Author Archives: Robert P. Ericksen

Conference Report: Fourth Annual Powell and Heller Holocaust Conference, March 17-19, 2011

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 2, June 2011

Conference Report: Fourth Annual Powell and Heller Holocaust Conference, March 17-19, 2011, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA.

By Robert Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

On March 17-19, 2011, Pacific Lutheran University hosted the Fourth Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education. This event began on the evening of March 17th with the showing of a film, The Last Survivor. This documentary focuses on survivors of four genocides—one from the Holocaust and one each from Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Congo. The co-directors, Michael Pertnoy and Michael Kleiman, introduced and discussed the film. They were joined by Justin Semahoro Kimenyerwa, a child survivor of the genocide in the Congo who now resides in the United States. The next morning Carl Wilkens spoke about another recent genocide. He was the only American to stay in Rwanda throughout the killing there, despite many who urged him to leave. His description of the genocide, in words and photos, helps explain his present work, which is to travel around the United States, sometimes by bicycle, raising awareness about genocide and other extreme forms of injustice.

Another highlight on Friday involved a discussion of the Huguenot rescue of Jewish lives in and around Le Chambon, France. This story about Pastor André and Magda Trocmé, along with other rescuers, is well known. Patrick Henry, a recent author on the rescue of Jews in France, gave the main presentation. He was assisted by Nelly Trocmé Hewett, a teenage daughter of the Trocmés at the time, who gave her first-person account of the rescue activities. Saturday morning included a dramatic presentation by “Living Voices.” This involved a one-woman show, “Through the Eyes of a Friend: The World of Anne Frank.” We also had a presentation on artistic responses to the Holocaust, including the work of Anselm Kiefer. A session on “Poetry after Auschwitz” began with a presentation on Theodor Adorno, followed by readings of poetry by writers such as Irena Klepfisz, a poet in Yiddish and English, who is also a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. An afternoon session on Saturday included a presentation by two professors from Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. Kevin Simpson (psychology) and Joel Davis (history) described their interdisciplinary course on the Holocaust in a presentation under the title, “Explaining Evil: Cross-disciplinary Approaches to Teaching the Holocaust.”

Readers of this journal are reminded that PLU will host a Holocaust conference each spring. Planning for the next conference, scheduled for March 15-16, 2012, has just begun. Interested persons are invited to contact Robert Ericksen at ericksrp@plu.edu.

 

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Review of David Cymet, History vs. Apologetics: The Holocaust, The Third Reich, and the Catholic Church

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2011

Review of David Cymet, History vs. Apologetics: The Holocaust, The Third Reich, and the Catholic Church (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2010). 489 pp. ISBN 978-0739132937.

By Robert Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

This book is a somewhat surprising entry in the ongoing wars over Catholics, the Holocaust, and Pius XII, especially in terms of the background and experience of its author. David Cymet, born and raised in Mexico City, traveled to the United States in 1944 as one of the first two Latin American students to study at an American rabbinical school. After four years at the Mesivta Torah Vodaath in Brooklyn, he returned to Mexico to study architecture, followed by an academic career teaching architecture at his alma mater, the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico, and then at the National University of Mexico. He also served the Mexican government in various capacities from the 1950s through the 1970s, for example, in the National Housing Institute and in the Ministry of Human Settlements. In the 1980s he moved to the United States, where he began working for the New York City Department of Education in 1986, also earning a doctorate at the University of Delaware in 1991. Described in his author’s note as “a student of the Holocaust since his earliest youth,” Cymet spent the first decade of the twenty-first century – presumably retired from his multiple careers – researching and writing this book.

We might be surprised when a trained architect from Mexico, after a distinguished public and academic career, writes a 500-page book on history for Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. We will be less surprised when the subject is the Holocaust. Furthermore, though it is almost fifty years since Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy became a first salvo in the Pius XII wars, the level of controversy has scarcely diminished. Thus we will not be surprised that David Cymet, a Jewish man raised in a Catholic country, has chosen to concentrate on the Catholic Church, theVatican, and the wartime Pope, and that he comes to harsh conclusions.

