: Saul Friedman, The Oberammergau Passion Play: A Lance against Civilisation, Southern Illinois U.Press 1984

“Jehovah’s Witnesses: A new documentary video-Stand Firm” Index of books reviewed or noticed in 1996

Dear Friends,

New Format: As you see I have adopted a new format, by establishing a new LIST = KIRZEIT-L. This avoids printing out all your addresses on the first page. But if you need to know, please write and ask. Please write anyway. I am always glad to receive contributions, reviews of new books, notices of church developments, conference reports etc. Also suggestions for improvements will be most welcome. JSC

Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Colloquium, Heidelberg

Early last month I went to Heidelberg to attend a colloquium on the subject of Religion and Civil War, with special reference to Northern Ireland and Bosnia. It was good to see a number of you there. The underlying topic was the question: has religion done more to stimulate or to overcome the current outbursts of murder, bloodshed, plunder and bigotry, which seem to have been the hallmarks of the conflict in both areas? We had a representative of Sinn Fein present, who outlined his party’s programme, which, to me at least, was surprisingly secular and socialist, not to say utopian. When pressed by others from N.Ireland, he had to admit that, while his party was opposed to violent solutions, there were a number of adherents who had ties to the I.R.A. But we also heard that deliberate incitement of religious hatreds was not part of the current scene. Instead, religious affiliation was more a kind of identity card, serving to separate the population into rival camps, with all too little opportunities for ecumenical contacts. The influence of those members of the clergy seeking reconciliation was notably weak, and the struggle should rather be placed in a wider economic and political context.

In Bosnia, on the other hand, the religious factor was considered more significant. We heard a chilling report from a very well informed observer who claimed that no serious effort was being made to overcome the long and entrenched hostilities between the Serbian Orthodox, the Croatian Catholics and the Bosnian Muslims. Moreover, the attempts of outside church bodies such as the World Council of Churches or the Conference of European Churches were dismissed as nothing more than “Reconciliation Tourism”.

I came away very much sobered and disillusioned. I would like to hear from any of you who were also there if you came to similar conclusions. JSC

Hitler’s visit in 1934 to the Oberammergau Passion Play – an eye-witness account – by Friedl Lang

(Prof. Gottfried Lang, son of Anton Lang, who played Christ in three successive Passion Plays, grew up in Oberammergau, and himself participated in the Passion Play as a young boy. He was also, as he describes, much involved with the Catholic youth movement, and as a result was obliged to leave Germany in 1937. He subsequently came to Canada and the USA, and eventually became Prof. of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. He now lives in Santa Fe. We are greatly obliged to Prof. Lang for this Zeitzeugenbericht.)

1934 marked the 300th anniversary of Oberammergau’s Passion Play. In 1633 the plague had approximately halved the village population, which led to a vow to perform the Passion Play every ten years, beginning in the following year 1634. After 1670 the Play was performed on the decennial years.

At that time, 1934, I was student at the Realschule in Weilheim, which had suddenly become “politicized” shortly after the Nazis came to power in the previous year. Many of my schoolmates now appeared in Hitler Youth (HJ) uniforms. Even some of the teachers suddenly wore the Hakenkreuz insignia on their jacket lapels. But those of us in the boarding school accommodation were warned by its director, a priest and a W.W.1 veteran, not to join the HJ., on the grounds that this whole Nazi movement was a thing which would not last.

Also we were Catholics, and our parents supported the Bavarian Volkspartei, so we were not very happy about the course of events – all the more so when the SA and HJ demonstrated on Sunday mornings during Sunday masses and called those of us who refused to join the HJ “schwarze Hunde”. So it was a real relief when I was allowed to transfer to the Benedictine Monastery School at Ettal, near Oberammergau, for the next school year.

In 1930 the stage for the Passion Play had been rebuilt and modernized. I was an altar boy when Cardinal Falhaber had come to bless these new facilities, and of course was much impressed by the ceremony. Like all boys and girls of my age, I participated in both the 1930 and 1934 performances, taking part in both the morning crowd scene of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and in the so-called “lebende Bilder” (Tableaux) in both morning and afternoon.

By the time of the 1934 Passion Play I had become an active member of the Catholic Youth Movement, and was very much involved with its Jungschar groups, for boys under 16. About twenty of us met regularly one a week in the cabin of the soccer field, under the leadership of our “Praeses”, the curate of the parish, who was known for his excellent sermons, which invariably pointed out the moral and religious decline of the time and the need to do something about it. He never mentioned the Nazis, but of course we knew what he was talking about. Eventually he was prohibited from preaching.

As part of my activity in the Catholic youth movement I went from house to house collecting subscriptions to the weekly newspaper Junge Front which was, we thought, a strong voice against Nazism. I think I was able to get about 40 subscribers. Then suddenly it did not appear, and I was told it had been banned. After some time the package of newspapers arrived again, under the new name Michael. But it too was eventually banned. Delivering the paper on my bicycle was very exciting because most of the subscribers were obviously not in sympathy with what the Nazis were doing. Some of them would involve me in a discussion, especially the older people who longed for a return of the “good old days” or others who confided in me, saying how terrible the political and moral state of the country was.

I think many of those longing for the “good old days” were loyal to the Bavarian crown. King Ludwig II had donated to the village a massive monument depicting Christ crucified with Mary and John at the foot of the cross, and had employed many Oberammergauers while building his nearby castle at Linderhof. Every August 24th the villagers celebrate the King’s Birthday with bonfires on the mountains and a huge fiery cross halfway up the local Kofel Mtn. (This event is still celebrated today). Others were not so romanticaly inclined, or were fearful that the policing of the population or even a war might be the goal of the Nazi regime. In 1934 none of the emergency measures on food or other amenities had as yet been introduced; nor was the Gestapo as yet a household word. So people still felt they could talk. Besides, the Passion Play and tourism in general was bringing many foreigners, especially British and Americans. By 1935, however, the situation changed, possibly because by then the Nazis had firm control over the whole country.

The Passion Play attracted not only tourists, but also many young people, including the Catholic Youth Movement members. As an active member of the Jungschar I got involved in providing tickets and sleeping quarters for these young people, often when members of the Sturmschar (the Catholic youth for older boys famous for their outdoor life and travels) wrote and enquired. Outside the village but close to the Passion Play theatre my family had a large barn, used mainly for storage. We helped to fix up the loft with hay, so that we could accommodate as many as 15 people there. My friend Karl’s father was the executive secretary of the village corporation responsible for the sale of tickets to the play. He was also a practising Catholic, so that when these young people came to us, he would always provide cheap tickets. Sometimes only standing room was available, which cost a mere 25 cents! What was important to us was that we got to know young Catholics from many parts of Germany, which again helped us in our conviction that we were not alone.

I used to sell German and English Passion Play texts to passers-by on their way to the theatre. Our house was right on the Theaterstrasse, and I stood in front of the shop door, a little elevated above the street level, which gave me a good view of the people passing on their way to the theatre. In late July or August, suddenly a black open Mercedes drove by. On its front fender was the swastika flag, and suddenly some people yelled “Heil Hitler”. The car swept on to the theatre, where Hitler was given a prominent seat. He actually sat through the whole performance, lasting from 8 a.m. to noon, and again from 2 p.m. to 6. During the play an annoucement was made to the cast that the “Fuehrer” would come onto the stage to shake hands with the actors. But I did not myself attend. I was told that Hitler was impressed by the Play and promised to see that it would always be performed according to the ancient vow. Saying that this was a great cultural achievement and true to the villagers of Oberammergau, he shook hands with all the principal actors (including my father who then played the role of Prologue). The only major actor who refused to come on stage was Kaiaphas (my maternal uncle).

What influence did Hitler’s visit have on the villagers? Those who called themselves “traditionalists” (without much of a religious conviction) may well have been convinced by Hitler’s “promise” to assure the Passion Play’s decennial performance. Others who had already joined the NSDAP were influenced by the idea that Hitler stood for strong leadership, obviously needed to keep the socialists and communists in check. Clearly Hitler represented a new time, a new approach to economic problems and an end to the uncertainties of the Weimar Republic. But there were also those who felt highly ambivalent about these new political changes. Some, like my parents, were already aware of such new institutions as the Dachau concentration camp, where political opponents of any color were incarcerated. A priest relative of my moher’s one day appeared after a long absence with a shaved head. When asked if this was the latest style, he jokingly remarked that this depended on your political “Einstellung”., and that Dachau was indeed the place where one could familiarize oneself with the “der Mode des Tages”.

We in the Jungschar understood little of the political implications of Nazism. We knew that at school history textbooks were being rewritten, though none of our teachers at Ettal used them. In the meantime, those of us who reached our 16th birthday moved from the Jungschar to the Sturmschar. In the Easter holidays of 1935 Karl and I were selected to join a group of Sturmschar on a trip to Rome. We camped there, wore off-white shirts with big silver buttons, and stood in cruxiform formation in front of St Peter’s to receive the Pope’s blessing. Then with banners flying we marched to the Colosseum, where our leaders made speeches reminding us that, like Peter and Paul, we also had to suffer for the ultimate victory of Christ. On our way back to Germany, our buses were stopped at the border in Constance. The guards seized our cameras, our shirts and buckles, tents, banners etc, and took our names. After running the guantlet of a bevy of abusing HJ boys, we were allowed to proceed to Munich. There the police were already waiting for us. We were again arrested, and taken to the Police Headquarters where our passports were checked and our names registered. In the morning they let us go.

As we learned much later, one of our leaders, from the Catholic Youth headquarters in Dusseldorf was arrested and shot by the SA. All of this was for us a persecution of Christianity, and we felt it would only get worse. But those of us who lived in the provincial remoteness of Oberammergau, though anti-Nazi, were ruefully ignorant of the world-shaking implications of Nazism.

