Author Archives: Manfred Gailus

A Past that Will Not Pass Away: A Contribution to the 850th Anniversary of the Brandenburg Cathedral

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

A Past that Will Not Pass Away: A Contribution to the 850th Anniversary of the Brandenburg Cathedral

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

The following article was adapted from a public lecture concerning the 850th anniversary of the Brandenburg Cathedral and is used by permission of the author. Our thanks to John S. Conway, University of British Columbia, for his translation and abridgment of Manfred Gailus’ text.

Brandenburg’s 850 year old cathedral, dedicated to St Peter and St Paul, is a noted historic site, picturesquely and sedately situated on the banks of the Havel River. But eighty years ago, it was the scene of a very different celebration. Shortly after the general election of 5 March 1933 there was a rambunctious parade in the Cathedral Square led by Nazi Party units, including veterans’ formations and the SA, as they paraded to celebrate Hitler’s victories and his coming to power in Germany. They were addressed by Dr. Ludwig Ziehen, the Principal of the Cathedral School (“Ritterakademie”), who gave a speech in which he celebrated the “liberation of Brandenburg by the forces of the nationalist movement” and thanked everyone who had helped to bring this about. At the same time, he expressed the hope that the “brave national flags” (including the swastika) would never disappear from Brandenburg’s flagpoles, and called for three Nazi cheers before the marchers dispersed back to the city centre.

Ludwig Ziehen was to play a crucial role in Brandenburg’s fortunes during this period. He had served as Principal of the Cathedral School since 1916 and was also chairman of the Cathedral Chapter (“Domkapitel”), which included laymen. As early as 1923 he had created a club of extreme right-wing sympathizers and after 1930 had emerged as a leading campaigner for the Nazi Party. Officially he joined the Party in November 1932, and in March 1933 was their leading candidate in municipal elections. In the following month he became chairman of the Brandenburg city council. One of the first actions it took under his leadership was to proclaim President Hindenburg and Adolf Hitler to be honorary citizens of Brandenburg. The session closed with the singing of the national anthem and the popular Nazi Horst Wessel song. Those socialist members of the council who had refused to stand for this song were escorted by SA marshals from the room and beaten up outside.

Ludwig Ziehen was thus a prominent political figure and at the same time manager of the Cathedral’s religious and business affairs. The Cathedral had over the centuries accumulated a great number of valuable pieces of property, including the renowned school, so that the legal position had become confused and complicated. In 1930 the responsible Ministry in the Prussian state government had issued a new constitution, which established a legally-recognized Foundation, which transferred authority from the clergy and placed it under the regional secular authority. The former Cathedral Chapter was then dissolved.

The Cathedral’s congregation was quite small, around 1000 members. In the July 1933 church elections, the overwhelming majority decided for the so-called “German Christians” who eagerly supported the Nazis’ ideology, and sought to combine this with their Lutheran inheritance. They then claimed 80 percent of the seats on the church council, and were vocal in support of their ideas. But this group was not given the authority to make appointments to the cathedral’s clerical staffing, which still rested with higher levels of the state and church administrations. The result was that, for several years, the question of new clergy appointments led to continuing problems, especially after one of the senior ministers, Superindendent Schott, decided to retire in 1934. Ziehen was one of those who complained that the seemingly endless controversies about who should be appointed in his place was unworthy of so distinguished and historic a parish as the Brandenburg Cathedral. In fact, in 1936, a provisional appointment was made of Reverend Bruno Adler. But he was one of the more extreme “German Christians”, who had already become notorious as a Nazi sympathizer in Westphalia and had even been made Bishop in Münster. But his rigid and domineering behavior there had made his position impossible.

In 1935-36 a new chapter opened, largely due to the actions of the new Reich Minister for Church Affairs, Hanns Kerrl. A new Cathedral Chapter was selected with retired naval officer, Adolf von Trotha, as chairman. He was known as a staunch opponent of the previous democratic governments, and in 1933 was chosen by the Nazi authorities to be a member of the distinguished Prussian State Council. In 1939 he wrote his own profession of faith, which included the statement: “I believe that Jesus Christ had fully cut his ties to the Jewish people. He told the Jews the truth, and they cast it back in his teeth and rejected him.” Amongst the other appointments to the Cathedral Chapter were Provost Konrad Jenetzky, a leading “German Christian” from Silesia, and the prominent “German Christian” pastor in Berlin and temporarily Bishop in Magdeburg, Friedrich Peter. The Church Ministry had tried to give Peter a leading position in the Berlin Cathedral, but the church council there had refused to accept him. So they obliged the Brandenburg Cathedral to give him a position, along with the local leader of the Nazi Party, Karl Scholze, who had already joined the Party in 1930 and was employed full-time in propagating the Party’s cause. In fact, because of the outbreak of war, only Ziehen was permanently present in Brandenburg, but was himself – as a member of the Cathedral Chapter – fully engaged in managing Cathedral affairs. In the Cathedral School, numerous festivities celebrated the Nazi Party’s achievements, including listening to the radio speeches of Nazi leaders such as the Propaganda Minister Goebbels and singing the praises of the Reich Youth leader Baldur von Schirach.

The war-time circumstances and the lack of clergy made for more difficulties. After Bishop Bruno Adler left in 1940, Ziehen was obliged to write to the regional church administration, because “for the last six months we have had no clergy available. Church attendance threatens to become depleted. This is a deplorable result of the previous squabbles.” Finally in April 1942 a young pastor, Dr. Rudolf Biedermann from Pomerania, was called to join the Cathedral. Ziehen assured his colleagues that he had found Biedermann to be filled with a true National Socialist spirit, and that he would rely not only on the Bible and his Protestant heritage, but also on his “loyalty to the Führer of the German people”.

An extensive correspondence between Ziehen and the various members of the Cathedral Chapter who were serving in the army gives a good impression of their attitudes during the period of hostilities. For instance, Bishop Peter was engaged for two years in the blockade of Leningrad, during which over a million civilians died of starvation and cold. His letters from the front showed him as still believing in eventual victory, with a loyal greeting to the Führer and “Heil Hitler”. But after the downturn in Germany’s military fortunes at the end of 1942, a change of tone occurs. Ziehen even expressed a sense of distance in his attitude towards the regime. He could no longer accept the over-optimistic forecasts put out by the Propaganda Ministry. But of course these doubts could not be expressed in public: that was – he conceded – much too dangerous a topic.