Cymet begins with the observation that Jews were not in a position to critique the Catholic Church in the first years after 1945. They had much more pressing concerns, such as immediate assistance to survivors, finding visas for DPs, and securing the place of Jews inPalestine(xi). Cymet then gives credit to major authors who began to probe the role of the Catholic Church, including Hochhuth, Saul Friedlander, Guenter Lewy, Klaus Scholder,  and Carlo Falconi, as well as later figures such as Michael Phayer, Gitta Sereny, and Fr. John Morley, SJ (xiv-xvi). “The aim of this study,” he says, “is to look critically at the polemic and present a view of the issues within the wider context of their contemporary political and ideological background” (xvi).

There is no doubt that Cymet tilts toward the more critical observers within the “wider context.” His opening statement about “defenders” of the Catholic Church, who provide the “apologetics” mentioned in his title, is harsh indeed: “Unlike their not-so-distant cousins – the Holocaust deniers – they did not claim that the Holocaust never happened, but rather chose to take cover behind half-truths, misrepresentations, and subtle distortions. At the margin of legitimate discussion beholden to historical truth, the defenders of all sorts aimed at derailing the discussion by creating a thick cloud of confusion and doubt” (xvi).

Flaws can be found in this book. In one chapter he mentions Guenter Lewy correctly, but then calls him Lewy Güenther in endnotes, repeating this mistaken last name and mistaken spelling through a sequence of five notes (13). He praises Doris Bergen’s work, but in his bibliography he cites her as the author of In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (2000), rather than correctly noting the editors, Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (461). He is careless of chronology at times, such as when he says Guenter Lewy “reacted” to We Remember (1998) and its claim that Cardinal Faulhaber was a defender of Jews. When Lewy, as quoted, called it “little short of falsification of history when Faulhaber’s sermons in 1933 are hailed . . . as a ‘condemnation of the persecution of Jews,’” Lewy may have been right; but his statement in 1964 was not a reaction to aVatican publication of 1998 (9).

Despite these lapses and despite Cymet’s occasionally impassioned prose, with words such as “mean-spirited” and “diabolical” signaling his point of view, his thorough and detailed telling of the story makes for a sobering read. He accepts David Kertzer’s view (The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, 2001) that Christian anti-Judaism cannot be seen as significantly different from racial antisemitism, and he finds many Catholic statements in Germany and elsewhere in which common cause with racial antisemites is clearly expressed. His chapter on “Catholic Europe ‘Defends’ Itself from the Jews” begins with Humani Generis Unitas, Pius XI’s unfinished encyclical often regarded as a significant attack on antisemitism. But Cymet notes the residual antisemitism in those parts which justify the “social separation” of Jews and the justification for Christians defending themselves against Jews, “as long as the unbelief of the Jewish people persists” (142). He then describes anti-Jewish legislation written with Catholic support in Poland,Italy,Hungary, and Slovakia prior to the war (150-63). In a chapter on “The Final Solution in Christian Europe” (305-74), he emphasizes the obvious, that this murder took place in Christian countries. He also points out the instances in which Catholic leaders protested in favor of Catholics of Jewish descent, but not, despite many entreaties, against the deportation and murder of Jews as Jews.

Cymet’s chapter on “Vatican Response to the Final Solution” first notes that the Klerusblatt in Germany described the Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935 as an “indispensable safeguard for the qualitative make-up of the German people” (375). He also describes Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary, Italy, and Vichy France as “clero-Fascist” countries which increased the severity of their anti-Jewish laws from 1938 to 1942, until they fed into the killing process itself. What was the Vatican response? Here Cymet points out the many avenues of information available to the Vatican, while stressing the silence that ensued. In a segment on “The Rome Deportations, a Paradigm of Vatican Policy,” he quotes Michael Phayer: “No other event placed Pius XII in greater physical proximity to the Holocaust than the deportation of the Roman Jews.” The paradigm for Cymet is seen in his conclusion that, here as elsewhere, “the Church stood calmly at the sidelines” (387).