An opposing view:

Saul Friedman, The Oberammergau Passion Play: A Lance against Civilisation, Southern Illinois U.Press 1984

(I include my short review of this book, written in 1989, to give an idea of how others regard the Passion Play)

Professor Friedman’s analysis of the passion play and its milieu is markedly hostile. Sustained polemic makes for invigorating reading and Friedman’s 200 pages of invective will not disappoint. This vestige of mediaeval bigotry, he claims, has been touted unjustifiably as a major world tourist attraction by playing on the credulity and superstition of those gullible enough to seduced by their neighbourhood travel agency. The play itself, he affirms, survived from the earliest years because of the church’s encouragement of religious zealotry, a deep-seated arrogance and anti-Semitism not uncommon in Bavarian peasants or art, and a developed pursuit of profit. Thanks to the work of gifted editors, the play has become a spectacle for foreign tourists, unwilling or unable to recognise its basic prejudice and vitriol against the Jews. The anti-Semitic overtones of the play, Friedman asserts, are dangerous. Too many scenes go far beyond the gospel narratives in depicting the Jews in the worst light: the portrayal of the crucifixion is shown to be solely Jewish-inspired; the Romans are exonerated; and the discontinuity between Christianity and Judaism is frequently stressed. It is not a hymn to reconciliation, but rather an exhortation to revenge. No wonder the villagers, and presumably their audiences, were immune to any appeals for sympathy from their fellow citizens of Jewish origins during the Nazi era. Friedman investigates closely the political attitudes of Oberammergau in the 1930s, when in honour of Hitler’s visit, “never were Oberammergau’s Jewish mobs more violent, never have the scribes and Pharisees who invoke the mob been more vehement than this year”. What particularly distresses Friedman has been the villagers’ sttempts since 1945 to deny any sympathy for Nazism and their refusal to alter the play’s text to remove its most offensive parts [This has been subsequently achieved: JSC] It remains, he says, despite some tinkering, essentially a lance against civilisation, a witness to the durability of both anti-Semitism and cupidity.

To all of this, it can only be said that Friedman seems to live in an ivory tower. Religious pilgrimages and shrines have alwys produced their zealotry and commercialism. The high-minded efforts of advocates of Christian-Jewish reconciliation have made considerable advances but it would be wishful thinking to expect such theological revision to begin in an Alpine village. The Oberammergauers’ pride in their play is matched by a conservative distrust against the meddling of outsiders. Having myself been to the passion play twice, I found that a repeat visit was disappointing, not because of the survivals of anti-Judaism, but rather because the mobilization of hosts of amateur actors is neither great art nor great theatre. The Oberammergau passion play is essentially a primitive peasant pageant. JSC

Jehovah’s Witnesses:

A new documentary video _Stand Firm_ portraying the Nazi persecution of this sect, published by the Watchtower Society in Brooklyn, has recently been released. The German-language version premiered at the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp Memorial on November 6th.

This is an hour-long and excellently edited account, which incorporates extensive survivor testimony, as well as commentary by historians of Nazi Germany, such as Dietlef Garbe, Susannah Heschel, and myself. It is very suitable for showing to audiences interested in the Nazi persecution of religious groups, and while narrowly focussed on the sufferings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, conveys the atmosphere of the steadfast resistance especially in the concentration camps to which some 1200 were sent, and where 200 were murdered for their refusal to abandon their beliefs. The video is presumably available from your local Jehovah’s Witnesses’ meeting hall. See also Christian Science Monitor, Nov.6th 1996, p 1 and 13. JSC

May I take this final opportunity for 1996 to wish you all a very blessed and happy Christmas, and to send you my very best wishes for all your endeavours for 1997.

Dona nobis pacem

John S.Conway

Dept. of History, University of British Columbia,

Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1, Canada

jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

.Index of books reviewed or noticed in 1996 – Newsletters 13-24 (Vol II, 1-12). Newsletter no. in brackets (All reviews by JSC unless noted)

Bergen D, The Twisted Cross The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (15)

Besier G, Der SED Staat und die Kirche 1983-1991 (R.Goeckel) (22) Bickersteth Diaries (19)

Clark C, The Politics of Conversion (18)

Crerar D, Padres in No Man’s Land (14)

Goeckel R, Die evangelische Kirche und die DDR (G.Besier) (20)

Hering R, Theologische Wissenschaft und Dritte Reich (13)

Huttner M, Britische Presse und nationalsozialistische Kirchenkampf (13)

Laechele R, Ein Volk,Ein Reich,ein Glaube (D.Diephouse) (18)

Lehmann B, Katholische Kirche und Besatzungsmacht in Bayern (17) Loest E, Nicolaikirche (15)

Marshall Joan, A solitary Pillar. Montreal’s Anglican Church and the Quebec Revolution (21)

Mau R, Eingebunden in den Realsozialismus? (20)

Mehlhausen J. ed., und uber Barmen hinaus (13)

Passelecq G and Suchecky B, L’encyclique cache de Pie XI (M Phayer) (21)

Pollmann K ed., Der schwierige Weg in die Nackriegszeit. Die evangluth.Kirche in Braunsweig 1945-50 (21)

Reichrath.H, Ludwig Diehl (12)

Rendtorff T. ed., Protestantische Revolution (J.Burgess) (23)

Schlie U, Kein Friede mit Deutschland (13)

Schneider T.M., Reichsbischof Ludwig Muller (D.Bergen) (21)

Siebert W, Das Maedchen das nicht Esther heissen darf (22)

Siegele-Wenschkewitz L. ed., Theologische Fakutaten im Nationalsozialismus (13)

Tomaszewski I and Werbowski T, Zegota. The rescue of Jews in Poland (12)

Vollnhals C and Brauer S, In der DDR gibt es keine Zensur (20)

Wilhelmy H, Aus meinem Leben (23)

Winter J, Sites of memory, sites of mourning (15)

Zeilstra, J.A., European Unity in Ecumenical Thinking 1931-48 (13)

November 1996 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter no 23 (Vol II, no 11) – November 1996

Journal Articles

Jay P.Corrin, “H.A.Reinhold: Liturgical Pioneer and Anti-Fascist,” Catholic Historical Review, Vol. LXXXII no 3, July 1996.

Francis Latour, [the Vatican in WWII], Guerres Mondiales, April 1996, no. 182.

Book Reviews

Heinz Wilhelmy, Aus meinem Leben, Evangelischer Presseverlag Pfalz, Speyer 1996, 310 pp.

Trutz Rendtorff, ed., Protestantische Revolution? Kirche und Theologie in der DDR: Ekklesiologische Voraussetzungen, politische Kontext, theologische und historische Kriterien, Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993, 357 pp., reviewed by John Burgess

Dear Friends,

German Studies Association Conference, Seattle Oct. 10-13th It was good to see a number of our members at this conference, and to have the opportunity of exchanging news and views.

Unfortunately, the sessions, as usual, were too short to have any really productive academic discourse, and the setting in one of Seattle’s unmemorable airport hotels was decidedly unacademic! But good to know that the scholarly enterprise continues in full flood.

Journal articles:

Jay P.Corrin of Boston University contributes an interesting article to the Catholic Historical Review, Vol. LXXXII no 3, July 1996, describing the career of “H.A.Reinhold: Liturgical Pioneer and Anti-Fascist”. Fr Reinhold was one of the few German Catholic priests who early on recognised the incompatibility of Christianity and Nazism, while his superiors were still beguiled by Hitler’s charisma, or saw Nazism as an effective bulwark against the greater danger of Bolshevism. Reinhold’s attempts to rally those Catholics who shared his views, and his resolute warnings made to churchmen abroad, led to his being persecuted by the Gestapo. Abandoned by the Catholic hierarchy, he was driven into exile, finally landing up in Minnesota, where he found a welcome audience for his stimulating ideas about liturgical reform. But even in the USA, notably in New York, his efforts to spread the truth about the Nazi plans to attack the churches were disbelieved, and like Waldemar Gurian, Luigi Sturzo and others, he was forced to eke out a meagre and isolated existence. No apologies were ever received when events proved him right. And even his last bishop advised him not to publish his autobiography as this would only cause public contention over long-dead issues and damage the reputation of distinguished Catholics. So his brave struggle against intolerance, illiberalism and clerical fascism were all too often ignored by Anglo-American Catholics in their obsession with the battle against international Communism. Prof. Corrin’s article is an excellent, if belated, act of reparation. JSC

Prof. F.W.Graf, Munich, gives an interesting description of the career and Nachlass of the Jena liberal theologian,Heinrich Weinels (1874-1936) in Zeitschrift fur Kirchengeschichte, Vol 107, no 2, 1996, pp 201-31.

In the same issue, Christopher Spehr prints and comments on the Gestapo’s report on the Confessing Church’s Bad Oeynhausen Synod 1936, pp 232-247.

Francis Latour contributes a provocative article to the April 1996 issue, no 182, of Guerres Mondiales, p.105-21, which outlines the efforts of the Holy See to defend its interests during the First World War. The rivalries of the warring powers endangered the Vatican’s position not only in Europe but also in the mission field and the Holy Land. Despite its discreet diplomacy, the Vatican was unsuccessful in its efforts to obtain a peace settlement, and managed only to hold the line in defending its own ecclesiastical policies. The contrast between the Holy See’s universal spiritual claims and its actual political leverage had only grown greater.The war, and the subsequent peace negotiations of 1919, from which the Vatican was deliberately barred, brought home to the Pope and his advisors the sobering and unwelcome fact that that the Holy See’s temporal influence had been severely reduced. Who could suspect that the Vicar of Christ, and the world’s oldest diplomatic entity had political ambitions? But such suspicions existed then, and still do.

Book Reviews:

Heinz Wilhelmy, Aus meinem Leben, Evangelischer Presseverlag Pfalz, Speyer 1996, 310 pp.

Pastor Heinz Wilhelmy’s account of the Church Struggle in his small rural parish in the Palatinate was written not long before he died in 1980. But the impulse to write came from the most traumatic experience of his life, when he witnessed the brutal mass murder of the Jews of the Ukrainian town of Berditschew, shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. This ghastly event profoundly shattered his loyalties as a German, a Christian and a pastor. It subsequently led to a far-reaching metanoia and dominated his post-war career in his parish – a tribute to which is appended by Klaus Enders.

This spiritual conversion was all the more remarkable since Wilhelmy, as he readily admits, had welcomed the new Nazi regime with open arms only a few years earlier. In 1933, like many of the younger clergy, he had thrown his support behind the efforts of the so-called “German Christians” to bring about a revolution in the church, patterned on that imposed by Hitler in the state, which sought to overcome the encrusted parochialism of the local churches, such as the Palatinate, and warmly embrace the new task of national renewal. This kind of hot-headed radicalism, based on the kind of volkisch theology so prevalent at the time, led to the success of the “German Christians” in capturing the majority of the provincial church structures and the installation of “German Christian” bishops, such as Ludwig Diehl in Speyer.

