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Article Note: Todd H. Weir, “The Specter of ‘Godless Jewry’: Secularism and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Article Note: Todd H. Weir, “The Specter of ‘Godless Jewry’: Secularism and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Central European History 46 (2014): 815-849.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

Todd Weir’s article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on Imperial Germany that explores how the “Jewish Question” was imagined and articulated across the ideological spectrum, particularly in secularist and anticlerical movements associated with the political left. He finds that conservative defenders of the confessional state and their liberal opponents shared an assumption that integration required Jewish self-transformation, though they differed in terms of what kind of transformation was required.

Weir draws on examples from the “Berlin Antisemitism Controversy” that began in 1879 to show that “the conflation of modern Jewry with worldview secularism was a unifying feature across the political and religious spectrum of the emerging antisemitic discourse” (823). He concludes that racial thinking did not replace religious antipathy but recast it by associating Judaism with national degeneration along with atheism and the erosion of Christian society. Although this part of the article focuses on the usual suspects (Adolf Stöcker and Heinrich Treitschke), Weir adds a significant twist with his claim that “modern antisemitism must be understood in the context of the struggle over secularism” (821).

Even more important is Weir’s observation that philosemitic defenses of Jews were often accompanied by hostility toward manifestations of Jewishness. For example, the Union of Free Religious Congregations welcomed individual Jewish members but refused to accept Free Religious Congregations that identified with Judaism. In such cases, the unity of Jews and non-Jews required “exclusion of Jews as Jews from this unity” (831). Likewise, Freethinkers tended to be “intolerant of the survival of any religious dogmas alongside their humanistic, monist, natural-scientific Weltanschauung” (838). Jews were welcome to join, but they were expected to “convert” to secularism.

Jewish secularists like Wilhelm Loewenthal, founder of the Berlin Freethought Association Lessing in 1881, resisted such pressure and tried “to find a means of overcoming confessional division through science that did not eradicate the right to subjective affiliation with religious and cultural communities” (842). The German Society of Ethical Culture promoted a similar kind of pluralism, in which a “science of ethics” served as a basis for cooperation among various confessions (844). Yet philosemites like Wilhelm Foerster also complained about “Jewish separatism” and admonished Jews: “do not organize among yourselves, rather join with us against all evil, also in your own ranks, against German and against Jewish nationalism” (845).

Weir’s study is limited to a comparison of conservative Protestant, free religious and secularist subcultures in Imperial Germany. Catholic and liberal Protestant approaches to the “Jewish Question” are not part of his analysis. Nevertheless, he provides an important corrective to earlier scholarship that reduced the story to a two-dimensional contest between conservative antisemites and liberal proponents of emancipation. Racism, religious bigotry, and fears of “godless Jewry” may have been part of a “conservative-nationalist cultural code” (847), but secularist philosemitism was not necessarily the antidote to this poison, for even as these secularists condemned antisemitism they also demanded “Jewish assimilation within the secularist fold” (847).

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

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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”

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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)”

Article Note: Friedrich Weber and Charlotte Methuen, “The Architecture of Faith under National Socialism: Lutheran Church Building(s) in Braunschweig, 1933-1945”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Article Note: Friedrich Weber and Charlotte Methuen, “The Architecture of Faith under National Socialism: Lutheran Church Building(s) in Braunschweig, 1933-1945,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 66 no. 2 (April 2015): 340-371.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In their article, the late Friedrich Weber, former university theologian and Lutheran Bishop of Braunschweig, and Charlotte Methuen, church historian at the University of Glasgow, consider the nature of church building in the Lutheran regional church of Braunschweig during the National Socialist era. This article had its genesis as a presentation by Weber at a Glasgow research seminar. This is reflected in the structure of the article, which begins with a brief explanation of Braunschweig church politics in 1933 followed by a general overview of the responses of the German Protestant churches to National Socialism. When Weber and Methuen turn to the discussion of church building in Hitler’s Germany, they begin not in Braunschweig but in Berlin, with a description of the Martin Luther Memorial Church, built between 1933 and 1935. In recent years, this church building, long neglected, has been studied by historians and preserved as a historic site.[1]

Weber and Methuen use the building and renovating of churches as a window into the relationship between the churches and the National Socialist state. They do this by asking questions about “the motivation for embarking on building projects, the mood in which they were received, and the architecture and decoration that resulted” (p. 341). Their understanding of the complex church-state relationship begins with a consideration of the events of 1933, which they see as “a re-Christianization of Germany and a rejection of the principles of the Weimar Republic” (p. 345). Drawing on the work of Manfred Gailus, they argue that distinctions between the Confessing Church and the German Christian Movement were not absolute, and that many clergy embraced the Confessing Church without abandoning their ties to the German Christian-led state churches. Conversely, many Nazis considered themselves Christians.

When it came to church building, Weber and Methuen note that while the construction of churches was in places forbidden by the Nazi regime—as in the cases of various National Socialist model estates and of the expansion of industrial centres like Salzgitter and Wolfsburg—in other cases, church building was celebrated as a public work which helped reduce unemployment. As Weber and Methuen delve into the history of German church architecture in the 1930s, they note that even members of the Confessing Church called for traditional Christian Germanic art rooted in “blood and soil, family and community” (p. 354). Indeed, the churches were allies in the National Socialist drive to expunge “degenerate” modern art, and the growth of “Christian imagery … was one aspect of the process of re-Christianization under National Socialism” (p. 355).

With this extended preliminary discussion complete, Weber and Methuen turn to the topic of Braunschweig church building under National Socialism. The six Lutheran churches built in Braunschweig between 1933 and 1940 share similarities of design and intent, celebrating the German Volk community and embracing simplicity and modesty. Weber and Methuen use excerpts from dedication ceremonies to emphasize that church building was portrayed as symbolic of the protection of Christianity in Nazi Germany (as opposed to the destruction of churches in godless, communist Spain and Russia), the blessing of God upon Germany, and the important contributions of Protestant Christianity to the Third Reich (p. 360-361).

If these simple new church buildings were supportive of the Nazi ideal of national community without embodying Nazi imagery, such was not the case with the reordering of the Braunschweig cathedral, which was transformed in a most radical way: worship services were suspended in 1936, the pews, altar, and pulpit were removed, and the cathedral was reimagined as a “national memorial” to the medieval German prince Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria. In 1939, Hanns Kerrl, Reich Minister of Church Affairs, took the additional step of requisitioning the cathedral on behalf of the state. The memorial to Henry the Lion—in Nazi eyes, an early champion of German interests in Eastern Europe—was greatly enlarged, and Nazi symbols were introduced alongside depictions of Henry’s military campaigns in the East. Only a few remnants of the pre-existing Christian content of the cathedral remained after the “Braunschweig cathedral had undergone a process of almost complete de-Christianization, much more extreme that the co-existence of Christian and National Socialist imagery found in the Luther Church in Berlin-Mariendorf” (p. 367). Beyond the creation of a National Socialist shrine, though, Weber and Methuen argue that the stripping away of “superfluous” décor from the gothic era onwards was itself part of a Nazi attempt to cast off the degeneration of un-German influences and return the building to its original (“the healthy, the strong, the unspoilt”) Romanesque condition (p. 368).

Using these examples, Weber and Methuen show how church building in National Socialist Braunschweig demonstrated both the potential of church-state partnership under Hitler and the danger of Nazi ideological usurpation of church spaces. Yet “as a whole the building programme in Braunschweig testifies to the extent to which the aesthetic interests of the National Socialist regime were at one with those of the majority of German Protestants” (p. 371). These conclusions certainly mirror the outcomes of the construction of the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin-Mariendorf, a highly collaborative venture between the parish clergy, council, and congregation, along with higher church officials, the wider Mariendorf community, and the state. Like the church building in Braunschweig, its design, construction, and celebration exemplify the symbiosis and symbolic fusion of Christian faith and National Socialist politics.[2]

Notes:

[1] Stefanie Endlich, Monika Geyler-von Bernus, and Beate Rossié, Christenkreuz und Hakenkreuz: Kirchenbau und sakrale Kunst im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2008); Kyle Jantzen, “Church-Building in Hitler’s Germany: Berlin’s Martin-Luther-Gedächtniskirche as a Reflection of Church-State Relations,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 27, no. 2 (2014): 324–48.

[2] Jantzen, “Church-Building in Hitler’s Germany,” 348.

Journal Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History 27, issue 2 (2014)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Journal Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History 27, issue 2 (2014)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

The latest issue of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History (Volume 27, Issue 2, 2014. See http://www.v-r.de/en/magazine_edition-0-0/kirchliche_zeitgeschichte_2014_27_2-1010266/#section_inhalte) is devoted largely to the publication of papers presented at the conference “Myths – National Borders – Religions,” held at the Akademie Sankelmark, Flensburg, Germany, in September 2014. Several articles will be of interest to our readers.