The end of the war was also a difficult and dangerous time for the Cathedral. The synthesis of Nazi Party ideology and Christian belief which had been so eagerly pursued since 1933 was now falling apart. In the end, Ziehen’s biography seems rather tragic as though he was involved in a Götterdämmerung leading to a fatal ending over which he had no control. But no one was prepared to admit that the whole experience of nazification since 1933 was a ghastly error. Now – 70 years after the end of the war and 25 years after Germany’s reunification – this would seem an appropriate time to reflect on these events.

A Crusade, a Holy War: Protestant Preaching in War-time, 1914.

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

A Crusade, a Holy War: Protestant Preaching in War-time, 1914.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

This article is based on “Ein Gott, der Fahnen entrollt,” zeitzeichen: Evangelische Kommentare zu Religion und Gesellschaft, 7 July 2014, available at http://www.zeitzeichen.net/schwerpunkt/fruehere-schwerpunkte/kirchen-und-1-weltkrieg/ . Our thanks to John S. Conway for his translation of Manfred Gailus’ text.

For the Berlin Court and Cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring, preaching to a large crowd from the steps of the Reichstag in a spontaneous service on 2 August 1914 was the high point of his life. The war had hardly got underway, but Doehring expressed in his inflammatory address all the main themes of Protestant war theology. This war, he told the crowd, had been forced on Germany. As a result, this could be seen as a perfectly justified war of defense against a conspiracy of surrounding enemies.

Yes, if we didn’t have justice and a clear conscience on our side, if we didn’t feel – I should almost say implicitly – God’s presence, which encompasses our flags and leads our Kaiser to take up his sword and call for a crusade and a holy war, then we should be shaking in our shoes with timidity. But now we will boldly give a defiant answer, one which is the most German of all: We Germans fear God, and nothing else in the world.

This patriotic war-time euphoria which gripped so many Germans in the late summer of 1914 was accompanied by a wave of religious enthusiasm. In the church the heightened sense of comradeship brought about by the events of August was seen as the beginning of a new era. The outbreak of war was enthusiastically greeted by many Protestants (and hardly less by many Catholics). The war raised the level of religious fervor and was theologically justified as a “holy war” or “righteous war” undertaken by Christian Germany against an imagined world of enemies, consisting of sinners or heathen or godless barbarians. Pastors, theological professors and publicists all took this historic moment to be a clear signal from God calling the people back to faith and the church from the allurements of faithlessness.

On 11 August 1914, the leaders of the Prussian Protestant Church, which was by far the largest in the country, issued the following declaration: “Seemingly lifeless signs of faith are awakening once more….The fields are white and ripe for a spiritual harvest.” But what did these leaders mean by conjuring up this somewhat questionable image? Clearly they could expect a great deal of suffering, death and distress, which would lead to a new and more realistic sense of the need to take life seriously. This would put an end to the too long period of peace since 1870-71 which had induced indifference and a frivolous superficiality of life. Now the need for faith, the church, communion, pastoral care and prayer would once more be recognized.

Early reports in the first days and weeks of the war seemed to confirm such expectations. Years later, Pastor Paul Vetter, in Berlin Friedenau, recalled almost nostalgically the enthusiasms of those late summer days. On 5 August, in response to an edict sent out by the Kaiser ordering a “day of prayer in war-time,” his church was almost overwhelmed by the number of those who wanted to participate.

At first we planned to have an overflow evening service, then an extra early morning service. In fact we had to have five services. When the church was filled up by 10 a.m. the parishioners got the off-duty pastors to leave their studies and hold an extra service in the parish hall, and even to have the children’s room opened up, because everyone was so eager to have the chance of hearing God’s word. And this continued Sunday by Sunday, even though we organized every evening special war-time prayer services.

The desire to take part in communion services was enormous. Quite often there would be a spontaneous request to have a special communion service if a sudden command to march off was ordered. Or someone would knock on the church office door and call out: “Pastor, I can’t stay for the communion service. But please give me a comforting word to live and die by.” Young couples now sought to have a church war-time wedding, including quite a number who had already been married by a civil rite and who now “because of the shattering seriousness of the outbreak of the war wanted to have God’s blessing for their union and for the baptism of their children, which for so long they had neglected or despised.”

The Protestant churches put all their spiritual and material resources behind the war effort. There was even talk of a spiritual mobilization campaign. As evidence of this hugely patriotic enthusiasm, we can point to the petition signed by 172 Berlin pastors in which they protested against the clergy’s exclusion from active military service, and sought to obtain permission to have the honor, like other professions, of defending their country in the front lines. But in general this strongly expressed desire to take up arms was rejected by the church bureaucrats. Only young ordinands were allowed to volunteer their services, i.e. those who were not yet fully established or had families. Pastors in office were to stay there and serve the cause on the home front. They were called as preachers, pastors and publicists to advance the nation’s collective cause by upholding the people’s patriotism, readiness to sacrifice, and maintaining confidence in the final victory. If pastors were called up, they would be serving as chaplains or ambulance workers, i.e. not with weapons. And in fact, during the course of the war approximately 1400 pastors were posted as chaplains.

On the home front, the pastors’ contributions consisted mainly of highly morale-boosting services, with special “war sermons” or “prayers in time of war”, which were often held every evening. Later on, a carefully organized system of pastoral care was developed through letters sent to the soldiers at the front, which brought greetings from home as well as uplifting spiritual messages. On top of this, a service for sending parcels was arranged to bring the soldiers gifts from loved ones. At the same time, the pastors were keen to demonstrate their care for the families affected by the war, and especially for the war widows. Finally we should note the very considerable financial support given by churches, church organizations or well-endowed parishioners to the government-sponsored War Loans, as well as the numerous occasions on which parishes donated their church bells to be melted down for the war effort.

War sermons were very much in demand, and became the hall-mark of Protestant responses to the outbreak of the war. Pastor Ferdinand Vogel was one of those who had taken his wife to join the crowds rejoicing on the main street Unter der Linden on the evening of July 31. In his memoirs, he made a point of describing the scene, and then on August 23 he had preached his first war-time sermon in the Sophia Church on the text of Romans 8. 31-9, with the stirring words: “If God be for us, who can be against us?” This was the spirit, the pastor claimed, which prevailed throughout the country in those weeks.

Of course the number of those who are against us is not small. Not only in Europe, but even in Japan, an island nation in far east Asia, there are those who hate us or are envious. So we won’t be surprised if others also join in. But we have Luther’s great hymn to comfort us: ‘A mighty fortress is our God’, which is so appropriately used by our congregations in this time of war.