Cymet makes extensive use of Kertzer, Morley, Lewy, Phayer, Saul Friedlander, and a host of others. I do not think he approached this project from a place of neutrality, with the thought that he might end up defending the Catholic Church, for example. However, he prepared his brief energetically. Those who would argue for the defense must acknowledge that his evidence for the prosecution weighs heavily. He identifies a burden of anti-Jewish prejudice, human insensitivity, and silence in the face of evil which fitted itself too comfortably within the Catholic nations, the “bloodlands,” of Central Europe.

 

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Conference Announcement: Fourth Annual Powell and Heller Holocaust Conference, March 17-19, 2011

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2011

Conference Announcement: Fourth Annual Powell and Heller Holocaust Conference, March 17-19, 2011, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA.

By Robert Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

Robert Ericksen, one of our ACCH editors and the Kurt Mayer Chair in Holocaust Studies at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma,WA, will host the Fourth Annual Powell and Heller Holocaust Conference at Pacific Lutheran University on March 17-19, 2011.

This year’s conference will focus on broad issues of genocide, beginning the evening of March 17 with a film, The Last Survivor. Both co-directors and one of the survivors depicted in the film will lead a discussion of genocide as it occurred in Rwanda, in the Congo, in Bosnia, and in the Holocaust. Friday will include a presentation on the Rwandan Genocide by Carl Wilkens, an American who defied advice and stayed in Rwanda throughout the killing. It will also include a presentation on “Conscience and Rescue,” with Patrick Henry speaking about his book on rescue at Le Chambon. Nelly Trocmé Hewett will also speak during that session, commenting on her experience as a teenager while her parents, Pastor André and Magda Trocmé, led the successful Huguenot rescue of some 5000 Jews in that French village. Saturday will be devoted to the arts and the Holocaust, with presentations on both visual arts and poetry. The dramatic group, Living Voices, will give a presentation on Anne Frank “Through the Eyes of a Friend;” and two colleagues from Concordia University in Portland, Kevin Simpson (Psychology) and Joel Davis (History), will speak on “Explaining Evil: Cross-disciplinary Approaches to Teaching the Holocaust.”

The conference is free and open to the public. Further information can be found at www.plu.edu, or by contacting Robert Ericksen,ericksrp@plu.edu.

 

 

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Review of Jürgen Elvert and Jürgen Nielsen-Sikora, eds., Kulturwissenschaften und Nationalsozialismus

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 16, No. 4, December 2010

Review of Jürgen Elvert and Jürgen Nielsen-Sikora, eds., Kulturwissenschaften und Nationalsozialismus. Historische Mitteilungen im Auftrage der Ranke-Gesellschaft, 72 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2008), 922 pp. ISBN: 978-3-515-09282-1.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

This review appeared first in German History, Vol. 28 No. 2 (June 2010): 246-48, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.

At the collapse of the Nazi State, some Germans committed suicide, unwilling to face a world without their Führer; some Germans were brought to Nuremberg, where they were placed on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity; and most Germans began to act as if they had never been attracted to Adolf Hitler, despite sometimes copious evidence to the contrary. Already in 1946 Max Weinreich wrote Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People;  but most professors managed to cultivate the idea, common to a large portion of their German fellows, that they had played no role in Nazi crimes and had merely been caught under the boot of a totalitarian regime. This postwar denial endured largely intact for a generation or more. In the past two or three decades, however, it has been overturned by scholarship which shows that ‘good Germans’ of every sort succumbed to the attractions of Hitler and worked willingly within and for the Nazi State. Such an assessment clearly includes German professors and their universities. Despite purges of Jewish faculty, despite the burning of books, despite violations of academic freedom, the Nazi goal of ‘Gleichschaltung’ (coordination) within the universities is now widely thought to have been ‘Selbstgleichschaltung.’ It was professors who helped burn the books and professors who competed for preferment after their Jewish and leftwing colleagues had been removed.

