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Call for Papers: Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Call for Papers: Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations

SCJR

Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations is the journal of the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations and is published by the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College. The Journal publishes peer-reviewed scholarship on the history, theology, and contemporary realities of Jewish-Christian relations and reviews new materials in the field. The Journal also provides a vehicle for exchange of information, cooperation, and mutual enrichment in the field of Christian-Jewish studies and relations.

The Journal may be accessed freely on the internet.

Please visit the Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations website at www.bc.edu/scjr.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The editorial board of Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations invites submissions for its current and future volumes. Interested authors are encouraged to contact the editors in advance. All papers will be subject to peer-review before acceptance for publication.

Co-Editors: Ruth Langer, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA Professor of Jewish Studies; Associate Director, Center for Christian-Jewish Learning ruth.langer@bc.edu

Kevin Spicer, CSC, Stonehill College, Easton, MA Professor of History kspicer@stonehill.edu

Managing Editor: Camille Fitzpatrick Markey, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA Associate Director, Center for Christian-Jewish Learning scjr@bc.edu

Review Editor: Adam Gregerman, Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, PA Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies Assistant Director, Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations scjrbks@bc.edu

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Conference Report: Panels in Honour of Hartmut Lehmann at the 39th Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

Conference Report: Panels in Honour of Hartmut Lehmann at the 39th Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association (GSA), Washington, DC, October 1–4, 2015

by Rebecca Carter-Chand, University of Toronto

The most recent German Studies Association conference featured a series of panels that celebrated the career of renowned historian of religion, Hartmut Lehmann. Organized by Doris Bergen, Benjamin Marschke, and Jonathan Strom, the five panels and their participants reflected the wide-ranging contributions and temporal and geographic scope of Lehmann’s career. Participants included colleagues, students, and friends from Germany, Austria, Israel, Canada, and the United States.

Lehmann PosterThe panel participants began the conference with a dinner to honour Hartmut and his wife, Silke Lehmann. James Harris spoke about Hartmut’s life and career trajectory, emphasizing his close ties to the United States, which began with a high school exchange program and continued through many visiting positions at UCLA, Chicago, Harvard, and Princeton. In 1987 Lehmann became the founding director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, returning to Germany in 1992 to serve as director of the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen. He has been professor emeritus at the University of Kiel since 2004, while continuing to visit the United States often, most recently as a visiting professor at Princeton Theological Seminary.

One thread that ran throughout the panels was Lehmann’s ability to bring people and ideas together. Sometimes it has been countries that have come together, particularly Germany, the United States, and Israel; in other cases it has been institutions, like universities, governments, and foundations. But Lehman’s own research and publications have connected different fields that typically remain separated: early modern and modern history, religious history and social history, and the history of European Christianity and global Christianity, to name but a few.

The first panel, chaired by Peter Becker and commented on by Robert Ericksen, offered a timely reflection on Luther memory and commemoration—a topic on the minds of many historians in anticipation of the 2017 Luther year. Greta Kroeker’s paper discussed Luther’s relationship with Christian humanists and the implications of their very different views on eschatology. Christopher Close examined the first centennial Luther commemoration in 1617, contrasting local commemoration in Strasbourg and Ulm. He showed how commemoration was instrumentalized to shape a particular memory of the Reformation. Manfred Gailus contextualized Luther’s “On Jews and their Lies” within German Protestantism during the Nazi period, warning us not to overemphasize Luther’s infamous tract in shaping German Protestants’ antisemitism. Thomas Brady also considered the instrumentalization of Luther by discussing three different constructions of Luther: Luther as a Protestant hero by nineteenth century liberals; Luther as a German reactionary by nineteenth century socialists; and finally Luther as a teacher of progressive politics in the GDR.

The second panel, chaired by Richard Wetzell, with a comment by Doris Bergen, engaged the notion of secularization, suggesting some level of skepticism about its pervasiveness with the title, “Secularization? Secularism, Religion, and Violence.” Carola Dietze’s paper was premised on the idea that usual narratives of secularization are specific to European history, and offered a very different narrative with the case of the American abolitionist John Brown. Anthony Roeber’s paper placed Hartmut Lehmann’s work in conversation with the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, discussing both scholars’ contributions in moving forward discussion on secularization. Victoria Barnett discussed the Kirchenkampf in a global context, considering how Christians outside of Germany viewed the German Church Struggle through the lens of a struggle between ethno-national religion and internationalism.