In “Myths of Religious Reconciliation,” Andrea Strübind of the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg explores the aftermath of the 1965 reconciliation ceremony in which Roman Catholic Pope Paul VI and Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras mutually revoked the excommunications of their predecessors. Through this act of “brotherly love,” the Great Schism of 1054 was to have been set aside. Strübund asks the important question of whether this event had any actual historical influence on the church-political relations between the two churches. Simply put, did it lead to greater unity? In her analysis, she finds that there was little theological consciousness of the events of 1965 in either church, and she notes that tensions even increased after 1989, when the two churches found themselves in competition with one another in post-communist Eastern Europe. In fact, in its year 2000 declaration “Dominus Iesus,” the Roman Catholic Church reiterated its self-understanding as the “mother church,” while Greek metropolitans recently signed a profession of faith in which Roman Catholicism is described as the “womb of heresies and fallacies” (p. 253-254). In other words, the 1965 gesture was a singular event which Strübind interprets as a reconciliation myth, just as the 1999 joint declaration on the Doctrine of Justification between the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation seems to be turning out to be (p. 255).

Anders Jarlert of Lund University has written an interesting article entitled “The Myth of Sweden as a peace-power state and its religious motivations.” In it he explores the history of Sweden’s self-identification as a peace-power state, an identity taken up forcefully by Archbishop Nathan Söderblom of Uppsala during his years of service from 1904 to 1931. Söderblom himself and Sweden more generally were to be mediators between churches and even states during and after the First World War. Söderblom understood “Sweden’s task and position as a God-given vocation” (p. 258). During the Second World War, however, Sweden was largely unable to use its neutrality for any purpose other than to stay out of the fighting, save that the country served as a site for international meetings and that Swedes took in the roughly 7000 Danish Jews rescued during the Holocaust (p. 259). Instead, a series of Swedish “modern martyrs for peace” (Count Folke Bernadotte, Dag Hammarskjöld, Raoul Wallenberg, Olaf Palme and Anna Lindh) served as heroes and “secular saviours,” becoming in the process the new basis for Sweden’s ongoing self-understanding as a country of peace and justice.

In his article “Norwegian National Myths and Nation Building,” Dag Thorkildsen of the University of Oslo explores the role of national religion in Norwegian identity. He describes the creation of the Norwegian national myth as a “secular salvation history” mimicking the story of ancient Israel, complete with migration story, founding myth, golden age, period of inner decay, and promise of regeneration (p. 269). Along the way he explains how both the cult of St. Olaf in Trondheim and the Cathedral of Nidaros have become components of Norwegian national identity.

Along similar lines, Inge Adriansen of the Museum Sønderjylland in Sønderborg, Denmark, analyzes the national-religious myth of Dannebrog (the Danish flag) in her article “The Danish national flag as a gift from God.” Formerly a symbol of the Danish monarchy, in the course of the nineteenth century Dannebrog was adopted by middle class Danes as a national symbol. According to tradition, the flag saved Danish King Valdemar II “the Victorious” during the 1219 crusade against heathen Estonians. As the Danish archbishop knelt in prayer for flagging Danish troops, Dannebrog floated down from heaven into his arms as a gift from God. Not surprisingly, the battle turned and the Danes were victorious (p. 277-278). As Adriansen points out, this Dannebrog myth is very like other ancient and medieval myths of flags and crosses in the sky leading to miraculous military victories (p. 279). She goes on to explain how Dannebrog became woven into Danish national identity, in school textbooks, as a royal and military symbol, as the people’s flag, in art and poetry, and on Valdemar’s Day—a civil-religious flag day. Two interesting aspects of Adriansen’s article are the special role of the flag in the Danish-German border region and as a tool for recruitment during the Second World War.

Kyle Jantzen of Ambrose University in Calgary, Canada, explores the relationship between German Protestantism, traditional religious nationalism, military patriotism, and National Socialism, in the construction of the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin-Mariendorf between 1933 and 1935. One of over 900 churches constructed or renovated during the Nazi era, the Martin Luther Memorial Church contained physical elements which fused Nazi, nationalist, and Christian ideology, including a crucifix portraying Jesus as an Aryan hero, a baptismal font ennobling the ideal Nazi family type, a pulpit depicting the Sermon on the Mount as an expression of the Nazi ideal of Volksgemeinschaft, and a triumphal arch comprised of ornamental tiles which included Christian, cultural, and National Socialist symbols. In analyzing the process by which this church was constructed, Jantzen finds that it was the product of a collaborative and largely local decision-making process that demonstrated the penetration of Nazi values into German Protestantism and the eagerness of German Protestants to work with the new Nazi state, from which they sensed little, if any, hostility.

In “Legendary Martyr: Maximilian Kolbe,” Christian Pletzing of the Akademie Sankelmark in Flensburg, Germany, has written a fascinating assessment of the problematic legacy of this Roman Catholic priest, editor, monastery director, and martyr. Kolbe is most famous for offering to take the place of a Polish family man sentenced to death in Auschwitz, in reprisal for an escape from the camp. In dying this way, Kolbe became “Poland’s martyr” (p. 365). He was subsequently beatified in 1971 as a “flower of Polish Catholic religiosity” and canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982 (p. 366). It would be hard to overstate the symbolic importance Kolbe came to hold in Poland. He was “an essential link between Poland’s national and religious identities;” the nexus of Catholic pilgrimage to and understanding of Auschwitz; the inspiration for the naming of well over a hundred churches, chapels, altars or other memorial sites; the symbol of resistance to dictatorship adopted by the Solidarity labour movement; and a general spiritual emblem of the vindication of death by sacrifice and the conquering of hate through brotherly love (p. 366-368).

Lost in this appropriation of Kolbe’s heroic act of martyrdom was the fact that his career as writer and editor for two papers, the monthly Rycerz Niepokalanej (Knight of the Immaculate) and the Catholic tabloid Mały Dziennik (Small Newspaper), included numerous antisemitic articles. Under Kolbe’s editorial watch, these papers portrayed Jews as “Poland’s cancerous ulcers” and “a threat to the Polish state.” He himself wrote an article in which he “accused the Jews of striving for world domination.” Other articles warned of Jewish conspiracy, noted the economic rivalry between Jews and Catholics in Poland, described Jews as “vermin” and called for a boycott of Jewish shops (p. 370). This legacy is counterbalanced somewhat by the fact that Kolbe’s monastery took in 1500 Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. Still, “most of the biographies and collections on the lives of saints about Maximilian Kolbe published in Catholic publishing companies essentially conceal his anti-Semitic publishing activities,” even as they highlight positive contributions he made as a publisher (p. 370-371). Pletzing also explains how Kolbe grew to become a symbol of German-Polish understanding, particularly in the years after 1971.

Finally, Katarzyna Stokłosa’s article, “Nationalism and the Church in the German-Polish border region after World War II,” explains the nature of the compulsory integration of the northern and western regions of Poland regained in the settlement of the Second World War. She describes a strongly nationalistic policy of Polonisation amounting to the “comprehensive destruction of all evidence of foreign elements that were reminiscent of the German era” (p. 375). This affected all manner of objects, including “pictures, maps, ash trays, plates, packaging, graves, crosses on the roadside, chapels, churches, religious images, etc.” in every kind of public space, including schools.(p. 375). Stokłosa demonstrates how the Roman Catholic Church played an important role in integrating these new territories into the rest of Poland. Indeed, “the Polish Catholic Church belonged to the strictest anti-German forces as it aimed to extinguish all remnants of German-ness in the new western and northern areas” (p. 381). The German language was forbidden for masses, in religious education, and at the cemeteries. Poles replaced Germans as parish priests, and the position of even Polish Protestants was so tenuous that many converted. In ways like these, the Polish Catholic Church played an important role in the Polonisation process of the post-war era.

Conference Report: “Resistance Revisited and Re-questioned: Church and Society in Scandinavia and Europe”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Conference Report: “Resistance Revisited and Re-questioned: Church and Society in Scandinavia and Europe”

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

A conference hosted by the Royal Academy of Literature, History, and Antiquities met in Stockholm on September 18-19, 2014, focusing on the topic of church resistance to an unjust state. Professor Anders Jarlert of the University of Lund served as organizer and host. This conference also coincided with the annual meeting of the Board of Editors of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, with the papers expected to appear in that journal in the fall of 2015.

A total of nine presentations looked broadly at the question of church resistance, especially against the Nazi state, and then focused more narrowly on Scandinavian responses to that regime. The first paper, presented by Gerhard Besier of Dresden, described the difficulty of assuming that Christian morality and resistance to the Nazi regime were naturally congruent. Though this idea dominated early postwar church historiography, and though it remains a default position for some even today, scholarship in recent decades has complicated that picture. While some Christians in Germany resisted the Nazi state and considered this a natural outcome of their religious faith, others attributed support for the Nazi state to their Christian beliefs. Hitler’s frequent references to “Providence,” for example, were designed to nurture such a connection. Besier advised against attempting to ascribe resistance to entire confessional groups or theological stances. Rather, one must consider individual circumstances and motivations as locate and interpret actual examples of resistance. Robert Ericksen of Tacoma, WA, stressed the importance of recognizing the widespread postwar condemnation of Nazi crimes and the nearly total loss of respect for the Nazi state as we try to assess church resistance to that state. Christians in Germany and their co-religionists abroad were eager to separate Christian values from Nazi crimes, with the result that the complex story of Christian behavior in Nazi Germany tended to get distorted. As we now ponder the reality of Church responses to the Nazi state, we recognize that resistance was hardly widespread. Ericksen also stressed the importance of acknowledging national identity and national experience in our analyses. We should not expect to find a typical “Christian” response to Hitler across national borders. It was far easier for patriotic Christians in Scandinavia, for example, to question and oppose Nazi policies than for patriotic Germans to contemplate treason against their own national government.