At the same time, in contrast to many other pastors, Vogel did not allow himself to overly indulge in patriotic rhetoric, since his sermon also included prudent passages calling for circumspection. “What right do we have as a people, he asked his parishioners, to claim that God is on our side? Why should we expect God to be with us, and not with those who oppose us? Of course we know that God deals not just with individuals but also with the destinies of whole peoples. Up to now God has given the Germans a great deal of support with which to build up his Kingdom. Look at Luther’s deeply spiritual powers of belief, the lofty flights of thoughts which are to be found in Schiller and Kant, or the depth of commitment to our people as seen in Bismarck or the old Kaiser, which they turned into legislated steps for social improvements. Yes, God has indeed called the German people to a great and glorious destiny.”

Very frequently these pastors referred in their sermons to the heroic spirit of the “Wars of Liberation” against Napoleon a hundred years earlier. The significant difference was that in 1914-18 it was not German territory which was occupied by foreign troops, but rather that all the most important theatres of war lay outside Germany’s borders. This fact was ignored in the fervor of patriotic enthusiasm. One of those in the forefront of jingoistic preachers was Bruno Doehring, already mentioned above, and his various colleagues in the Berlin Cathedral. He was born in 1879 in Mohrungen in East Prussia, the son of a farmer. In 1914 as a young pastor he was promoted by the Kaiser to be a Court and Cathedral Preacher. During the war, and because of it, this young and hitherto unknown country pastor became one of the best known preachers in the nation’s capital. His sermons were printed with large circulations. The titles of his collected war-time sermons say it all: A Mighty Fortress. Sermons from a Testing Time (1915), Religion on the Battlefield. Impressions and Reflections (1916), and God and the Germans. Thoughts for the Present Day (1917). Particularly notable was his sermon of 15 April 1917 when he preached to a congregation of between two and three thousand people in the Cathedral. The original enthusiasm of August 1914 for a quick victory had been replaced by a disillusioned sober assessment of the war’s experiences. Great controversy was raging about Germany’s war aims and about possible negotiations for peace. “Our enemies,” so Doehring claimed, “are trying to shatter our innermost faith and trust in God for our mission. But Germany will never capitulate, even when we fall in heroic sacrifice for our nation. If Christ dwells in our people, then even if we are murdered as the Jews murdered Jesus, then a new faith in Germany will arise from our graves.” Indeed, in his address Doehring painted a picture of the German people as a redemptive force, whose nearness to God had given them the mission of calling a lost world back to God.

What other people could undertake this task to save the world from the chaos around them? There can be no doubt that only a strong and courageous people can do this. So we must remain united and be led by men filled with God’s spirit. We have got to find those courageous elements who demonstrate exactly the opposite from the materialist-minded English, or the blindly hateful French, or the violence-loving Russians, or the treacherous Italians, or the bestial Rumanians, let alone the mendacious and greedy followers of the so-called mighty American dollar.

Doehring appealed to his hearers to remain strong in their faith and love, since God still had great things in hand for Germany and the Germans. In fact the tone of this sermon presaged the party line of the Fatherland Party which was to spring up a few months later, and which campaigned with fanatical zeal for the retention of all annexations in a truly imperialistic confidence of eventual victory.

This was the prevailing tone of war sermons. Only a few pastors adopted a more peaceful line. Amongst these men were the five Berlin pastors—Karl Aner, Walter Nithack-Stahn, Otto Pless, Friedrich Rittelmeyer and Rudolf Wieland—who in October 1917 issued a declaration in support of the Peace Resolutions passed by the majority of the Reichstag in July 1917. In view of what they called the “catastrophic consequences of war” they called on all Christians to reject the idea of using war as a means of settling international disputes, and instead to campaign for peace. The great majority of their clerical colleagues found such ideas to be outrageous. They immediately drafted up a counter-blast, which was signed by 160 of the capital’s pastors . “There are only two things in store for Germany: victory or defeat. Once we have achieved victory, that will be the time to show the English and French that we are ready to practice reconciliation. But in the meantime we are still entitled in the sight of God and man to righteous anger against our enemies. And therefore we will hold off from any offers of reconciliation until the enemy is defeated and ourselves and our children have secured peace and freedom.”

Such was the prevailing tone amongst these pastors in the fourth year of the war. Anyone who did not subscribe to such a view of the need for victory was quickly accused of being un-Protestant, even un-German. And it was this tone of unyielding militancy which could be seen in the founding of the Fatherland Party on the anniversary of Germany’s victory at Sedan on 2 September 1917. Numerous pastors, even some complete synods, church organizations and clubs were quick to join. And it is easy enough to trace a direct line between this kind of nationalist-conservative mentalities to the later German National People’s Party of the Weimar Republic, or to the militia groups and the subsequent radical nationalist associations such as the Stahlhelm and other supporters of the new Nazi Party in the post-war years.

“The fields are white and ready for a spiritual harvest” was the joyful proclamation made by the Prussian Protestant Church Council when war was declared. But at the end of the war many branches of the Protestant Churches experienced a collective spiritual collapse. Defeat had brought to an end the 500 years of Hohenzollern rule. And the subsequent democratic revolutions of 1918-19 seemed to be wholly disastrous. Many shattered people wanted to know from their pastors how God could have allowed this to happen. The pastor of the Good Shepherd Church in Friedenau, who had recorded the throngs coming to church in August 1914, was now obliged to deal with his own reservations about preaching at the end of the war in 1918. “The question, what should I preach about, seemed so easy and yet was so difficult, all the more because the nation’s defeat was so sudden after we had put so much effort into maintaining hope and trust.” The end of the war raised agonizing questions amongst the members of the congregations about God’s righteousness, which were not easily answered in either sermons or pastoral counseling.

The young Court and Cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring, already prominent for his fanatical war sermons, now at the end of the war became one of the significant propagators of the so-called “stab-in-the-back” theory. This attributed Germany’s defeat not only to the military superiority of their known enemies on the battle fields, but also to the decisive contribution of those treacherous and secretive elements who had betrayed Germany at home. The only way to regain Germany’s political resurrection would be to return to those values which had made Germany great, namely God, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther, Bismarck and Adolf Stoecker. It was in this sense that Doehring was to use his position as a political preacher and to combat Germany’s new and first democratic experiment in the years that lay ahead.