By 1934, however, these illusion collapsed like soap bubbles. After Wilhelmy had read the Barmen Declaration and heard about the murders of Roehm and his clique, he began to change his tune. Luckily he preserved several of his sermons which are here reproduced in full and which give an excellent flavour of the heated debates of those days. His outspoken comments on the errors of the Nazi ideologues soon got him into trouble with the local Nazi officials. His resolute support for the Confessing Church after 1935 further alienated him from both the political and religious leadership in the Palatinate. But this combative determination to uphold the integrity of the church did not extend to any open criticism of the purely political actions of the state – and in this regard Wilhelmy shared the same limitations as most of the Confessing Church. Their attempts to harmonize these divergent loyalties became more difficult, especially after Martin Niemoller’s arrest in July 1937, and under the incessant pressure of the Nazi authorities to keep silent. Wilhemy’s practice of praying by name for all the Confessing Church members imprisoned or disciplined by the Gestapo was a particular cause for friction. Never one to speak diplomatically, Wilhelmy modelled himself on Luther’s steadfastness in defence of the Gospel.

But in November 1938, the Palatinate church authorities, obviously desiring to rid themselves of this tiresome trouble- maker, ordered his immediate suspension from office and the complete cessation of his pay. Neither his parishioners’ strong support, nor his lengthy defence of his actions, disclaiming any intention of attacking the regime’s policies (and this immediately after the notorious November pogrom!) availed him anything. Luckily in May 1939 he was inducted into the army shortly before the Gestapo ordered his arrest. Since the army did not acknowledge the Gestapo’s jurisdiction over its members, Wilhelmy escaped their clutches for six long years. In May 1945 he returned to his parish and resumed his pastoral duties.

This autobiography was written nearly twenty years ago as an act of expiation. The decision of the Palatinate Church’s publishing house to print it now can be regarded as a form of overdue rehabilitation for one who was left in the lurch by his church superiors and who never received any subsequent retraction or apology. The publication of this memoir is therefore a belated but welcome gesture.
JSC

ed. Trutz Rendtorff, Protestantische Revolution? Kirche und Theologie in der DDR: Ekklesiologische Voraussetzungen, politische Kontext, theologische und historische Kriterien, Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993, 357 pp (Despite this book appearing in 1993, I thought this excellent review by John Burgess, Associate for Theology, Presbyterian Church,USA, would be helpful to complement other reviews about the DDR churches in recent issues of this Newsletter. JSC)

In the 1980s, the East German church provided a free space in which alternative groups met to discuss issues of peace, justice, and the environment. Their critical rhetoric seemed to express the discontent of much of the population. By 1989, hundred of people were regularly gathering in churches prior to demonstrating publicly against state policies. Particular congregations such as the Gethsemane Kirche in East Berlin and the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig became synonymous with the “peaceful revolution”. Within a couple of years, public attitudes towards the church had shifted. The “midwife” – even “mother” – of the revolution had become more akin to a prostitute. Journalists, former dissidents, even some historians accused the church of having stabilized the East German state for too many years. Reports of Stasi infiltration of the church, including the recruitment of key church leaders as “unofficial collaborators”, further undermined its reputation.

This collection of essays first presented at a colloquium in 1992 critically assesses these issues, seeking to determine just what role the church and theology played during the 40 years of communist rule. The list of authors reads like a “Who’s Who” of observers of the East German church. West German authors include Reinhard Henkys, journalist, author of numerous articles on this topic, and editor of “Kirche im Sozialismus” for many years the premier western journal on the East German church; Uwe-Peter Heideingsfeld, who worked in the offices of the E. K D. as liaison for the eastern church; Gerhard Besier, church historian whose co- publication of secret Stasi files on the East German church created much controversy; and F.W.Graf, professor of theology in Hamburg. East German authors include Dietlef Pollack, sociologist of religion at the University of Leipzig, who has a special interest in the church’s alternative groups; Guenter Krusche, General Superintendent in East Berlin; Kurt Nowak, professor of church history, and Wolf Kroetke, professor of theology in East Berlin.

In general, the essays dispute the contention that the peaceful revolution was either “Protestant” or a “revolution”. While the church supplied important impulses for reform, offered a space in which protest could crystallize, and channelled it into constructive dialogue, Pollack emphasises the contingency of events and disputes that any group consciously directed them.. Graf gives the church even less credit, and sees it as having stabilized the regime.

As well, the essays agree that the East German church went wrong in assuming that Marxist-Leninist socialism was reformable. By locating itself as a “church within socialism”, the East German church took seriously the need to respond to the realities of its own society but failed to see that the entire system was bankrupt. Nor did it have the theological resources to critique the foundations or the ideologically-based practices of the regime. Graf takes this argument to an extreme, arguing that the East German church adopted Romantic ideas of community. Because the church viewed capitalism as resting on an individualism and egotism that were counter to the gospel, its theology resulted in implicit support for “socialism” however vaguely defined. As a result it failed to develop an adequate understanding of the need for democracy and pluralism.

While other authors qualify this “affinity of Protestantism for socialism”, none of the essays argues persuasively that the church’s theology made any major contribution to the rise of a protest movement within the church and society. Even Kroetke, who argues that Bonhoeffer’s ideas were of value to the alternative groups, uses most of his essay to portray how various parts of the East German church (especially in the theology faculties) misused or instrumentalized Bonhoeffer’s theology for their own purposes.

Nonetheless the book is rich in information, bibliographical suggestions, and reflections on the challenge of writing kirchlicher Zeitgeschichte (see especially the essays by Besier and Nowak). The inclusion of some of the discussion which followed each paper adds to the value of the volume; one gets a sense of the give-and-take and critical questions that arose. As can be seen from the spate of subsequent publications, the situation of the East German church will continue to be of interest to a wide group of scholars and church leaders for years to come.

John Burgess.

With every best wish to you all,
John Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

October 1996 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter no. 22 (Vol II, no 10) – October 1996

Articles:

Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Vol 9, no 1, 1996, essays on the two German dictatiorships.

J.S.Conway, “The European Churches’ search for a new international order 1919-89” in C.Baechler and C.Fink, The establishment of European Frontiers after two world wars, P. Lang: Berne 1996.

Book reviews:

Gerhard Besier, Der SED-Staat und die Kirche 1983-1991. Hoehenflug und Absturz. Berlin: Propylaen Verlag 1995, reviewed by Robert Goeckel.

Winfried Siebert, Das Maedchen, das nicht Esther heissen darf: Eine exemplarische Geschichte. Leipzig: Reklam Verlag 1996, reviewed by Marion Grau.

Kurt Nowak, ed., Adolf von Harnack als Zeitgenosse: Reden und Schriften aus den Jahren des Kaiserreichs und der Weimarer Republik. Vol 1: Der Theologe und Historiker; Vol 2: Der Wissenschaftsorganisator und Gelehrtenpolitiker. Berlin/New York De Gruyter Verlag DM 460.00 and Johanna Jantsch, Der Briefwechsel zwischen A. v. H und Martin Rade (1879-1930): Theologie auf dem oeffentlichen Markt, Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Verlag 1996, ca. 920 Seiten, reviewed by Uwe Rieske-Braun.

Dear Friends,

Since I shall be away in Germany at the end of the month, attending the meeting of the Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte group in Heidelberg, next month’s Newsletter will have to be somewhat delayed. My apologies, but I hope to return to the usual date by December.

New issue of journal:

Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Vol 9, no 1, 1996 prints eight essays on the subject of Resistance to the two German dictatorships of this century. The authors examine both the comparable, but also the distinguishing features of the Resistance movements before and after 1945. Despite the common repressive features of both the Nazi and Communist regimes, their ideological goals were directly antithetical. Correspondingly those who opposed them had widely differing goals and strategies. The churches’ role is carefully examined, especially the issues of their compliance with, or opposition to, the dictatorships. Attention is paid to the hefty debates over their alleged collaboration, which essentially revolve around the character of the church as a public institution. Their apologists’ argument, both after 1945 and 1989, is that they “durch ihre Kooperation das Schlimme vielleicht gefoerdet, das Schlimmste aber verhindert haben”. On the other hand, the resisters’ claims are known to be subject to legend-building. The obstacles to evaluating the extent of theologically-based resistance are readily apparent, and are here specifically analysed in a number of case studies.

Book reviews:

In August I sent you a review by Gerhard Besier of the German edition of Bob Goeckel’s “The Lutheran Church and the East German State”. I therefore thought it would be valuable to have a review by Bob of Gerhard’s third volume on the same subject.

Gerhard Besier, Der SED-Staat und die Kirche 1983-1991. Hoehenflug und Absturz.
Berlin: Propylaen Verlag 1995. 976pp, DM 98.00

Judging from the prodigious work of Gerhard Besier, the current angst of Germans regarding the competitivesness of Standort-Deutschland seems exaggerated. With this in-depth and extensively-footnoted volume Besier has completed in three years his trilogy on the history of church-state relations in the former GDR. Like the earlier volumes, this one relies primarily on the author’s extensive use of church, state, party, and secret police archives. No scholar has more exhaustively researched the documentary record of this relationship. Since his 1992 book, in which he charged the Protestant churches with Kumpanei (complicity) with the regime, Besier’s interpretation has been clear if controversial; his treatment of the denouement of the GDR in this volume remains consistent. In his view, this complicity was facilitated not only by the penetration of the church by the Stasi – often a result of personal avarice and psychological needs of church leaders – but also by an identification with the idea of socialism among many Protestant leaders. Hence his argument that this complicity continued even after the collapse of communism, as manifested in the apologetic writing of church history, and the debates over the church’s role in contemporary Germany.

Besier’s treatment is heavily informed by his critique of the politicization of the EKD, which has “increasingly steered a decisively leftist course” (p.112). On numerous occasions he attacks the “interlinking of personnel between parties and churches” (p.263), stressing particularly the close relationship between the EKD and the SPD. In his view the East German churches likewise tilted towards the SPD, engaging in high-level diplomacy and promoting “polit-tourism” to the GDR. Besier suggests that the alleged complicity with the SED regime is an all-German phenomenon: “even after the church reunification there is a split going through the Protestant church, which has its origins only minimally in the twenty-year division of the EKD” (p.479). West German church journalists are viewed largely as apologists, even myth-makers for the “Church within Socialism”.

Yet his evidence gives room for considerable nuance as well. He discusses cases of disagreement between the EKD and the GDR churches over such issues as nuclear deterrence and pacifism. The EKD and GDR churches had drifted apart considerably by the 1980s, despite the continuous consultations which Besier chronicles. His research also suggests that the SED was hardly unified regarding the impact of these inter-German ties: as in earlier periods, so in the 1980s, some in the SED saw the leftist shift in the EKD as an opportunity to influence West German foreign policy; others saw it as a threat to efforts to separate themselves from all contacts with the west. The churches’ affinity with the SPD, which this reviewer would confirm, was in fact more of a bane than a boon for them in their relationship with the Communists, who had viewed social democracy as the chief enemy since 1917.

