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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 Undergirding this seminar was the assumption that old models of church history have been superseded.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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Article Note: On Christian Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Article Note: On Christian Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reflection on Pastor Christian Führer of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Reflection on Pastor Christian Führer of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig

By Roger Newell, George Fox University

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

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

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

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

As I read later in the Nikolai brochure:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the good pastor noted: 

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

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

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

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

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Article Note: New Contributions on Nazism and Christianity

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Article Note: New Contributions on Nazism and Christianity

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In Remembrance: Ernst Klee (1942-2013)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

In Remembrance: Ernst Klee (1942-2013)

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

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

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

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

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Book Note: Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern, No Ordinary Men. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters against Hitler in Church and State

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Book Note: Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern, No Ordinary Men. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, Resisters against Hitler in Church and State (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), Pp. 157, ISBN 978-1-59017-681-3.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The latest addition to the Bonhoeffer corpus of writings is a double-headed tribute to both Dietrich and his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, written by Fritz Stern, a distinguished historian of Germany at Columbia University, New York, and by Elisabeth Sifton, the daughter of the noted American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. Their aim, in this short book, is to refresh and uphold the heroic picture of these men’s lives and tragic deaths as already formulated seventy years ago by British and American liberal churchmen, such as Bishop George Bell and Reinhold Niebuhr.   According to this interpretation, their participation in the resistance movement in Germany was motivated by their high ethical ideals and by their moral revulsion against the Nazis’ aggressive and violent persecution of their opponents, particularly the Jews. Their account of the careers of both Bonhoeffer and von Dohnanyi clearly follows that given by Eberhard Bethge, since they too later got to  know the surviving members of both families.  In essence, however, they bring no new insights to the political or theological controversies about the resistance movement, its motives or tactics.  Instead they repeat the now familiar themes of earlier biographies. They honour the inherent decency and courage of these intrepid witnesses to a “better” Germany. They deplore the readiness of other Germans, even years afterwards, to regard these men as traitors to the nation for seeking to overthrow the established government.  They still regret the British government’s refusal to offer the resisters any gestures of support. They are dismayed at the leniency extended to former Nazis in post-war West Germany.  In short, although well aware of the dangers of hagiography, especially in Bonhoeffer’s case–for all the wrong reasons–these authors nevertheless seek to affirm that “the Third Reich had no greater, more courageous and more admirable enemies” than these men who so steadfastly expressed their moral and political revolt against horrendous injustice and immeasurable cruelty.  But they leave unexplored the many questions which historians and theologians still have about the complexities of the German resistance movement, and the historical conditions which led these men to follow the path of heroic self-sacrifice and eventual death as witnesses to their beliefs. 

Curiously, in the appended footnotes, the references to the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Collected Works are all drawn from the German, rather than the now completed English edition.

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Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “Reassessing The Holy Reich: Leading Nazis’ Views on Confession, Community and ‘Jewish’ Materialism”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “Reassessing The Holy Reich: Leading Nazis’ Views on Confession, Community and ‘Jewish’ Materialism,” Journal of Contemporary History 48 No. 3 (July 2013): 423-445.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Samuel Koehne is a young Australian scholar who has been researching on the twin topics of how liberal and conservative Christians interpreted and responded to the rise of the National Socialist movement and how the Nazi movement developed its official policy on religion (see our summary of his research in Contemporary Church History Quarterly 18, no. 4 (December 2012)). In his recent article in the Journal of Contemporary History, Koehne revisits the controversy surrounding the Richard Steigmann-Gall book, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945—a controversy which featured prominently in the pages of the same journal back in early 2007. Koehne examines one of Steigmann-Gall’s key arguments in The Holy Reich, that the “positive Christianity” of Point 24 in the 1920 NSDAP Programme represented a coherent Nazi version of Christianity, which was supra-confessional (uncoupled from any Protestant or Catholic dogmatism), antisemitic (rooted in the German racial community), and socially ethical (placing common interest before private interest). In contrast, Koehne argues that “the notion of ‘positive Christianity’ as a Nazi ‘religious system’ has been largely invented” (423). Koehne makes his case by analyzing the public statements of Nazi leaders Adolf Hitler, Gottfried Feder, and Alfred Rosenberg on confession, community, and “Jewish” materialism, finding that all three ideas were “openly depicted as part of Nazi a racial-nationalist ideology,” and not portrayed as part of some kind of Nazi Christianity (424). In terms of source material, Koehne focuses on Hitler’s statements prior to the Munich Putsch and his writing in Mein Kampf, along with published explanations of the party programme by Rosenberg and Feder, from 1933 and 1934 respectively.