Comment by John Conway:

But what could the pastors say? They held a position of authority and stature in the parish, and were easily accessible. They were supposed to provide not only personal moral uplift to individuals but to nourish the parish’s corporate loyalty to the state. In any case, they lacked the knowledge or the capacity to be critical of the nation’s political or military leaders. The pastors’ conservative milieu, their nationalist sympathies and their loyalty to their God-given Emperor all induced them to play the expected role of spiritually equipping their parishioners for war. To have uttered a dissenting voice against the widespread feelings of the majority would have evoked tremendous resentment or even hostility. No pastor, even today, wants to play that role. To be sure, their readiness to predict Germany’s imminent victory, or to ascribe this to divine approval, or to demonize Germany’s enemies as agents of Satan, were regrettable features, which for the most part were replaced by more appropriate lamentations. But the inevitable conflation and contradiction of political and pastoral claims in war-time needs to be reckoned with. After all, I can myself recall that in September 1939 we all went to church to pray for God’s guidance and protection for our armed forces. And Bob Dylan surely expressed a widespread opinion when he wrote:

The First World War, boys

It came and it went

The reason for fighting I never did get

But I learned to accept it

Accept it with pride,

For you don’t count the dead

When God’s on your side.

In Remembrance: Ernst Klee (1942-2013)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

In Remembrance: Ernst Klee (1942-2013)

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

Ernst Klee, who died in May of last year, was a redoubtable investigative journalist and a noted non-academic historian whose publications did much to expose some of the darker side of National Socialism and its crimes. Originally he studied to be a social worker, and during the 1970s did much to support the lost and homeless inhabitants of his home town Frankfurt, particularly the mentally ill, the handicapped and those suffering from discrimination. But in the 1980s he became well known for his numerous books and newspaper articles about the scandals of the Nazi doctors, especially those involved with the so-called euthanasia programmes, as well as about the Nazi lawyers and what became of them later. He also published a number of items which revealed striking findings about the misdeeds and complicity of church officials and parishioners. The publicity he gained naturally made him enemies among these doctors, lawyers and clergymen in post-1945 Germany. But he persevered in exposing the former compromised careers of many prominent members of the Federal Republic. The number of his books is remarkable. Twenty-five of them were published by the well-known S. Fischer Publishing House. And in 1989 his sharp attack on the churches’ attitudes after 1933 appeared under the title: Jesus Christ’s Storm Troopers: The Churches under Hitler’s Thumb (Die SA Jesu Christi: Die Kirchen im Banne Hitlers). In the book’s foreword, the author was quick to note that “this is not an attack on the church, to which I myself still belong. The Church was not alone in its apostasy. But nowhere else was the hypocrisy so evident of on the one hand claiming to uphold the cause of the poor and weakest in society, while on the other hand in fact abandoning them for the sake of clinging to their own positions of power.”

Particularly notable was Klee’s wide-ranging Encyclopedia of People in the Third Reich. Who Was What Before and After 1945? (Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945?). This 750 page volume first appeared in 2003, containing the biographies of 4300 individuals from all sections of German society. In many cases this was the first time the wider public learnt about the activities of some leading figures of the Nazi era and their subsequent careers. Even today these revelations continue to surprise many people, since the individuals concerned have taken great pains to conceal their previous political sympathies or actions. Shortly before his death, Klee was able to finish his last book, published in the autumn of 2013, The Auschwitz Perpetrators and Accomplices, and What Became of Them (Auschwitz: Täter, Gehilfen, Opfer und was aus ihnen wurde: ein Personenlexikon).

It was only to be expected that Klee should have aroused much opposition by his forthright and uncompromising pursuit of truth. On the other hand he was honoured and admired for his dedication, and awarded tributes such as the Family Scholl Prize in 1997 and the Goethe Medallion given by the City of Frankfurt in 2001. Walther H. Pehle, a long-time friend and the reader for the S. Fischer Publishing House, praised him as “an outstanding journalist and significant historian of the Nazi period, whose courageous and innovative investigations were a most valuable contribution towards an adequate knowledge of those dark days.”

Review of Thomas Grossbölting, Der verlorene Himmel. Glaube in Deutschland seit 1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

Review of Thomas Grossbölting, Der verlorene Himmel. Glaube in Deutschland seit 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), Pp. 320.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

This review appeared originally (in German) in Der Taggespiegel (1 July 2013). Our thanks to John S. Conway for his translation. The original can be found here: http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/land-ohne-himmel/8426976.html

What do Germans today still believe in and how? Can we still talk of this being a “Christian country”?

GrossboeltingVerlorene Thomas Grossbölting, who teaches at the University of Münster, poses these questions and puts them in the context of faith, church and religion after the catastrophe of National Socialism in Germany. This well researched study can be seen as the first up-to-date history of religion in the Federal Republic of Germany. His basic thesis is clear and hardly surprising. Anyone examining how and what Germans have believed in the past fifty years has to take note of a striking decline in the significance of religious consciousness. Although, in recent years, some observers have claimed that there has been a so-called religious revival, in fact anyone taking a longer view over the past five or six decades must conclude that a far-reaching secularization has taken place. The very idea of Heaven has been lost. As the author crucially points out in his introduction: “A Christian Germany no longer exists”. On the other hand, the elements of faith, church and religion have not disappeared from daily life in Germany. Rather they have been thinned out, pushed to the edge of society, and in many people’s lives they are completely or largely absent.

Grossbölting describes this transformation in religious life as taking place in three stages, to each of which he devotes an appropriate chapter. Firstly, there were the immediate post-war years, the so-called Adenauer era, when the old established Christian world still seemed to be at least partially in order, but which now looks really archaic. There followed the Swinging Sixties when the younger generation with their Beatles, their mini-skirts, their love of Karl Marx, and their rebellious behaviour in 1968, constituted a revolutionary change in life-styles. This was a turbulent period which saw a striking abandonment of religious customs and traditions. Finally, in the most recent decades, we have seen a further lessening of the ecclesiastical structures in both the major churches which used to possess a religious monopoly. Today the country is increasingly taking on the character of a multi-religious society. Amongst the most notable features in the religious statistics of this latest phase are the unstoppable growth of “non-confessionalists’, as well as the increase in the portion of the population which adheres to Islam, and the numerous colourful but often short-lived new religious movements. “From Church to Choice” may be an appropriate slogan for these dramatic changes, whereby individuals move from inherited church-going patterns to personal choices of faith and denomination.

