Author Archives: Victoria J. Barnett

Conference Report: “Verständigung und Versöhnung: Beiträge von Kirche, Religion und Politik (Understanding and Reconciliation: The Contributions of Church, Religion, and Politics)”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Conference Report: “Verständigung und Versöhnung: Beiträge von Kirche, Religion und Politik (Understanding and Reconciliation: The Contributions of Church, Religion, and Politics)” 18^th Dietrich Bonhoeffer Lectures, Institut für Gesellschftswissenschaften und Theologie, Europa-Universität Flensburg, July 10-12, 2015.

By Victoria J. Barnett, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The role played by religious leaders and institutions in political processes of reconciliation, particularly in the wake of conflicts and wars, is a topic of growing interest, due both to the revival of interest in interfaith work and the number of contemporary conflicts in which religion is a factor. It’s a topic in which the historical precedents are often obscured by the realities of contemporary issues, but it’s interesting to reflect on how those precedents shape our assumptions today. In U.S. popular culture the reputation of the Second World War as “the good war” is based not only on the clear-cut moral and political issues surrounding the war against Nazi Germany but on what unfolded in the aftermath of that war. European cities were rebuilt in what in historical terms seems like record time, Germany was reintegrated into collective European society, and despite the Cold War the Second World War was followed by decades of relative political and economic stability throughout Europe. One has only to reflect on the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the ongoing conflict in the Sudan to realize what a rare phenomenon postwar Europe was in all these respects, despite the widespread scope of the war’s damage, the millions of displaced persons, and the fact that a genocide had just occurred.

The contemporary challenges of multiculturalism and political stability in Europe and the historical period of reconstruction after 1945 were the topics of this year’s Bonhoeffer Lecture conference in Germany, a two-day conference organized and hosted by the Institute for Social Science and Theology at the Europa-Universität in Flensburg. The German Bonhoeffer Lecture, sponsored by the Stiftung Bonhoeffer-Lehrstuhl, is a biennial program that convenes U.S. and European Bonhoeffer scholars in a wider conversation with European scholars on historical and contemporary issues.

The focus of the first day was “Religious Pluralism as a Challenge for Social Understanding Today,” with a particular focus on Muslim-Christian relations in Germany. Conference host Ralf Wuestenberg, professor of systematic and historical theology at the university in Flensburg, introduced the theme by analyzing the applicability of Bonhoeffer’s late writings about the “scarring over of guilt” to conversations about guilt, reconciliation, and the challenges of inter-European reconciliation today. Klaus von Stosch, a professor of Catholic theology in Paderborn who also teaches at their Center for Comparative Theology and Cultural Studies, discussed the ways in which theological Muslim-Christian dialogue in Germany today has led to deeper understandings of his own Catholic theology, and the potential of the intercultural programs at the Paderborn Center for a better understanding of pluralism. Çefli Ademi, a postdoctoral fellow for Islamic Theology at the Westphalian Wilhelm University in Münster, delivered a paper on the possibilities within Islamic jurisprudence for co-existence and in some cases integration into western European legal systems. Christiane Tietz, professor of religious philosophy at the University of Zurich whose recent work has focused on interreligious understanding, analyzed and summarized the ways in which interreligious work and dialogue function in today’s Europe.

The second day, “Reconciliation as a Service of the Church and Task of International Politics after 1945,” offered an overview of post-World War II reconciliation in Europe, particularly with respect to the role and responses of the different churches. Konrad Raiser set the foundation by giving an overview of the history of the ecumenical movement in the twentieth century, particularly in terms of its dedication to international peace. My own paper traced the engagement of U.S. churches in postwar Germany, particularly through the work of the Federal Council of Churches and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Karsten Lehmkühler, professor of ethics at the University of Straßburg, talked about the ongoing process of German-French reconciliation after 1945, and Tim Lorentzen, who teaches church history at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, analyzed the role of Christian memorial culture in the process of German-Polish reconciliation.

As the topics indicate, most of the presentations (as well as the discussion that followed) explored theologically-based approaches to dialogue and the ways in which such dialogue can shape broader political discourse. The presentations on the second day, however, illustrated that even theological agendas and discourses are shaped by the historical realities of the respective dialogue partners. A conference volume is being planned.

(The views expressed in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.)

Research Report: Summer Research Workshop “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945”

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Research Report: Summer Research Workshop “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945”, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, August 3-14, 2015.

By Victoria Barnett, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The rise of fascism, ethno-nationalism, and antisemitism after 1918 was a transnational phenomenon. Across Europe, fascist and nationalist groups, many of them religiously aligned, began to appear, laying the foundation for the subsequent involvement of these groups and their sympathizers in the Holocaust. This research workshop conducted a broader comparative examination of this phenomenon among Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches from different regions in Europe, with the goal of better understanding the broader dynamics at work as well as the specific factors that motivated each group. What political, cultural, and theological factors in the different religious traditions and regions facilitated the appearance of such groups? Were they aware of and in touch with each other, and what theological or ideological features did they share? How did religious leaders, theologians, and institutions in the respective countries and churches respond to these developments? While much research has been done on groups like the German Deutsche Christen and the Romanian Iron Guard, relatively little has been done on the other smaller groups and individuals who played a role—although such movements can be found in all three of the major Christian churches, despite significant theological and ecclesiastical differences between and within Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity.

Three central themes emerged from the workshop discussions: 1) the challenges of understanding the role of “religion” in these developments; 2) the diverse forms of ethno-nationalism and fascism that appear in this period; and 3) the significance of antisemitism as a bridge between these radical groups. Discussions about religion addressed the complexity of the theological understandings and institutional realities of the three traditions, as well as the often-overlooked role of transnational movements and ecumenical organizations. Even within a single tradition like Catholicism, for example, there were very different levels of action, ranging from the role of Vatican officials, to regional bishops’ conferences responding to events in places like Poland, Slovakia, and Germany, to radical individuals like the pro-fascist Monsignor Umberto Benigni in Rome and Charles Maurras, who become a leading voice in the right-wing French Aktion Française. Daniela Kalkandjieva’s presentation on the Russian Orthodox churches identified the very distinct traditions and groups that fell under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate, with one group in particular, the Karlovci Synod, emerging as an antisemitic movement that had a transnational following. Other points of discussion included Samuel Koehne’s analysis of Nazi racialized ideology as a kind of “ethnotheism” that resonated among pro-fascist groups but alarmed other bodies, such as the Protestant ecumenical movement and interfaith movements which were driven by an explicit anti-nationalism and anti-racism, particularly in the United States.

The acknowledgment of the complexity of these religious dynamics shaped the workshop approach to the history of fascism and ethno-nationalism, particularly in terms of the different religious “players” that surfaced in these radical movements: religious institutions and organizations, religiously aligned political parties, individual clergy, theologians, and public intellectuals. The differences and similarities between such figures as the Slovakian priest and political leader Josef Tiso, German Reich Bishop Ludwig Mueller, the Romanian theologian Fr. Liviu Stan, and French Mgr. Ernest Jouin, co-publisher of the radically antisemitic Revue Internationale des Sociétés Secrètes, were explored.

While none of these figures can be understood independently of the political circumstances that brought them to prominence, it became clear that the primary “bridge” issue among them was the hatred of Jews. While the roots of such antisemitic discourse rested deep in early Christian theology, more modern forms of racialized, socio-economic, and nationalist antisemitism gained steam in many parts of Europe between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s. In some of the groups studied antisemitism was the dominant theme; in others it converged with ethnic divisions, anti-Communism, and localized political factors.

In many ways this workshop served as a preliminary exploration of a number of important issues for further study. Even these preliminary research findings, however, illustrate that an understanding of the role of “religion” or the churches during the Holocaust cannot be gained purely from the study of specific cases such as the German churches, and that there is much to learn from a comparative look at the entire religious landscape of that era.

The participants in this workshop and their topics are listed here:

Pantelis Anastasakis (independent scholar, New York): “The Church of Greece and the Holocaust: The Limits of the Ethnarchic Tradition”
Victoria Barnett (USHMM): “International Protestant Ecumenical Interpretations of the Rise of Nazism, Fascism, and Antisemitism during the 1920s and 1930s”
Ionut Biliuta (currently at the Simon Wiesenthal Institute for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Vienna, Austria): “When ‘God Was a Fascist’: The Antisemitic Radicalization of the Orthodox Theology under the Impact of Fascism in Interwar Romania”
Giuliana Chamedes (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “The Vatican, Catholic Internationalism, and Nation-Building”
James Felak (University of Washington): “Catholicism, Anti-Semitism, and the Radical Right in Interwar Slovakia and Beyond”
Daniela Kalkandjieva (Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria): “Russian Orthodoxy, Fascism and Nationalism”
Samuel Koehne (Deakin University, Victoria, Australia): “Racist, Brutal, Revolutionary: A Conservative Christian View of Nazism by 1933”
Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College): “Antisemitism, Catholicism, and Judaism in Germany 1918-1945”
Nina Valbousquet (D. Candidate at the Sciences Po Paris, France): “An Anti-Semitic International? Catholic and Far-Right Connections in Monsignor Benigni’s Roman Network (1918-1930s)”

Clarification and Addendum to My Review of Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Clarification and Addendum to My Review of Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory

By Victoria J. Barnett, General Editor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition

A closer look at the original sources cited in Professor Marsh’s book Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer has led me to write this clarification. In my review (September 2014) I commented on “a previously unpublished letter that, in the passage that is quoted, is quite striking” with respect to Marsh’s claim that there was a homoerotic relationship between Bonhoeffer and Bethge. The letter can be found on page 252 of the book; Marsh apparently found the original in the Bethge papers, although he gives no archival citation in the footnote (65). This is incidentally the only place in the entire book where a supposedly newly discovered document is cited in the notes.