Katarzyna Stoklosa of Sønderborg, DK, mirrored Ericksen’s concern about the importance of national borders and national perspectives. Studying churches in Eastern Europe under communism, she has found no simple relationship between Christian faith and political resistance. For example, when Germans started to flee the GDR toward Poland, the Polish Catholic Church provided shelter and assistance. By contrast, the Reformed Church of Hungary did not, almost certainly due to its greater willingness to support the communist views of the national government. Recent events in Ukraine, according to Stoklosa, show a similar divide. The Greek Orthodox Church has shown sympathy toward the demonstrators who eventually produced the present government in Kiev. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, on the other hand, has tended to follow the Russian line, condemning the new government in Kiev. In none of these examples does one find a simple Christian stance in terms of values and politics. Andrea Varriale of Weimar presented the final paper within this broad focus on Christian resistance. Examining the Italian resistance during World War II, he described a postwar tendency to create an image of resistance unified in values and in class consciousness. A closer look, however, shows internal conflict within the Italian resistance and disagreements on the question of values. Varriale argued that popular culture, especially film, proved willing to acknowledge these internal conflicts more readily than professional historians.

The balance of this conference devoted itself to Christian responses to the Nazi presence in wartime Scandinavia. This too presented a varied picture. Palle Roslyng-Jensen of Copenhagen described a complicated response within Denmark, and a response that conflicts somewhat with Denmark’s positive reputation for its rescue of Jews in the fall of 1943. The complication began upon the German invasion, when the occupiers provided both the Danish government and the Danish Church a good deal of autonomy. This resulted, naturally, in a careful avoidance of harsh criticism toward German policies, for fear that the benefits of considerable normality in Danish life would be undercut by a clear critique of Nazi attitudes and policies. Beneath this official layer of Danish society, however, local pastors and laypeople grew increasingly critical of the Nazi occupation, based upon their pride in Danish attitudes and values and leading, among other things, to their defense of Danish Jews. In this case, a Danish population homogeneous in ethnicity and religion, still divided to a considerable extent on the question of cooperation with or resistance against Nazi Germans. Svante Lundgren of Lund described the case of Finland, allied with Germany for much of the war. The Lutheran Church in Finland worked to protect its flock and its prerogatives within this setting, including some resistance against the Nazi ideology. However, Lundgren described a small group of 150 Jewish refugees in Finland who failed to receive support or assistance from that church. Anders Jarlert of Lund also dealt with a nation never under direct German occupation. Swedish neutrality, however, did involve many connections with Germany that could prove complicated. Jarlert described how the Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935 could create problems in cases of intermarriage between Swedes and Germans. The response of the Swedish Lutheran Church was marked more by bureaucratic muddling and uncertainty than by a moral defense of Swedish citizens of Jewish descent.

Roslyng-Jensen’s paper on Denmark had already identified the Norwegian example as a model to Danes of a more heroic way to respond to Nazi occupation. Torleiv Austad of Oslo then presented that story, a story much less marked by the ecclesiastical vacillation found in Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The Norwegian government, taken over by Vidkun Quisling with German backing, was of course a willing puppet of the Nazi occupation. The Norwegian Lutheran Church, however, resisted the Nazi hope that this official institution would become a counterpart to the sycophantic Quisling government. Bishop Berggrav and clergy throughout Norway risked their comfortable and safe positions by taking up resistance. This included a pastoral letter read in churches in early 1941 in support of justice and human rights. Then, in February 1942, seven bishops resigned, with 93 percent of the clergy following that example and resigning their positions on Easter that spring. Bishop Berggrav prepared the ground for these responses by taking on Romans 13 and the standard Lutheran belief in obedience to state authority. In a paper of 1941, “When the Driver is Out of His Mind: Luther on the Duty of Disobedience,” Berggrav established a theological basis for resistance. The Norwegian Lutheran Church then produced a document for Easter 1942, “The Foundation of the Church: A Confession and a Declaration,” clarifying a doctrine of the two kingdoms that could allow for resistance to state authority. This statement included these words: “As long as the above mentioned conditions exist … the church and its servants must live and act in accord with their pledge to God’s Word and their Confession and accept all the consequences that may follow from that.” That statement marked the day when Norwegian bishops and clergy resigned their positions rather than collaborate with the German occupation.

This conference concluded with a visit to the lovely Sigtuna Foundation buildings and grounds outside Stockholm, allowing those present to appreciate the setting where Dietrich Bonhoeffer met Bishop George Bell in his effort to secure British support for the German resistance as it attempted to overthrow Hitler.

Call for Papers: Jewish/non-Jewish Relations from Antiquity to the Present, University of Southampton, 7-9 September 2015

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Call for Papers: Jewish/non-Jewish Relations from Antiquity to the Present, University of Southampton, 7-9 September 2015

2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Parkes Library at the University of Southampton, which is now one of the largest Jewish documentation centres in Europe and the only one in the world devoted specifically to Jewish/non-Jewish relations. The dedication of the Parkes Library was the catalyst for establishment of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, which is based on the work of Reverend Dr James Parkes (1896-1981), one of the most remarkable figures within 20th century Christianity. A tireless fighter against antisemitism in all forms, including from within Christianity, he campaigned on behalf of European Jews during the Holocaust and was involved with the rescue of Jewish refugees in the 1930s. As part of his international campaigning, he built the Parkes Library and its associated archive, helped to found the Council of Christians and Jews, and worked throughout to promote religious tolerance and mutual respect in Jewish/non-Jewish relations.

This anniversary conference will examine the subject of Jewish/non-Jewish relations, past, present, and future, by looking at its history of research over the last fifty years, by presenting the latest research, and by determining future directions in the field. Keynote speakers include Todd Endelman, Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History, University of Michigan; Sander Gilman, Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University; Martin Goodman, Professor of Jewish Studies, Oxford University, and President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies; Tony Kushner, Marcus Sieff Professor of the History of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton and the Parkes Institute; Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History, Queen Mary University of London; Greg Walker, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, University of Edinburgh.

Proposals covering any topic related to Jewish/non-Jewish relations from antiquity to present day are welcome, especially in the areas of:

The legacy of James Parkes
Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim relations
Jewish/non-Jewish relations in the Hellenistic and Roman periods
Rabbinic literature and the representation of the ‘other’
Medieval and Early Modern Jewish/non-Jewish relations
History of antisemitism
Comparative migration and identity
The Holocaust and Jewish/non-Jewish Relations
Jewish/non-Jewish relations in literature and philosophy
Representations and constructions of the image of ‘the Jew’
Jews and non-Jews in the visual and performing arts
The role and representation of Jews in the heritage world, including museums, libraries and archives

Please submit proposals by 1 April 2015 to Dr Helen Spurling (H.Spurling@southampton.ac.uk), including:

Author’s full name, postal and email addresses, institutional affiliation
Abstract of paper to be presented (no more than 250 words)
Biographical information (no more than 50 words)
Panel proposals should not exceed one page in length
A limited number of bursaries are available on a competitive basis for postgraduates and early career researchers; please indicate if you would like to be considered.

For further information, please visit: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/parkes/jubilee/index.page?.

Conference Report: Religion in Germany in the 20th Century: Paradigm Shifts and Changing Methodologies

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Conference Report: Religion in Germany in the 20th Century: Paradigm Shifts and Changing Methodologies. Seminar at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association, September 19-21, 2014

By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

More than two dozen historians and German language and literature scholars from North America, Germany and Great Britain traveled to the annual meeting of the German Studies Association in Kansas City to take part in this seminar from September 19-21, 2014. The seminar was convened by Thomas Großbölting of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster and Mark Edward Ruff of Saint Louis University.

This group of scholars made their focus the changing methodologies in the field of German church history. Undergirding this seminar was the assumption that old models of church history have been superseded. Whereas an earlier generation of church historians typically painted a narrow picture of theologies and old men in church towers, younger scholars have sought to broaden the canvas. In their picture of the German religious landscape, both Protestant and Catholic, they now analyze social forms of organization, political networks, societal relationships, gender, religious vocabularies and alternatives to Christianity that range from Islam to political religions, cults and new forms of religious spirituality.

Yet these younger scholars, critical of old orthodoxies, have been unable to achieve any sort of consensus. This lack of consensus stems, at least in part, from the lack of a methodological common denominator. Sociologists, confessional theologians, scholars of religious studies and historians have long often used different vocabularies and definitions of the transcendent, the immanent, the spiritual and religion. Such problems of definition are familiar to anyone entering the field of religious studies today but they have posed a particular challenge to the historiography of German religious history in light of the fact that so many more scholars have recently entered the field.