The reader will surely be able to evaluate the main lines of this well-researched and convincingly argued study. But the author’s Catholic perspective should not be forgotten, which leads him to overlook certain scandalous aspects in the Catholic milieu. It is hardly justifiable that such a notable critic as Rolf Hochhuth, whose drama “The Deputy” aroused such a stir in the 1960s, should be ignored. And in fact this study concentrates primarily on West Germany, so that the religious developments in East Germany are cursorily treated at the end of the volume. Furthermore, the author’s treatment of the long shadow of National Socialism and the churches’ problematic responses during the Nazi era from 1933 to 1945 is too abridged. This experience was a fateful epoch whose repercussions in the post-war world were, and to some extent still are, a dire legacy. But, at the same time, this attempt to give us a religious history of Germany since 1945 can be seen as a successful and well-informed survey.

Crosses and Swastikas

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Crosses and Swastikas

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

The following article was written to commemorate the 80^th anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power. It was published in Der Tagesspiegel on February 2, 2013. The original can be viewed at http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/kreuze-und-hakenkreuze/7722926.html. Translation from German by John S. Conway.

Nazi flags on the altars, Nazi songs in the pews, Nazi greetings at the church doors—this was the scene in “German Christian” churches in 1933. Eighty years later, the Church is still shying away from facing up to this fateful and heretical perversion.

Many churchmen were only too glad to see a “national Saviour” rise to power. They encouraged and applauded this belief, wherever it might lead. This was not just a handful of misguided bigots, but churchmen of all shades, men of faith and pillars of the Church.

One of them was Pastor Bruno Marquardt, pastor in the Friedenau parish of Berlin. For him, 1933 was the “year of greatness” when Adolf Hitler came to power and changed the country into a dictatorship. For him, it was a year when Germany regained its lost heroic qualities. Instead of being discriminated against as a downtrodden nation, Germany was once again able to hold its head high. “The proud heroism of these men—from the Führer to the least SA-man—who have campaigned for the soul of the people during the years of degradation and shame, who have committed every ounce of their life and blood for a new Germany, this proud heroism has finally won in the ‘victory for faith.’” Despite all the malignancy and devilry of the years before 1933, so the Pastor thought, “this new national revival has shown that the German soul has not been broken, but is now embarking on a new intensification of faith.”

Many other pastors thought the same during the exciting events during this “turning point of history.” And so naturally did a great many of their parishioners. In Berlin, the nation’s capital, the Protestant churches were overwhelmed by a newly established movement, calling itself “The Faith Movement of German Christians.” For instance, four days after Hitler came to power, a special service of celebration and thanksgiving was held in the packed church of St Mary, one of Berlin’s most historic sanctuaries in the city centre. Pastor Joachim Hossenfelder of Christ Church, Kreuzberg, the leader of these “German Christians,” preached on 1 Corinthians 15: 57: “Thanks be to God, who has given us this victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” He praised President Hindenburg for choosing the best possible person to lead the country and its new government. Hossenfelder even went so far as to characterize the new Chancellor, who was by birth a Roman Catholic, as “one of a kind, forged from purity, piety, energy and strength of character—our Adolf Hitler.”

Only a few days later, on 5 February, the “German Christians” were given permission to hold a funeral service in the Berlin Cathedral. This was to say farewell to a murdered SA-leader Hans-Eberhard Maikowski, one of the notorious gang of SA rowdies in the Berlin back streets. Together with a policeman, he had been shot during a SA demonstration on 30 January in Charlottenburg. For this funeral requiem not only did Adolf Hitler himself appear, but also Marshal Hermann Goering, numerous SA and SS leaders, as well as the Crown Prince of the exiled Hohenzollern family, and many German Christian pastors in full ceremonial vestments. Once again Pastor Hossenfelder preached. He spoke of the “great grey army” in the beyond who were, ”maintaining a watchful guard in heaven.” Standing by the coffin placed in front of the altar, he proclaimed: “You were one of the best. Your coffin is draped with the swastika flag, and in the first row sits our supreme leader, Adolf Hitler. So to say goodbye, we sing the beloved old military song: ‘When the seed is so fine, then the harvest will be abundant and golden.’”

In the course of the year 1933, hardly any of Berlin’s Protestant churches remained free from such Memorial, Thanksgiving or Jubilee celebrations. There were indeed plenty of opportunities. In March, Remembrance Services were held for the fallen, in April the Führer’s birthday was celebrated, on 2 July, special Thanksgiving services were organized for the “National Revival,” in October Harvest Festivals were turned into celebrations of “Blood and Earth,” and in November the same themes were noted to mark Martin Luther’s 450th birthday. The spill-over from such ceremonies was all too frequently reflected in the Sunday worship services.

In the short week between the Nazi-organized boycott of Jewish shops on 1 April and the passage of the new law banning Jews from the civil service on 7 April, the “German Christians” held their first national assembly in the Prussian House of Lords. Pastor Siegfried Nobiling of Friedenau gave the key-note address on the topic of “Church Leadership,” and pleaded for the creation of a new generation of theologians who would be fully committed to the values of “family, clan, race and nation.” Anyone who did not recognize these categories as God’s holy creation should not be admitted to the ordained clergy ranks. No “Jew or part-Jew” should be allowed to hold the honorable office of pastor or leader in the congregation. Pastor Karl Themel of the Luisenstadt Parish called for the “annihilation of the atheist movement.” All Christians should welcome the clean-up measures taken by the state. And he saw the “German Christian” parishes as “healthy cells in the sick body of the German people.”

These sentiments were to be long-lasting. Even though the “German Christian Movement” fell apart into separate rival factions after 1936-7 and disappeared almost without trace after 1945, yet the Berlin Churches in the post-war world, despite all the damage they had suffered, and the years they had been caught up in a Cold War situation, still now decades later have shown little willingness to come to terms with this Nazi legacy.

It was only very late, namely in the era when Wolfgang Huber was Bishop, that the process of re-examining the past begin. But even now, in most recent times, one frequently meets the sentiment in church circles: “Enough is enough!” So, for example, the now richly established Theological Faculty at the Humboldt University in the twenty years since the overthrow of the Communist regime has done almost nothing to deal with the record of the Berlin churches’ Nazi past, or with its own appalling theologies of that era. It is also notable that the Berlin Protestant Academy, one of the notable public affairs institutions, does not include any such topic as the performance of Berlin churches during the Nazi period in its 2013 programme. One would think that 80 years after 1933 would be a highly suitable time to take stock, and particularly to ask: how could the Christian churches have been so blind, or allowed such blatant Nazi propaganda to be proclaimed from their pulpits?