The author’s rich detail regarding the leading church personalities also reveals more nuance and change than the complicity theory suggests. He portrays, for example, how Bishop Johannes Hempel of Saxony moved from a stance critical of Berlin-based church-state summitry, to one asserting a “basic trust between church and state” in 1985, and then back to a critical stance in the waning years of the GDR. Besier tends to deal in heroes and villains, but even his heroes, such as Bishop Gottfried Forck of Berlin-Brandenburg and Dean Heino Falcke of Erfurt, are steeped in “socialism in the colours of the GDR” and his villains, such as General Superintendant Gunter Krusche of Berlin, became critical as the revolution gathered steam in 1989.

The heroes and villains are largely determined by their stance regarding the “groups”, namely the non-religious dissent that arose in the 1980s and devloped largely under the auspices of the church. The state’s attempts to use the church to discipline and domesticate this dissent are amply demonstrated by Besier, as well as the churches’ responses. The pattern of the 1970s – internal church dissent which increased the bargaining of the church with the regime – was replaced by one of opposition outside the control of either the church hierarchy or the regime.

Despite this changed context Besier underscores aspects of continuity in state policy. The differentiation policy developed in the 1950s remained throughout a fundamental tenet of the state’s strategy. For example, the regime sought to set the regional churches against Berlin-Brandenburg with its more active dissident community. He chronicles the regime’s steadfast and repeated rejection of meetings with the churches on such issues as educational discrimination and altenatives to military service. The detachment of SED officials from societal reality loomed larger in 1985-9, but was certainly characteristic of the entire GDR period. Misperception by both church and state is an undercurrent of this analysis; the church tended to assume more benign intentions on the part of the regime and to overestimate its ability to reform socialism; the regime assumed a coherent antagonistic long-term strategy on the part of the churches and overestimated the hierarchy’s ability to control its ranks.

Yet misperceptions remove the moral onus from the actors and this is certainly far from Besier’s intention. Collaboration with the Stasi and the compromising statements of church leaders are a major focus of this work, but hardly dominate it to the extent that they do in his journalistic contributions to such magazines as Spiegel and Focus. To be sure, the collaboration with the regime in efforts to dampen dissent by Manfred Stolpe, former leading church administrator and now SPD premier of the state of Brandenburg, receive extensive treatment. But Besier is fair: no one is spared from scrutiny, including conservatives such as Hans-Wilhelm Ebeling (pastor in Leipzig and founder of the German Social Union Party) and Stefan Heitmann (former Saxon church leader and a major CDU politician in Dresden) (p.668-9,696). Besier might have plumbed more deeply the moral onus in some cases which were major issues at the time, such as the arrest and removal from church service of Vicar Lothar Rochau for environmental activism in 1983. Also underplayed here are the church debates surrounding Chernobyl and the efforts to create a United Evangelical Church in the GDR.

As a social scientist this reviewer would like to have seen more discussion of the broader political context of developments in the relationship. For example, the church debate over “basic trust between church and state” occurred against the backdrop of the Soviets’ cancellation of Honecker’s planned visit to West Germany in 1984, and his apparent efforts at damage limitation in inter-German relations. Or the criticism of the rigged local elections of May 1989 should be placed in the context of the Soviet’s own multicandidate elections in 1989. The general refusal of the SED to introduce Soviet-style perestroika comes up short as a contextual factor in the Church-State relationship.

Besier’s interpretation is controversial in the church today, particularly given his extrapolation that the church is unable to come to terms with its past. The historian is amply rewarded for the effort of a careful reading of this detail-laden book.

Robert Goeckel, State University of New York. Geneseo

Winfried Siebert, Das Maedchen, das nicht Esther heissen darf: Eine exemplarische Geschichte. Leipzig: Reklam Verlag 1996

Winfried Siebert is a lawyer who saw an article in a law journal about a special appeal in 1938. On August 11, 1938, the Protestant pastor Friedrich Luncke reported the birth of his daughter Esther to the authorities. But he was refused permission to call the girl Esther because it was a “typical Jewish” name. Pastor Luncke fought the issue all the way through the courts, but in vain. Esther is a name that is “not German”.

Winfried Siebert, whose daughter is also called Esther, got interested and researched the case. He then looked for the family and for the woman who wasn’t allowed to be called Esther, but who resumed her name after the war. Eventually he found her. This interesting unconventional book recounts the struggle for a name. It is both a personal document and a psychogram of German law at the time, with overtones of the national psychology. Why did the pastor insist on calling his daughter Esther? It would have been easy enough to choose another name. But quite possibly this was in a small way a form of resistance to the regnant Nazi ideology.

Marion Grau,Tubingen

Contribution to book:

In ed. C.Baechler and C.Fink, The establishment of European Frontiers after two world wars, P.Lang: Berne 1996, J.S.Conway contributed an article (p.71-80) on “The European Churches’ search for a new international order 1919-89” which examines the strengths and weaknesses of liberal churchmen’s thinking about the reconstruction of the European state system after both wars, particularly through such agencies as the World Alliance for Promoting Intenational Friendship through the Churches, and later the Prague-based Christian Peace Conference.

Adolf von Harnack:

Uwe Rieske-Braun, Aachen, reports on new publications and a revival of interest in Harnack’s life and work. ed. Kurt Nowak, Adolf von Harnack als Zeitgenosse: Reden und Schriften aus den Jahren des Kaiserreichs und der Weimarer Republik.Vol 1: Der Theologe und Historiker; Vol 2: Der Wissenschaftsorganisator und Gelehrtenpolitiker. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Verlag DM 460.00! Zwar sind die hier abgedruckten Schriften Harnacks bereits andernorts veroeffentlicht, doch die Einfuehrung des Herausgebers verdient besonderes Interesse. Uwe herself has now published a shorter work about H’s earlier career: Uwe Rieske-Braun, Moderne Theologie. Der Briefwechsel Adolf von Harnack – Christoph Ernst Luthardt 1878-1897, Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag 1996, 154 pp DM 48. In dieser Edition werden insbesondere Harnacks Abloesung von der bekenntnisorientierten Theologie und seine Beziehung zu Albrecht Ritschl, die Kontroverse um Harnacks Edition der “Didache” 1884, und die Quellen anlaesslich der gescheiterten Berufung Harnacks nach Leipzig im Winter 1885/6 dokumentiert. Die spannungsreiche Beziehung zu Chr. Ernst Luthardt (1838-1902), die H. trotz der bald gravierenden theologischen Distanz zum einflussreichen Vertreter des bekenntnisorientierten Luthertums gepflegt hat, ist theologisch und auch menschlich bewegend.

Angekuendigt sind auch: Johanna Jantsch, Der Briefwechsel zwischen A. v. H und Martin Rade (1879-1930): Theologie auf dem oeffentlichen Markt, Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Verlag 1996, ca. 920 Seiten. Dieser Briefwechsel wirft ein helles Licht auf mannigfache Auseinandersetzungen und Debatten, in die Harnack und Rade verstrickt waren – etwa nach den Veroeffentlichung des 1.Band des Lehrbuchs der Dogmengeschichte 1885, und beleuchtet besonders instruktiv die Gruendungsphase de “Christlichen Welt”.

Stefan Rebenich, Theodor Mommsen und Adolf Harnack:

Wissenschaft und Politik im Berlin des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts, ca. 800 Seiten – liegt noch nicht vor. Zwei weitere Arbeiten, eins in Bonn, eins in Leipzig, sind in Vorbereitung.

Uwe Rieske-Braun, Aachen

All best wishes,
John S.Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

September 1996 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter no 21 (Vol II, no 9) – September 1996

Bonhoeffer on Inter-Net

German Studies Association Conference, 1996

Article

Michael Phayer, “The German Catholic Church after the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies Fall 1996, pp. 151-65.

Book Reviews

Thomas M. Schneider, Reichsbischof Ludwig Muller: Eine Untersuchung zu Leben und Personlichkeit. Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte, Series B: Darstellungen 19, Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1993, 384 pp. reviewed by Doris Bergen

Klaus Erich Pollmann ed., Der schwierige Weg in die Nachkriegszeit. Die evangelisch-lutherische Landeskirche in Braunschweig 1945-1950. Studien zur Kirchengeschichte Niedersachsens: 34. Gottingen; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1995, 335 pp. reviewed by John Conway

Joan Marshall, A Solitary Pillar. Montreal’s Anglican Church and the Quebec Revolution. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1995. 220 pp. reviewed by John Conway

G. Passelecq and B. Suchecky, L’encyclique cachee de Pie XI. Une occasion manquee de l’eglise face a l’antisemitism, Paris: Editions La Decouverte 1995, 321 pp. reviewed by Michael Phayer

Dear Friends,

German Church leadership is once again the theme of this issue, since the plethora of books appearing on this theme seems to be continuing. However, I append a short review of a more local situation, here in Canada, where momentous political changes are also causing a critical situation for a long-established church community; and also a short note about the “missing” encyclical due to be issued by Pope Pius XI in 1939.

Bonhoeffer on Inter-Net.

The Bonhoeffer-list on Internet has now been amalgamated with one for Paul Tillich. Messages can be sent to DBPT-l@bgu.edu. Lately the in-coming mail has been desultory and not of much interest to historians. But there is also now a new Bonhoeffer Web site Home Page:
http://204.245.208.1/bonhoeff/index.htm
I would be interested to know how you find this service.

German Studies Association Conference

The 1996 meeting of the G.S.A. will be held from Oct. 10th-13th at the Red Lion Hotel, Sea-Tac Airport, Seattle, Washington, USA. Several sessions relevant to our theme of contemporary church history will be give by members of our Arbeitsgemeinschaft, viz Doris Bergen, Susannah Heschel, Bob Ericksen and Gerhard Besier. For my sins, as one of the surviving founding members of GSA, I have been dragooned into giving the Banquet speech! I look forward to seeing several of you there.

Article:

Michael Phayer, “The German Catholic Church after the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 10/2 Fall 1996, pp. 151-65. Mike Phayer describes the belated and reluctant attitude of German Catholics to realise the full extent of the Holocaust in the immediate post-war period, and then outlines the change brought about in the 1960s, not least due to the valiant efforts of Gertrud Luckner, the redoubtable editor of the very significant Freiburger Rundbriefe. Gertrud Luckner died last year, and this is a heartfelt tribute to her memory.

New Book:

Nicholas Hope, German and Scandinavian Protestantism 1700-1918 (Oxford History of the Christian Church) Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995, pp xiii,685. $120.00. (To be reviewed in German Studies Review, February 1997).