The third panel turned its attention to Pietism in a transnational context. Chaired by Kelly Whitmer and commented on by by Simon Grote, this panel included papers by Benjamin Marschke, Jonathan Strom, and Manfred Jakabowski-Thiessen. Marschke revisited the question of how to define Pietism, questioning whether we should speak of Pietism as one reform movement, and making a plea for “many pietisms.” Strom considered the role of British conversion narratives in eighteenth century German Pietism, noting that influence flowed in both directions, although more strongly from Britain to Germany. Jabobowski-Thiessen discussed the importance of networks among Pietists, in this case Württemberg Pietists in Denmark. Several of the panelists reflected on Lehmann’s contribution to Pietist studies, praising his transnational approaches.

The fourth panel, titled “Germany and America,” was chaired by Silke Lehmann; the comment was given by Andreas Daum. Martin Geyer spoke about nation building and international technical standards (including currency and standards of measurement), and the meanings that people infused into them in the nineteenth century. James Melton gave a paper on slavery, Johann Martin Bolzius, and the German-speaking Pietists who migrated to Georgia in 1734. Claudia Schnurmann’s paper explored Martin Luther in the American biographical imagination from 1799 to 1883, bringing together many of the themes from the series of panels, including Luther memory and transatlantic exchange.

The fifth panel considered Harmut Lehmann’s works and influences and was chaired by Roger Chickering. Doug Shantz offered a reassessment on Lehmann’s 1969 work, Pietismus und weltliche Ordnung in Würrtemburg. Frank Trommler spoke about “the Lehmann era in Washington” (1987-1993) and Irene Aue-Ben-David’s paper spoke to the contribution of the Max Planck Institute for History in German-Israeli research cooperation. Hartmut Lehmann concluded the panel with some brief remarks, expressing his gratitude to all of the participants and the organizers of the series of panels.

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These Church Historians of Our Time: Markus Huttner, Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier, Huamin Toshiko Mackman

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

These Church Historians of Our Time: Markus Huttner, Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier, Huamin Toshiko Mackman *

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

In these days of professionalism and of stolid institutions of higher education we seldom think of the work of the scholar as possessing much of the quality of a vocation. If we live and work outside the academic sphere we tend to assume that all is well within it, or at least as well there as it is anywhere else. The difficulties of finding a steady place in a world of university departments might be obvious to those who haunt its corridors, but we do not glamourize them. If the young scholar who cherishes a vision comes and goes we might enjoy them while they are here but we do not worry about them unduly when they have gone. They may not go on to quite the career they would ideally have chosen, or written the books they would have wished to write. But doesn’t that go for us all?

The modern university, like any other institution, exists to give the theme of scholarship structure and form. But the truth is often that for younger scholars academic institutions exist as a kind of intricately structured instability, in which only the powers at the top, the elect, enjoy the confidence of position and all the solidity that comes with it, while at the bottom contracts are brief, and prospects are often bleak. In such an atmosphere of benign interest and effective indifference a great deal of vital new wisdom is lost to us, and because it never has time to ripen and reveal itself we hardly know what we miss. Although they might stand to benefit so much from such labour and such insight, churches rarely view this matter as one to concern them and while money is carefully set aside for the payment of the clergy it would hardly be considered appropriate to spend it on the ambitions of a young medievalist or a historian of religious faith in the modern age. Scholars of religious history often find that they are stranded between a university world which often proceeds on the assumption that religion does not matter very much, if at all, and churches which continue to feel that the enterprise of research and critical thought is really no responsibility of theirs.

The situation, of course, varies from one country to the next. In the world of the German university it is not only the structures that look distinctive but the degrees themselves. Not yet have they shed the lengthy progress from a first doctorate to a second Habilitationsschrift. Professors do possess power and patronage matters. It is dispensed in the context of collective research projects often funded by foundations outside the university itself. This has much in common with the working of science departments in British and North American universities, though money for the Arts and Humanities is thinner and the opportunities dimmer. In North America an aspiring academic must confront all the liabilities of the ‘tenure track’ and hope that security for the longer term will come, in its time. In such a context do many young historians spend much of their energy scrambling as best they can from one position or project to another, and in Europe it is the research project, not the institution itself, which often defines the narrative. All of this makes it exceedingly difficult to enjoy much freedom in what one writes, or indeed to build a career which possesses any clear sense of direction or cumulative character. A historian of one subject will need to become the historian of another, if that is where the money is to be had. A little like the ship-builders of the industrial age whose security lasted only so long as the present ship was emerging on the slipways of a dock, they must hope that there will come another ship-building contract when the present work is done.