Because the passage quoted was so unusual I didn’t immediately recognize it, but as it turns out, it’s from the letter published as nr. 102 in Bonhoeffer Works Volume 14, and the text of the letter differs significantly from the translation offered by Marsh. In his book, Marsh actually quotes a phrase from this letter (which he misdates) two paragraphs before: “I miss you often.” In the passage from the supposedly unpublished letter, Marsh renders the text as follows: “The heart is more deceitful than anything else, and is desperately sick….The semester is coming to an end, and I miss you often.”

The full passage as quoted on page 225 of volume 14 of the Bonhoeffer Works reads as follows:

There is a lot of confusion here at the end of the semester, and I miss you often. I always greatly look forward to your letters! And the unrest in church politics on top of it all. ‘The heart is a defiant and despondent thing.’ (Jer. 17:9) Defiance and despondency – all that just dies in prayer. Let us remain faithful and in the process also remain true to each other.

“The heart is a defiant and despondent thing” is actually a quotation from Jeremiah and Bonhoeffer is commenting on the unrest in church politics.

In other words, the translation is a very misleading version of the original text. Taken as an isolated example this might be overlooked, but unfortunately there are examples throughout the book of mistranslation and misinterpreted (or misunderstood) information, particularly with respect to Marsh’s portrayal of the Bethge-Bonhoeffer relationship. Facts are given without the larger context that gives a more accurate picture. It is not news, for example, that Bonhoeffer and Bethge had a joint bank account; Bethge essentially managed Finkenwalde as well as the underground pastorates in Bonhoeffer’s absence and had to pay bills (and there was always uncertainty as to whether Bonhoeffer might be arrested, which made a joint account a necessity).

In Marsh’s telling the entire section devoted to Bonhoeffer’s brief 1939 stay in New York emphasizes his longing for his friend Bethge, but it must be said there is really no indication of that in either his 1939 New York diary and the letters he wrote during that period, which I translated and edited for Bonhoeffer Works volume 15. What emerges from the actual texts is that Bonhoeffer’s sense of homesickness and remorse at having left Germany was shaped first and foremost by a deep connection and sense of responsibility for his students. He felt that he had left them in the lurch, and his letters to Bethge focused on these concerns.

Here again, the translations in the Marsh book are misleading. Throughout his 1939 diary (and even in some letters to Bethge) Bonhoeffer uses the second-person plural, which makes clear that he’s addressing the entire Finkenwalde community. In Marsh’s account these passages have been turned into the first-person singular and rendered incorrectly as personal notes to Bethge. For example, the quotation on page 280, “someday we will worship together in eternity” (which is not footnoted in Marsh) is from the June 11, 1939, entry in Bonhoeffer’s diary. The larger paragraph in which this passage occurs makes it abundantly clear that the “we” is the community (see the entire text on page 218-19 of Bonhoeffer Works, volume 15). Similarly, in the June 4 letter to Bethge in which Bonhoeffer writes “You will be tired and gone to bed now…” (Marsh, page 277) the “you” is plural and addresses the Finkenwalde community as a whole.

There are similar instances throughout the book of incorrect citations or historical errors that, while they make for a dramatic story, don’t reflect the actual record. For example, in his review of the book in Sojourners (http://sojo.net/blogs/2014/08/26/harlems-influence-bonhoeffer-underestimated-strange-glory), Reggie Williams noted the odd claim that Bonhoeffer broke ties with Abyssinian Baptist church in 1931 because the church was charging people admission to Easter Sunday services (Marsh, pp. 127-128). The source given is a letter Bonhoeffer wrote to his grandmother, but that letter says nothing about an admission charge or even Abyssinian; it’s only a mention of the common practice of major metropolitan U.S. churches to regulate the large Christmas and Easter crowds by issuing passes. Given the centrality of the Abyssinian experience for Bonhoeffer’s theology, a break with that church would be a dramatic development and worthy of further examination—yet there is no evidence of such a break. Indeed, as Clifford Green noted in his introduction to Bonhoeffer Works volume 10, there is some evidence that Bonhoeffer actually spoke at Abyssinian in 1939.

My review essay was titled “Interpreting Bonhoeffer.” As I stressed in that review, the books I was reviewing are all interpretations and attempts to carve out new ground. There is certainly room for that in Bonhoeffer scholarship. There is also room for new interpretations of seminal events and relationships in Bonhoeffer’s life and for new theological interpretations of what he tried to do. But historians will know that interpretation of any kind must be grounded in fact and scrupulous attention to detail and correctness. Interpretation in history and biography (which, as the history of a life, deserves the same kind of faithfulness to accuracy) is only as sound as the accuracy of the account itself.

Review Essay: Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Post-Bethge

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Review Essay: Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Post-Bethge

By Victoria J. Barnett, General Editor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition

Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). 544 pages.

Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G. Siegrist, and Daniel P. Umbel, Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Publishing, 2013). 272 pages.

Reggie L. Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014).

In 2003 the British historian Andrew Chandler (one of the contributing editors to this journal) wrote “The Quest for the Historical Bonhoeffer,” a review essay of the German Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke (DBW) that to my mind remains the best analysis of the challenges of contemporary Bonhoeffer interpretation that has been written.[1] One of his main points was that most of the authors who have written about Bonhoeffer come from a theological or religious background and interpret him, as well as his historical context, through that perspective. The dramatic historical events of Bonhoeffer’s era and the individuals he encountered in ecumenical, political, church, and resistance circles serve primarily as the backdrop for the poignant personal and theological story that is center stage. For decades, the main source for that story has been Eberhard Bethge’s definitive biography of Bonhoeffer, but increasingly Bethge’s text is being augmented by the vast collection of documents now available in English in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition (DBWE) (the final index volume will be published this fall).

When I edited the new unabridged English edition of the biography about 15 years ago, I was struck by the thoroughness of Bethge’s research and by how much of it was correct. Although not a historian, Bethge went to great pains to get the history right. He himself had been part of the Confessing Church, the battles about theological education, and the resistance circles before he was conscripted into the German Wehrmacht, and he reconstructed the parts of the story that he had not personally experienced (such as Bonhoeffer’s early ecumenical period and his year of study in the U.S.) by consulting with others who had known Bonhoeffer during those periods, obtaining copies of correspondence from others and relevant documents from other archives.

There was a just-the-facts modesty in Bethge’s approach to the historical story. There were other versions of certain events, of course, and after the biography appeared there were people who disagreed with him on certain points, and there were pieces of the historical puzzle he did not have. New insights into Bonhoeffer have emerged in recent years from other historical studies that remind us that Bonhoeffer was not nearly as central or prominent as the biography made it seem. Finally, there were issues—notably the centrality of the persecution of the Jews and the churches’ reactions to this—that became dominant in the historiography only after the biography had appeared. Yet it must be said that Bethge was markedly open to all these developments, questions, and new challenges, and in later writings and lectures he began to address these issues.

Nonetheless, a Bonhoeffer mythology developed early on; in fact, it predated the publication of the biography. Particularly because of The Cost of Discipleship and the Letters and Papers from Prison, both of which were available in English by the early 1950s, Bonhoeffer was already being read as a Christian martyr by the time the biography appeared, and the historical narrative that Bethge laid out was interpreted accordingly. Bethge was as surprised by this as anyone. When he arrived in this country during the 1950s to begin writing the biography he observed that “everyone has his own Bonhoeffer,” and once the biography was published he had to spend some of his time countering popular re-interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s theology, notably those from the “death of God” movement.

The mythology remains the crux of the problem in Bonhoeffer interpretation. As Chandler noted, the common portrayal of Bonhoeffer as martyr and hero goes “hand-in-hand with a number of historical arguments about the world he inhabited.” Those historical assumptions emerged during a period in which the history of the German churches under Nazism was largely a hagiographic account. Not only was Bonhoeffer’s actual role in the Kirchenkampf, the ecumenical circles, and the resistance overemphasized, the role played by these groups were portrayed far more heroically and clear-cut than it had actually been.

In the decades since, historical research on the German churches, especially the church struggle and the Confessing Church, has given us a very different picture, and yet the popular historical picture of Bonhoeffer and his context remains frozen in time. The historiography shows, for example, that the Nazi state did not try to impose the 1933 Aryan paragraph on the churches and that the attempted nazification of the churches was carried out largely from within. The ensuing internal debates were the focus and framework for most of Bonhoeffer’s theological writings between 1933 and 1939. A side effect of these debates was pervasive caution throughout the Confessing Church about directly confronting the state. As the documents in DBWE indicate, Bonhoeffer had such moments of caution himself, even advising his seminarians in 1939 to fill out Aryan certificates if the state demanded it.

Yet the dominant narrative in most books on Bonhoeffer continues to portray the church struggle as a clear battle that the Confessing Church bravely waged against the Nazi state, rather than the reality, which was an ongoing internal series of disputes within the German Evangelical Church between German Christians, Confessing Church leaders, and so-called “neutral” church leaders. Until the 1980s the persecution and genocide of the Jews was largely ignored in historical works on the churches (and it was not a central theme in the Bethge biography), but as attention to this topic grew, it was simply assumed that concern about the Jews was Bonhoeffer’s primary motivation in opposing Nazism and that Bonhoeffer was far more outspoken on the issue than in fact was the case. That assumption ignores a number of important nuances—notably the distinctions made at the time by church leaders inside and outside Nazi Germany between secular and observant Jews and so-called “non-Aryan Christians” (i.e., Christians of Jewish ancestry who after 1933 were affected by racial laws). As a result, in much of the Bonhoeffer literature the phrase “the Jews” is uniformly applied to everyone affected by the racial laws, including those (like Franz Hildebrandt) who adamantly did not consider themselves to be Jewish.

The purpose of critically engaging such issues is not to pull Bonhoeffer off the pedestal but to understand the complexities that he himself confronted and wrote about. Chandler concluded his review essay by warning that unless the theologians learned from the historians, the DBWE volumes might themselves simply “become an imposing obstacle to a more mature and profound historical understanding of many substantial questions.”