Book reviews:

Thomas M.Schneider, Reichsbischof Ludwig Muller: Eine Untersuchung zu Leben und Personlichkeit. Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte, Series B: Darstellungen 19, Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1993, 384 pp.

There is no shortage of biographies – inspirational, critical, and scholarly – of the leading figures of the Confessing Church. The same cannot be said for the German Christian movement. Among historians of the Kirchenkampf, Joachim Hossenfelder, Reinhold Krause, and Siegfried Leffler may be household names, but the details of their lives remain obscure. Thomas Schneider’s biography of Reich Bishop Ludwig Muller is an important effort to end this state of affairs by examining close-up probably the most famous German Christian of them all. His thorough research pays off, by producing a useful work which fills in some gaps and confirms much of what others have said about the Protestant church under Nazism. This is a valuable addition to the literature of the church struggle, even if it might be thought to present more than we need to know about the life of the “Reibi”, Ludwig Muller.

As the fifteen-page conclusion suggests, Schneider’s argument does not lend itself to concise synopsis. But if there is one red thread throughout, it is the view of Muller, as a man of his times, extraordinary neither in his motivations nor in his values. Ludwig Muller was shaped throughout his life, Schneider tells us, by the piety of the Erweckungsbewegung of his native Minden- Ravensberg, and his mother remained for him the model of Christian devotion. World War I was a crucial moment in his development, and in this regard, as in his fervent nationalism and ardent anti-Communism, he paralleled his subsequent antagonist, Martin Niemoller. Significantly but not surprisingly, Muller’s antisemitism also emerges as a constant factor, from his schooldays to his viciously anti-Jewish speeches in the Weimar years and his chauvinistic publications during World War II. In 1934, he coldly refused his own niece’s plea for help when her “non-aryan” husband lost his job. (p.304)

Schneider’s picture does not shock or astound, but it does offer details that show a more human side of the “Reibi”. Even as a child, Muller displayed some musical talent and distinguished himself as both a flautist and a pianist. His ambition was to be a marine officer, but in deference to the wishes of his family, he entered the ministry. Service as a naval chaplain during World War I in Turkey and subsequently as a military pastor in Konigsberg, allowed him to keep alive his fantasy of being a :fighting man:. One of the nicknames he acquired early in his career as Reich Bishop – Lugenmuller – appears to have been well deserved. Although Schneider’s tone remains scholarly throughout, he cannot refrain from showing many occasions on which Muller lied, deceived, and connived. Indeed the Reich Bishop emerges as even weaker, less principled, and more opportunistic than one might have suspected. In 1920, during the Kapp putsch, Muller tried to collaborate with left-oriented sailors who seized control of the Wilhelmshaven base (p.56). After World War II, in another volte- face, he claimed to Soviet occupation troops that he had broken with Hitler over the Fuhrer’s policy towards the Jews (p.312).

Muller’s intellectual reputation gets no boost from this biography either. Another of his nicknames – Bettknuller – suggests that his “reign” as Reich bishop included little productive activity, theological or administrative. Schneider does credit Muller with considerable strategising, much of it successful, and all of it intended to improve his own professional and personal standing. From dumping one fiancee for a wealthier woman to scheming with Goering against Niemoller, Muller never stopped wheeling and dealing. Even his death has the making of a con job. Schneider provides a careful discussion of the evidence of what killed Muller in July 1945: heart attack or suicide. His findings are inconclusive, but he seems to lean towards a s sort of combined explanation which echoes Hossenfelder’s 1956 claim: “perhaps his (Muller’s) heart was quicker than his hand” (p.314).

Schneider’s overall assessment of German Christian thought and the church struggle adds little to the accounts of Klaus Scholder, Hans- Joachim Sonne and others. The German Christian movement as a whole appears just as anti-intellectual, banal, and internally contradictory as Muller himself. Rather than analysing that banality or seeking an explanation in it for the “Reibi’s” appeal, Schneider is content to describe it, often in list-like detail, and leaves his readers to draw their own conclusions. To the extent that Schneider accounts for Muller’s successes, he attributes them to Hitler’s backing. That assumption is problematic on its own account. Many of the claims that Hitler supported Muller originated with the Reich bishop himself, a notorious liar. Moreover, even if Hitler were willing at times to intervene on Muller’s behalf, we would still need to know something about what motivated the Fuhrer, himself capable both of immense opportunism and extreme disloyalty, to take such steps. Perhaps a better key to understanding the relationship between the two “leaders” is Schneider’s own comparison of Muller to Diederich Hessling, Heinrich Mann’s Untertan (p 9). Hessling’s power did not require the direct support of his patron, the Kaiser. He needed only the blessing of a society that rewarded bullies, applauded attacks on those deemed outsiders, and surrounded its own brutality with sentimentality and cheap piety.

Doris L. Bergen, University of Notre Dame

This collection of essays about the denazification process in the small church of Brunswick tells much the same story as already described by Gerhard Besier for the neighbouring church in Hannover, but with a sharper, more critical tone. The same sad tale emerges of evasion, denial, prevarications and protection of establishment figures. It was difficult enough to get rid of the Nazi Landesbischof, incarcerated for two years by the Yugoslavs as a prisoner-of-war. Even more notable was the survival in office of several prominent German Christians, while the only three pastors dismissed by order of the British military government were all reinstated in their parishes shortly afterwards. The pastors’ widespread reaction to the denazification fiasco was one of outrage that they should have been so (mis)treated at all. No one expressed regret over his past support for the Nazi regime, let alone any sympathy for the Nazis’ victims. The most scandalous case involved the presiding judge of one of the Nazi special courts, responsible for at least fifty death sentences for mainly trivial crimes. This man was subsequently rehabilitated, elected to the diocesan synod in 1946, appointed by the church authorities to the Church Executive Council, and even became a member of the national General Synod in 1949. Only in the 1970s did questions begin to be asked about such compromising cases, to which the excellently researched accounts by Dr Pollmann and his associates provide dispiriting answers.

John Conway

Joan Marshall, A Solitary Pillar. Montreal’s Anglican Church and the Quebec Revolution. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1995. 220 pp

Local histories of parishes or dioceses, especially in the Anglican church, tend to become antiquarian in focus. So Joan Marshall’s insightful analysis of the contemporary Anglican diocese of Montreal, especially of five cross-section parishes, is much to be welcomed. Over the past thirty years, Montreal’s Anglicanism has suffered a drastic decline of approximately 70% of its membership, due to the general trend away from regular attendance, but also because of heavy out-migration of Anglophones from Quebec. Marshall’s study of the Anglicans’ reaction to the determined attempts by the Parti Quebecois to become “maitre chez nous” concentrates on the strategies adopted by the survivors. She examines how Anglicans have responded to the challenge to their previously dominant identity, personal and collective, and how they have sought to preserve their sense of history and shared memories, while maintaining their community structures in an increasingly minority situation. She also discusses the impact of liturgical changes on parish life, the role of women in leadership, and the character of their socio-political engagements. These congregations have made major financial sacrifices in order to maintain their churches as places of communal identity and tradition. Yet it is also notable that these predominantly English- speaking Anglicans have shown little willingness to engage in significant encounters with French-speaking or French Catholic fellow Christians. As a study of the religion-society relationship at a time of high political drama, this account has much to tell us all.

John Conway

G.Passelecq and B.Suchecky, L’encyclique cachee de Pie XI. Une occasion manquee de l’eglise face a l’antisemitism, Paris: Editions La Decouverte 1995, 321 pp.

The authors, an American Jew and a Belgian Benedictine, have done a great piece of historical sleuthing to put this book together. It shows that Pius XI (1921-1939) was extremely concerned about racism and, among other things, commissioned three Jesuits – an American, a German and a Frenchman – at the end of 1938 to write an encyclical for him that would condemn racism and antisemitism. After the manuscript was finished – humani generis – intrigue set in. For some months it was “lost” in the Vatican, probably through the machinations of a Polish and a Spanish Jesuit. By the time it arrived on the Pope’s desk, he had only a few days to live, and died at the end of February 1939. The book shows that had he lived longer, sparks would have been flying between the church and the Nazis over racism. But at the same time the authors are balanced in their judgement: the encyclical would have broken no new ground theologically concerning Jews and Christians. The new Pope, Pius XII, used part of the manuscript in his first encyclical, but left out the condemnation of racism and antisemitism. Michael Phayer, Marquette University.

With best wishes

John Conway

jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

August 1996 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter no. 20 (Vol II no. 8) – August 1996

1. Conferences:

US Holocaust Memorial Museum on Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer

2. New Books:

Robert F. Goeckel, Die evangelische Kirche und die DDR. Konflikte, Gesprache, Vereinbarungen unter Ulbricht und Honecker. Reviewed by Prof. Gerhard Besier.

Rudolf Mau, Eingebunden in den Realsozialismus? Die evangelische Kirche als Problem der SED, and Siegfried Brauer and Clemens Vollnhals eds.,In der DDR gibt es keine Zensur. Die evangelische Verlagsanstalt und der Praxis der Druckgenehmigung 1954-1989. Reviewed by John S. Conway.

Dear Friends,

I trust you (in the northern hemisphere) are all enjoying your summer holidays. And congratulations to Mark Lindsay in Perth, Australia, on the occasion of his marriage.

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Conferences: In May, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum held a notable meeting to honour Hans v. Dohnanyi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer for their active role in the rescue of Jews and for the sacrifice of their lives in the attempt to overthrow the Nazi dictatorship. Specific mention was made of the “U 7” rescue operation of 1942, principally organised by Dohnanyi, when 14 Jews were assisted to escape to Switzerland. Two of the survivors came to attend. Mention was also pointedly made by the USHMM officials of the need for the German government to revoke the sentences of treason against these heroic resisters. (P.Hoffmann)

Also in May, in Berlin, an international conference took place to discuss The Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet State 1917- 1991, which analysed both the official Soviet policies, varying over time from strict repression to a more moderate, but deliberately subversive, attitude, as well as the controversial reactions of the R.O.Church leadership, which as in other Communist-controlled countries, varied between dissidence and seeming collaboration. In contrast to the former East Germany, access to the basic documents is strictly limited. So the problems and opportunities for research in this troubled period of the R.O.Church’s history have still a long way to go. (Robert Goeckel)

Review Article:

W.R.Ward: “Guilt and Innocence; The German Churches in the twentieth century,” Journal of Modern History, Vol 68, no 2, June 1996, pp398-426.