Koehne makes his case well. By the end of the article, there is little question that German racial purity, antisemitism, and Volksgemeinschaft were essential components of Nazi ideology, as opposed to core beliefs in a kind of Nazi Christianity. As a result, the “positive Christianity” of Point 24 remains ambiguous—social cohesion in Hitler’s Germany would not be achieved through an “’interconfessional’ religion but by a kind of salvational nationalism” (444). But if Koehne’s conclusion casts doubt on one of Richard Steigmann-Gall’s key arguments in The Holy Reich, it doesn’t clarify the questions the latter raises about individual Nazis’ attitudes towards Jesus or Christianity (444) or about the nature of National Socialist ecclesiastical policy. Amid Koehne’s examples of Hitler’s criticisms of the churches for the insufficiency of their Germanness and antisemitism are other references that suggest Christianity and the churches could play a positive role in German political life, as they had during the First World War (432-434). Nonetheless, Koehne’s article is an important reminder that religion was of minor importance to Hitler and other leading Nazis as they formulated and later implemented their antisemitic völkisch ideology, even if the their movement posed difficult challenges to Christianity and the German churches.

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Article Note: Nicholas Railton, “Escaping from Sodom: A Christian Jew Encounters German Antisemitism”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Article Note: Nicholas Railton, “Escaping from Sodom: A Christian Jew Encounters German Antisemitism,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 64 (2013): 787-826.

By Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., Stonehill College

In his fascinating article, Nicholas Railton of the University of Ulster’s faculty of arts details the life of Maly Kagan (1897-1963), a Christian of Jewish heritage, to highlight the struggles faced by such individuals under National Socialism.  The daughter of Russian immigrants who fled to Germany in the Kaiserzeit, Kagan left Orthodox Judaism in 1919, following a period of spiritual trial and personal tragedy.  In 1925, her faith-journey led her to accept a position as an auxiliary nurse at the Innere Mission sponsored Tannenhof psychiatric hospital in Remscheid-Lüttringhausen in the Rhineland.  Like many similar institutions in Germany, the Tannenhof hospital underwent nazification within a few months of Hitler’s assumption of power.  Steps in this process included the introduction of the Hitler salute for all employees and the implementation of the July 1933 sterilization law.  Tannenhof’s clerical director, Pastor Paul Ernst Werner, a devout Nazi and member of the German Christians, zealously promoted National Socialist doctrine through his leadership and bible study sessions.  In particular, he was aided by Martha Rielandt, a teacher at Tannenhof and a member of the National Socialist Women’s League, who similarly promoted National Socialist ideology, especially in her classes for trainee deaconesses.  Such changes in the institution did not go smoothly, especially after the German Christian Berlin Sportspalast November 1933 fiasco in which Reinhold Krause called for the removal of the Old Testament from the biblical canon.  Though evidence is conflicting, it appears that Hildegard von Bülow, Mother Superior of Tannenhof’s deaconesses, challenged Werner and Rielandt on the content of their teaching.  Both Werner and Rielandt were eventually removed from their positions.  Kagan was also dismissed at the same time.  It is unclear if the departures were linked, though Railton surmises that Kagan “became the sacrificial lamb that was meant to limit the influence and impact of Nazi ideology on the establishment” (p. 801).