This seminar was intended to take stock of these fundamental transformations in the historiography and point to new directions for the future. The first day of the seminar explored traditional models of church history that predominated well into the second half of the 20^th century. Participants analyzed portions of classic primer for Catholic Church historians, Kirchengeschichte, by Karl Bihlmeyer and Hermann Tüchle. They turned to an article from 1981, “Christ und Geschichte” by the profane Catholic historian, Konrad Repgen, a long-time director of the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte who put forward his vision of Christian scholarship in this lecture-turned-essay. They concluded with an overview and critique of these approaches by the Professor for Mittlere und Neuere Kirchengeschichte in Tübingen, Andreas Holzem in an article entitled “Die Geschichte des ‘geglaubten Gottes’: Kirchengeschichte zwischen ‘Memoria” und ‘Historie.’”

The second day of the seminar was devoted to an analysis and critique of the classic model of the the Catholic milieu from 1993, “Katholiken zwischen Tradition und Moderne: Das katholische Milieu als Forschungsaufgabe” by the Arbeitskreis für Katholizismusforschung in Münster, Germany. One of the participants, Christoph Kösters of the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, had served as one of authors of this pioneering article and provided an account of this article’s genesis. Participants subsequently examined a recent and powerful challenge to these models posed by Benjamin Ziemann of the University of Sheffield in his article, “Kirchen als Organisationsform der Religion: Zeitgeschichtliche Perspektiven.”

The third day analyzed the current state of fragmentation in the field. Participants began by examining a plea for embracing cultural history and the linguistic turn by the Swiss historian, Franziska Metzger, in her article, “Konstruktionsmechanismen der katholischen Kommunikationsgemeinschaft.” They subsequently turned to an essay, “Further Thoughts on Religion and Modernity” by the Harvard sociologist of religion, Peter Berger, who since the 1990s has largely repudiated his writings from the 1960s on secularization. They also drew upon a survey of recent literature, “’Sag: Wie hast Du’s mit der Religion?’: Das Verhältnis von Religion und Politik als Gretchenfrage der Zeitgeschichte” by the London-based historian, Uta Andrea Balbier.

Almost all of the participants agreed that the paradigms that have long dominated the field – paradigms of church history, secularization and “social-moral milieux” – suffer from distinct weaknesses. These include undue teleologies and the fact that the social-moral milieux were as heterogeneous as they were homogeneous.

But it was probably inevitable that the group of two dozen scholars did not agree on precisely where the field is heading – and should be heading. The assembled represented a diverse group including graduate students, freshly-minted Ph.D.s, junior faculty, associate professors and senior scholars in the field. Some taught at religiously-affiliated colleges and university, others at secular institutions. The majority focused on the twentieth century, but even there, their interests were diverse. Two-thirds were scholars of Catholicism, one-third scholars of Protestantism, the inverse of the confessional balance in Germany through from 1870 through 1945. Some focused on the Weimar era, others almost exclusively on the Nazi era and its immediate aftermath; others focused on the Federal Republic, including the Vatican II era. With such diversity in the seminar, perspectives naturally – and refreshingly – differed.

Why else was there such a lack of consensus?

The lack of consensus stemmed the fact that not all participants were willing to throw the baby out with the bath water. Many sought to retain the most valuable insights from these earlier models, while jettisoning their outdated features. While all of the participants agreed that “salvation history” (Heilsgeschichte) was dead, for instance, not all participants were willing to a priori reject the notion of Christian scholarship as defined out by such distinguished scholars as the Notre Dame historian, Mark Noll. In response to criticisms that the model of the Catholic milieu papered over the very real diversity within, some participants pointed out that there was a coherence to the Roman Catholic milieu (how could there not have been during eras of religious persecution!) The models of the Catholic milieu, they observed, had always taken into account the social, economic, political and intellectual diversity within the flock and fact that the Catholic milieu had been anything but static. Religious organizations, their social-forms, and even their message changed with the times – and had to out of necessity. And no one would deny that the major churches today show far lower rates of membership, church and mass attendance and cultural influence than they did even as late as the 1960s.

The lack of methodological consensus also arose out of a lack of agreement over how to describe the contemporary German religious landscape. Conscientious observers of the religious landscape of modern Germany disagree over what religious forms took hold following the era of religious upheaval in the 1960s. Are Germans even religious today, or even spiritual? If so, where are their religious and spiritual roots, if they are no longer anchored in the established churches? Do existing religious and spiritual practices even exert any significant claim over daily lives of Germans or have they become utterly diffuse? These questions become all the more important for historians today, since most inevitably read the past through the lens of the present. If it is unclear which methodological tools are needed to make some sense of a muddled German religious present, how can we grasp the transformative processes from fifty years ago that ushered it in?

Where was there widespread agreement? Most participants agreed it was necessary to integrate religious history into mainstream narratives of German history. They also concurred that religious history would profit from the insights and methodologies gleaned from cultural history. All agreed on the need for additional comparative studies, in which the German religious experience would be placed alongside that of its neighbors and those from the other side of the Atlantic. Finally, all recognized that the field of contemporary German religious history has become a much more vibrant place since having been freed from often stifling methodological orthodoxies and a narrow focus on churchmen and dogmas.

Holocaust Survivors and Holocaust Scholars: A Changing and Challenging Relationship

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Holocaust Survivors and Holocaust Scholars: A Changing and Challenging Relationship

Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

On November 17, 2014, I gave the Rudolf Vrba Memorial Lecture at the University of British Columbia. The lecture honors the memory of Dr. Rudolf Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz in 1944 and together with another Jewish prisoner, Alfred Wetzler, wrote the first eyewitness report of what was happening there. After the war he became a medical researcher and for many years a professor of pharmacology in Vancouver. There he became friends with John Conway, and that relationship contributed to some important articles and interventions by Conway on the subject of the Holocaust in Hungary. John, who was present on November 17, thought our readers might be interested in a synopsis of my lecture.

It is easy to think of Holocaust survivors and scholars in terms of dichotomies and oppositions – between emotion and detachment, authenticity and artificiality, memory and history. In the worst case, scholars are cast as antagonists who appropriate and discount survivors’ witness. In the best case, scholarship is sometimes seen as a pale substitute for the compelling voice of experience. I tried to complicate this picture by suggesting that we contemplate instead how survivors and scholars of the Holocaust are intertwined and have been since the earliest studies in the field. Indeed, it is precisely the close ties between the experiences of victims, the memories of survivors, and the work of scholars that has shaped the study of the Holocaust into a dynamic and resilient field.

I opened with two short film clips from Claude Lanzmann’s masterpiece, Shoah. The first showed Raul Hilberg, the most famous scholar of Holocaust, explaining how Nazi antisemitism was similar to preceding centuries of anti-Jewish measures yet broke with the past. The second showed Gertrude Schneider and mother, Charlotte Hirschhorn, survivors of the Riga ghetto, singing a song in Yiddish. At a glance, these segments present a study in contrasts, between the articulate scholar who sees the big picture, and the speechless survivors who are emotional – Hirschhorn is crying throughout the scene – and fatalistic: they sing “Azoy muss sein” – that’s the way it has to be. Both Hilberg and Schneider, however, are survivors and scholars. Both were born in Vienna, driven from their homes, and lost many members of their families in the Holocaust. Both received doctoral degrees in New York, with dissertations on Holocaust-related topics, and went on to produce numerous publications. These clips framed the presentation by reminding the audience that the views and voices of survivors and scholars are entangled and at times indistinguishable. In fact, in many cases they are the same people.

The rest of the talk sketched out three major stages of scholarship on the Holocaust. The first, which began before the war was even over, was driven not only by survivors but by people who did not live through the war. Some of the most important initiatives to “collect and record,” to use the phrase popularized by Laura Jockusch’s book, were by trained historians. I focused on two of them, Emanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw Ghetto, and Philip Friedman from Łódź, founder of the Historical Commission, which became the Jewish Historical Institute. As social historians trained in Polish universities, they sought to produce histories that were as credible as possible: empirically complete, analytical, and methodologically strong. Other works followed, by scholars writing in Hebrew, Polish, Dutch, and other languages, but these studies remained outside the scholarly mainstream.

During the second phase, stretching from the 1960s through the 1980s, scholarship developed a different relationship to survivors. Now the emerging field of inquiry increasingly separated itself from private, communal acts of commemoration. But survivors remained central to production of scholarship. Hilberg, Gerhard Weinberg, Nechama Tec, Henry Friedlander, Saul Friedländer, Yitzhak Arad, Dori Laub, and Yaffa Eliach are key contributors here. They did not incorporate their personal experiences into their scholarship in an explicit way but emphasized the importance of research that met the highest standards of scientific rigor. Under their leadership, study of the Holocaust became a recognized field of scholarship. They were joined in their efforts by an important contingent of non-Jewish scholars, many of them Germans – Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen, Eberhard Jaeckel. These people studied the Nazi system, Hitler’s role, the German bureaucracy, elites, and ordinary people. Their contacts across the Atlantic with colleagues who literally spoke the same language, proved essential to creating a dynamic, open field of inquiry. Before his death, Hilberg said the best scholarship on the Holocaust was being done not in Israel, North America, but in Europe.