There is now an extensive and more critical body of historical literature (much of it by the editors of this journal) on the German churches and the Holocaust, especially with regard to the Jews, that has definitively repudiated the early hagiography on this topic. There are new studies of sermons, the influence of Luther’s thought during this era, and localized studies of parishes and pastors that give a nuanced portrait of the Confessing Church. There are new theological and historical examinations of the ideological nationalism and antisemitism that shaped many Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox leaders of the period. There are now studies that show a broader, continent-wide phenomenon in which ethnonationalist, explicitly antisemitic forms of Christianity were emerging in other parts of Europe and the Deutsche Christen were simply the German expression of this.

The documents published in DBWE are themselves another possible source of historical information about these larger events. They give a rare close-up view not just of the individuals and events in the German church struggle as it unfolded, but of the theological debates inside and outside Germany. Thus it is possible to arrive at new interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s theology from within the opus itself, and there are elements that I think Bethge himself overlooked.

This is precisely where the theologians have something to offer, and where a closer examination of Bonhoeffer’s thought would be fascinating: because Bonhoeffer, while certainly writing within the context of Nazi Germany, was addressing these larger issues. From early on—partly through his travels, his ecumenical engagement, and his exposure to a variety of cultural and theological perspectives, partly through his dialectical approach, partly through his sheer erudition—he thought in terms of the grand sweep of Christian theology and its intersection and engagement with the world. By the late 1930s he understood what was happening in Nazi Germany as part of a much larger phenomenon, theologically and historically.

The question before us is whether, with the completion of DBWE, these volumes will open the door to that new kind of theological scholarship about Bonhoeffer that seriously engages the historical challenges he faced.

As examples of the new ways in which the DBWE are being used, the three books reviewed here show both the potential for breaking new theological ground as well as some of the aforementioned historical shortcomings. The authors come from theological backgrounds. Charles Marsh is professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1994), a study of the philosophical influences on him, as well as several books on the civil rights movement. Mark Thiessen Nation teaches at Eastern Mennonite University and has authored several works on ethics, pacifism, and the works of John Howard Yoder; Anthony Siegrist teaches at Prairie Bible College and Daniel Umbel, a graduate of Eastern Mennonite University, is a pastor. Reggie Williams teaches Christian ethics at McCormick Theological Seminary and has written a number of articles on race, ethics, black theology, and Bonhoeffer.

Each of these books marks an attempt to break new ground in very distinct genres. Marsh has written a popular biography that focuses both on conveying Bonhoeffer’s theological development as well as offering a more personal picture of him. Nation and his co-authors focus on the development of Bonhoeffer’s pacifist thought, and openly challenge Bethge’s version of Bonhoeffer’s role in the German resistance. Williams examines how Bonhoeffer’s encounter with black theology and the Harlem Renaissance during his 1930/31 study year in New York shaped his larger theological development. (Disclosure: I am personally acquainted with all three authors).

Charles Marsh’s book is an eloquent, well-written portrayal of Bonhoeffer and his theological development from his young student days to the end of his life. Marsh offers two primary re-interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s theological development: one concerns the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr on Bonhoeffer during his year at Union as pushing Bonhoeffer to a more concrete and activist ethics once he returned to Germany. The other is an attempt to show the extent to which Bonhoeffer’s theology was influenced by Judaism, particularly the work of Martin Buber.

Both topics, of course, have implications for understanding Bonhoeffer historically. I found the Niebuhrian connection more convincing; the case for the influence of Judaism is much thinner and Marsh notably avoids the issues raised by Bonhoeffer’s 1933 essay “The Church and the Jewish Question” entirely (he refers to it obliquely while discussing the Bethel confession). Although Bonhoeffer’s postdoctoral dissertation Act and Being makes striking use of the Ich-Du distinction that Buber employed in I and Thou, the interpretation of most Bonhoeffer scholars to date has been that Bonhoeffer meant something quite different than Martin Buber–and it’s worth noting that we don’t know whether Bonhoeffer even had read the book (he didn’t own a copy and nowhere in his writings does he actually cite Buber). Because these are academic debates of little interest to general readers Marsh doesn’t develop these arguments in depth; on the other hand, precisely because he offers these as new readings of Bonhoeffer’s texts it would have been worth a footnote or two going into more detail to make his case.

Marsh’s primary aim, however, is to render a more personal portrait of Bonhoeffer. A combination of personal reserve and family considerations made Bethge remarkably circumspect about personal anecdotes, and the biography appeared before the era of tell-all biography. The only other sources for such personal glimpses have been Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann’s I knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer with its recollections by various contemporaries, Sabine Leizholz’s memoir of her family, and the published collection of Bonhoeffer’s letters to Maria von Wedemeyer, Love Letters from Cell 92, which did offer readers a completely different and often poignant glimpse of the man behind the theology. In addition to poring through the more personal letters in DBWE, Marsh went through Bethge’s personal papers that are now at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, and he also gives some wonderful more personalized descriptions of the very different circles in which Bonhoeffer moved.

The results are somewhat uneven, although that may be because this is such an ambitious and difficult thing to do. In rearranging the figure-ground relationship of a biography, how does one know what to emphasize, and does the selection of more personal letters obscure the broader sense of the person that can be gotten from other letters? Much of the early material Marsh cites makes Bonhoeffer seem surprisingly superficial, and yet there are other letters in DBWE (not cited) by the young Bonhoeffer that show a real gravitas, as well as a closeness and respect for his parents and his siblings that is quite moving; both those qualities seem lost here. But there are strong portrayals of his travels, particularly the trip he took through the Deep South at the end of his Union year and the impression made on him by seeing American racism.

The aspect of the book that has drawn the most attention is the portrayal of the friendship to Bethge as a homoerotic one that on Bonhoeffer’s part really was a romantic attachment. It must be said that there are a few letters in DBWE that can be read this way, and in Bethge’s papers Marsh discovered a previously unpublished letter that, in the passage that is quoted, is quite striking. Ultimately, however, such an interpretation remains speculative. The love letters to Maria von Wedemeyer do indicate a real affection and certainly a hope in the possibility of a shared future, and in one of those letters Bonhoeffer actually wrote of his earlier love for Elisabeth Zinn. The relationship (and Bethge himself) can be seen in a broader context if one realizes where Bonhoeffer stood in life at the moment Bethge arrived in Finkenwalde: increasingly marginalized in his church as well as in the ecumenical movement, under growing pressure and surveillance, and tasked with overseeing one of the five Confessing seminaries that had been created in the wake of the 1934 Dahlem synod. Bethge–a steady, unflappable person if there ever was one–came along at the right time and Bonhoeffer soon turned to him for help with running Finkenwalde and increasingly leaned on him as pressures mounted. Reading some of the correspondence, it is possible to conclude that Bonhoeffer was often a demanding friend, but most of their exchanges were intellectual and theological.

The exercise itself is an interesting one that raises broader questions about how to interpret the DBWE texts; by highlighting the more personal and informal elements of some of these documents Marsh shows us a different and in many ways more modest Bonhoeffer. The book’s real contribution may be that by illustrating the personal turning points in Bonhoeffer’s life Marsh illustrates that these were theological turning points. Those theological turning points are often overlooked by historians, and yet as Marsh notes, they were the driving impulse in some of his decisions.

Bonhoeffer the Assassin offers a theological examination of Bonhoeffer’s writings on peace from a pacifist perspective (the authors are Anabaptists). It offers a good summary of these texts, from the early period of the 1930s through the prison period, demonstrating the strong theological continuity from his ecumenical speeches to Discipleship to Ethics that shows the centrality of a peace ethic in Bonhoeffer’s thought. The analysis and insights of these texts from a peace tradition perspective is a genuine contribution to the literature.

The more problematic section of the book is the historical section and its contention that because Bonhoeffer was a committed pacifist, he could not possibly have supported the conspiracy plans to kill Hitler and other Nazi leaders, and that his actual involvement and knowledge of such plans was peripheral. This section of the book is an attack on Bethge’s historiography. The authors claim that the “myth” of Bonhoeffer as stated in the provocative title emerged directly from Bethge’s portrayal of this period of Bonhoeffer’s life in the biography and that there is actually no evidence in the DBWE documentation to support this version. The authors argue that Bonhoeffer remained opposed to the planned murders of Adolf Hitler and leading Nazis, and that far from playing an actual role in the resistance activities, Bonhoeffer primarily served as pastoral counselor to the conspirators.

They base their argument in part on Sabine Dramm’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Resistance (reviewed in this journal in 2008), but much of their methodology draws directly on the documents in DBWE—as the authors put it, by going directly to Bonhoeffer’s own words and not relying on what they describe as the secondary and erroneous account by Bethge. Dramm did something similar, it should be noted: drawing primarily on the documents in DBWE 16, she argued correctly for a more modest understanding of Bonhoeffer’s entry into and role in the July resistance circles.

Dramm’s outline of events does not contradict Bethge’s account in the biography, but Bethge did emphasize Bonhoeffer’s early knowledge of and support for the conspiracy aims, and this is one of the issues Nation and his co-authors focus on. While it is correct that Bonhoeffer did not write down information about the related discussions in the Bonhoeffer home that took place as early as 1938 (he would have been a fool to do so), there is substantial evidence to support Bethge’s version of things, both in the later accounts of people who knew Bonhoeffer and most particularly in Winfried Meyer’s recent studies of Hans von Dohnanyi and the Abwehr resistance circles, as well as in Marijke Smid’s study of Hans and Christine von Dohnanyi. By these accounts, Bonhoeffer was Dohnanyi’s most trusted confidant and was informed quite early both about the regime’s atrocities as well as the emerging plans to overthrow the regime.