Kulturwissenschaften und Nationalsozialismus is one of several recent attempts to focus on scholars in the humanities as one aspect of this problem. The plan for the book, formulated in 2000, involved thirty-five disciplines. Participants hoped to create a foundation for future scholarship, showing where research on each of these disciplines stood at the time and creating a sort of grid by which interdisciplinary comparisons could be made. Jürgen Elvert somewhat disarmingly admits that the goals of the project were not achieved (p. 17). No contributor could be found for some areas, some contributors agreed to produce a chapter but failed to deliver, and some contributors produced work unworthy of being printed. Nonetheless, this ‘failed’ project resulted in twenty-eight chapters plus an introduction, filling some 922 pages. It is a very useful work, though hardly a quick read and somewhat uneven in quality and thoroughness. Individual contributions vary from a low of thirteen pages to a high of sixty on standard topics such as history, sociology, literature and political science, with much attention to philology as well as fields as diverse as classical archaeology and modern theater.

Hans-Joachim Dahms, one of the contributors, was an early player in the uncovering of academic complicity. In 1987 he co-edited Die Universität Göttingen unter dem Nationalsozialismus and he has since written extensively on philosophy during the Nazi era. Here he gives a very useful assessment of that discipline, arguing that no actual ‘National Socialist philosophy’ emerged during the Third Reich, nothing to equal, for example, the anti-Jewish, anti-Einstein ‘German Physics’ pushed by two Nobel laureates, Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark. He blames this upon the quarrelsomeness of German philosophers and their ongoing arguments over neo-Kantianism, logical positivism, and other branches within their field. Many important philosophers, however, did endorse the Nazi state, most famously Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s supporters later argued that his famous pro-Nazi address in 1933 as Rektor atFreiburg had nothing to do with his philosophical ideas and represented merely an early, mistaken assessment. Dahms cuts him no such slack: ‘It has long been clear that his NS enthusiasm during the Third Reich never stopped and that even after 1945 he never distanced himself from National Socialism in general or from his own actions during that time’ (p. 43). Dahms sketches the careers of other pro-Nazi philosophers, such as Alfred Baeumler ofBerlin, who said at the time of the book burning in 1933: ‘What we remove today are poisonous materials which were collected during a time of false tolerance. It is our task to let the German spirit within us become so powerful that such materials can no longer be collected’ (p. 48).

Horst Junginger, taking on the discipline of Religionswissenschaft, illustrates some of the irony and complexity of the Nazi era. As a student of comparative religion, Junginger cannot approve the old tendency to study religion only from the perspective of orthodox Christian belief. He mentions Adolf von Harnack, for example, arguing a century ago for the primacy of the Christian point of view (p. 52). Junginger then bemoans the postwar influence of Karl Barth, whose Christology rejected all non-Christian faiths as false attempts to find the true God (p. 85). Comparative religion of the sort practiced today expects a more modern approach, more objective, based upon empirical evidence and similar to anthropology in its method. Ironically, Junginger finds that just that sort of open modernity produced a strange variety of racist and völkisch religious movements during the Nazi period. Many of the individuals he describes began as Protestants. They studied theology and then often spent time on a mission field, perhaps in India, as in the case of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer. Back in Germany their linguistic skills and openness to non-Christian religions allowed them to fill newly created university positions in comparative religion. Within the nationalistic and racist atmosphere of their day, however, they were likely to use their freedom from Christian orthodoxy to endorse syncretistic beliefs closely related to the Nazi Weltanschauung.  Some, like Hauer with his German Faith Movement, tried to return to a purer, pagan past. Others, like the Deutsche Christen within the official Protestant Church, used comparative religion to reach the unlikely conclusion that Christianity had no actual connection to Judaism, but had always been entirely and inherently anti-Jewish. Walter Grundmann, professor of theology at the University of Jena and founding director of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, worked at de-judaizing the Christian tradition and even Jesus himself (as described recently by Susannah Heschel in The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany). Dozens of professors attended conferences at Grundmann’s institute and contributed to its work. No scholar today would consider the work of Grundmann or the ideas of Hauer objective attempts to study and learn from religious traditions, yet many professors made that claim in the Nazi era and achieved success.