In 1933 the churches were often fuller than ever before. The services often became spectacular ceremonies. For example, on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday on 20 April, one local Nazi Party group and two SA formations marched to the Stephen Church in the Wedding district. Pastor Walter Aner preached on 1 John 5:4: “His is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” At the end of the service, many of the congregation were deeply stirred when prayers of remembrance were made for those who “following in the ranks of the Führer had died for the rebirth of our nation and people,” while in the background the organ quietly played Nazi “hymns.” In this parish no fewer than 17 of the Church Elders, all four pastors, and most of the church officials, the parish nurses and care-givers, all joined the “German Christian Movement.”

The question has to be asked: was this astonishing perversion shared by all Protestants in 1933? The answer is: not all, but very many. On 23 July, new elections were decreed for the representative church bodies which had been dissolved by command of the fanatical Nazi Commissar August Jäger. Only two lists of candidates were put up, one for the “German Christians” and one for the “Gospel and Church” party. This latter group was made up of the various rather weak and dubious opposition elements. In Berlin it was particularly notable that a large number of parishes (43%) adopted a unity list, whereby the “German Christians” were assured of between 75 and 100% of the available places. The result was that about half of the parishes were taken by storm by the “German Christians” without any struggle at all. In those 75 parishes where elections were held, the “German Christians” achieved on average two thirds of the votes. This electoral triumph was due to the fact that many of the pastors and church members clearly supported such a result, and because the opposing forces were appallingly weak.

At the beginning of September, as a result of these elections, a new Synod for the Prussian Church was convened, usually called the “brown synod” because of the dominance of Nazi Party members. Because of their two-thirds majority, the “German Christians” enacted their desired plan to exclude “non-Aryan Christians” from holding clerical offices.

It was only at this point that the church opposition which had been so lacking in foresight became alarmed. A few days later a core group led by Pastor Martin Niemöller, Gerhard Jacobi and Martin Albertz founded the Pastors Emergency League to mobilize support for those pastors who wanted to unite in opposition against the perverted plans of the “German Christians.”

A few months later, the “German Christians” planned to hold a giant rally in the Berlin Sports Palace. It was to include a mass march which would be both a demonstration of their strength and a victory parade. On the evening of 13 November, the Sports Palace was filled to the roof with over 20,000 participants. A large number of prominent “German Christian” pastors from all over Berlin took their places on the platform. The main speaker was Reinhold Krause, who called on the Church to undertake the “completion of the German Reformation in the Third Reich.” In this new “German Church” the same rules for life should apply as in the new state, namely “heroic piety” and “nationally-appropriate Christianity.” Most important of all was to get rid of all un-German aspects in the worship services, such as the use of the Old Testament with its “Jewish morality.” So too St Paul’s deplorable theology of scapegoats and inferiority complexes must be removed. What was needed was to preach a manly picture of Jesus which would be in line with the concepts of National Socialism. When he had finished the speaker received numerous rounds of applause from the thrilled audience. But at the same time this speech aroused considerable irritation among some of the “German Christians,” and even some resignations, which could only be of help to swell the ranks of the still incipient church opposition.

By the end of 1933 the “German Christians” had conquered a significant portion of the Berlin churches, but not all. Indeed there soon developed a fierce competition between the opposing factions which led to Berlin’s churches being caught in a deadly fight for supremacy. This “Church Struggle” was to continue to dominate the church scene for years. At first the Berlin “German Christian” pastors were in the majority, since more than 40% of the parish pastors belonged in this group (at least temporarily). A good 20% of all Berlin pastors joined the Nazi Party. It would have been more except that the Party refused to take any more applications from clergy in order to prevent denominational divisions within its ranks.

In those parishes where the “German Christians” held sway, new forms of liturgies soon appeared. First, the service began with a parade of Nazi flags entering the church, followed by the dedication of these flags on the altar, and the singing of the Nazis’ anthem, the Horst Wessel Song. In their sermons, these “German Christian” pastors painted a picture of the “heroic figure of Jesus” as a model for today’s Christians. Anything Jewish or seemingly Jewish had to be eliminated from the church or the worship services. Hence the words “Zion” or “Hosanna” were to be cut out and not again heard in German churches. Parish educational activities were expressly encouraged to organize indoctrination sessions at which these new ideas for a synthesis between National Socialism and Christianity could be propagated. Such special topics as “Luther and the Jews,” “The Struggle for the German Soul” or “Christianity and the Nordic Faith” were widely promoted. So too portraits of Hitler or other Nazi symbols were given prominent places in the church rooms, and the Hitler greeting was appended to all correspondence without fail.

If one looks at the total record of the Protestant Church in Berlin, or indeed for the whole of Germany, during the Nazi era, one has to paint a very dark picture. Of course there were a few bright spots. The Berlin parish of Dahlem where Martin Niemöller officiated was one of them; or one could mention the young Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was unable to find any parish in Berlin to serve; or there was the formidable Superintendent in Spandau, Martin Albertz, whose remarkably consistent Christian witness needs to be remembered; or the still largely unrecognized historian Elisabeth Schmitz who wrote a very courageous memorandum against the persecution of the Jews in 1935-6; and surely there were many other individuals of like mind.

The Nazi era left a legacy which will not go away, and which the Church today still has to reckon with. Even now, 80 years later, much remains to be done on this historical building project.

Review of Hildegard Frisius et al., eds., Evangelisch getauft – als Juden verfolgt. Spurensuche Berliner Kirchengemeinden

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Review of Hildegard Frisius, Marianne Kälberer, Wolfgang G. Krogel, Gerlind Lachenicht, Frauke Lemmel, eds., Evangelisch getauft – als Juden verfolgt. Spurensuche Berliner Kirchengemeinden (Berlin: Wichern–Verlag, 2008), 452 Pp.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

On November 20th 2002, a day of Prayer and Repentance, Bishop Wolfgang Huber, who was the Chairman of the Council of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD) from 2003 to 2009, held a remarkably self-critical sermon in St. Paul’s Church, Berlin-Zehlendorf, commemorating the fate of the non-aryan Christians during Third Reich. Rarely if ever had a leading representative of Germany’s Protestant churches spoken out so clearly about what happened to the Christians of Jewish origin, or confessed the guilt of the churches and their fellow Christians. After this sermon, various groups in some 16 Berlin parishes started investigations to discover the identities of these former “baptized Jews”, and formed a “working group” to discuss research problems and present their findings. Altogether, after a long-lasting and pain-staking research process, they identified some 300 former “non-aryan Christians” from their own Berlin parishes i.e. persons, who had been deported to the East during the Second World War. Only eight of them survived.