The German historian Markus Huttner will have known such a landscape, its opportunities and frustrations, well enough. Born in Weilheim/Oberbayern in 1961 he graduated from Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn in 1990. He was already conspicuous as a student and he had taken a year abroad to study at Oxford, where he was a visiting student at Christ Church. In such places a commitment to the history of National Socialism, and its convergence with Christianity in particular, had yielded a deepening awareness of the significance of these themes in the context of wider European opinion. This would define his first doctorate and his first book. In 1995 Markus Huttner published Britische Presse und nationalsozialistische Kirchenkampf and gave to scholarship an intricate survey of the British newspapers and their interpretation of what went on in the Catholic churches of Germany in the years of the Church Struggle – one of those immense monographs which have been possible for German researchers but unthinkable almost everywhere else, and which have become the speciality of the Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh. The book shows conviction not only in the choice of subject but the disavowing of some of the theoretical and methodological approaches, by then conventional in much of German scholarship, which might well have defined it. The book established a firm claim both for its subject and its author.

Although he was soon immersed in the necessities of publishing a plethora of articles for academic journals, Markus Huttner already had his sights set on a second book, and one that might reach a wider public. In 1999 he published an innovative discussion of the great matter of religion and totalitarianism as it was argued out by Christians in both Germany and Britain during the National Socialist era. This was Totalitarismus und Säkulare Religionen. Blending theoretical and biographical approaches, Markus Huttner here developed the strengths of his earlier work and drew together a striking pantheon of critics and observers, churchmen like J.H. Oldham and George Bell, intellectuals like George Orwell and Christopher Dawson, international critics like Waldemar Gurian and influential journalists like the editor Wickham Steed, the German correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, Frank Voigt and the Times correspondent, Norman Ebbutt. At the time when the book appeared a growing number of historians were beginning to write again of totalitarianism (a word which had itself passed in and out of fashion) as a ‘political religion’, and in many ways this became the premise of the book.

In the German universities the place of this work was recognised. Established historians like Thomas Brockmann, Christian Kampmann, Antje Oschmann and Franz Bosbach had come to value the achievements and the promise of this new voice. Maintaining a fruitful relationship with Oxford and the British universities, Huttner’s work was equally known to Jonathan Wright, at Christ Church itself, and, at Leicester, by Richard Bonney, who met him at a conference in 2001 and found him eager to help his own work. But it was now a question of settling to work on a Habilitationsschrift. Working under Ulrich von Hehl at the University of Leipzig, Markus Huttner began to explore the history of the German universities across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new work which united the intellectual and the corporate and emphasized with a new profundity the development of professionalization and the organization of disciplines. The work prospered and much of value was accomplished. But now, suddenly, time was running out. It was in Leipzig in the spring of 2005 that Markus Huttner learnt that he was seriously ill. He was killed by a brain tumour, dying in hospital on 31 May 2006.

I never met him, but with characteristic generosity he once sent me his two books and I replied, saying that I was embarrassed that I had nothing of comparable worth with which to reciprocate. After his death, in 2007 a fine anthology of Markus Huttner’s shorter writings, Gesammelte Schriften zur Zeit- und Universitätsgeschichte, was edited by Thomas Brockmann, Christof Kampmann and Antje Oschmann. The collection does well to show the character and quality, and the range, that he had by then achieved and the promise that had become its own fulfilment. Today his contribution is barely known outside his own country. One is left to acknowledge the barrier of language and the difficulties of making scholarship truly an international adventure in which the riches that may be known in one place are equally known to another.

The academic world which Markus Huttner knew bore much in common with that of Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier. Born a decade later, in 1971, she grew up in Lyon and studied History at the Jean Moulin University there, graduating in 1993. Her next step was to the University of Heidelberg where she was increasingly drawn to the history of modern Catholicism in Germany, particularly between 1848 and 1933. Like Markus Huttner, she soon looked to study abroad and an opportunity to study German Catholicism in the Kaisserreich in Oxford in 1996 proved a striking influence, as did a short visit to Vancouver for a conference of German Studies organized by John Conway. The first time that I encountered her was in a conference of the Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte journal at Strasbourg. Very much in the background and barely making her presence felt, she maintained nonetheless a palpable intensity of interest in everything and everybody there. Her work had by now garnered plaudits and accolades, but not yet a solid foundation or way ahead. It is hard not to sense that the happiness of these stipendium and conferences, and the praise that she won there, must have given her a still more vivid sense of what she wanted but could not quite secure for herself. Lyon remained her home and it was there that she completed her doctorate on the Katholikentage in the Weimar Republic.