Moreover there is much evidence in Bonhoeffer’s own writings that contradicts the book’s claims. Bonhoeffer did in fact speak about “tyrannicide”–in a 1935 study of the Augsburg Confession at Finkenwalde–and he also argued against a simple principled adherence to strict pacifism. Reconciling Bonhoeffer’s writings on peace with his role in the resistance is a challenge that requires an exploration of Bonhoeffer’s pacifism not only through his writings on that topic, but through his writings on ethics and the church/state relationship, with a recognition of the complexity of the circumstances he faced and the decisions he made as a result. Beginning with his deconstruction of the legitimacy of Nazi authority in 1933 and going through to his wartime writings, in fact, the church/state writings offer deep insights into Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the pacifist question.

In his July 1945 eulogy for Bonhoeffer, George Bell said that “deeply committed as he was to the plan for elimination, he was not altogether at ease as a Christian about such a solution.” Bell was in a position to know, since Bonhoeffer had given him information about the intended coup (including the plans to kill Hitler) in 1942 to convey to Anthony Eden. The second part of Bell’s sentence addresses the very dilemma that troubles the authors of this book: how did Bonhoeffer reconcile the conspiracy’s aims with Christian principles? The answer is that he didn’t, and he accepted the full responsibility demanded by such a “boundary situation.” Eberhard Bethge gave a similar reply to Bell’s when I interviewed him about this in 1985, saying that while Bonhoeffer believed that the killing of Hitler and others was necessary he deliberately refused to claim the sanction of the church for this action, saying that this was his personal choice and involved taking a certain guilt upon himself. Bethge’s version was also confirmed by Klaus Bonhoeffer’s widow Emmi when I interviewed her in 1986; she told me that the entire family was unanimous in support of the coup attempt. That might not satisfy doctrinaire thinkers, but I think it is difficult to understand Bonhoeffer fully if we insist on a version of him that ignores such contradictions and complexities.

Here there are insights to be gained from the perspective of contemporaries who were active in pacifist circles and were in fact consistent on the issue– Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, Corder Catchpool, George Bell’s sister-in-law Laura Livingston, many of the people in the Gruber office, and Andre Trocme in Le Chambon. One of Bonhoeffer’s closest friends before Bethge came on the scene was Herbert Jehle, who strongly championed Bonhoeffer’s pacifism in postwar debates about it. So this is an especially complex area where–as with the issue of Bonhoeffer’s engagement in helping for Jews–much could still be written.

Another such area is Bonhoeffer’s encounter with the African-American church and the realities of American racism during his year in New York in 1930-31. Bonhoeffer himself acknowledged the tremendous impact of this experience, writing, “I heard the gospel preached in the Negro churches,” and taking recordings of Negro spirituals back to Germany, where he played them for the somewhat baffled Finkenwalde seminarians. Josiah Young’s 1998 book No Difference in the Fare explored this period, particularly in terms of how it shaped Bonhoeffer’s critique of Nazi ideology.

Reggie Williams’ Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus builds on Young’s insights but breaks new ground in offering a detailed and vibrant portrait of the Harlem Renaissance that was in full blossom during Bonhoeffer’s time in New York. The course syllabi and reading lists for Bonhoeffer during this time (published in DBWE 10) show that Bonhoeffer read a number of books by black authors like Countee Cullen, and Williams talks about what it was the Bonhoeffer was actually reading, how authors like Cullen and W. E. B. Du Bois thought about racism in the broader sense, and what he would have encountered in the culture at Abyssinian Baptist Church and beyond.

William makes the case that these encounters shaped Bonhoeffer’s subsequent thought about the theological questions that were so central for him: what is church? And who is Christ today? The breakthrough sections of the book are those that explore the influence of the black theology of the day on Bonhoeffer’s notion of Stellvertretung (“vicarious representative action,” in DBWE) and his ecumenism. Williams argues that the theological insights that emerged from Bonhoeffer’s exposure to the black church shaped his further exploration of ecumenical theological identity beyond strictly European concerns and actually included some of the concerns expressed by African-American thinkers at the time.

Historically, Williams offers new information about Bonhoeffer’s seminary friend Albert Franklin Fisher, the son of a prominent Baptist minister in Birmingham who became Bonhoeffer’s guide to this new world. The book also gives an evocative description of the Harlem Renaissance in its full radicality and rawness (similar to some of Marsh’s descriptions of the south). As in each of these books, there are places here where the historical understanding of Bonhoeffer’s immediate context and the issues he confronted falls short. Williams’s use of colonialization theory in particular sometimes leads him to make sweeping claims about the German church struggle and Bonhoeffer’s theological background. The ethnocentric theology of the German Christians, while it definitely has analogies in some aspects of American racism, included a complex mix of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and certain interpretations of Lutheran tradition that led to some distinctive challenges.

The strengths of all three books rest in the theological sections: Marsh’s tracing of the different influences on Bonhoeffer’s theology and where he took them; Nation, Siegrist, and Umbel in the exploration of the development of his pacifism; Williams’ discussion of how the larger context of the Harlem renaissance inspired both Bonhoeffer’s personal spirituality and broader ecumenism.

The other strength, especially in the books by Marsh and Williams, is the vivid portrait of the worlds in which Bonhoeffer wrote and lived: the travels to Spain and Italy, the time in New York, and the theological debates that shaped Bonhoeffer and his circles. Each author has made a serious attempt to go beyond Bethge–through new information, new interpretations of the documents and the history itself, and in the case of Nation, actually challenging Bethge’s version of the history. All three draw heavily on the lesser-known material that is now available in the new DBWE edition, including material that is less familiar to English-language readers. As one of the general editors of DBWE, I welcome this as the necessary step to bring Bonhoeffer scholarship to a new level.

There is important information in each of these works for historians to consider. Nonetheless, Chandler’s warning that theologians need to consider more recent historical literature remains true; in their historical sections these books reveal the inherent limitations of constructing a historical narrative primarily from within the DBWE opus.

Notes:

[1] Published in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (Jan 2003), 54:1, pp. 89-97.

Conference Report: “Karl Barth, The Jews, and Judaism”

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Conference Report: “Karl Barth, The Jews, and Judaism,” 2014 Annual Karl Barth Conference, Princeton Theological Seminary, June 15-18, 2014.

Victoria J. Barnett, General Editor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition

The connections and tensions between Karl Barth’s theological approach to Judaism, his stands on the Aryan paragraph in the early period of the German Kirchenkampf, and their greater implication for the entire period of Nazism and the Holocaust have been explored by theologians and historians alike. Barth is often compared unfavorably with Bonhoeffer on this point, primarily because of the different position he took in September 1933 as to whether the time had come to break with the German Evangelical Church, which at the its General Synod had just passed an Aryan paragraph that would apply to clergy. In a letter to Barth, Bonhoeffer urged such a break; Barth’s reply of September 11, 1933, urged caution at that particular moment, arguing that the best tactic was to fight from within (“we must be among the last actually to leave the sinking ship”). That position has been strongly criticized, particularly in Wolfgang Gerlach’s work on the Confessing Church, and has led to a general assumption that Bonhoeffer was clearer than Barth on this issue not only in the Kirchenkampf but in his general political critique of Nazism. At the same time, the theological centrality of Israel in Barth’s thought made it foundational in his opposition to the German Christians and Nazism. Eberhard Busch, the dean of Barth scholars, as well as theologians like Mark Lindsay have long argued that Barth’s theological approach to Israel needs to be taken into account in any analysis and conclusions about his role between 1933-1945.

This issue was the theme for this year’s annual Barth conference at Princeton Theological Seminary. While the focus of many of the plenary and session papers was on Barth’s theology, there were several historical papers, including my own plenary remarks. Other plenary presentations included remarks by leading Barthians Eberhard Busch, Mark Lindsay, and George Hunsinger, and papers by Ellen Charry (Professor of Theology at Princeton), who has done much work in this area, as well as two leading Jewish scholars, David Novak (Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Toronto) and Peter Ochs (Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at The University of Virginia).

The result was a far-reaching discussion that covered a great deal of theological and historical territory. In my own paper I focused on Barth’s significance for the early postwar interfaith circles. Barth’s theology of Israel influenced several of the early interfaith pioneers of Jewish-Christian relations. People like Karl Thieme and John Oesterreicher began to incorporate this theology into their thought during the 1930s, and Barth was invited to attend the 1947 Seelisberg meeting of the International Conference of Christians and Jews (Barth was unable to attend). Barth’s student Friedrich Wilhelm Marquardt brought Barthian theology to bear on postwar Jewish-Christian dialogues in Germany. In addition, Barth’s outspoken support for the war against Nazi Germany and his connections to Swiss refugee and German resistance groups (not only his Bonhoeffer connection, but his active support for the activities of Gertrud Staewen and the Kaufmann resistance circle, and the cover letter he signed with Willem Visser ‘t Hooft, Emil Brunner, and Paul Vogt for the Auschwitz Protocol, a 1944 document with details about the death camps that was sent to international leaders) led to postwar invitations to dialogue with Jewish groups.

Eberhard Busch traced Barth’s development both historically and theologically, noting that Barth was incorporating the theology of scholars like Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber during the 1920s; in turn German Jewish thinkers like Emil Bernhard Cohn and Leo Baeck read and engaged Barth in conversation. Even before 1933 Barth was critical of the strong anti-Judaism in German Protestant theology. His attack on völkisch theology was based on three points that were central in his own theology: the notion that Christianity constituted a completely new religion, the rejection of Judaism as a result, and the “orders of creation” theological understanding of God’s law. Busch argued that this led to a theological clarity about Judaism that went beyond that of Bonhoeffer.