After finding refugee at the Malche Bible House in Freienwalde an der Oder, upon recommendation of a director there, Kagan made her way to Berlin to begin work with the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel (HCTI), a missionary society designed to “bear witness for Christ to the Jewish people in all its lands of their dispersion” (p. 804).  There she worked with Heinrich Poms, also a Christian of Jewish heritage, who shared a background similar to Kagan.  Following Kristallnacht, Poms and his family fled Germany with Kagan’s assistance.  Kagan herself remained behind and assumed the running of the HCTI.  Amazingly, she avoided deportation three times and continued in her administrative position.  During this time, Kagan was even able to have surgery to correct a degenerate eye condition.  She also became involved with relief efforts in connection with Pastor Heinrich Grüber’s Office, the Kirchliche Hilfsstelle für evangelische Nichatarier.  This perilous work eventually brought her to hide both Jews and Christians of Jewish heritage in the HCTI building.  At some point, the situation became too dangerous for Kagan to remain in public view and she went into hiding until the war ended.

In post-war Germany, the situation for Christians of Jewish heritage within the German Lutheran Church did not change.  Railton attributes this to the Church’s unwillingness to address its National Socialist past directly and honestly.  He writes:  “It was a strange time when silence veiled a multitude of sins committed during the dark night of National Socialism:  sins of commission and even more sins of omission” (p. 813).  Despite this situation, Kagan resumed her missionary efforts and promoted the healing of wounds between Christians and Jews.  To this end, she encouraged her former colleague, Heinrich Poms, to return to Germany to assist her in her efforts.  Poms accepted her invitation and inaugurated a series of lectures that addressed the “‘demonic origin of antisemitism’ and the need to repent of all forms of such prejudice” (p. 816).  After seven years of toiling with reconciliation work and finding little support from the Lutheran Church, Kagan had had enough.  Family members in Israel had already been encouraging her to move there.  Giving up on Germany, she accepted their invitation and moved to Israel just outside of Haifa.  After her move, she continued to minister to the small Messianic Jewish community there until her sudden death in May 1963, the result of being hit by a motorbike.

Railton’s article informatively relates the horrendous impact of antisemitism on Christians of Jewish heritage.  As Railton notes, this is a topic that deserves more scholarly attention.  The article is well researched as Railton has thoroughly scoured the existing archives to tell Kagan’s story.   Yet, there are some areas where the reader desires more information or greater clarification.  For example, this reader would like to know more about the trials Poms and Kagan faced together.   Similarly, one learns little about Kagan’s experience in hiding in the last years of the war.  More specific examples might also have been offered to illustrate the prolongation of antisemitism in post-war German Lutheranism.  These points aside, Railton’s article provides us with a unique insight into the life of one woman who courageously resisted the Nazis by living out her faith conviction.  Hopefully, Railton’s work will inspire fellow historians to investigate this under-studied area further.

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Memorial Speech: Dr. Margot Kaessmann on the 120th Anniversary of the Birth of Dr. Elisabeth Schmitz

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Memorial Speech: Dr. Margot Kaessmann on the 120th Anniversary of the Birth of Dr. Elisabeth Schmitz

By Margot Kaessmann

On 17 December 2013, the City of Berlin and the Evangelical Church in Berlin, Brandenburg and Silesian Upper Lusatia honoured the historian Dr. Elisabeth Schmitz with a prestigious memorial service on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of her birth. The memorial speech was given by the former Bishop of Hannover, Dr. Margot Kaessmann, who is currently representative of the Council of the EKD for the Reformation Jubilee of 2017. We are pleased to publish excerpts from her speech and thank Dr. John S. Conway for his translation of the text.

Margot Kaessmann: Memorial speech on Elisabeth Schmitz (1893-1977)

Elisabeth Schmitz was born on 23 August 1893. I am grateful that 120years later André Schmitz and Manfred Gailus have taken the initiative to honour her this evening in Berlin, and also that the present Bishop of Berlin-Brandenburg Markus Droege is here with us. She lived here in Berlin from 1915 to 1943, and from 1933 onwards she saw at close range how damaging the Nazi ideology truly was, which led her to recognize the dangers and to protest, quietly but unmistakably. It is now 75 years since the notorious Crystal Night pogrom in 1938, but Elisabeth Schmitz had already foreseen such disasters. As a result she felt obliged to resign her duties as a teacher, fearing that her integrity would be compromised.