This is a splendidly perceptive review article, which covers a lot of ground with great insight, and constitutes the very best in interdenominational and international kirchliche Zeitgeschichte.

New books:

The post-mortem on the role of the churches in the German Democratic Republic continues unabated. The following reviews show the diverse views involved. First, we congratulate Bob Goeckel, one of our members, on having his book, The Lutheran Church and the East German State, translated, and therefore send you the review published in the Frankurter Allgemeine Zeitung on July 1st, written by another of our members, Prof. Gerhard Besier. (with apologies for the unavoidable omission of umlauts!)

Robert F.Goeckel, Die evangelische Kirche und die DDR. Konflikte, Gesprache, Vereinbarungen unter Ulbricht und Honecker, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt: Leipzig 1996, 371 Seiten, 45-DM.

1990 veroffentlichte R.F.Goeckel sein Buchmanuskript, das er noch vor der “Wende” 1989 abgeschlossen hatte. Es ist jetzt in deutscher Sprache erschienen. Obwohl der Autor inzwischen weitergeforscht und eine Reihe erganzender Aufsatze zum Gegenstand veroeffentlicht hat, fanden seine neuen Erkenntnisse noch keinen Eingang in das vorliegende Buch. Wie Stichproben ergaben, handelt es vielmehr um eine nahezu wortgetreue Uebersetzung; sogar die Zahlung der Fuessnoten hat sich nicht oder kaum veraendert. Goeckel ist dennoch der :”Ueberzeugung, dass die Ergebnisse seiner bereits etwas zurueckliegenden Untersuchung standhalten konnen”. Neben gedrucktem und zahlreichen Interviews mit kirchenleitenden Personlichkeiten konnte Goeckel durch gunstige Umstande fur sein Buch auch vertrauliche Aktenmaterial aus dem zentralen Parteiarchiv der Ost-CDU in der “Hauptstadt der DDR” einsehen. Im Vorwort der englischen Ausgabe bedankt er sich fur Rat und Hilfe von Helmut Dressler, Herbert Trebs, Wulf Trende und anderen. Heute weiss er, dass etwa Dressler und Trebs in ihrer Funktion als IM dem MfS uber ihn berichteten. Um so erstaunlicher ist es,dass Goeckel trotz der ruhrigen Handleitung linientreuer Linksprotestanten, treuer Genossen und umsichtiger “Unionsfreunde” zu einem weithin klarsichtigen Urteil gelangt ist; “Es war bekannt, dass gewisse kirchlicheAmtstrager, wie z.B. Manfred Stolpe, Horst Gienke, Eberhard Natho und Gerhard Lotz, sehr enge Kontakte zum Stasi unterhielten, obgleich ihre Verbindungen zur Stasi damals nicht so offenkuendig waren”.

Damit ruft der Wissenschaftler aus dem fernen Amerika in Erinnerung, was zumindest kirchenleitende Personlichkeiten in Ost und West schon vor dem Zusammenbruch der DDR ueber das dortige “Staat-Kirche-Verhaltnis” auf hoeher Ebene hatten wissen konnen und ubersehen wollen. Im Ton eher zurueckhaltend, in der Sache meist glasklar, werden die Prozesse wachsender Annaherung beschrieben. Allerdings geht Goeckel in seiner Analyse der Verfolgung kirchen- und staats- bzw. parteipolitischer Ziele durch die Akteure von einer Rationalitat des Handelns aus, die personenspezifische Faktoren und geheimes Rankespiel in den Hintergrund treten lasst. Personlicher Ehrgeiz als Antriebsfeder zugunsten einer bestimmten Option kommt bei ihm nicht vor, obwohl gerade die SED den eher dunklen Seiten anthropologischer Gundstrukturen besondere Aufmerksamkeit und Foerderung zuteil werden liess.

Rechtsanwalt Clemens de Maiziere und der Ost-Berliner Theologieprofessor Handfried Muller treten in Goeckels politischer Geschichte als Representanten der Trennungspartei innerhalb der Kirchen von Berlin-Brandenburg auf. Das trifft gewiss zu. Die mogliche Breite des Motivspektrums beschraenkt sich allerdings auf die Differenzierung zwischen “Linken”, “Rechten” und einer vermittelnden Position. De Maiziere und Mueller gehorten eben zu den “Linken”. Das Ausserte, was sich Goeckel leistet, sind Satze wie: “Der Staat durfte davon ausgehen, dass sich zwischen ihm und (Bischof) Schonherr ein gutes Verhaltnis entwickeln konnte, weil sein Protege Manfred Stolpe, der bereits gute Beziehungen zum Staat unterhielt, zum Leiter des Sekretariats (scil. des Kirchenbundes) gewahlt worden war”. Diese kuehle, vornehme Zuruckhaltung ist zweifellos eine Starke des Buches. Sie mindert vielleicht den schieren Selbstbehauptungswillen der ehemaligen Akteure im Raum der Kirche und erhoht womoglich deren Fahigkeit zur Selbstkritik, Auch das Erscheinen dieses ebenfalls verhaltismassig preisgunstigen Buches scheint auf eine Initiative der EKD zuruckzugehen. In seinem Vorwort dankt ihr Goeckel “fur ihre finanzielle Unterstutzung”

Gerhard Besier – Heidelberg

Rudolf Mau, Eingebunden in den Realsozialismus? Die evangelische Kirche als Problem der SED, Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1994, 259 pp.

Siegfried Brauer and Clemens Vollnhals eds.,In der DDR gibt es keine Zensur. Die evangelische Verlagsanstalt und der Praxis der Druckgenehmigung 1954-1989, Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 1995, 422 pp, 39.80 DM

Rudolf Mau has spent his career teaching in one or other of the church-run theological academies in the former G.D.R. He thus knows first-hand about all the kinds of trials and tribulations the churches faced during the forty years of Communist rule. From this vantage point he takes issue with those critics, such as the above, who in recent years have so roundly attacked the Protestant Church, or more particularly its leaders, for their tactical compromises, their collaboration with the secret police, or Stasi, and their alleged willingness to encourage a theology in sympathy with the Marxist aim for an egalitarian socialist society. Instead May seeks to show that the churches’ struggle to preserve their autonomy was a constant problem for the Communist rulers, and provides an analysis of the various methods employed to bring the churches to heel. His findings are mainly drawn from the files of the official State Secretariat for Church Affairs, which was directly responsible to the central committee of the ruling Communist Party (SED), and which, in his view, give a much clearer picture than the tendentious reports of former Stasi agents. >From the beginning there could be no doubt as to the regime’s hostility to the churches, and its determination to control all aspects of church life. The Marxists saw the GDR churches as capitalist survivals, as the defenders of “imperialism”, or as harbouring subversive elements prompted by West German “reactionaries” and eagerly seeking to overthrow the Communist victory of 1945. Even though there were times when the state seemed ready to encourage an armistice, its ultimate objectives never changed. The churches were therefore forced to be constantly on the defensive, trying to ward off both the direct attacks of the 1950s and the more subtle undermining attempts of later years. To begin with, the Communists were convinced that aggressive confrontational measures were needed to destroy the churches’ traditional position in society and to overcome the last remnants of Christianity’s “pre-scientific” ideology. When these steps evoked opposition, produced numerous “martyrs”, and were clearly counter-productive, the state was forced to see that its long- term goal of eradicating church influence altogether would have to be postponed. Instead it began to seek to sow divisions in church ranks, to place spies in all church offices, and to rely on its massive atheistical propaganda to secure ideological victory. For its part the church faced the alternative of living a persecuted catacomb existence, looking for rescue by its west German partners, or else exploring the as yet untrodden path of renouncing its privileges, accepting its minority status, but still witnessing to the relevance of the Gospel for the new GDR society. This attempt to formulate a new concept of “the church within socialism” did not please the Communist authorities who doubted its sincerity, and to the end suspected that the churches were nothing more than fifth column agents for the “NATO militarists” in the western world. Time and again, as Mau shows, the dogmatic inflexibility of the party bureaucrats made impossible any reasonable resolution of the ensuing conflicts. Since the SED refused to countenance any challenge to its exercise of power, let alone any public participation in policy formation, the churches became the only visible agencies outside the state’s direct control, and hence the one group where alternative ideologies and policies could be discussed. In the 1980s they became the central focus points for all the regime’s opponents, and, as we know, were in the forefront to bring about its eventual overthrow in 1989.

The churches could not be wiped out; but neither could they be absorbed under Communist auspices. This was the regime’s dilemma. Mau’s excellent and detailed account of the convoluted and sometimes contradictory efforts within the party bureaucracy to deal with this unwelcome situation is therefore much to be welcomed. His analysis of the evolution of the state’s mechanisms for dealing with the churches, its success in breaking the links to west German Protestantism, and its attempts to foster “progressive elements” among the pastors and laity loyal to the regime is a reliable guide to the intrigues and chicanery practised. On the other hand, Mau does not go into the even murkier depths of the controversial deals over the churches’ finances, or the conspiratorial activities of some of the chief officials. Rather he sees the main achievement to have been the churches’ steadfast refusal to accept the state’s totalitarian claims, despite the unrelenting and very costly efforts made at every stage of the GDR’s history. Critics of the churches, he believes, should concentrate rather on the undoubted fact that their resolute witness, and their readiness to proclaim the Gospel’s truth in contemporary contexts, led to the virtually complete failure of the Marxists’ overall offensive.

Forty years of incessant atheistic propaganda, to be sure, have had their effect. Church participation is at a record low. On the other hand there is no one today in the former GDR who believes that Marxism-Leninism is the preferred ideological position, or who seeks to justify the SED’s nefarious policies towards the churches. Whether the churches can regain their credibility is an open question; but Communism certainly can’t.