By now Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier had come to her view herself as a historian of religion, politics and society and a scholar of comparative histories. There was a profusion of articles in journals and collections of conference proceedings of various kinds. She was as much at home with the history of German Catholicism as she was with that of French Catholicism, but she was far more interested in the realm of lay activism than the manoeuvres of ecclesiastical powers. Her work showed that she had already become an accomplished surveyor of long chronologies and broad landscapes, but she was, if anything, more drawn to intricacies of personal and collective experience. A succession of short biographical studies was published bringing a succession of neglected figures, many of them women, into the foreground of historical appreciation. But Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier already perceived that her fortunes must be, at best, precarious in the national and secular worlds which defined the outlook of the French universities. In the European faculties of that time funding could be secured for what had come to be called ‘trans-national’ and ‘trans-cultural’ research and this offered some prospect of work on projects of various kinds. Looking to secure a post-doctoral position she turned towards the history of the international women’s movement. At a workshop in Hamburg in 2005 she met the historian, Angelika Schaser. It was an important connection. Together they were able to pursue an innovative seam of research into religious conversions in the border areas of France and Germany across the nineteenth century. But the search for a university position began to look increasingly desperate and it proved impossible to develop what had been begun. There was a brief stipendium at the University of Vechta in 2006 and then at the University of Mainz in the following year. At a meeting organized by the George Bell Institute in London she said very little in formal sessions but was rich in conversation, and here she found in the Polish historian, Dorota Schreiber-Kurpiers a new and vital friendship. This yielded another brief opportunity, this time a short lectureship, from 2007-9, at the University of Opole. Together Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier and Dorota Schreiber-Kurpiers now planned an innovative project exploring the relationship between military authorities and prostitution during the First World War, a matter never before touched by scholarship in that country. I remember well the quality of near-trepidation with which they outlined this to me, and how firmly they insisted that it was surely time that such a subject must be examined (though I should add that, for my part, I needed no convincing). For Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier the position at Opole was precious, but it also brought an immense burden of teaching. There was another flurry of applications – I remember writing many references for her, often more in hope than expectation – but to no avail. When Angelika Schaser met her again in 2009 she found her almost exhausted and dispirited, but still putting a brave face on it all. The University of Hamburg remained something of an academic home for her work.

I think I have never known a scholar who was so ardent in seeking to write and publish what she had discovered in her work; always she appeared to be hunting for a home for something just finished. No other avenue opened before her. She soon became convinced that there was no future for her, and for the research in which she had come to believe, in Europe. She had some contacts in North America and believed there might be something to favour her there. Her command of English was excellent. A modest breakthrough occurred: Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier moved to Quebec and to a position at Laval University. Now she wrote a short study of the French journalist, Louise Weiss (in French, and as yet unpublished) and another, of the German politician Helene Weber (the fruit of scholarship from the Hiledegardis Association in Bonn). An article, presenting something of her earlier research on conversions in French Catholicism, was completed for the journal Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte (but not published). It was in Hamburg, shortly before Christmas in 2011, that Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier, discovered that she had developed an inoperable brain tumour. The following January treatment began in Canada, but little could be done. Friends rallied as best they could and they found her resilient, even optimistic. Far from Lyon and from the many cities which she had known so briefly, she died in hospital on 4 October 2012.

Huamin Toshiko Mackman grew up in a quite different world from that known to Markus Huttner and Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier. She was born in 1961 in Japan, to a Chinese father and a Japanese mother. Already as a child she was familiar with international travel; because her father worked for an American airline company she frequently flew alone to the United States and to Taiwan, journeys which made her family wonder if she possessed a distinctively independent and adventurous character. At elementary school she discovered the English language, often studying it late into the night and, it was feared, harming her eyesight. Much of these young years was devoted to caring for an ill mother: there was no money for university fees, but Huamin won a scholarship and duly repaid what she owed with the first job that she secured upon graduation. For a time she was employed as an interpreter by a Chinese trading company, often flying to China on business, much to the satisfaction of her father. Her parents died within weeks of each other when she was 27.