Saul Friedländer’s two-volume “integrated and integrative history” of the Holocaust is part of the third phase, from the early 1990s until now. In these past decades, the field has taken off with enormous growth in every direction. Following Friedländer , scholars all over the world recognize the importance of writing “integrated histories” that take seriously Jewish sources and how they complicate and interrupt the narrative based on perpetrators’ records. Some survivor-scholars remain active and questions first raised by Ringelblum, Friedman, and others decades ago – about Jewish life in the ghettos, religious practice, Jewish-gentile interactions, collaboration, and more – have returned to the agenda.

I closed with a final clip from Shoah, with Rudi Vrba telling about an effort that failed to spark a general revolt in Auschwitz. Here Vrba embodied the tension between action and words, reason and emotion that is at the heart of Holocaust studies. He and others have given us powerful models of how to combine scholarly rigor and human engagement in pursuit of truth.

Conference Note: Lessons and Legacies 2014, Boca Raton, Florida

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Conference Note: Lessons and Legacies 2014, Boca Raton, Florida

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, University of Notre Dame

The thirteenth biennial Holocaust conference, sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation, took place from October 30 to November 2 in Boca Raton, Florida. The conference prides itself on being the premier gathering of scholars across North America and Europe who share teaching and research interests in the subject of the Holocaust. This year’s theme, “The Holocaust After 70 Years: New Perspectives on Persecution, Resistance, and Survival”, echoes themes from previous years, emphasizing expanding perspectives (2010) and new directions (2012) in connection with the Holocaust’s continued relevance today. The Holocaust as a subject of historical inquiry continues to sustain immense scholarly interest, which makes it challenging to craft truly original or groundbreaking arguments. However, the scholars who meet at Lessons and Legacies are as devoted to revisiting and improving older arguments as they are to producing brand-new ones. Consequently, the quality of the papers is generally extremely high.

Gershon Greenberg delivered a keynote address on the first night, speaking about Jewish religious thought through the Holocaust. Marion Kaplan, discussing her research on Jewish refugees in Portugal, gave a second keynote address on the conference’s third night. There were two plenary sessions, the first considering new generational approaches to Holocaust studies, the second, featuring pre-circulated papers, about the impact of feminism and gender studies on Holocaust studies. Over the course of two and a half days, the conference held twenty-three panels, several special sessions, and four workshops geared towards teaching and discussion of sources.

As is often the case at this conference, panel topics were both specific – a discussion of the digital collections of the International Tracing Service, the Holocaust documentation center in Bad Arolsen, Germany; a consideration of the place of the Kindertransport in commemoration and literature; the role of Spain in the Holocaust – as well as broad, with panels on culture and memory, new cultural approaches to the Holocaust, gender, violence, resistance in camps and ghettoes, and the Holocaust in photographs as well as representations of the Holocaust in film and literature. While there were no panels devoted specifically to the churches or religion under Nazism, a paper by Joanna Sliwa of Clark University recounted the role of Krakow nuns in the rescue of Jewish children. Staying true to the general theme, several panels featured topics under revision or reconsideration, including scholars rethinking Nazi Germany beyond the racial state, a panel investigating the writing of Holocaust history beyond the “linguistic turn”, and a discussion of new conceptions of collaboration and perpetration.

The conference was well attended by many of the field’s established scholars, junior scholars, and graduate students. Four scholars – Steven T. Katz, Dagmar Herzog, Roger Brooks, and Francis Nicosia – received distinguished achievement awards from the Foundation for their contributions to Holocaust Studies. The conference’s book series also launched its most recent volume, Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World, edited by Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes, with essays drawn from papers presented at the 2010 conference.

The next Lessons and Legacies conference will take place in November 2016 at Claremont-McKenna College, in southern California.

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

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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.

Article Note: Luke Fenwick, “The Protestant Churches in Saxony-Anhalt in the Shadow of the German Christian Movement and National Socialism, 1945-1949”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Article Note: Luke Fenwick, “The Protestant Churches in Saxony-Anhalt in the Shadow of the German Christian Movement and National Socialism, 1945-1949,” Church History 82, no. 4 (December 2013): 877-903.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

In the years immediately following the Second World War, the denazification of the German churches exhibited many of the same shortcomings as denazification in the broader society. Church leaders rarely acknowledged the complicity of their institutions during the Third Reich, and many former supporters of Nazism remained in positions of authority in the postwar era. The broad contours of this story are well-known, but there is still a need for further research on regional and local variations, and this is where Luke Fenwick’s article makes an important contribution. His close analysis of the postwar “self-purification” of two regional Protestant churches in Saxony-Anhalt reveals diverse motives and priorities among key players as well as the continuation of the “church struggle” under new circumstances.

In his analysis of the Church Province of Saxony, Fenwick notes that in 1946, 170 of the approximately 1400 pastors and other church employees were former members of the German Christian Movement or the Nazi Party. The regional church administration dismissed only four of these pastors, while four others were placed on probation, six were transferred, and ninety were encouraged to participate in re-education seminars. Not surprisingly, state authorities found these measures to be insufficient. However, religious leaders insisted that the Church Province had been a bastion of resistance against Nazism, the state had no right to interfere in church affairs, and church policy had to be oriented around forgiveness rather than vengeance. Fenwick argues that an additional, unacknowledged motive was simply the need to maintain adequate staffing at the parish level.

The State Church of Anhalt had a different history and followed a slightly different path forward. About half of the pastors in this regional church had belonged to the most radical faction within the German Christian Movement. The postwar church administration established a commission to determine which of those clergy had been “activists” and which had been purely “nominal” affiliates, and by May 1946 it had dismissed ten pastors and transferred six others. In addition to mandatory re-education for former members of the German Christian Movement, church authorities required individual declarations of repentance from those who hoped to remain in office. Overall, denazification in Anhalt was as lenient as in the Church Province of Saxony, yet in this case state authorities expressed their approval rather than their displeasure, because they had been consulted throughout the process.

Fenwick draws a number of important conclusions from his study of these two regional churches. He confirms for the Soviet zone what Doris Bergen (Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich)found to be true in the American zone—that a more accurate description of clerical denazification would be “de-German-Christianization.” Though both regional churches were now controlled by former Confessing Church members, these postwar leaders were willing to leave former German Christians in office for the sake of church unity, pastoral care and evangelization—so long as they submitted to the new church regime and its theology. However, church unity was elusive. On the one hand, Confessing Church pastors complained that former German Christians were still in the pulpit. Some also invoked their Confessing Church credentials to gain advantage when competing for positions or when in conflict with other clergy. On the other hand, ordinary parishioners were inclined to protest the dismissal or transfer of clergy, for personal rapport often mattered more to them than whether their pastor had supported the German Christian Movement.

Fenwick’s article focuses primarily on the highest levels of authority in the two regional churches, but some of the most provocative illustrations revolve around individual pastors and their parishioners. For example, we see Pastor Erich Elster (Dessau-Ziebigk) explain his former affiliation with the German Christians in such a way as to satisfy the Anhalt church council, and we see Pastor K. at the church of St. Martin continue to preach nationalistic sermons and use the German Christian hymn book until he is transferred in 1946 (much to the dismay of his congregation). The local particularities and variations revealed by such examples suggest that additional research on denazification at the parish level would yield important insights.

Article Note: On Christian Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Article Note: On Christian Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Robert Morgan, “Susannah Heschel’s Aryan Grundmann,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 32, no. 4 (June 1, 2010): 431–94.

Susannah Heschel, “Historiography of Antisemitism versus Anti-Judaism: A Response to Robert Morgan,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33, no. 3 (March 1, 2011): 257–79.

Many of our readers will be familiar with Susannah Heschel’s important and widely-reviewed work, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Fewer may know of these two articles from the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, which take up the long-standing debate over the use of “anti-Judaism” and “antisemitism” in the context of Christian hostility towards Jews and Judaism, whether in pre-modern Christian history or in the history of the Holocaust. This exchange between New Testament scholar Robert Morgan and Jewish Studies scholar Susannah Heschel highlights key disciplinary differences between theological and historical approaches to this question. Morgan hopes to distinguish between various theoretical categories of Jew hatred, while Heschel focuses on the historical confluence of theological, cultural, and racial attitudes and language of hostility towards Jews.

In his sixty-page critique of Heschel’s book, Morgan argues that The Aryan Jesus presents a one-sided impression of 1930s German church history,” based on a “failure to distinguish clearly between the churches and the völkisch movement that stands behind Nazi antisemitism.” (431) In contrast to her, he makes the case for a conceptual distinction between medieval Christian antisemitism, theological anti-Judaism, and modern secular antisemitism.