This book describes how this research was undertaken, for instance the hard work of looking through thousands of pages of dusty old “Taufbücher” (baptism registers), and the results of this laudable research initiative from below. It is not an academic or scientific book in the strict sense. However, the initiative in itself and many of the results are more than respectable. Some of the researchers were able to reconstruct biographies about “non-aryan Christians” at full length – biographies that were often completely unknown and forgotten up to the present day. In some parishes, the identification of their deported former fellow Christians was the first step to the installation of commemorative plaques in the entrance halls of churches, or for the installation of the so called “Stolpersteine” (small metallic plaques in the pavement with biographical data) in front of their houses. In a lengthy article, Wolfgang G. Krogel repeats the earlier findings about the “Sippenforschungen” of the Berlin Nazi parson Karl Themel (“Kirchenbuchstelle Alt-Berlin – ein Hilfsorgan des NS-Staates”, pp. 297-361). The book also contains a list of 35 deported women and 53 deported men belonging to Protestant parishes in Berlin, as derived from the “Fremdstämmigen-Kartei” (Aliens’ Card-Index) produced by Themel in his “Kirchenbuchstelle Alt-Berlin” (pp. 366-373). In it, the information under the rubric “date and place of deportation” reads like this: Theresienstadt, Riga, Minsk, suicide Berlin, Auschwitz, Treblinka. Finally, the book reprints three outstanding documents: parts of the famous and courageous sermon by Helmut Gollwitzer, given on the day of Prayer and Repentance on November 16th 1938 in Berlin-Dahlem; the sermon of Johannes Hildebrandt in commemoration of the November 1938 pogrom, given at the Sophiengemeinde (then in East Berlin) in 1978; and, as already mentioned, the 2002 sermon by Wolfgang Huber in Berlin-Zehlendorf.

To sum up, this is a remarkable book, which grew out of an initiative of engaged Berlin Protestants who are more or less hobby or half-professional historians, in order to give remembrance to their former non-aryan fellow Christians. However, the book is not yet the professional scholarly study on this issue that is so badly needed for the whole Berlin area. One has to remember the fact that Berlin housed not only the largest Jewish community in Germany during the 1930s, but was also the home of some 20-30 000 baptized Jews belonging to the Protestant churches, which to a large extent were governed at that time by the strongly antisemitic German Christians who betrayed and expelled their non-aryan fellow Christians. So, much more remains to be done, to bring to the present day and age this awful story so full of guilt and shame.

Memorial Speech: Friedrich Weissler (1891-1937) and the Confessing Church. Remembrance and Commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the Death of Friedrich Weissler. Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, February 19, 2012

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2012

Memorial Speech: Friedrich Weissler (1891-1937) and the Confessing Church. Remembrance and Commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the Death of Friedrich Weissler. Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, February 19, 2012.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität, Berlin

Seventy-five years ago, in February 1937, Freidrich Weissler died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp as a result of mistreatment by the prison guards. He is widely regarded as the first Confessing Church member to be murdered as a victim of the Nazi persecution of the churches. Recently, at a commemorative ceremony held in the camp, Professor Manfred Gailus of Berlin’s Technical University honoured him with a fine tribute, which is here translated in abbreviated form by John S. Conway.

Friedrich Weissler came of a Jewish family, but, as a child, was baptized into the Protestant Church. He completed his studies in law just before the outbreak of war in 1914, when he served his country loyally and with true German patriotism. In the 1920s he resumed his legal career and by 1932 had been appointed a judge in Magdeburg. However, the rise of the National Socialists to power rapidly brought his career to an end. Already in April 1933 he was one of the 600 so-called “non-aryan” judges suspended from office, and in July he was dismissed. Despite his war service and distinguished record, the Nazis regarded him as “politically unreliable”. Thereafter there was little or no likelihood of his being employed in any branch of the public service.

Later he moved to Berlin and began to look for work in the private sphere. Due to his connections with the Protestant Church, he obtained a post as legal advisor to the incipient Confessing Church, first under Bishop Marahrens of Hannover, but subsequently with the more uncompromising wing led by Martin Niemöller and Martin Albertz. These men gave a strong lead to the Confessing Church’s rebuttal of the so-called “German Christians” efforts to infiltrate Nazi ideologies and practices into church life But there were also divisions in the Confessing Church’s ranks. The more moderate members were prepared to compromise on some issues, while the more radical wing, led by Niemöller, refused any such accommodations. They courageously adhered to the views outlined in the 1934 Barmen Declaration and resisted all attempts to limit or weaken the Church’s autonomy. Weissler joined this latter was a dangerous step, all the more because he had been branded since 1933 as a “non-aryan”. But he maintained his beliefs and served as a legal advisor for this wing of the Confessing Church.

In 1936, the increasing harassment of individual Confessing Church pastors and laity led this group’s leaders to draw up a petition calling for an end to such stressful persecution by the Gestapo or local Nazi agencies. Politely but unflinchingly the memorandum opposed the regime’s on-going attempts to “de-Christianize” Germany. The Nazi interpretation of “positive Christianity” was criticized. The document also called for an end to the measures limiting the church’s outreach in the schools, the press or public media. Finally the church leaders roundly declared their opposition to the Nazi antisemitic campaign, since such an ideology was against the Christian commandment to love one’s neighbour. Weissler was closely associated in drawing up this document to ensure that it was fully in compliance with the existing law. This forceful protest was to be presented in June 1936 to Hitler personally and in private, in the hope that he would then issue restraining orders to his underlings. But it was a sign of the Confessing Church’s political naivety that they entirely miscalculated the Nazis’ response. The scandal was made worse by the fact that somehow or other a copy was made available to the foreign press, where it was hailed as a significant challenge to Hitler’s regime. (Later researches have never been able to discover exactly how this happened.) The Gestapo immediately launched investigations into this act of national treason, and suspicion fell on Weissler – as a “Jew” – as well on two young curates, Werner Koch and Ernst Tillich. The Confessing Church leaders hastily sought to dissociate themselves from any accusation of political treachery and left Weissler to his fate. In October 1936 he was arrested and in February 1937 taken off to Sachsenhausen. Within a few days he was brutally done to death. The fact that Weissler was left in the lurch by his former employers and by the anti-Nazi champions in the Confessing Church was long suppressed. Only recently have attempts been made for some form of appropriate recognition. In Magdeburg a street has been named after him, and since 2008 one of the law courts bears his name. In 2005 the then chairman of the Evangelical Church’s Governing Council, Bishop Wolfgang Huber, said this: “We in the Evangelical Church have to acknowledge our guilt in not standing up for our co-worker Friedrich Weissler. Our history is not always one of heroic resistance to tyranny.” It is to be hoped that in the near future a suitable church building in Berlin will carry his name, as a token of remembrance of this intrepid Confessing Church member during those dark times.