It was soon after leaving the trading company that she began to work with foreign students in Japan. She also visited Korea and began to study its language. It was striking that in the midst of such a life she should encounter the Society of Friends and herself become a Quaker. During the early 1990s she worked for the Waseda Hoshin Christian Centre in Tokyo, developing a particular commitment to Japanese-Korean relations. It was in this context that she travelled to Britain in 1996, first to study for a brief period at the Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham, then to return there, this time to live. These early Birmingham years found her researching for a doctorate and organizing a Centre for the Study of North East Asian Missiology with Werner Ustorf. Together they edited a collective volume, Identity and Marginality: Rethinking Christianity in North East Asia (Peter Lang, 2000). She married, settled and made the city her home.

In its heyday a renowned bastion of Christian internationalism, missionary training and education, Selly Oak was in many ways an ideal place for Huamin Toshiko Mackman to flourish. But that era had now all but passed. The financial basis of the establishment was fragile and was judged by its governors to have served its purpose in the world. Negotiations were soon rumbling in the background. When Selly Oak was effectively acquired by the University of Birmingham, salaried academic staff were adopted and given a new home in the Department of Theology while a still-peripheral figure like Huamin was stranded. Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, the end of the age of Selly Oak deprived her of an important context for her work, and one to which she could have made a sustained contribution.

At this time Huamin encountered the Birmingham Quaker and Director of the Barrow Cadbury Trust, Eric Adams. The Trust had only a few years before committed generous funds to the development of a new body, the George Bell Institute, which was run from an office at the Queen’s Foundation nearby. A modest power with modest funds, the institute promptly made her a Fellow, undertook to support her research costs and made a study available to her so that she could work, translate and write as she saw fit. Here, for two years, much was achieved. Huamin published two valuable articles in the journal of the institute, Humanitas, one a discussion of Japanese Christianity and missionary controversies in the 1930s and the other on the political dilemmas of the eminent Japanese evangelist, Toyohiko Kagawa. The library at Selly Oak housed archival treasures documenting vividly the activities of international corresponding members of the World Student Christian Federation across the first half of the twentieth century. These had barely seen the light of day for decades. This was the kind of work which would have suited Huamin almost perfectly and we often discussed what we would like to do. In these conversations the name of Marie-Emmanuelle Reytier often came up. Applications for some modest finance which might make possible some new research there simply ran into the ground. Shortly afterwards the Birmingham office of the Institute had to close altogether.

Very possibly Huamin Toshiko Mackman did not view herself primarily as a scholar, though her research was meticulous, her command of languages capable and her sense of a subject was acute, creative and persuasive. But her research spoke of a profound moral engagement with contemporary issues, many of which called upon persevering, practical qualities. She was deeply involved in various works of international reconciliation and later accomplished much for the Japanese community across the Midlands. Local hospitals called upon her when they needed assistance with Japanese or Chinese patients who spoke little English. She also committed a great deal of time to contemporary issues of justice. In particular, she monitored refugee issues as they arose in Japan itself, seeking to support those who campaigned for a more liberal policy there. At heart, she was a vigorous and assiduous Christian internationalist whose work constituted a consistent challenge to those old enemies, nationalism, militarism, imperialism and indifference in their many forms. In company she was immensely kind and wonderfully thoughtful. The impression that she made on people of very different backgrounds was striking. A quiet presence in any conclave, her conversation was given wholly to things that mattered. Huamin Toshiko Mackman learnt that she had lymphatic cancer soon after the final colloquium of the George Bell Institute, in Poland in 2012. For a time there were hopes that the disease could be controlled, but it was too strong. She died in a Birmingham hospice on 17 August 2014. She left behind her husband, Steve, and a young, adopted daughter, Rose, brought to Birmingham from a Chinese orphanage only a few years before.

These three brief lives will leave few traces. Many of those who have grown familiar with the conferences and seminars of university life hardly noticed when they were among us and barely knew that they had gone. What then of the institutions of the Christian faith, as we know them in their more solid ecclesiastical forms, their national and local hierarchies and synods, their ongoing pronouncements and resolutions? Here there will be almost no acknowledgement at all, no sense of what has been lost, no sense even of what might have been learnt. Yet all three of them were still, in their own way, Doctors of the Church

 

* My particular thanks to Franz Bosbach, Angelika Schaser and Eric Adams.

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

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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).

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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)” 18th 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.)

 

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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)”
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?.

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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 20th 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

 

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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.

 

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