Today’s commemoration must be seen as an exceptional event. This “protesting Protestant”, as Manfred Gailus calls her in his biography, has hardly been known, and much too little recognized. But as he says: “Protestantism in Germany in the 21st century will want to accord this woman a high place, and even sooner or later to put her in the category of Protestant saints.” Of course Protestants have a problem with saints, since they believe that only God deserves to be worshipped, not men or women. For people in the Reformation tradition, the communion of saints is reserved for those whose life and death was totally committed to God, as is recognized in Article 21 of the Augsburg Confession of 1530.

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But Manfred Gailus is quite right to assert that we can learn from the example set by Elisabeth Schmitz’ faithful witness and her self-sacrificing commitment to others. It is high time that we acknowledge what she achieved. When people talk about the Resistance Movement in the Third Reich, we all know about such names as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Alfred Delp, or Hans von Dohnanyi. But women’s names are mentioned only as supportive wives. But of course there were women active in this resistance, and not only in the “White Rose” circle, such as Sophie Scholl, or in the Red Chapel network. One of them was Elisabeth Schmitz. She was originally from Hanau, but worked here in Berlin, but finally went back to Hanau where she died at the age of 84 in 1977. Only seven people attended her funeral.

Why are we commemorating her now? One of her pupils was Dietgard Meyer, who later became a pastor in Hessen. I myself was ordained in 1985 in Hessen and so learnt to know Dietgard Meyer. She told me about Dr. Katharina Staritz, who was provisionally ordained in Breslau as a “city vicar” in 1938, and who was arrested because of her engagement in the resistance, but whose status was not recognized after the war. Only in the last few years did I learn about Elisabeth Schmitz, but I was quickly appreciative of her early and clear recognition of the unbearable violations of human dignity and rights by the Nazis. From Manfred Gailus’ biography I learnt how well established Elisabeth Schmitz was in her circle of well-educated women, such as Dr. Carola Barth, who taught religion, and also Dr. Elisabet von Harnack, or particularly later with Dr. Martha Kassel, a medical doctor, who was a Protestant of Jewish origin. She had good contacts with Professor Elisabeth Schiemann, and also with such colleagues as Dr. Elisabeth Abegg and Margarete Behrens. These were among the first generation of women to be particularly well educated, and took advantage of this fact to express their views with vigor. This gave them a capacity for a critical approach to affairs, and their freedom and independence therefore made them skeptical towards the allurements of the National Socialist ideology.

Already in 1933 Elisabeth Schmitz had expressed her outrage about the injustice and cruelties inflicted upon those of Jewish origin. This was a time when many in the church thought that matters would improve after the Nazis took power. But Elisabeth Schmitz was more sanguine. As Gailus noted: “She was deeply involved and offended by the daily humiliations inflicted on her ‘non-aryan’ friends Martha Kassel, and her brother the lawyer Heinrich Kassel, as well as on other friends and acquaintances. She was also influenced by belonging to a circle of Jewish intellectuals around Julius Bab, by her reading of the writings of Karl Barth and by her extended correspondence with this Swiss theologian from April 1933 onwards.” These were the factors which affected her after that date, and brought her to join the circle led by Pastor Gerhard Jacobi in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial parish. In 1934 she took the step of signing the “Red Card” indicating her willingness to join the Confessing Church group in this parish.

In 1935 already she wrote a memorandum urging her church to stand up against the discrimination being inflicted on the Jews. She wrote: “For the past two and a half years a severe persecution has been inflicted on a portion of our people because of their racial origin, including a portion of our own parish membership. The victims of this persecution have suffered dreadful distress both outwardly and inwardly but this is not widely known, which makes the guilt of the German people all the more reprehensible.”

Elisabeth Schmitz had studied history, German, and theology in order to teach in a secondary high school. She graduated in 1920 as a pupil of Friedrich Meinecke in Berlin, which was an unusual achievement for a woman at that time. She was then granted her teaching certificate, and from April 1929 she was promoted to be a senior teacher in the Berlin school system. One of her pupils described her as being “quietly reserved, concentrating on the lesson materials, but both positive and demanding in her requirements from us. Her dress was very modest, her hair parted in the middle and held up with a comb. All of which gave her a slightly old-fashioned look, which didn’t inspire us. Nevertheless she succeeded in gaining our respect. Her quiet authority made us speechless.”