David Novak offered an overview of some of the key elements of Barth’s theology that have opened the door to Jewish-Christian conversation, notably his understanding of the law and his emphasis on Christianity’s continuities with Israel. Novak observed that Barth demands that Jews address Christians precisely as Jews, which changes the conversation and makes it possible for Jewish thinkers to engage with Barth’s work in a deeper way. Peter Ochs explored Barth’s interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures and Judaism, noting both the ways in which a Christian (particularly a Christocentric) interpretation of these texts is necessarily supersessionist and yet because Barth affirms the Tanakh there are ways to engage. Nonetheless, the interpretation of these texts from within Judaism itself will always differ from the Christian approach, which references and interprets them retrospectively from the theological standpoint of the Christian gospels.

Ellen Charry offered a much more critical analysis of Barth’s understanding of Christianity, both in light of his Christology and particularly his interpretation of Romans. In viewing the Jews as a people essentially “elected for rejection,” she noted, Barth’s support for modern Judaism was grounded in the supersessionist notion that their existence served the church and the Christian understanding of salvation. Mark Lindsay, author of the recent Reading Auschwitz with Barth: The Holocaust as Problem and Promise for Barthian Theology, acknowledged some of these elements in Barth’s thought, yet argued that because of the continuities he draws from Judaism to Christianity, there are opportunities for post-Holocaust theologians to engage with Barth.

There were several other conference papers of particular interest to historians, including a presentation on the Baptists responses to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, particular the statements that emerged from the 1934 International Baptist Congress held in Berlin by Lee B. Spitzer (an American Baptist scholar in New Jersey); a study of Confessing Church pastor and postwar theologian Helmut Gollwitzer’s understanding of Judaism by W. Travis McMaken (who teaches religion at Lindenwood University); a paper on Hans-Joachim Schoeps by David Dessin (University of Antwerp); and an overview of Barth’s encounters with Judaism in America (Jessica DeCou, University of Basel). In the concluding conference remarks, George Hunsinger (Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton and director of the Barth Center there) stated that the influence of Barth’s theology has shaped Christian understandings of Judaism in a way that does not undo the damage of Christian antisemitism but opens the way for other conversations. The publication of the conference presentations is being planned.

Call for Papers: 2014 Annual Karl Barth Conference

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

Call for Papers: 2014 Annual Karl Barth Conference

The 2014 Annual Karl Barth Conference will be held on June 15^th-18^th, 2014 at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, NJ. The theme of the conference is “Barth, Jews, and Judaism” and the plenary speakers include Victoria Barnett (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), Eberhard Busch (Georg-August-Universität-Göttingen), Ellen Charry (Princeton Theological Seminary), George Hunsinger (Princeton Theological Seminary), Mark Lindsay (MCD University of Divinity), David Novak (University of Toronto), and Peter Ochs (University of Virginia).

Those currently enrolled in a doctoral program or with completed doctorates are invited to submit paper proposals on this year’s theme. The focus of this year’s conference is the relationship between Judaism and Karl Barth’s theology both historically and constructively.

Abstracts not exceeding 250 words should be sent to Barth.center@ptsem.edu no later than March 1^st, 2014. Papers should be no more than 3,500 words in order to be delivered in 30 minutes and allow 15-20 minutes for Q&A. Please include your current academic standing with submissions.

Seminar Announcement: Moral Dilemmas and Moral Choice in the Holocaust

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

Seminar Announcement: Moral Dilemmas and Moral Choice in the Holocaust

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies

Program on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust

2013 Annual Seminar for Seminary and Religious Studies Faculty

Moral Dilemmas and Moral Choice in the Holocaust: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Pius XII as Case Studies in Religious Leadership

June 23-27, 2014

The Program on Ethics, Religions, and the Holocaust of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is pleased to announce its annual seminar for faculty from all disciplines but particularly for professors of theology, ethics, and religion at theological schools and other institutions of advanced education. The seminar is scheduled for June 23-27, 2014.

Holocaust history provides complex, often troubling examples of the responses of religious groups, theologians, and leaders from across Europe. As two of the most studied religious figures of this era, German Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Catholic pontiff Pope Pius XII offer significant insights into the larger theological, ecclesial, and political issues that shaped Christian reactions to National Socialism and the Holocaust. Bonhoeffer, a young Confessing Church pastor and theologian, eventually became involved in the conspiracy to overthrow the Nazi regime and was executed by the Nazis in 1945. Eugenio Pacelli was the Vatican’s secretary of state until he became Pope Pius XII in 1939. Both men have their defenders and critics, particularly with respect to their responses to the persecution of the Jews. This seminar will explore the historical and theological complexities of their respective roles, as well as their legacies in shaping Christian understandings of the Holocaust after 1945.

The seminar will be co-taught by Victoria Barnett and Robert Ventresca. Robert Ventresca is associate professor of history at King’s University College at Western University in London, Ontario (Canada), and the author of Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII (2013). He is also the author of From Fascism to Democracy: Culture and Politics in the Italian Election of 1948 (2004) which received an honorable mention for the Canadian Historical Association’s Wallace K. Ferguson Prize. Professor Ventresca was a founding member and inaugural Co-Chair of the former Center for Catholic-Jewish Learning at King’s University College at Western University. Victoria Barnett directs the Museum’s Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust. She is also one of the general editors of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, the translation of the complete 16-volume writings of Bonhoeffer being published by Fortress Press. She is also the author of Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (1999) and For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (1992).

Participants will also have the opportunity to learn more about Museum resources for their teaching and to consult and interact with Museum staff and visiting scholars. More information about the Museum’s programs on the history of the churches during the Holocaust can be found at www.ushmm.org/research/center/church/.

Candidates must be faculty members at accredited, degree-awarding institutions in North America. Applications must include: (1) a curriculum vitae; (2) a statement of the candidate’s specific interest and purpose for attending the seminar; and (3) a supporting letter from a departmental chair or dean addressing the candidate’s qualifications and the institution’s potential interest in having Holocaust-related courses taught.

Admission will be decided without regard to age, gender, race, creed, or national origin. A maximum of twenty applicants will be accepted. For non-local participants, the Center will (1) reimburse the cost of direct travel to and from the participant’s home institution and Washington, DC, up to but not exceeding the amount of $500; and (2) defray the cost of lodging for the duration of the course. Incidental, meal, and book expenses must be defrayed by the candidates or their respective institutions. All participants must attend the entire seminar.

Applications must be postmarked, emailed, or faxed no later than Monday, February 24, 2014, and sent to: Victoria Barnett, University Programs, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW, Washington, DC 20024-2150 (Email: vbarnett@ushmm.org; Fax: 202-479-9726). For questions, contact Victoria Barnett at 202-488-0469 or vbarnett@ushmm.org. All applicants will be notified of the results of the selection process by Monday, March 24, 2014.

This seminar is made possible by the Hoffberger Family Fund and by Joseph A. and Janeal Cannon and Family.

Review Article: Academic and Ecclesiastical Complicity in the Third Reich

3 Replies

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

Review Article: Academic and Ecclesiastical Complicity in the Third Reich

By Victoria J. Barnett, Director of Church Relations, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Robert P. Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Jens Gundlach, Heinz Brunotte 1896-1984: Anpassung des Evangeliums an die NS-Diktatur. Eine biographische Studie (Hannover: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 2010).

The issue of complicity has become a major focus of Holocaust historiography in recent years, fueled by the research of historians like Christopher Browning, Robert Gellatelly, Peter Hayes and many others. While the very word “complicity” connotes a more secondary, passive role, the work of these scholars has documented the extent to which complicity was in fact an active and participatory process, particularly with regard to the persecution of the Jews. Germans from every walk of life participated in and benefited from these measures. Continue reading →

Conference Report: Bonhoeffer for the Coming Generations: A Conference Celebrating Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition and the 15th Annual Bonhoeffer Lectures in Public Ethics

Leave a reply

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Conference Report: “Bonhoeffer for the Coming Generations: A Conference Celebrating Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition and the 15th Annual Bonhoeffer Lectures in Public Ethics,” Union Theological Seminary, New York, November 13-15, 2011.

By Victoria J. Barnett, General Editor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition

This conference was an unusual symbiosis of two longstanding cooperative international projects: the biennial Bonhoeffer Lectures in Public Ethics and the English publication of the 16-volume Bonhoeffer Works. With the imminent conclusion of the Bonhoeffer Works series (two volumes have yet to appear: volume 11 will be published next spring; volume 14 will appear in early 2013) the combination of these two events was a logical move. The conference in New York provided a retrospective of Bonhoeffer’s influence in the theological world in recent decades as well as a look at the promising future of Bonhoeffer scholarship.

The opening Bonhoeffer Lecture in Public Ethics was held by Sam Wells, Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, and set the tone for the predominantly theological reflections of the first day, which explored Bonhoeffer’s international interpretation by theologians and church activists as well as some new directions in the scholarship. Bishop Emeritus Wolfgang Huber of Germany, a Bonhoeffer scholar in his own right and the chair of the editorial board of the German Bonhoeffer Werke, offered an analysis of Bonhoeffer’s legacy after 1945 in the Federal and German Democratic Republics as well as in unified Germany after 1990. An international panel of Bonhoeffer scholars from South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil and Japan explored the different issues that have influenced the interpretation of the Bonhoeffer legacy in those countries. The afternoon presentations included a panel on “new research related to Bonhoeffer and public life,” with panelists exploring the influences of Harlem Renaissance literature and theology on Bonhoeffer’s ethical thought and activism (these were strong influences on Bonhoeffer during his fellowship year at Union from 1930-31), the theological continuities between Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship and his later Ethics manuscripts, and the development and consequences of Bonhoeffer’s concept of the “church for others.” The day concluded with an analysis of the extent to which Bonhoeffer’s Christology, which is such a central motif throughout this theological writings, can be understood in today’s pluralistic societies.