The same theme is also clearly shown in Brauer and Vollnhals’ depressing book, which reprints a selection of the secret “assessments” written for the Ministry of Culture about theological literature, all of which required a “Publication Permit” before appearing in print. The determination with which the regime sought to exclude anything which was likely to enhance the church’s reactionary views extended from scholarly texts down to ephemeral up-lifting pamphlets and even to church calendars. Ideological conformity demanded the excision of opinions which, even in a disguised form, attacked the regime’s policies or encouraged Christians to resist the state’s pretentions. Officially the GDR claimed that there was no censorship; in fact, over the forty years of its existence, the regime perfected the art of suppressing unwanted publications on a scale far beyond that practised by the Nazis or any of their predecessors. These “assessments” were written by a limited handful of loyal party members, some of them bureaucrats in the offices dealing with the churches, others by party-line theology professors in Leipzig and Berlin, continually on the watch for “dangerous” infiltrations of ideas opposed to the goal of realising “the atheistic character of Marxism-Leninism as the dominant ideological force in our society”. Since the origins of these “assessments” were never revealed to the publisher or to the authors, they were unable to reply, but had to accept the demands for changes, or face having their books turned down. This happened often enough, or else entailed lengthy delays before some compromise could be reached. Even the addresses and sermons of the Presiding Bishop Schonherr were delayed for two years on these grounds. While the bureaucrats objected to anything which might be interpreted as critical of the regimes’ practices, the party-line theologians took issue with any presentation of Christianity which contradicted party ideology. Even though in the 1980s the system became more relaxed, these secret critics adhered right up to 1989 to the idea that the churches were doomed to die out, and hence nothing should appear in print which suggested the contrary. As the editors point out in their useful and lengthy introduction, this continued censorship had a profoundly depressing effect on any creative scholarship. The censors’ zealotry, their familiarity with theological terminology, and their awareness of developments within the churches, made their obscurantist efficiency all the more sinister.

The lengths to which this censorship could go are clearly demonstrated in the case-studies provided, to which the editors append a short commentary on the eventual results. These detailed demands for revisions or excisions before publication could be allowed, even for books written by west German authors, undoubtedly had a disillusioning impact. But it was only a small part of the regime’s determination to impose ideological conformity. It is hardly surprising that the editors can show that these same bigoted theologians and pastors were not only being paid for their censorship efforts, but were for the most part also unofficial collaborators of the Stasi assisting in its all-pervasive surveillance activities. To be sure, after 1990, these men and women were quickly removed from the scene. But the damage they inflicted on the life of the churches, and the discredit they caused to the institutions they alleged served, remains a horrendous legacy to be resolved by the battered survivors. John S.Conway

Best wishes

John Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

July 1996 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter no. 19 (Vol II, no. 7) – July 1996

1. Forthcoming conference: Kirkliche Zeitgeschichte

2. Works in progress

3. New Books: The Bickersteth Diaries 1914-1918, introduction by John Terraine, ed. John Bickersteth, Leo Cooper, London 1995, 332 pp. Reviewed by John S. Conway.

Dear Friends,

Despite the onset of the northern hemisphere’s summer vacations, and the delay in promised contributions (DB:NB), I am hoping to keep in touch with you all, and that you will continue to find these Newsletters of interest. I will be very glad to have your news and views to pass around.

Forthcoming conference:

Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte (Prof. Gerhard Besier, Heidelberg) in conjunction with the Bundeszentrale fuer Politische Bildung is organizing its 1996 conference to be held in Heidelberg on November 1-3. The subject will be: Civil War and Religion. The Churches’ and Denominations’ Role in Europe’s Ethnic, Economic and Political Conflicts.

Works in progress:

Mrs. Heike Kreutzer, Bonn, is writing her thesis under the direction of Prof.Anselm-Duehring (Tuebingen) on the personnel of the Reich Kirchenministerium, and making use of the remaining files which were for so long inaccessible in the G.D.R. Her main topics will concern the tactics of Hanns Kerrl and his staff, their struggles with the Nazi bureaucracy, especially the Gestapo and the Parteikanzlei, and the legal and financial policies imposed on the churches. Richard Wiggers, Georgetown U,Virginia, is working on the career of Bishop (later Cardinal) Aloisius Muench and his 1946 appointment as Papal Visitator to Germany, and examining the records in the USA, Germany and Rome in order to describe the remarkable and unprecedented experience of this hitherto unknown American bishop when he was in fact fulfilling the office of Papal Nuncio. His somewhat chequered career throws light on the difficulties he met in dealing both with the Vatican and the American occupation authorities, due certainly to his lack of diplomatic experience, and the conflicting interests of the various hierarchies involved.

Bob Ericksen and Susannah Heschel are collaborating on a book of essays dealing with Christian-Jewish relations during and after the Nazi era, which is nearing completion this summer..

Chris Clark (St Catherine’s College, Cambridge) is giving a short summer school on the career of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and hopes to publish the results in order to give a somewhat more positive appraisal of this flamboyant monarch.

Bob Goeckel, who has spent the last year in Berlin, announces the translation of his book The Lutheran Church and the East German State. He continues to work on the role of the East German CDU and its Kirchenpolitik.

Mark Lindsay (U of Western Australia, Perth) is writing his thesis on the attitude of the German Confessing Church theologians, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, towards Israel, both theologically and politically.

Kevin Spicer (Boston College) is shortly leaving for Germany to continue his research into the German Catholic Church’s response to the Third Reich, which he describes as a “selective resistance”. Richard Weikart (California State U, Stanislaus) has completed a manuscript entitled The Myth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which seeks to show that Bonhoeffer’s theology is incompatible with traditional American evangelical doctrine.

Richard Ruggle, Chaplain, Canadian Forces Base, Camp Borden, Ontario (see address above) has compiled a bibliography of items on German military chaplaincy. He would doubtless be glad to share this, and would appreciate hearing of new items to add. Ronald Webster has been given tenure and promotion at York University, Toronto. Congratulations, Ronald.

New Books:

The Bickersteth Diaries 1914-1918, introduction by John Terraine, ed. John Bickersteth, Leo Cooper, London 1995, 332 pp #21.00

As a sequel to my review of Duff Crerar’s splendid “Padres in No- man’s land”, (Newsletter no 14) I can highly recommend The Bickersteth Diaries 1914-1918. The Bickersteths were, and are, a distinguished Church of England family, liberally decorated with bishops. In 1914 five of the six sons of Canon Sam Bickersteth volunteered for military service, fully persuaded that their fervent patriotism and religion should be dedicated to the nation’s cause by joining the armies in France. Their letters to their parents at home were carefully copied, sent round to the other siblings, and then preserved along with their mother’s comments and newspaper clippings. >From the resulting eleven fat volumes, their nephew, the now retired Bishop of Bath and Wells, has distilled a selection which gives an extraordinarily vivid picture of conditions on the western front, exceptional for the graphic and detailed descriptions, and highly revealing of the changes of mood experienced by this strongly-motivated and well-educated segment of the officer corps. The bulk of the letters were written by Julian, who rushed home from Australia in order to volunteer as a padre to an infantry division, and by his younger brother Burgon, a cavalry officer, who was disillusioned to discover that the cavalry were virtually useless in the mud and shell-holes of the Flanders fields, and not enamoured to be transformed into a machine-gun trooper. Their third brother Morris was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, a tragedy which deeply affected the whole family, despite their Christian conviction that his death was a heroic sacrifice for King and Country. Both Julian and Burgon sought relief in writing extremely lengthy accounts of their lives at the front, obviously as a form of psychological antidote against the increasing ferocity of the war. Even though their letters had to be tailored to the sensitivities of their parents, and the regulations of the army’s censors, they bring out to the full the horror, futility and frustrations felt by the serving soldiers. As such, they recapitulate for the modern reader a picture which has long been familiar, but add significant details, particularly of the padres’ preoccupations, and thus are an enormously valuable contemporary witness.

Step by step as these brothers shared the lives and deaths of so many of their age-group, the clear-cut patriotism of 1914 gives way to an almost despairing war-weariness and to a realization that the sacrifices being made could never be healed. They were too clear- sighted and intelligent to allow their listeners to cling to the romantic crusading views of the early days of war-fervour, even though they still affirmed their view that good would finally prevail. In September 1916, Burgon wrote: “I think that after the war I shall write a book, and in it I shall put everything that is filthy and disgusting and revolting and degrading and terrifying about modern warfare – and hope thereby to do my bit towards preventing another”. In the same month his padre brother Julian wrote: “This war may bring out some of the good qualities in man, but the evil it does is incalculably greater. The whole thing is utterly devilish and the work of all the demons of hell. It will take generations to eradicate the evils done to civilisation by it. I feel that our whole moral outlook is being systematically lowered”.

So too, the brothers came to abandon the prevalent Germanophobia of the initial war years, when they recognised that the ordinary German soldier was undergoing the same futile sacrifices as themselves. By September 1916 Burgon was convinced that “we cannot and we shall not crush Germany; to prolong this idea is to prolong the war to no purpose”. He argues in favour of a ‘status ante bellum’ peace, since “the war has now come to be such a horrible fearful thing that one wonders whether for sheer wickedness it is not worse than the domination of the world by German ideas”. But it was not to be. For two more years the pointless daily slaughter continued, and war-weariness increased. Julian noted in June 1918: “the war becomes more terrible and soul- corroding as month succeeds month. It is now a perpetual round of dull prosaic murder, with one desire in the hearts of all – to keep alive a little longer and to see a speedy end to the business. The men don’t and won’t hate the Germans – they only hate the war, and so it goes on.”

As a padre Julian rightly and quickly recognised that the only respect the Church would gain was for the chaplains to be as closely involved with the front-line troops as possible. He was dismayed by the indifference of the much of the officer corps, and no less by the widespread ignorance of the troops who retained only the vaguest concepts of Christianity from their boyhoods. With his high-church views, Julian sought to offer a fully sacramental religion of consolation, and was indefatigable in organising ritualistic services in makeshift quarters complete with candles and altars and decorations and psalmody. But even he could not obliterate the knowledge that, for so many, these were the last rites. His time was increasingly spent on burial duties, sickenly repetitive and destructive of all his previous efforts. His caring solicitude earned him praise from those he tried to help. But his expectations that the spirit of comradeship found in the trenches, and the doubtless genuine piety of these shell-battered and frightened young men, would lead to a revival of the church after the war were to be sadly disappointed. Too many had died, and those who survived had suffered too much from the brutalizing conditions they had experienced.

Yet, notably, neither man lost his faith. In the post-war period, Julian went on to be a prominent headmaster and Burgon an influential adornment, as Warden of Hart House, of the University of Toronto, where his impact on the young men of the succeeding generation was immense. But, at the same time, when writing home, neither man faced up to the major issue for Christians – how to reconcile the incompatibility of their Christian beliefs with the appalling slaughter in which they were engaged, or the contradictions involved when both Allied and German chaplains were appealing to the same God to grant them victory over the other. In hindsight, we may claim, it was these two basic factors which most discredited Christianity for the survivors, even when they had a high respect for the padres as men. But at the time, as so many writers have recounted before, the stench of blood and the noise of guns, the bleeding bodies and the shattered limbs, the agony of wounded and dying men, were overwhelming in their impact. These diaries serve to recall the pain as well as the dedicated commitment of these two witnesses, as they sought to come to terms with the futility and sacrifices of such a war, and still bear witness to the Church they so loyally served.