These pupils didn’t know anything about what she did outside the school. But in fact she was a member of Helmut Gollwitzer’s “Dogmatic Study Circle.” Between 1933 and 1936 she conducted an extensive correspondence with Karl Barth in the hopes of getting him to adopt a public stance on the subject of the situation of the Jews in Germany. In these early years she received two answers. From her standpoint, this persecution of the Jews and the silence of the Church in response was a vital matter, but Barth at that time regarded this only as a side-issue. This seems to me to denote a vital difference among the active members of the Confessing Church who were trying to live out their Christian convictions. Was this really an issue about the true nature of the Church? Or was it merely a matter of standing up for the rights of the persecuted Jews? Or was the Church failing in its most essential obligation when it did not oppose vehemently enough the oppression, the betrayal of values, and the disrespect for human beings?

I was particularly struck by finding a very similar protest being made by Edith Stein, who was a Catholic convert from Judaism, writing to Pope Pius XI in April 1933. But she, like Elisabeth Schmitz, got no answer. But Schmitz carried on her commitment by writing an extensive memorandum about the situation of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and presenting this to the Synod of the Confessing Church which was held in Berlin in September 1935. But she got no reply. It is still not clear just who actually received this document. It would seem that its contents were talked about, but that it was never officially presented to the synod.

An interesting fact is that for a long while the authorship of this document was ascribed not to Elisabeth Schmitz, but to another member of the Confessing Church, Marga Meusel. Not until 1999 was Elisabeth Schmitz’ authorship recognized, and then only by chance when a large number of documents were discovered left behind in Hanau after her death. But the question still remains: why did she herself not take more trouble to have its contents better known even after the Nazi regime was overthrown?

This memorandum is an impressive document. Its author was an alert observer of the damages inflicted by the Nazi regime. For example, in describing the fate of children, she wrote: “Children ought to have the first claim on our sympathy. But now? In many large cities, Jewish children are sent to Jewish schools. Or their parents send them to Catholic schools, since in their view they will be better protected than in Protestant schools. And what about the converted Protestant children? And what happens to Jewish children in smaller communities where there is no Jewish school, or in the countryside? In at least one small town I have heard that the exercise books of Jewish children are torn up, and that their breakfast snacks are thrown in the gutter. Christian children are doing this, while Christian parents, teachers and pastors allow this to happen.” And to think that all this was written three years before Crystal Night!

Why did this protest fail to gain any support? Was it because the Confessing Church was more concerned about safeguarding its own existence than in saving the Jews? Or was it because the author was a woman and not a properly ordained pastor?

Elisabeth Schmitz was denounced because she had given hospitality to Martha Kassel, a Christian of Jewish origin. From 1935 on, she had increasing problems at her Lankwitz school because she couldn’t agree to “educate the children in the spirit of National Socialism”. So after the Crystal Night she asked to be allowed to retire. She was evacuated from Berlin in 1943 and returned to her parents’ home in Hanau. But from 1946 to 1958, she was once again teaching as before. She evidently had close contacts with her friends and former students, but never raised the subject of her memorandum.

I am concerned about this story. For one thing, it shows how early the injustices of Nazi policy were recognized. Everyone could have known what was happening. Look at the questions she posed so frankly in 1935: “Why do the ‘non-aryan’ Christians feel so deserted by the Church both locally and at the international level? Why does the Church do nothing? Why do they allow these palpable injustices to be perpetrated?”

Of course this raises the question about the nature of the Church. For her, it wasn’t just a question of the Church’s freedom to witness, as Karl Barth assumed, or about the fate of the baptized Jews, which so concerned Marga Meusel. She was much more concerned about the fate of the Church as Church if it was not prepared to stand up for the rights of those being maltreated. This was happening in front of these churchmen’s own eyes, or even with their participation. On the other hand, it is unforgivable that this memorandum was not honored after 1945. The church leaders were surely guilty of a collective amnesia, when only a few heroes were selected to be remembered, but their own failures were pushed out of sight and forgotten.