Morgan minimizes the connection between modern German theological developments and the participation of masses of German Protestants and Catholics in the Holocaust–simply put, for Morgan, the failure of Christians of the Nazi period to live up to their beliefs was nothing unusual in the history of Christianity, and didn’t require an associated failure of theology. In that vein, he argues that the efforts of theologian Walter Grundmann and his Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (established in 1939) had little if anything to do with the Holocaust (434).

With this as his starting point, Morgan raises the broader question of the historical relationship between theological anti-Judasim and secular antisemitism. His answer revolves around setting theological scholars like Grundmann and those involved in the Institute, who “introduced the racial issue into their older liberal Protestant theology,” into a separate category from the masses of Christians who supported the Hitler movement during and after 1933. He maintains that Heschel fails to examine Grundmann’s theological context in sufficient detail or to assess carefully enough his relationship to and responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust.

In contrast, Morgan argues that the Institute was an outgrowth of a particular radical Thuringian wing of the German Christian Movement. Apart from this development, most Germans were caught up in “a pervasive antisemitism” which was fueled by factors like “nationalism, hostility to modernity, to secularism, to left-wing politics, resentment against rich bankers at a time of national distress, and a perceived disproportionate influence of assimilated Jews in the professions and national life. But little of this passive antisemitism was ideologically driven, as it was in the völkisch movement and its political expression in the National Socialist party” (441). Morgan goes on to distinguish what he calls “this (passive) cultural antisemitism” from both “the more aggressive völkisch racist antisemitism” and “theological anti-Judaism” (441). Morgan admits that “some modern antisemitism surely included religious and tribal echoes and memories along with its more obvious social, political and economic ingredients,” but argues we still need more investigation about “how far (when at all) it was fuelled by theological anti-Judaism” (441). As a way to distinguish between older and newer eras, he introduces a new term for medieval and Reformation-era Jew hatred, which he calls “theological antisemitism,” and which occurs “where monstrous religious beliefs such as the guilt and curse of Israel for the death of Christ lead directly to antisemitism.” Moving forward to the Nazi era, Morgan argues that theologians like Grundmann and Gerhard Kittel were not guilty of this “medieval ‘theological antisemitism'” but rather promoted a “poisonous modern antisemitism” which was “distinct from the results of their New Testament scholarship” (441). Their scholarship, which contained a measure of “theological anti-Judaism,” was “less inflammatory, and concerned with Christian self-definition, not (in principle) defamation of Judaism” (441-442).

What emerges from this detailed process of categorization is the sense that Morgan would like to rescue the term “theological anti-Judaism” and redefine it to mean simply the disagreement of Christians with Jews concerning the one God they both worship–in other words, criticisms of the religion, not the people. As an example of his granular approach to categories of hostility towards Jews and Judaism, Morgan describes the Confessing Church leader Martin Niemöller as “untouched by racial theory,” but sharing in “the pervasive cultural antisemitism of the time, which was presumably reinforced by the tradition of Christian theological anti-Judaism and even contained residual traces of ‘theological antisemitism’.” This was, Morgan adds, “social and cultural non-violent antisemitism” (444).

Morgan continues in this vein throughout the rest of the article, criticizing Heschel for not distinguishing clearly between various scholarly theological developments, cultural antisemitism, the rise of the völkisch movement and Nazi party, nationalism, and racism (461). He is willing to admit to the indirect influence of theology on popular belief, but attempts to keep these areas as distinct as possible (465). In his conclusion, he reasserts that Heschel has not properly demonstrated the “contributions of theological anti-Judaism to Christian antisemitism,” that Christianity is not racialist, nor a kind of anti-Judaism, nor antisemitic, though Christians themselves have acted in those ways (488-489).

Not surprisingly, Heschel disagrees with Morgan’s critique, particularly with respect to his categories of theological anti-Judaism, and modern, racial antisemitism. In her article, she argues “that the texts of pro-Nazi German Protestant theologians integrate race and religion with a fluidity that obviates a sharp distinction between the two terms. Antisemitic propaganda produced by Christian theologians during World War II leaves the strictly theological realm in its use of Nazi language and concepts, even when framed in a Christian context, and demands a different kind of conceptualization by historians” (257).

In the first instance, Heschel highlights the significant difference between her approach and that of Morgan, noting how she and many other scholars “no longer find the distinction between theological anti-Judaism and antisemitism to be helpful.” She argues this categorization tends to “mask rather than illuminate the historical material we are studying,” and that she and many other scholars are now “less interested in establishing definitions and boundaries than in finding slippages, similarities, influences and parallels” (258). More concretely, Heschel demonstrates how intertwined Christian and Nazi racial ideas were with one another. For instance, she characterizes Morgan’s view that Martin Niemöller exhibited cultural antisemitism, theological anti-Judaism, and theological antisemitism as “quite a brew” (258). To drive this home, she asks how we should understand the mixture of ideas in the speech of Siegfried Leffler, a well-known leader in the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, who stated in 1936: “Even if I know ‘thou shalt not kill’ is a commandment of God or ‘thou shalt love the Jew’ because he too is a child of the eternal Father, I am able to know as well that I have to kill him, I have to shoot him, and I can only do that if I am permitted to say: Christ” (258-259). Simply put, Heschel doesn’t find Morgan’s taxonomy useful as a means to historical explanation. Instead, she points out how the historical context of Leffler’s words–the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws prohibiting sexual relations between “Aryan” Germans and Jews and the widespread fear-mongering about the dangers of Jewish impurity–goes a long ways to explaining the passion in Leffler’s outburst against the dangers of Jews and Judaism for German Christianity.

Heschel also questions Morgan’s chronological differentiation between anti-Judaism and antisemitism, with theological anti-Judaism giving way to secular racism and antisemitism. Indeed, she notes how this view has been abandoned by many scholars, who prefer to describe all hostility to Jews and Judaism as antisemitism. Religious hostility, which might be called anti-Judaism, is just another kind of antisemitic discourse, alongside economic, political, nationalistic, or racial modes of speech. For instance, Heschel quotes a New Testament scholar, who explained: “The problem is that even in the patristic and medieval eras, long before the coinage of the term antisemitism as such, it is almost impossible to distinguish between the racial and religious/ethnic elements. Form many of these authors, as I’ve seen in my Caiaphas research, Jews were by their nature evil, and their rejection/killing of Christ is evidence of that evil nature” (260). Heschel adds that racial language and imagery were used to describe Jewish degeneracy in the Middle Ages, creating “an otherness of the Jewish body … that, already by the thirteenth century, was believed to be immutable and incapable of erasure even by baptism” (260).

As for the Nazi era, Heschel lists four reasons why scholars increasingly employ “antisemitism” to describe Christian hostility to Jews and Judaism: 1) explicitly Nazi language plays a central role in Christian discussions of Jews, while older terms took on new connotations in the Third Reich; 2) negative theological statements about Jews have to be understood in their wider social and political context; 3) “‘das Judentum’ is an ambiguous term in German,” meaning “Judaism, the Jews, or Jewishness,” which in turn creates an ambiguity in German theological language; and 4) “given the Nazi regime’s policies towards the Jews, terms such as ‘Entjudung’ (dejudaization) of Christianity or ‘Beseitigung’ (eradication) of Jewish influences insinuate practical implications and not just theoretical allusions” (261).

Heschel goes on to criticize Morgan for an outdated historical understanding of the German Christian Movement and an outdated theoretical understanding of the relationship between racism and nationalism, providing examples to show how racially-oriented German Protestant leaders were. For instance, she notes how Walter Grundmann “spoke about fighting on the ‘spiritual battlefield’ to protect Germans from Jews, Christianity from Judaism,” how he described “Jews as the underlying enemy of Germany,” and how he wrote that “‘the Jew’ is ‘the Antichrist [who] wants to unleash itself and overthrow the Reich’ through the war, Bolshevism and liberalism” (264). Heschel adds that this mixture of theological and racial antisemitism can be found in Grundmann’s scholarly and popular writing, making it impossible to separate his words and ideas into different categories of antisemitism.

Heschel restates the interpretation she puts forward in The Aryan Jesus: Grundmann and his colleagues “were theologians predisposed to accept the nationalism, antisemitism, anti-liberalism and anti-Bolshevism of Hitler and to view politics through religious lenses.” They viewed Nazism as a means to revitalize Christianity and sought to support Nazism with spiritual means. “To that end, Nazism had to be defined as embodying Christian values, and Christianity as embodying Nazi values.” They sought “to eradicate Jewishness from Christianity, just as the Reich sought to eradicate Jews from Europe” (265). And Nazi theologians need to be understood not only in their theological context, but also in their political and social context. She illustrates this last point by reminding Morgan (and her readers) of the wide-ranging evidence of Grundmann’s Nazi affinities and activities and the broad consensus of scholars such as Robert Ericksen, Guenter Lewy, and Kevin Spicer. In the end, Grundmann and his theological allies provided Hitler with ideological and propaganda support for “the disenfranchisement, deportation, and murder of the Jews,” (268) just as so many other academics and functionaries did throughout German institutional life.