The second day was devoted to celebrating the publication of the Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, and speakers continued to explore his historical and theological context. Some background about the content and publication history of this series is in order. (Full disclosure: I have served since 2004 as general editor of the new English Edition, having edited volumes 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16. I also worked as associate general editor on volume 6 [Ethics] and served both as volume editor and one of the translators on the recently published volume 15. Wayne Floyd, who resigned as general editor in 2004, edited volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9; the third general editor, Barbara Wojhoski, is a professional copyeditor who joined the project in 2004 and has overseen the copyediting and production phases since then. This arrangement means that I’ve overseen the work on the more historical volumes, although even these volumes contain a great deal of theological material.)

The German Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke consists of 16 annotated volumes (plus a 17th index volume). The first eight volumes are his theological writings (Creation and Fall, Discipleship, etc.) plus one volume of his fiction; the last eight volumes are arranged chronologically and contain his correspondence and some correspondence by others, university lectures, bible studies, sermons and various other documents from his life between 1918 and 1945. Much of the material in these last eight volumes has either never been translated into English or has appeared only in abridged form.

In 1990 the English Language Section of the International Bonhoeffer Society signed an agreement with the German Bonhoeffer Society and Augsburg Fortress Press for the translation and publication of the German volumes. The translations have been undertaken by a team of translators—some of them native German speakers, some of them Bonhoeffer experts, and some of them professional translators. Each volume was assigned to an individual editor who worked with the translator(s) for that volume and upon completion sent it along to the series general editor for review before publication. As part of the agreement with the German Bonhoeffer Society, the German editors of the respective volumes reviewed and commented on the translation.

Hence, the approaching conclusion of Bonhoeffer Works English Edition marks over 20 years of collaborative work by an international team. If the discussions at the New York conference are any indication, this body of work will open new avenues for research about both his theological and his historical legacy. Bonhoeffer interpretation to date has generally fallen into one of these two categories, with relatively few works that masterfully combine the two narratives (the Bethge biography, I think, is one such success).

Bonhoeffer himself was one of the most brilliant and provocative theologians of his generation. He cannot be understood without an understanding of his theological training, the influence of thinkers like Karl Barth, and the larger theological conversations—notably in the context of the Church Struggle and the international ecumenical movement—in which he was a key participant. At the same time, the historical locus of his life and work in Nazi Germany and at the heart of the German Church Struggle—and naturally his role in the German resistance and his execution by the Nazi regime—means that he has always been a figure of great interest to historians.

These very different aspects of his life and thought make him an unusually complex figure, and this is a challenge both to the theologians and the historians. Hence many of us found it particularly important at this conference that participants could hear from both disciplines and I believe that the second day, devoted to the series, successfully highlighted many of the important theological and historical issues. I introduced the day with some remarks about the series, its potential contribution to the field, and the research areas that still remain. This was followed by a panel of seven of the translators who have worked on the series, discussing the particular translation issues that arose in trying to convey the history, the theology, and the person of Bonhoeffer. A paper by the German project liaison Hans Pfeifer explored “the impact of translation on cultural elements in theology,” giving the German perspective on these challenges. An afternoon panel featuring Union Seminary professor Gary Dorrien and several editors of this newsletter (Doris Bergen, Andrew Chandler, Robert Ericksen, and Matthew Hockenos) discussed Bonhoeffer’s place on the historical landscape. The day concluded with a summary of Bonhoeffer’s theological contributions—with some significant new insights for further research—by Clifford Green, executive director of the Bonhoeffer Works English Edition and Michael DeJonge, author of a forthcoming book on the theological interaction between Bonhoeffer and Barth.

The conference—particularly the contributions by younger scholars—illustrated that there is still much to do, both in understanding the development of Bonhoeffer’s theology and in situating him in the history of his era and his church. The new English edition of the Bonhoeffer Works offers the big picture as well as all the minute details. The theological works in the first eight volumes and the theological/historical final eight volumes inform each other, because they will enable future scholars to trace the emergence of Bonhoeffer’s theology, follow its development throughout his life, and better understand the impact of the times in which he lived and wrote.

Conference Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Conference, Kreisau, 15-17 September, 2011

Leave a reply

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2011

Conference Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Conference, Kreisau, 15-17 September, 2011.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

The annual meeting of the journal, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History, took place in Kreisau, now in Poland, where Helmuth James von Moltke led the “Kreisauer Kreis,” a group of resisters against the Nazi state. We met from September 15-17, 2011, on the Moltke estate, now renovated and serving as a retreat center. German and Polish presenters spoke on the topic, “Kirchliches Versöhnungshandeln im Interesse des deutsch-polnischen Verhältnisses (1962-1989).”

Underlying issues on this topic are obvious. German-Polish relations had not been good since the re-establishment of Poland after World War I and the German bitterness that ensued. German crimes against Poland during World War II then added huge grievances on the Polish side. In the early postwar period, West Germany was tempted to downplay German guilt and complain about things such as the Polish border on the Oder-Neisse line—a border that left Germany without a large portion of its 1937 boundaries—and the perceived injustice of Germans mistreated, dispossessed of property, and driven out of Eastern Europe. This conference, focusing upon church responses to German-Polish relations from 1962-1989, dealt with three main themes found in the churches: German attitudes toward Poland, Polish attitudes toward Germany, and the underlying role of Christian identity in individual nations as well as in Europe as a whole.

Andrea Strübind presented a paper on the “Tübingen Memorandum,” a foreign policy statement by Protestant intellectuals that appeared in Die Zeit on March 2, 1962. This statement was signed by eight prominent individuals: Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Ludwig Raiser, Klaus von Bismarck, Georg Picht, Günter Howe, Helmut Becker, Joachim Beckmann, and Werner Heisenberg. These men identified themselves as Protestants and spoke of the need for private citizens of conscience to speak out on public issues, but the EKD and its more conservative leadership quickly distanced itself from these Protestant voices. The Memorandum offended many West Germans, even though its ideas subsequently drove West German policy. The authors included a claim for the free status of Berlin, but coupled it with the right of self-determination for the GDR, a foundation of human rights in foreign policy questions, and the need for “Wiedergutmachung” and reconciliation—including acceptance of the Oder-Neisse line—in Germany’s relationship with Eastern Europe. This statement raised hackles, not least because of its claim to a foundation in Christian ethics. In Klaus von Bismarck’s earlier words in relation to his family’s estates in Pomerania, “We have no claim on lands that God has taken from us.” Not all Germans were so magnanimous.

Polish efforts toward reconciliation in the 1960s included a correspondence between Polish and German bishops, but they mostly talked past each other. Polish bishops were willing to speak of “forgiveness,” rather than “reconciliation.” Christians forgive each other, they wrote. But they also expect confession and changed behavior. In general during the 1960s, West Germans were far more interested in the GDR and eventual reunification, than they were in questions of confession and forgiveness between Germany and Poland. Two decades later, as described in a paper by Gerhard Besier, Helmut Kohl picked up on this idea of Christian unity, making a gesture that combined his own roots in the Catholic Church with the Catholicism of Poles. In November 1989, he met in Kreisau with the Polish leader, Mazowiecki. Kohl insisted that the meeting should include a Catholic mass. This led to a “Friedensgruss” and a hug at the end of the service. It proved a powerful symbol of German-Polish reconciliation, useful both to Kohl and Mazowiecki, whether or not the emotional moment was spontaneous or planned.

Katarzyna Stoklosa presented a paper interrogating the idea of Polish Catholicism and Polish identity as reflected on Radio Maryja. This radio station, quite popular among some portions of the Catholic demographic in Poland (and among some Poles in the U.S.), emphasizes Polish nationalism with strong components of Catholic piety, ethnocentrism, and antisemitism. Willfried Spohn then offered ecumenism as the one hope for harmonious relations between the religions and nations of Europe. He leads a project at Göttingen University focusing on the ongoing effort to create European identity out of disparate nations. Noting the former widespread belief that Europeanization and secularization represent parallel processes, he acknowledged the resurgence of the Orthodox Church in Russia and the Catholic Church in Poland, not to mention the place of Islam in today’s Europe, as elements in a counter-thesis that unbroken secularization is by no means a certainty in the 21^st century.

Having discussed various ways in which Christian leaders tried to deal with the disharmonies of early postwar Europe, conference attendees then speculated on whether religious identity coupled with ecumenism might provide the right set of tools for a harmonious future.

Review of Manfred Gailus, Mir aber zerriss es das Herz. Der stille Widerstand der Elisabeth Schmitz

5 Replies

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

Review of Manfred Gailus, Mir aber zerriss es das Herz. Der stille Widerstand der Elisabeth Schmitz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), ISBN: 978-3525550083.

By Victoria Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The individuals in Nazi Germany who acted with moral clarity, simple decency, and straightforward courage are in such short supply that they are worthy not only of honor but of serious study. As we know all too well, between 1933 and 1945 the vast majority of German citizens lived their lives in the grey zones of compromise, silence, and complicity. Those who resisted were outsiders in virtually every respect, and they remained so after 1945, when most Germans were quite uncomfortable with those in their midst who had opposed and resisted Nazism or been its victims. And by the time people became eager to uncover these stories, many of the traces had become buried.

Elisabeth Schmitz is a poignant and powerful example of one such individual. In 1999 a short study by one of her students, Dietgard Meyer, appeared as an appendix in Katharina Staritz, 1903-1953. Mit einem Exkurs Elisabeth Schmitz (Neukirchener, 1999). The 1999 essay included the startling discovery that Schmitz (not the Berlin social worker Marga Meusel) was the author of the 23-page memorandum, “Zur Lage der deutschen Nichtarier,” submitted to the September 1935 Prussian Confessing Church synod in Berlin-Steglitz. Meyer’s portrait of Schmitz proved that she had been one of the rare Germans who had consistently and at great personal cost chosen to stand by their Jewish neighbors.