John Conway

Last Reel by Andrew Parkin

Could we, for an instant, freeze the frame,
Reverse the long calamitous movie,
Our reeling past,our jabbering history,
To make the martyrs whole, unkindle flame,
And spurning every lethal bid for shame,
Undeclare the wars, undrill each army,
Unfire the guns, uncross each crimson sea,
Undo the wrongs, and then unsay the blame;
O edit out all hate to leave but love!
Could we then splice and roll the human film
Where lovers meet and trust, where laughter lives,
Where we evade the serpent, prize the dove?
There is no censor but the censure earned
From all the demon lessons left unlearned.

With very best wishes

John Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

June 1996 Newsletter

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter no. 18 (Vol II, no. 6) – June 1996

1. Book review: Christopher M.Clark, The Politics of Conversion. Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728-1941, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1995, 340 pp. Reviewed by David Diephouse.

Vancouver, B.C.

Dear Friends,

I apologise for the delay in sending you this month’s Newsletter, due to my absence in Europe for the past three weeks. I hope to catch up to my usual schedule by next month.

New Books:

As before, there are a large number of interesting new works appearing. I hope the following reviews will be of help:

Christopher M.Clark, The Politics of Conversion. Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728-1941, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1995, 340 pp.

Chris Clark’s survey of Protestant missionary endeavours to convert the Jews of Prussia from the eighteenth century to the Nazi era is both erudite and informative. This is essentially a study in missionary attitudes and strategies, being the first to use such archives as those of the Berlin Missionary Society, which fortunately survived their confiscation by the Gestapo in 1941. The Jews themselves, or their communal responses to attempts to convert them are not elucidated. Rather Clark concentrates principally on the non-theological factors which strongly affected this enterprise throughout, and adds thereby substantially to our knowledge of the political climate of Prussian Protestantism and the intense struggles within in its ranks.

During the eighteenth century, mission to the Jews was regarded as an essential, indeed highly significant, obligation by the group of pietists based in Halle under the leadership of Francke and Spener. Their importance in the growth of the Prussian state is well- known. The support of successive Prussian monarchs, both on religious and nation-building grounds, was a vital ingredient in the promotion of their endeavours. Bolstered by chiliastic expectations of mass conversions, the pietists saw this mission as an integral responsibility for Christians, and challenged the long-held Lutheran pessimism on this subject. Spener was notable in realizing the need to make material provision for potential converts, even though this led to accusations of bribery and/or opportunism. These missionaries, however, like their monarchs, believed that the social problems caused by the vagrancy and poverty of the outcast Jews could be overcome if they were trained for useful trades along with conversion. The Church’s missionary imperative could thus be blended with the desire for social integration.

In the nineteenth century, this highly conservative social image was increasingly challenged by the growth of industry, by the spread of liberal ideas, and by the increasing self-confidence of the Jewish community. The missionaries and their aristocratic patrons were thus forced to fight on several fronts. Political emancipation of the Jews came to be an ambiguous programme, since the liberals’ support of individual rights was anathema to the authoritarian state, as can be seen in the various edicts dealing with Prussian Jews. The missionaries naturally continued to believe that conversion to the Christian basis of the state was the most effective way to resolve the “Jewish question”. But the political upheavals of 1848, the growing rationalism within the clergy’s ranks, and the quarrels brought about by the heavy-handed centralization policies of the Prussian royal governance of the churches, all induced a sense of crisis for missions to the Jews. The expectation of a religious revival which would unite all segments of the Prussian nation now became even more illusory and utopian. The rise of a new reformist Judaism, with its strong support for liberal principles, came to be regarded as a most sinister development, and as a threat not only to traditional Jewry but to the Christian state as well.

Another important handicap was the reluctance of the established church structures to participate. Many leading clergymen were suspicious both of the eschatalogical hope and the evangelical activism of the missionaries. Such endeavours were left up to the private voluntary efforts of unregulated societies. The Church itself was hesitant to be committed to the cause – if only because the results were predictably meagre and controversial, due to the Jews’ alleged obduracy. Such traditional religious aversion was only accentuated by the growing secular prejudice against Jews which affected increasing segments of the population.

After 1871, the “Jewish problem” became a central issue in the forging of German national identity. Liberals were disappointed that the Jews were not becoming fully German; conservatives that they were not becoming Christians. Neither camp envisaged a pluralistic solution, nor had they any inclination to foster ideas of philosemitism. The rise of organized antisemitism, the dramatic increase of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, and the birth of the Zionist movement necessitated a re-thinking of the missionaries’ previous strategies. Notable was the revival of academic interest in Jewish studies and Hebrew for mssionary trainees, since, as Franz Delitzsch stated, “the evangelization of Israel was their aim and the study of Judaism was the means”. But even this training did little to counteract the increasingly widespread and academically-propagated perception that the Jews were Germany’s “misfortune”. As for Zionism, while some missionaries saw this project as a desirable prerequisite for the eventual apocalypse, others more percipiently saw it as a secular movement seeking to allow Jews to escape entirely from their divinely-appointed destiny.

From their strongly conservative social perspective, missionaries deplored the spread of unbridled capitalism, which had seemingly been exploited by the Jews. They lamented the resultant corrosive effects of materialism which threatened the integrity of the Christian message and the Christian state. But, while their utterances often overlapped with those of the rising antisemitic tide, missionaries became aware that such diatribes would only make their task harder, both by increasing the general opposition to their goal of conversion, and by strengthening the defensive barriers amongst the Jewish community. Similarly they vigourously opposed the views of such writers as Wilhelm Marr, who was as anti-Christian as he was antisemitic. The missionaries were both appalled and isolated by the increasingly polemic stridency of debates over the “Jewish question”. But because they imbibed the rhetoric of Volk and Nation, and upheld their anti- modernist views of a monolithic Christian state, most missionaries remained ambiguous on the subject of antisemitism.

After 1919 the Protestant missions declined rapidly. Not only did their remedy of conversion appear more and more irrelevant, but the infiltration of voelkisch and racial ideas into the ranks of the Evangelical Church, culminating in the rise of the “German Christian” movement, led to demands for the complete cessation of Jewish missions, and indeed paved the way for their suppression by the Nazis. Only the minority Confessing Church continued to stress the Church’s obligation to offer salvation to all peoples, including the Jews, defended teaching the Old Testament, and justified baptism of sincerely-motivated Jews. But here too, Nazi propaganda had its impact. Neither the Confessing Church nor the Protestant missionary societies mobilized any protests against the Nazi crimes of the Holocaust.

Clark’s book will surely become the definitive study of this lost cause. He remains studiously neutral on the theological merits of this enterprise, but acquits the missionaries of being bigoted agents of the kind of Jew-hatred which culminated in the mass murders of the 1940s. Rather his analysis points to the complex interweaving of theological and racial-ethnic elements which characterized much of the missionary discourse. In fact, however, these men were always too strongly Prussian to be truly philosemites. The absence of any genuine sympathy for Judaism, as could be found elsewhere in Christian circles, was a notable feature of their historical development. Moreover both their eschatological perspective and their regressive social outlook effectively blocked any meaningful relationships either with Jews or more liberal Christians. This was truly a dialogue of the deaf.

John Conway

Rainer Laechele, Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Glaube. Die “Deutschen Christen” in Wuerttemberg 1925-1960. (Quellen und Forschungen zur wuerttembergischen Kirchengeschichte 12) Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1994, 319 pp. DM 44

(Reviewed more extensively in Church History, March 1996)

Rainer Laechele has produced the first detailed regional study of the German Christians to appear since the 1970s. His decision to focus on his native Wuerttemberg is as commendable as it is understandable. With its close-knit clerical caste and vibrant associational sub-cultures, the Protestant church in Wuerttemberg was one of the few major “intact” Landeskirchen of the Nazi era; local German Christians therefore operated perforce within a stable framework of well-established institutional practices and loyalties.

Laechele’s straightforward narrative demonstrates that the shape of the German Christians’ career in Wuerttemberg, from their heyday of activism at the beginning of the Third Reich to their subsequent protracted drift towards fragmentation and marginalization, owed at least as much the dynamics of local church life as to stimuli from Berlin or Thuringia. From the beginning, Laechele argues, the German Christian agenda combined two ultimately incompatible impulses, one rooted in politics and the other in missions. For political activists the paramount aim was to capture the church for the “national revolution”; for the missionary faction it was to reclaim the nation for the church. Attempts to force a full-fledged ecclesiastical Gleichschaltung a la Prussia served primarily to demonstrate how ill attuned political activists were to the actual pulsebeat of parish life. The result was a mass exodus of early supporters and, for those who remained, a choice between re-accommodation in some fashion to traditional church norms or withdrawal into the sectarian confines of a self-proclaimed but effectively apolitical “national church”. Thanks to a cadre of leaders such as the charismatic Stuttgart preacher Georg Schneider, the latter option proved surprisingly durable; splinter groups of German Christians managed to survive well into the Adenauer era.

One of Laechele’s most striking findings is that none of the social historian’s conventional markers, be it age, family background, or even Nazi party membership, reliably distinguishes German Christians from their fellow Protestants. In fact, as his account implies, the Wuerttemberg “church struggle” after 1933 revolved primarily around issues of church order. What set German Christians apart was not so much who they were or what they believed as the fact that their church-political practice threatened established authority structures and flouted time-honoured rules of clerical procedure. Significantly, the major mark of differentiation that Laechele succeeds in identifying – Georg Schneider constitutes a notable case in point – is that German Christian clergy were less likely than their mainstream colleagues to have come to ordination by way of the time-honoured Wuerttemberg system of preparatory seminaries and the Tuebingen Stift, suggesting that the individuals in question may have been marginally less influenced than the majority by traditional forms of occupational socialization.

While Laechele clearly abhors the theological and political commitments of his subjects, he refuses to demonize them as “heretics or fascists” (p.4), pointing out that in many respects they were unexceptional indeed. His account thereby calls attention to strengths as well as weaknesses in the Volkskirche tradition; on the one hand a healthy measure of pastoral flexibility, on the other a lack of clear theological definition and a dangerous susceptibility to the idolatry of state and nation. In presenting the German Christian project as a case of Protestant syncretism that both antedates and considerably outlived the Third Reich, Laechele reinforces many of the findings of fellow Arbeitsgemeinschaftler Doris Bergen in her recent study of the movement as a whole (Reviewed in Newsletter #15). The two books in fact complement each other nicely – and their conclusions resonate well beyond the narrow confines of Kirchenkampf historiography.

David Diephouse.

With every best wish

John Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

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