To summarize, Heschel argues persuasively that the older distinction between theological anti-Judaism and racial antisemitism is increasingly difficult to sustain, given current scholarship on either historic Christianity or the churches in the Third Reich. This is certainly the interpretive path most historians now follow. Taken together, the Morgan and Heschel articles outline the two main perspectives in this terminological debate.

Reflection on Pastor Christian Führer of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Reflection on Pastor Christian Führer of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig

By Roger Newell, George Fox University

Pastor Christian Führer of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig, the founding organizer of the famous peace prayers in the 1980s, died on 30 June, at the age of seventy-one. Not long ago, Professor Roger Newell of George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon took a party of students to visit sites of special significance in European Church history. One of their stops was in Leipzig, about which he reported as follows:

We were welcomed by the good Pastor who led us straight into the church, right up to the main altar, explaining that this was formerly reserved for the priests in centuries past, but now was open to everyone. There we got a short tour of the church building, its history and the tradition of music (including the link with J.S. Bach, who functioned mainly in the nearby Thomaskirche). Then he took us to the adjacent priests’ vestry, where he told us the story of his ministry beginning in the early 1980s. He reminded us that it was a time of increasing tension between East and West. The Cold War’s trench cut Germany in half. On both sides of the Berlin Wall, Germans grew increasingly anxious that Germany could become the battleground for Europe’s third war in this century. At the same time, what was then the government of East Germany vastly increased its police-state controls through its secret policy (the Stasi) which deployed a huge force backed by unofficial collaborators to keep tabs on any possible opponents and dissidents. It made for a highly oppressive situation where suspicion and mistrust reigned.

This was the brooding climate in which Pastor Führer opened the doors of the church to young people anxious to discuss such things. The initial gathering took place in 1981 when Pastor Führer invited people with concerns about peace and the arms race to meet at the Church late in the evening (possibly to avoid Stasi attention). He expected maybe ten or so people to come and let off some steam. But to his astonishment ten times that number showed up. They were mostly young, many of them dissidents who were not getting along with the Communist government.

Next, Führer described how he brought everyone right to the central altar, sat them on the floor of the church and laid a large rough wooden cross on the floor in their midst. He asked everyone who wanted to raise a point to take a candle, light it, and speak to their concern as they placed their candle around the cross. If the dissidents were surprised to find themselves at an old-fashioned prayer meeting, it was Pastor Führer’s turn to be surprised when every single person lit a candle, spoke a concern and shared in what turned out to be the most significant prayer meeting in the forty year history of the German Democratic Republic The sharing continued past midnight as gradually the bare wooden cross changed into a cross glowing with light. The mood of openness, freedom and acceptance was so life-giving that no one wanted to leave. It was a harbinger of things to come of which no one sitting there could have foreseen.

As I read later in the Nikolai brochure:

When we open the church to everyone who has been forced to keep silent, has been slandered or maybe even imprisoned, then no one can ever think of a church again as being simply a kind of religious museum or a temple for art aesthetics. On the contrary, Jesus is then really present in the church because we are trying to do what he did and what he wants us to do today. This is the hour of the birth of the Nikolai Church–open for everyone–also for protest groups and those living on the margin of society. Throw open the church doors! The open wings of the church door are like the wide open arms of Jesus: “Come unto me, everyone who is troubled and burdened, and I will relieve you! ” And they came and they come!

From this first event Führer would eventually arrange what he called ‘peace prayers’ to meet every Monday evening at 5 p.m. to pray for peace in both local and international situations of conflict. Later these prayers were sometimes followed by the people walking into the streets carrying candles to witness for peace and freedom. These were the largest and also the most peaceful of any such demonstrations in the GDR.

A particular moment of tension occurred in May 1989 following a blatantly fraudulent election in which the Communist party claimed to have received 98% of the votes cast. The public was outraged at such a flagrant deception. Calls for reform grew louder. The police reacted by blocking all driveways to the church, seeking to shot down the Monday prayer meetings, which they determined had become a cover for political insurrection. Nevertheless the crowds only increased.

On October 7, the GDR was due to celebrate its 40th anniversary. President Gorbachev, the author of the movement for openness and Perestroika, attended from the Soviet Union. Naturally the government did not want the occasion to be used for any kind of public expression of discontent. In Leipzig, for ten long hours police battered and bullied defenseless demonstrators who made no attempt to fight back. Many were taken away in police vehicles.

In this heightened atmosphere, just two days later, Monday 9 October, the peace prayers were to be held. The government warned protesters that any further demonstrations would not be tolerated. All day long, Führer told us, the police and military tried to intimidate them with a hideous show of force. Schools and shops in the city were shut down. Roadblocks were built. The police had guns loaded with live ammunition. Soldiers with tanks were mobilized and surrounded the central area. Extra beds and blood plasma had been assembled in the Leipzig hospitals. Rumors from many reliable sources circulated that the government intended to use the “Chinese Solution” and repeat the massacre of Tienanmen Square in Beijing.

To neutralize and perhaps disrupt the prayer meeting, 1ooo party members and Stasi went early on to the church. 600 of them filled up the nave by 2 p.m. But,as Führer described it in the brochure:

They had a job to perform. What had not been considered was the fact that these people were exposed to the word, the gospel and its impact! I was always glad the the Stasi agents heard the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount every Monday. Where else would they hear these?

So the stage was set, the actors assembled for the climatic Monday prayer service. Huge numbers came out to pray, not only at the Nikolai Church but at other churches throughout the city, which had joined the peace prayers. During the service, the atmosphere and the prayers were serenely calm. As he prepared to send the people out into the streets, Pastor Führer made a final plea to the congregation to refrain from any form of violence or provocation. The Sermon on the Mount was again read aloud.

As the doors opened for the worshipers to depart, something unforgettable happened. The 2000 people leaving the sanctuary were welcomed by tens of thousands waiting outside with candles in their hands. That night an estimated 70,000 people marched around the main city streets. Though the police and the military were everywhere, Pastor Führer said: Our fear was not as big as our faith … Two hands are needed to carry a candle and to protect it from extinguishing. So you cannot carry stones or clubs at the same time.

As the good pastor noted:

There were thousands in the churches. Hundreds of thousands in the streets around the city centre. But not a single shattered window. This was the incredible witness to the power of non-violence. … It was an evening in the spirit of our Lord Jesus for there were no winners and no defeated. Nobody triumphed over the other, nobody lost his face. There was just a tremendous feeling of relief.

It was later reported that Horst Sindemann, a serving member of the Central Committee of the GDR, summed up both the extensive preparations of the authorities as well as their inability to know how to respond to the events of that evening:

We had planned everything. We were prepared for everything. But not for candles and prayers.

A month later the Berlin Wall was breached, and the whole Communist empire crumbled away.

Article Note: New Contributions on Nazism and Christianity

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Article Note: New Contributions on Nazism and Christianity

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Samuel Koehne, “Nazism and Religion: The Problem of ‘Positive Christianity,’” Australian Journal of Politics and History 60 No. 1 (2014): 28-42.

Samuel Koehne, “Nazi Germany as a Christian State: The ‘Protestant Experience’ of 1933 in Württemberg,” Central European History 46 No. 1 (March 2013): 97-123.

In this past year, Samuel Koehne has published two new articles, both of which are interesting contributions to the ongoing debate over the relationship between Nazism and Christianity. One looks at the question from the perspective of the National Socialist movement, probing the party’s use of the term “Positive Christianity”. The other examines the relationship from the perspective of conservative Christians in Württemberg, analyzing their early responses to Nazi rule.

In “Nazism and Religion: The Problem of ‘Positive Christianity’”, Koehne challenges Richard Steigmann-Gall’s interpretation of “Positive Christianity”—the term used in Point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform. Koehne rejects Steigmann-Gall’s view, as presented in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, that “Positive Christianity” was a kind of Nazi Christianity which was supra-confessional (uncoupled from any Protestant or Catholic dogmatism), antisemitic (rooted in the German racial community), and socially ethical. Noting that Steigmann-Gall never considered the pre-history of the term, Koehne argues convincingly that from the nineteenth-century on, “Positive Christianity” emerged in juxtaposition to liberal, rationalistic Christianity. Right into the Weimar era, the term was widely used to mean conservative, orthodox, doctrinal (i.e. dogmatic) Christianity. It had appeared in Meyers Konversationslexikon, then in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart as well as in Brockhaus, and was featured in church election campaign coverage in the Weimar period—even in the Völkischer Beobachter. Though Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller tried to redefine “Positive Christianity” on behalf of the German Christian Movement, Koehne points out (following the lead of James Zabel) that there were other meanings floating around, including “orthodoxy, neo-paganism, heroic faith, anti-intellectualism and moderation” (32). Indeed, this “lack of definition” may have been an important reason the term was adopted by Hitler for the NSDAP Platform.