As Gailus notes in this new biography, several historians were already looking more closely at the history of the memorandum; the historian Hartmut Ludwig had already confirmed that Schmitz was indeed the author. It was Gailus, however, who began to compile and document a much more comprehensive picture of Schmitz’s activities during the Third Reich and the subsequent historiography that had omitted her. The author of several fine studies on the Kirchenkampf, Gailus organized a 2007 conference in Berlin on Schmitz’s life and work; papers from this conference were published as Elisabeth Schmitz und ihre Denkschrift gegen die Judenverfolgung. Konturen einer vergessenen Biografie (1893-1977). Gailus also served as the key consultant for the film Elisabeth of Berlin produced by U. S. filmmaker Steve Martin, who produced the documentary several years ago on Robert Ericksen’s work Theologians under Hitler; both films are available from Vital Visions (www.vitalvisions.org).

Gailus has now written a biography of Schmitz that does justice both to her courage and to the troubling questions that her story raises about how historical narratives are created. Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of this biography is its dual narrative, which combines the story of a remarkably courageous and self-effacing woman with what Gailus calls the “Erinnerungskultur”—the culture in which the narratives of memory in postwar Germany distorted the truth and obscured those individuals who had actually spoken it during the Nazi era.

As Gailus shows us, Schmitz was an Aussenseiterin in a number of ways, both before and after 1945. She was a trained historian (she did her doctoral work under Friedrich Meinecke), Confessing Church member, and teacher at a girls’ Lyceum. Her 1935 memorandum, written shortly before the passage of the Nuremberg laws, was a painfully detailed account of what everyday life for German Jews had become and a devastating indictment of what had happened to German society. But it was directed particularly at Confessing Church leaders. “The Germans have a new god,” she wrote, “which is race.” Schmitz wrote of her hope that the Confessing Church at the Steglitz synod would speak out, “late, much too late, but nonetheless better too late than not at all … Because for the church this does not concern a tragedy that is unfolding but a sin of our people, and because we are members of this people and responsible before God for this our people, it is our sin.” She subsequently added a postscript to the memorandum after the passage of the Nuremberg laws. In addition to sending it to the synod, Schmitz personally made about 200 copies of the memorandum and circulated them among friends and people whom she hoped would have influence.

For years the author of this memorandum was believed to be Marga Meusel, a Berlin church social worker who had written another memorandum about the Confessing Church’s responsibility for its “non-Aryan” members that was submitted to the Augsburg Confessing synod in October 1934. It was, I think, an honest mistake for many of us. Copies of both documents were in the same file folder in the Günther Harder collection of Kirchenkampf documents in the Berlin Evangelische Zentralarchiv, and because Meusel’s name was written on the one memorandum (and there was no name on the other) most historians concluded that Meusel was also the author of “Zur Lage der deutschen Nichtarier” – even though a February 1947 affidavit signed by Probst Wilhelm Wibbeling had actually confirmed Schmitz as the author (a copy of the affidavit was published in Meyer’s 1999 essay). But that affidavit wasn’t in an archive, but in Schmitz’s private papers—and Schmitz, as Manfred Gailus shows, was not a self-promoter. In 1948 Wilhelm Niemoeller attributed the Steglitz memorandum to Meusel, and in the years to follow the error was repeated wherever the memo was discussed (I repeated the error in my discussion of the memorandum in For the Soul of the People).

But the story is more complicated, because as Mir aber zerriss es das Herz shows, Schmitz did far more than write the one memorandum. From the beginning to the end, she tried to help Jewish friends and colleagues and convince her church to speak out in protest. In the summer of 1933 she wrote and then met with Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, hoping to move him to speak out about the persecution of the Jews. (Her summary of his reply in an Aktennotiz in the Bethel archives begins: “For the time being, only work in silence possible.”) In the years that followed she sought out and wrote many of the leading figures in the Confessing Church—all with the hope that she could convince the Confessing Church to take a clear stand. After the November 1938 pogroms, she wrote an impassioned letter to Helmut Gollwitzer, Martin Niemoeller’s successor at the Annenkirche in Dahlem, urging him to preach openly about what had happened and to include the German Jews in the prayers of the congregation. As Wolfgang Gerlach noted in And the Witnesses were Silent, Gollwitzer’s sermon was one of the few in the aftermath of November 9, 1938, that can be considered a protest.

Then, in a remarkable act of integrity and courage, Schmitz drew the consequence that so few within the Confessing Church (or anywhere) were willing to take: she resigned her position as Studienrätin on December 31, 1938, requesting an immediate leave of absence and early retirement. “I decided to give up school service and no longer be a civil servant of a government that permitted the synagogues to be set afire,” she later wrote. In her letter to the director of the Berlin schools she told him exactly why she was doing it: “It has become increasingly doubtful to me whether I can offer instruction … in the way that the National Socialist state expects and requires of me …. I have finally come to the conviction that this is not the case.” She then quietly did volunteer work for the Confessing Church until the 1943 bombing of Berlin compelled her to return to Hanau, where she had grown up. In 1946 she returned to teaching, at a Gymnasium in Hanau.

Gailus includes several documents that give the closest glimpse of Schmitz. In addition to the text of her 1935 memorandum and the 1938 letter to Gollwitzer he has included a speech that Schmitz delivered in Hanau on September 7, 1950, at a ceremony commemorating “the victims of fascism and the war.” By 1950 German speeches on such occasions could easily slide into rationalization and alibis. Not surprisingly, Schmitz’s words summoned her audience to the responsibility of remembering and remembering accurately, not just for political reasons, but because, in her words, “otherwise we would be defrauding ourselves of our human dignity.” She concluded her remarks with references to Jochen Klepper, Hildegard Schaeder, Klaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer—and yet said not a word about her own acts of courage and integrity.

Outside of a very small circle of acquaintances—including several Jewish colleagues whom Schmitz had helped and who wrote affidavits for her after 1945—Schmitz remained unknown and unrecognized. One reason that emerges very clearly in this biography was her modesty. The memorandum was unsigned and, with Niemoeller’s early attribution of it to Meusel, the historical record seemed to have been established. But Schmitz lived long enough that she could have corrected it (Meusel was in ill health after the war and died in 1953). And as Meyer’s 1999 essay showed, Schmitz did assemble documentation after 1945—affidavits from people she had helped as well as the affidavit from Wibbeling. She had clarified the record, at least for herself—but in the decades that followed she didn’t tell her story. Even Dietgard Meyer later told Gailus that she had never learned about the memorandum directly from Schmitz.

And no one asked her. For a very long time the women of the church struggle and resistance circles were forgotten and on the margins of the historiography. Extensive documentation emerged from the work during the 1980s of Göttingen systematic theology professor Hannelore Erhart and a group of former Confessing Church Theologinnen and doctoral students, leading to several volumes, including the 1999 one with the essay on Schmitz. My own work (For the Soul of the People, 1992) included a study of the role of women in the Confessing Church based upon of my oral histories with about 25 of the Theologinnen and women who had been in the resistance. More recently, biographies of women like Schmitz and Gertrud Staewen (Marlies Flesch-Thebesius, Zu den Aussenseitern gestellt: Die Geschichte der Gertrud Staewen, 1894-1987, 2004) have appeared.

Yet another question arises, and Gailus addresses it bluntly in this volume: why didn’t any of those who had known her and worked with her during the Nazi era come forward in the postwar era to acknowledge her courage and the role she had played? Why is it that the leading figures in the Kirchenkampf who had known her during the 1930s (Gollwitzer, Niesel, and Barth, among others)—and who eventually wrote and spoke so extensively about the events of the church struggle—failed to tell the story of Elisabeth Schmitz? The portrait of her in this biography shows a woman driven by outrage at the Nazi persecution of the Jews, someone who was active in the most prominent Confessing Church circles Berlin: in the Gossen Mission, in Dahlem, in Charlottenburg, at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche. As yet, as Gailus notes, when Schmitz died in 1977 only seven people attended her funeral.

In any case, we now have this fine biography of Schmitz. It is among the recent German books that I wish could be published in English; it would be a strong addition to any course on the Third Reich. Her story is so compelling that I think it would find wider interest, and the chapters on Erinnerungskultur and the emergence of the historiography of the Kirchenkampf—and the emergence of her own story and the correction of the historical record—could stand alone as studies in the creation of historical narrative.

Book Comment: Ecumenical, Academic, and Pastoral Work: 1931-1932. Volume 11 of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition

Leave a reply

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

Book Comment: Ecumenical, Academic, and Pastoral Work: 1931-1932. Volume 11 of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, publication forthcoming in 2012).

By Victoria Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

While the Bonhoeffer Works series is primarily a portrait of the biographical and theological path of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in many places it also offers a uniquely detailed historical portrait of his church, political, and ecumenical context. This is particularly true of the forthcoming volume 11 of the series, which documents Bonhoeffer’s entry into the ecumenical world in the final years of the Weimar Republic. The volume offers some rare insights into the debates about nationalism and the emerging völkisch movements that were taking place in 1931 and 1932 within German Protestantism and in the European ecumenical movement. In many respects, this volume traces the beginnings of the fault lines that would soon place Protestants in Germany on opposing sides of the Kirchenkampf.