Every chapter in this book acknowledges the affinity of German scholarship for the ideas of the Nazi state, though authors differ in their assessment of culpability and in the breadth of their critique. Most academics never cooperated with the regime quite as much as the regime would have liked; most retained some loyalty to the ideals of their profession. Yet the story remains grim and much closer to the one told by Max Weinreich in 1946 than defenders of academia might like to think. This book is an important source for insight into the phenomenon. As is often the case, these German authors could have paid more attention to scholarship produced in Britainand America. However, most made good use of archival records, correspondence, and other forms of primary documents. Kulturwissenschaft und Nationalsozialismus thus takes its place beside similar volumes, such as Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwissenschaften (Hartmut Lehmann and Otto Gerhard Oexle, eds., 2004) and Die Rolle der Geisteswissenschaften im Dritten Reich, 1933-1945 (Frank-Rutger Hausmann, ed., 2002), in helping us understand the failure of humanities scholars in Nazi Germany to be humane.

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Conference Report: Third Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Conference Report: Third Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education, March 18-20, 2010, Pacific Lutheran University Tacoma, WA.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

On March 18-20, 2010, Robert Ericksen, Kurt Mayer Chair in Holocaust Studies at Pacific Lutheran University, hosted the Third Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education. This program grows out of generous gifts from the Mayer, Powell, and Heller families which have made possible an endowed chair as well as this annual conference.

The sessions began on March 18 with a lecture by Christopher Browning. He spoke on “Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: Challenges, Limitations, and Opportunities,” based upon his research for his most recent book, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp. Browning gave a nuanced analysis of the benefits and difficulties in using survivor testimony. While he discussed in detail various aspects of survivor testimony which must be considered by historians, he also concluded with the thought that it is not the obligation of survivors to give testimony which matches our expectations.

Friday’s sessions began with two presentations by Holocaust survivors. Philip Waagner, who is a member of the Speakers Bureau of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center (Seattle), described his remarkable experiences as a child survivor in Holland. Sarah Tamir also described her childhood experiences, as well as the Holocaust memory activities now undertaken by the large survivors’ community in her home of Melbourne. The afternoon session began with a presentation by Sara Horowitz, Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at York University, speaking on her latest project, “Gender, Genocide, and Jewish Memory.” Professors Lisa Marcus, Rona Kaufmann, and Jennifer Jenkins, all of PLU, spoke on “Jewish Literacies and the Holocaust;” and Tomaz Jardim, a recent Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, spoke on “Ambiguous Justice: The Mauthausen SS Before American Military Commission Courts.” Friday ended with the announcement of two student winners of the Raphael Lemkin Student Essay Contest at PLU, highlighted by James Waller speaking on the themes within his important book, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Mass Murder and Genocide.

Saturday’s session focused on the theme of bystanders. First, Carl Wilkens described his experience of the Rwandan Genocide. As the only American who stayed in Rwanda throughout the violence, he took great risk but survived without harm and was able to intervene successfully in several situations. Victoria Barnett then continued our discussion of bystanders, with recent reflections on her book, Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust. John Roth responded to her presentation in a session chaired by John Conway. Throughout this day, students and others in attendance were inspired to consider the importance of their own response to injustice and also the potential for brave individuals actually to make an impact.

The next PLU Holocaust Conference will take place March 17-19, 2011. Interested persons are invited to contact Robert Ericksen (ericksrp@plu.edu) with inquiries or suggestions.