Koehne finds a great deal of diversity in the use of “Positive Christianity” among National Socialists. Some meant it in its older sense of “not liberal,” while others linked it to cultic or neo-pagan movements. In Mein Kampf, Hitler himself emphasized the role of traditional dogma in turning religious or political belief into faith, and in generating both certainty and intolerance, which Hitler felt to be important for any movement, including his own. In short, it was as “doctrinal faith” that the Führer understood “Positive Christianity” (39). Nonetheless, it is precisely here that Koehne identifies:

the paradox of Hitler’s dogma. In his most public statement it is clear that Hitler defined Christianity as a religious system precisely in terms of dogmatic faith. It is equally clear that those leading Nazis who declared themselves to be Christian adhered not to a dogmatic form like that of the Catholic or Protestant orthodox position, but to a radical and “Aryanised” form of faith (40).

In his conclusion, Koehne argues convincingly that the Nazis were trying to have it “both ways”, a tension revealed in Gottfried Feder’s official commentary on the Nazi Party Platform. In it, Feder asserted that National Socialists supported: 1) “Complete freedom of conscience”, 2) “Special protection of the Christian creeds”, and 3) “Suppression and obstruction of doctrines which are contrary to the German moral sense and whose content is of a character destructive to the state and Volk” (40-41). Clearly, these were not mutually compatible.

Though Koehne has effectively demonstrated that “Positive Christianity” was not a coherent “religious system” (à la Steigmann-Gall), his findings don’t exactly clarify the relationship between Nazism and Christianity. Near the end of his article, Koehne argues that “Hitler’s own definition [of “Positive Christianity”] meant that the Nazis were decidedly “un-Christian” (40). That may be, but as Steigmann-Gall has demonstrated, many leading Nazis self-identified as Christians. By both affirming traditional doctrinal Christianity and reinterpreting it in light of National Socialist racial ideology, Hitler and his Nazi colleagues created a great deal of confusion, both then and now. As a result, whether Point 24 and its affirmation of “Positive Christianity” was merely a smokescreen for Nazi anti-Christianity or whether it represented a willingness to accept the Christian churches as subordinate partners in the remaking of Germany is still open to debate. Koehne rightly calls for more research into how ordinary Christians understood the “Positive Christianity” of Nazism, in order to better define the relationship between Nazism and Christianity.

In “Nazi Germany as a Christian State: The ‘Protestant Experience’ of 1933 in Württemberg” (the earlier of the two articles, in terms of publication dates), Koehne engages in just the kind of research he calls for. This article is a response to Manfred Gailus’ call for new micro-histories of Christianity in Nazi Germany, and especially of the upsurge in Christian nationalism during the Nazi seizure of power—what Gailus, studying Berlin, calls the “Protestant Experience” of 1933 (97). Koehne attempts to discover whether a similar phenomenon occurred in Württemberg, and he does so by analyzing parish newsletters and pastoral correspondence, particularly from conservative (Pietist) Protestants in the Pastors’ Prayer Group (Pfarrergebetsbund) headquartered in Korntal. His goals are to discover how they viewed the Nazi regime in 1933 and how they responded to Nazi antisemitism.

As in the article on “Positive Christianity”, Koehne begins with a historical review—this time, of the relationship between politics and religion during the pivotal years of German Unification (1870) and of the outbreak of the First World War (1914). What he finds is that the conservative Protestants like the Korntal Pietists tended to view political events in religious terms, so that, “as Hartmut Lehmann has noted, events such as the foundation of the German Reich, World War I, and the rise of the Nazis could be read as indicating divine will” (100). Germany was, according to this perspective, a Christian nation.

In light of this, conservative Protestants came to see the Weimar era as a time of spiritual crises and godlessness, the product of the collapse of the Christian state that was Imperial Germany. As his 1933 speeches make clear, Hitler leveraged this fear. He called for a fight against communism and a duty to reestablish national unity and revive the German spirit. He declared his support for the Catholic and Protestant churches, proclaiming that they would play a key role in the moral and national renewal of Germany. He even announced that National Socialists “would create a state in which there could be a really profound revival of religious life” (103).

The Korntal Pietists Koehne studied responded favourably to Hitler’s overtures. Koehne quotes Regional Bishop Wurm, in the Korntal Parish Newsletter, drawing a parallel between the German Wehrmacht and the Christian Church, both of which stood above the conflict of the parties, served the entire nation, and fought “for good against evil and for the well-being of the whole Volk” (105). Similarly, the Korntal Parish Newsletter editors welcomed Hitler’s ascension to power, giving thanks for a Führer as a leader not seen since Bismarck, and one who was saving Germany from Marxist terror. As they put it, “Hitler and his regime have proclaimed the Christian State” (106). For Koehne, this was a revival of the spirit of 1914, a combined national and religious revival in the wake of powerful political events. Here he reviews the excitement of conservative Württemberg Protestants from that time, who saw the outbreak of war as a “spiritual springtime” complete with large upswings in church attendance. He quotes Gailus’ argument that both 1914 and 1933 were seen as “God’s hour” and interpreted “as a reunion with God of a people who had strayed from the true faith, a change of direction toward re-Christianization” (107).

If conservative Württemberg Protestants were pleased with the national-spiritual revival of early 1933, they grew increasingly concerned throughout the course of 1933 over the increasing politicization of the German churches. Whether it was the attempt by Premier Wilhelm Frick to place the Mecklenburg church under state control, the appointment of August Jäger as commissar over the Old Prussian Union Church, or Hitler’s support for the German Christian Movement, the Korntal Pietists understood that the state was interfering regularly in the life of the churches. There was, quite simply, a significant inconsistency between Hitler’s assurances that the inner religious life of the churches would be protected and his advocacy of the German Christians, the group who sought to “bring the Protestant Church in line with National Socialism—taking extreme positions on religious questions in doing so” (109). If, as the Korntal Pietists believed, the churches were to act as “the conscience of the Volk,” then the essential question was not about the national revival, but about the spiritual one: Would the Volk “listen to the voice of the Word of God proclaimed by the church, which does not simply awaken the slumbering good in our Volk but also judges the evil” (111)?

In addition to his findings concerning the attitudes of conservative Protestants towards the new Nazi state, Koehne also probes his sources for evidence concerning Christian attitudes towards antisemitism. He finds almost no mention of antisemitic events like the April 1 boycott of Jewish shops, and beyond that, little opposition to the persecution of Jews or other victims of Nazism. Rather, the emphasis among Korntal Pietists was invariably on the role of the Nazi state in working toward national renewal, leaving the spiritual renewal to the churches. They believed Hitler’s state was creating the conditions for spiritual renewal in four ways: 1) by fighting immorality, 2) by promoting a Christian concept of community, 3) by publicly supporting the Christian churches, and 4) by sparking general enthusiasm in German society, a “spring storm” of sentiment (112). Writers in the Korntal Parish Newsletter called on the German Protestant Church to use this enthusiasm to create a national mission (Volksmission) and hoped Christians would enter into and take on leadership roles in the National Socialist movement. In reality, as Koehne notes, the proselytization went the other way, as Nazi values reshaped the Christian churches. He also describes how conservative Protestants viewed the neo-pagan German Faith Movement as a growing threat.

Koehne finds that, in contrast to the Korntal Parish Newsletter, the correspondence among members of the Pastors’ Prayer Group was more circumspect, a mixture of joy and concern. Yes, Hitler was a God-given saviour, but the German Christian Movement, the totalitarian claims of the state, and the growing prevalence of the “racial question” in the Church was disconcerting. Indeed, one member of the group wondered whether the “‘Aryan question’ … was possibly a satanic devise to prevent ‘a genuine awakening’” (115). In terms of antisemitism, Koehne found allusions to the persecution of Jews, but didn’t seem to uncover much material on the “Jewish Question.” In fact, he wonders whether antisemitic measures had any real impact on these pastors or their congregations and concludes that their “willingness to overlook antisemitic policy” or other “less pleasing” actions of the state (here he is quoting one of the pastors) “meant that they were actively passive, having made a choice to remain passive, to abide” (118).

Overall, the members of the Pastors’ Prayer Group exhibited a mixture of political joy but religious concern. While they saw Hitler as a “God-given Führer” for the nation, they lamented the absence of a “spiritual leader” for German Protestants (119). They worried about the extensive politicization of religion and the growth of a media culture which created a sensory overload and left no room for spiritual reflection. In terms of racial politics, their narrow focus on the national rebirth meant that they found National Socialist antisemitism tolerable. Again, they were “actively passive,” viewing their interests as limited to the ecclesiastical realm and deciding that the positive aspects of National Socialism overwhelmed the negative ones.

In his conclusion, Koehne quotes the Korntal Parish Newsletter’s description of the experience of 1933 like a national-spiritual wave, a return to the high point of 1914 after the low ebb of the Weimar era. Once again, Koehne has demonstrated the complexity of relations between Nazism and Christianity, particularly at the outset of the Third Reich. His conservative Protestants from Württemberg clearly welcomed the new Nazi state and saw themselves as participants in a spiritual revival that ran alongside Hitler’s national revival, as had been the case in earlier moments of national importance, such as 1870 or 1914. Their sense of partnership with the new regime enabled them to ignore the regime’s antisemitism, though the growing politicization of religious life concerned them. Still, in 1933, they expressed “belief in a national revival under the Nazis” and “belief that Nazi Germany was a state in support of religion” (120).