Like his ecumenical colleagues during the 1920s, Bonhoeffer was searching for the common ground that would unify “the church among churches.” But for Bonhoeffer, this common ground could exist only among churches that remained true to the confessions and the Word. This led him, at a very early stage, to criticize the notion of a national or any ideologically constrained church. As early as Sanctorum Commmunio (published in 1930), he warned that, “There is a moment when the church dare not continue to be a national church. . .”^{^[1]} This put him on an early collision course with German theologians such as Emanuel Hirsch, who in 1925 was already opposing German participation in the ecumenical movement. Hirsch’s position reflected the political isolationism of a German still angry about Versailles, but it was also based on the conviction that, as Robert Ericksen paraphrases it, “the ideal boundaries of a church should correspond to those of a Volk.”^{^[2]}

During the 1920s, then, opposing concepts of church were already evident in Germany, based in part upon contradictory views of the church’s role in a national culture. These issues began to dominate the ecumenical debates of the late 1920s and early 1930s, with both sides seizing ecumenism as a possible vehicle to further their cause. As Swiss ecumenical leader Adolf Keller noted in 1936, the interwar ecumenical movement found itself opposing a “rival, hostile, secular ecumenism” that sought not common religious ground, but rather the establishment of churches along the divisive boundaries of race and nationalism.^{^[3]}

In Germany, the Deutsche Christen were not alone in arguing for church recognition of those boundaries; even more mainstream Protestant leaders (including some who would join the Confessing Church) welcomed a new national destiny for Germany and saw this as part of some divine plan. The particular danger for the church came from within: from theologians and pastors who believed that religion and the new ideologies could be merged, as Gerhard Kittel contended when he supported Nazism as “a völkisch renewal movement on a Christian, moral foundation.”^{^[4]}

Thus, even before 1933, the lines of demarcation and the cast of characters who would soon play leading roles in the German church struggle had been established.^{^[5]} And this is where DBWE 11 begins: in the summer of 1931, after Bonhoeffer’s return from his year at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Before beginning his time as a lecturer in Berlin, Bonhoeffer traveled to Bonn where he met Karl Barth for the first time, attended the World Alliance conference in Cambridge and was appointed one of the three ecumenical “youth secretaries.” In the year that followed he attended ecumenical gatherings in Czechoslovakia, Geneva, and Gland, Switzerland, and he became an active participant in German ecumenical discussions.

One of the striking things about these ecumenical gatherings is the number of Germans in attendance who subsequently became prominent Deutsche Christen or openly embraced a nationalistic theology: in addition to Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch, Hermann Sasse, Reinhold Krause (who delivered the infamous Sportpalast speech in November 1933), Friedrich Peter, Adolf Schlatter, Georg Wobbermin, Theodor Heckel, Hans Schoenfeld, August Schreiber, Fritz Söhlman, Wilhelm Stählin, and Erich Stange all make appearances in DBWE 11. In particular, the minutes and documents from the ecumenical meetings in this volume offer a detailed picture of the debates among the Germans. At the April, 1932, Berlin conference of the German Mittelstelle for ecumenical youth work in Berlin, Bonhoeffer disagreed with practically everyone present, including Theodor Heckel, who as bishop in charge of the church’s foreign office subsequently tried to block foreign recognition of the Confessing Church (and who after Bonhoeffer’s return from London denounced him to authorities as an “enemy of the state”).

This is a meeting where Friedrich Peter (later the Deutsche Christen bishop of Magdeburg) spoke of the need for the “völkisch self- preservation” of the church, and Bonhoeffer openly criticized the racialized language that had found its way into German theology, most specifically the concept of a divine order of creation that stressed the “separation and differences of peoples, their characteristics and fate.” Here Bonhoeffer scholars can find the political context of Bonhoeffer’s opposition to the fixed order of creation (Schöpfungsordnung) being promoted by the nationalist theologians, and read his highly political articulation of the “order of preservation” (Erhaltungsordnung) that he promoted to counter the nationalists.

The volume also documents Bonhoeffer’s relationship to those at the opposite end of the spectrum, particularly the individuals who were working in the early 1930s with Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze in his social ministry in eastern Berlin: Franz Hildebrandt, Richard Jordan, Renate Lepsius, Gertrud Staewen, and Hermann Maas. The rich details of the ecumenical documents and correspondence in this volume give a clear portrayal of the theological and political fault lines within German Protestantism on the eve of Nazism, before the real madness began.

[1]. Bonhoeffer, The Communion of the Saints (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 189.

[2]. Robert Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) p. 142.

[3]. Keller, Adolf. Church and State on the European Continent. (London: The Epworth Press, 1936), p. 361.

[4]. Ericksen, p. 35.

[5]. See Glenthoj, 131ff, and Marikje Smid, Deutscher Protestantismus und Judentum 1932/1933 (Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1990).

Conference Announcement: Celebrating the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition

Leave a reply

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

Conference Announcement: Celebrating the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, November 13-15, 2011, Union Theological Seminary, New York.

By Victoria J. Barnett

Plans are well under way for the upcoming conference celebrating the completion of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition. Organized by the International Bonhoeffer Society, “Bonhoeffer for the Coming Generations” will take place at Union Seminary in New York, where Bonhoeffer came to study and teach in 1931 and 1939. The conference program is as follows:

Sunday | November 13

11:00 a.m. Optional Worship at Abyssinian Baptist Church

3:00 p.m. Check-in at Union Theological Seminary

8:00 p.m. Keynote Address “Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Activist, Educator. Challenges for the Church of the Coming Generations” | Sam Wells, Duke University

Monday | November 14

Bonhoeffer, Ethics, Public Life 1945-2010

“Inspiration, Controversy, Legacy. The Response to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Three Germanys” | Wolfgang Huber, Germany

Panel: Bonhoeffer in International Contexts | John de Gruchy, South Africa; Keith Clements,

United Kingdom; Larry Rasmussen, USA; Carlos Caldas, Brazil; Kazuaki Yamasaki, Japan

Emerging Issues, New Research 2011-

“Bonhoeffer’s Strong Christology and Religious Pluralism” | Christiane Tietz, Mainz

Panel: New Research, New Issues | Florian Schmitz, Mainz; Reggie Williams, Pasadena; Brigitte Kahl, Union Theological Seminary

Tuesday | November 15

Translation and the Interpretation of History and Theology

“Translating Bonhoeffer. Intercultural Theological Challenge” | Hans Pfeifer, Düsseldorf

Translators Panel: Bonhoeffer in Translation: Challenges and Discoveries | moderated

by Victoria Barnett, USA

Historians Panel: History and Theology in Bonhoeffer Interpretation | moderated

by Andrew Chandler, Chichester

Theologians Panel: Reading Bonhoeffer the Theologian | Michael DeJonge and Clifford Green

Concluding Banquet

A banquet celebrating all the translators, editors, publishers, financial supporters and volunteers of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition will mark the conclusion of the conference on Tuesday evening.

For more information about the conference, as well as the registration form, please go to http://dietrichbonhoeffer.org/BonhoefferConf.brochure_Feb.2011.pdf.

Conference Announcement: Celebrating the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, November 13-15, 2011

Leave a reply

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

Conference Announcement: Celebrating the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, November 13-15, 2011, Union Theological Seminary, New York.

By Victoria J. Barnett

Sunday | November 13

11:00 a.m. Optional Worship at Abyssinian Baptist Church

3:00 p.m. Check-in at Union Theological Seminary

8:00 p.m. Keynote Address “Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Activist, Educator. Challenges for the Church of the Coming Generations” | Sam Wells, Duke University

Monday | November 14

Bonhoeffer, Ethics, Public Life 1945-2010

“Inspiration, Controversy, Legacy. The Response to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Three Germanys” | Wolfgang Huber, Germany

Panel: Bonhoeffer in International Contexts | John de Gruchy, South Africa; Keith Clements,

United Kingdom; Larry Rasmussen, USA; Carlos Caldas, Brazil; Kazuaki Yamasaki, Japan

Emerging Issues, New Research 2011-

“Bonhoeffer’s Strong Christology and Religious Pluralism” | Christiane Tietz, Mainz

Panel: New Research, New Issues | Florian Schmitz, Mainz; Reggie Williams, Pasadena; Brigitte Kahl, Union Theological Seminary

Tuesday | November 15

Translation and the Interpretation of History and Theology

“Translating Bonhoeffer. Intercultural Theological Challenge” | Hans Pfeifer, Düsseldorf

Translators Panel: Bonhoeffer in Translation: Challenges and Discoveries | moderated

by Victoria Barnett, USA

Historians Panel: History and Theology in Bonhoeffer Interpretation | moderated

by Andrew Chandler, Chichester

Theologians Panel: Reading Bonhoeffer the Theologian | Michael DeJonge and Clifford Green

Concluding Banquet

For more information about the conference, as well as the registration form, please go to http://dietrichbonhoeffer.org/BonhoefferConf.brochure_Feb.2011.pdf.

Conference Announcement: American Responses to the Holocaust: Transatlantic Perspectives, June 15-17, 2011

Leave a reply

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

Conference Announcement: American Responses to the Holocaust: Transatlantic Perspectives, June 15-17, 2011, Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, The Netherlands, and Institute of Jewish Studies, Antwerp University, Belgium.

Victoria J. Barnett, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

This year’s Conference of the Netherlands American Studies Association and Belgian Luxembourg American Studies Association is being held in cooperation with the Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Antwerp. This conference aims to explore American responses to the Holocaust and the ways in which the systematic destruction of European Jewry during World War II has figured in American politics, in important cultural and social debates in the United States, in American literature and popular culture, and in other aspects of American life, such as religion, education, and jurisprudence.

The conference will include six excellent keynote speakers and 33 speakers from 11 different countries who offer multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to the topic. American Responses to the Holocaust will bring a new American Studies perspective to what has traditionally been the focus of Jewish Studies and Holocaust studies. The organizers have selected many papers that explore responses to the Holocaust from a transatlantic perspective in the belief that a comparative approach that takes into account the similarities and differences between responses in Europe and the United States is useful and enlightening for American studies scholars and can contribute new and valuable insights into the ways in which the Holocaust has figured in American life.

Keynote speakers include David Cesarani (Royal Holloway College, University of London), Dan Diner (Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, University of Leipzig and Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Hasia Diner (Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History, New York University), Deborah Dwork (Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University), Alvin Rosenfeld (Indiana University), and Herman Van Goethem (Antwerp University and Museum on Holocaust and Human Rights, Mechelen, Belgium).

For more information on the conference, including the full program, see http://www.roosevelt.nl/smartsite.dws?ch=rsc&id=29408.