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Conference Report: “Understanding Religious Freedom in Germany, Poland and the United States”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 1, March 2010

Conference Report: “Understanding Religious Freedom in Germany, Poland and the United States,” German Studies Association Conference, Washington, DC, October 11, 2009.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

This session, organized by Professor Gerhard Besier, Director of the Institute for European Studies at the Technical University of Dresden, included his paper on Germany; a paper on Poland by Katarzyna Stoklosa, also from the TU Dresden; and a paper on the United Statesby Derek Davis of Baylor University. Rebecca Bennette of Middlebury College moderated, and Robert Ericksen of Pacific Lutheran University provided commentary.

Besier began with a brief overview of church and state relations throughout Europe, noting the state church model to be found in places such as Great Britain, Denmark, Greece and Finland; the cooperative model of church and state to be found in Germany, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Austria and Portugal; and the separation model to be found in France. He then focused on Germany, noting that the nominal principle of religious freedom appeared in the Weimar Constitution and again in the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany. Despite that, however, the two main churches in Germany, Catholic and Protestant (EKD), have managed to secure their position of dominance. For example, in the FRG these two churches are “statutory corporations.” This grants them legal rights normally reserved to the state, such as raising taxes from their members, and privileges, such as filling positions on bodies created to monitor radio and television. Free churches (Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers, for example) have also received recognition as statutory corporations, assuring them some rights, though not certain privileges reserved for Catholics and EKD Protestants, such as the right to be appointed to a theological faculty in public universities. Beneath the Free Churches, one finds a scale of reduced privilege and respect, running from “sects,” such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists, through “New Age” groups, Hare Krishna, and, at the very bottom, “psycho-organizations,” such as Scientology. Besier then focused his attention on the effort of Jehovah’s Witnesses to be designated a statutory corporation. As is well known, this group suffered heavy persecution within the Nazi state. They have also faced considerable difficulties in postwar Germany, including various obstacles to their protracted effort from 1995-2009 to secure official status. This effort seemed to culminate in 2000, with a Federal Constitutional Court victory. However, since the individual German states have the right to administer their own cultural affairs, the battle had to be fought again and again, culminating in apparent victory in the spring of 2009. Throughout the process, the two main churches and their political allies fought against this development, arguing that a religious community which rejects blood transfusions, for example, “cannot be regarded as being loyal to the constitution.” Besier described religious liberty in Germany as simply the right for members of minority groups to worship as they choose. However, they will struggle to attain official recognition and they are likely to suffer social stigmatization. Legal privilege and political power reside primarily in the two mainstream churches.

Katarzyna Stoklosa described a very different situation in Poland. By the late 19th century, Catholic faith had become a vital component of rising Polish nationalism. By the 1930s, a nationalist slogan described (with approval) a “new middle ages” to be found in the “Catholic State of the Polish Nation.” After 1945 this homogeneity tightened further, with the deportation of most non-Polish ethnic groups (Germans, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, etc.) and, of course, with the disappearance of three million murdered Jews. Non-Catholic religious groups gradually attained some rights in the 1970s and 1980s–for example, access to radio stations in 1982 and a legal status for Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1989. During the communist era, the Catholic Church nurtured its reputation as an opponent of the regime, especially in the 1980s. It thus emerged as a powerful force in Poland post-1989. The new constitution has a formal statement in support of religious freedom, and the rights of religious minorities have improved somewhat. But there is also a formal place for the Catholic Church built into the constitution and it plays a powerful political role. For example, in the political campaign of 2005, the right wing Catholic “Radio Maria” openly endorsed Lech Kaczynski’s “Law and Justice” party—and also attracted attention for making antisemitic statements. Given the powerful place of the Catholic Church, religious minorities in Poland continue to be marginalized. Stoklosa concluded that the practice of religious freedom in Poland simply does not match the ideal advocated in the West.