Review of Martin Greschat, Protestantismus im Kalten Krieg. Kirche, Politik und Gesellschaft im geteilten Deutschland 1945-1963

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2012

Review of Martin Greschat, Protestantismus im Kalten Krieg. Kirche, Politik und Gesellschaft im geteilten Deutschland 1945-1963 (Paderborn: Schöningh Verlag, 2010), 450 Pp., ISBN 978-3-506-76806-3.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität, Berlin

This review was first published in theologie.geschichte – Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kulturgeschichte (Universität Saarbrücken) Band 6 (2011). Translation courtesy of John S. Conway.

This book is the first overview of the history of German Protestantism in the early post-1945 period up to the year 1963. (Why the author chose to end there is not explained). His study begins with a broad survey of international relations and personalities, such as the Great Power rivalries between the USA and the USSR, the Korean War, Stalin and his diplomacy, Konrad Adenauer and Walter Ulbricht. This makes for an extremely lengthy introduction of nearly two hundred pages before the main topic is reached. But the author sees these events, as described in his Chapter 1, as important historical preconditions for the division of Germany The second chapter describes the establishment of the two German states. On the one hand, West Germany adopted a course of integration with the West and of rearmament, despite much internal opposition. On the other hand, the German Democratic Republic under Ulbricht underwent a similar process of integration into the Soviet sphere of influence. The third chapter briefly describes the turbulent years of the 1950s with the Geneva Conference of 1955, the uprisings in the Soviet bloc in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, the 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Communists in 1956, Khruschchev’s ultimatum over Berlin, and the Cuban crisis. Finally, in chapter 4, Greschat arrives at his main theme, namely the developments in the Protestant churches. He deals first with the situation in the German Democratic Republic, in a far too detailed and hence rather wearying fashion, in my view. He then turns to West Germany. Despite the fact that both Protestant communities were decisively in favour of upholding the notion of German national unity, they slowly drifted apart from one another. In the following chapter 5, developments in the life and witness of the Protestant churches in the 1950s are analyzed These years saw the erosion of the traditional pietistic forms of worship, heated theological debates over Rudolf Bultmann’s “demythologizing” contentions, institutional innovations such as the Church Rallies, and the notable establishment of the Evangelical Academies, which did so much to foster the Protestant churches’ life and their involvement in the wider international and ecumenical discourse of the World Council of Churches and similar bodies.

This is indeed a vast undertaking. The reader will undoubtedly gain much on these various topics. But there are problems. For one thing, the author gives us several chronological accounts, first for the international scene, then for the national political level, and thirdly for the churches’ own historical developments—and in this case, twice over, one for the west, one for the east. This leads to numerous repetitions, to frequent recapitulations of items already covered (“as already mentioned”), or to redundant digressions.

Furthermore, the author does not tackle the problematical issue of how best such a history of recent German Protestantism should be written. Since 1945, despite the strong fixation on tradition, the evident trend has been to create a constellation of about two dozen separate provincial churches, each with its own theological, ecclesial and church-political character. Greschat’s concentration on the top-level deliberations of the Evangelical Church leadership, and on the significant political disputes of two divergent groups, one around Ehlers, Dibelius and Lilje and the other around Niemoller, Heinemann and Gollwitzer, hardly does justice to the diversity of the situation. Another more serious defect is the astonishing decision to omit any discussion of Germany’s recent past, which the historian Friedrich Meinecke so rightly called “The German Catastrophe”. In fact, this was also the catastrophe of German Protestants who constituted a two-thirds majority in the “Third Reich”. Greschat’s discussion of the internal and highly divisive disputes in the post-war period are really inexplicable without reference to the Nazi period, or to the Church Struggle against Nazism. In this regard Matthew Hockenos’ A Church Divided. German Protestants confront the Nazi Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) is a model study. Unfortunately Greschat doesn’t even mention it.

Many sections of German Protestantism incurred a heavy burden of guilt for their highly regrettable behaviour during the Nazi period. But their stance is hardly mentioned in Greschat’s 450 pages. Likewise, no attention is given to the process of de-nazification, or what in the church was the wholly inadequate process of “self-cleansing”. Christian anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism or the Holocaust as such are not mentioned. And even the timorous Protestant attempts to begin to come to terms with a scholarly examination of the recent past, as in the Evangelical Association of Contemporary Church History after 1955, are not thoroughly discussed. The book by Bjorn Krondorfer, Katharina von Kellenbach and Norbert Reck, Mit Blick auf die Täter. Fragen an die deutsche Theologie nach 1945 (Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), with its pertinent and often biting criticisms is not taken into account.

The outbreak of the Korean War, or more widely the Cold War, appears to have engrossed the attitudes of most contemporary Germans, and thus covered over that unspeakable darkness which burdened them, and in some cases still does. And so, one might suggest, it was highly convenient that the Cold War diverted attention away from those other more fateful events, about which they were unwilling to speak. But are these considerations still valid for scholarly accounts today? It is incomprehensible why this book omits mentioning the widespread silence, or more particularly the active evasiveness, the frequently well-rehearsed tissue of lies or alibis, or the habit of sweeping such unwelcome matters under the carpet, as engaged in by many Protestants.

Of course there may have been numerous understandable reasons why contemporaries in the 1950s wanted to suppress their personal pasts. But to continue suppressing such lamentable episodes in the Protestant collective past seems wholly reprehensible. Any history of German Protestantism in the 1950s needs to be written, not from the perspective of “Korea”, but from the viewpoint of the participants themselves. Herein lies what would appear to be an inexplicable omission in an otherwise significant study. As a first attempt to provide an overall account of post-war German Protestantism, this study needs to be substantially enhanced and improved.