Derek Davis presented a paper on “the interplay of law, religion and politics in the United States,” describing four interconnected aspects: “separation of church and state, cooperation between sacred and secular, integration of religion and politics, and accommodation of civil religion.” This four-part scheme represents his attempt to explain what otherwise seems inconsistent in the American experience, for example, the refusal to allow organized prayer in public schools alongside the public prayers which open daily sessions of Congress, or the alleged “wall of separation” between church and state alongside the slogan, “In God we Trust,” printed on American money. Davis argued that separation of church and state is indeed an important part of the American system and a phrase taken seriously by the Supreme Court, but he added that it represents a “colossal overstatement” of the actual, complicated circumstances. For example, the Court assumes that children are impressionable, making it important to avoid any form of state-sanctioned religious expression in public schools. Presumably this means that members of Congress are considered old enough to ignore religious rituals in their chamber, if they so choose. He described court cases involving questions of tuition support to attend private (mostly religious) schools, whether to provide bus service, computers, or books, and whether religious charitable organizations can receive state contracts or support. He also described the pervasive rituals of civil religion practiced in America and the widespread belief that membership in and support for the nation has a divine component. In all of these matters, Davis endorsed the complexity found in practice and his belief that apparent contradictions and vigorous arguments are part of the healthy democratic experience in the questions of church and state.

Ericksen noted that one conclusion to be drawn from these three diverse examples is that churches are loath to give up power and influence. This seems most obvious with the Catholic Church in Poland and the two major churches in Germany. It also can be seen in the United States, however. For example, the banning of prayer and Bible reading in public schools has been widely resented by many churches. Even the principle of separation of church and state, which goes back more than two centuries, can perhaps be best understood as a pragmatic necessity, rather than expression of an ideal. The multiplicity of religious denominations in the Thirteen Colonies would have made the prospect of a state church quite contentious. On the other hand, is not freedom of religion an essential element of real democracy? We can see this historically in the gradual increase of voting rights and other legal rights granted to religious minorities as the idea of democracy progressed. It seems hard to imagine that the political or legal privileging of one religion over others can be consistent with equal political rights. Is this okay with churches? Can religious groups with the power to enforce their place of privilege accept the democratic implications of pluralism? A related question involves the development of secularization. If we note the trajectory from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, we see a general pattern of more religious liberty and less church attendance. Will a similar trajectory mark the twenty-first century? If so, will that be a good thing? Alternatively, can religion retain its vigor and still contribute to the “good life” in a pluralistic and democratic society, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “world come of age?” How do we expect Poland,Germany, and the United States will understand these issues fifty years from now?

 

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Conference Announcement: Third Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 1, March 2010

Conference Announcement: Third Annual Powell and Heller Family Conference on Holocaust Education, March 18-20, 2010, Pacific Lutheran University.

Host: Robert P. Ericksen, Kurt Mayer Professor of Holocaust Studies, Pacific Lutheran University

Pacific Lutheran University will host the Third Annual Powell and Heller Family Holocaust Conference, March 18-20, 2010, on the PLU campus.   Professor Christopher Browning, internationally recognized author of “Ordinary Men” and a former professor at PLU, will deliver the opening Raphael Lemkin Lecture at 7 p.m. on March 18. His topic is, “Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: Challenges, Limitations, and Opportunities.”

Other conference highlights include Professor Sara Horowitz and her ground-breaking research on “gender, genocide and Jewish memory”; Carl Wilkens, an eye-witness to the Rwandan genocide, testimony from Holocaust survivors; an exploration of the psychology of evil; and a special presentation of music from the Holocaust.

This conference is free and all sessions are open to the public. Registration is requested. The program on Saturday, March 20, is designed with educators in mind, and is focused on lessons of diversity and tolerance that can be learned through the Holocaust. Educator clock hours are available. For further information, please contact Brenda Murray at 253-535-7595 or the PLU Kurt Mayer Professor of Holocaust Studies, Robert Ericksen, at ericksrp@plu.edu.

For full details, including conference program and online registration, please visit www.plu.edu/holocaustconference.

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