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But today we should really celebrate Elisabeth Schmitz and be thankful for her stalwart witness. And we should be encouraged to follow her example in the life of our churches today. Her story is one which needs to be resurrected from the archives and kept alive in the day-to-day practice of our community. In this way Elisabeth Schmitz can truly be described as a Protestant saint, whose life and witness will remain of vital importance for us today and for the future.

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New Research on Nazism and Christianity: William Skiles

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

New Research on Nazism: William Skiles

By William Skiles, University of California, San Diego

William Skiles is a Ph.D Candidate in the History Department at the University of California, San Diego.  Here is a brief description of his dissertation research.  Mr. Skiles can be reached at wskiles@ucsd.edu.

Historians of the Church Struggle in Nazi Germany have closely examined the establishment of the oppositional Confessing Church (die Bekennende Kirche) in 1934, as well as the institutional conflicts between factions and figures within the movement and also with the regime and its supporters.  Yet the approach of most historians has focused on the institution, its leaders, and its persecution by the Nazi regime, leaving essentially unexamined the most elemental task of the pastor – that is, preaching.  My research explores the Confessing Church through the sermons its pastors preached Sunday after Sunday, for holidays and weddings and funerals, and even in the dark corners of concentration camps.

I am concerned with finding answers to a few key questions.  First, do the sermons of the Confessing Church reveal expressions of condemnation or support for National Socialism or Adolf Hitler?  In other words, did the pastors enter into a public debate about the Nazi regime from their position of influence behind the pulpit?  Second, how do these sermons express views either in support or antagonistic towards Jews and Judaism?  How often do we see cases of anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism preached, or conversely, how often do we see the Jews encouraged or esteemed as religious cousins in Nazi Germany?  And lastly, just how often do we see Confessing Church sermons offer dissent, opposition, or even resistance to the Nazi regime.  Given their unique role in Nazi Germany as professionals who had the opportunity to speak to the German population about Jews and their tradition, what did they say and how did they say it?  And in answering these questions, I aim to understand how these sermons may have contributed to the social and religious milieu of the Protestant Church and, in a wider scope, Nazi Germany.

Of course, one of the most difficult problems is determining what constitutes opposition or resistance.  I have examined over 900 sermons to find any expressions about Nazism or Hitler, and also about Jews and Judaism.  Categorizing comments about Adolf Hitler and National Socialism is much more straight-forward, as political comments in a sermons stand out as unusual and purposeful in a sermon.  For example, a pastor might condemn National Socialism as a false ideology or an ideology in direct opposition to Christianity; or a pastor would criticize Hitler as a false messiah or leader, or condemn other Nazi leaders for their persecution of the German churches.

On the other hand, analyzing comments about Jews and Judaism is more complicated.  Naturally, we expect Christian pastors to preach on the Old Testament, to tell the stories contained in this book.  Often the pastors’ presentations of these stories is without implication for the support or prejudice of Jews in Nazi Germany, they are simply re-iterations of old stories for a new audience.  Therefore, I pay particular attention to comments that reflect views of Jews and Judaism relevant to the current situation in Nazi Germany.  I did not catalogue more mundane examples of pastors discussing the traditions of the Jewish people, such as reiterations of the story of Jonah and the whale, for example.  Nevertheless, the fact that these Confessing Church pastors preached on the Old Testament and held up Hebrew and Jewish figures as heroes or moral and spiritual examples demonstrates not only their appreciation of the Old Testament as a sacred text, but differentiates them from the pro-Nazi Protestant German Christian movement (Glaubensbewegung “Deutsche Christen”).

This research is an original contribution to the historiography because for the first time we will have an in-depth analysis of a variety of messages delivered by Confessing Church pastors in their sermons to their communities of faith.  This will give us greater insight into the nature and the degree of dissent, opposition, and resistance in the everyday ministry of the church, and also provide some insight about public opinion expressed from the pulpit from week to week, whether explicitly or cryptically.  In addition, I am interested in how the Nazi regime perceived these sermons and dealt with pastors who were deemed too vocal – the Gestapo repots are superb documents in this regard.  Lastly, my research will advance our understanding of the social world of Germans in the Nazi dictatorship, particularly the values and priorities of their communities of faith, and how sermons may have informed political, social, and theological perspectives.  In the end, we may better be able to answer to what extent Confessing Church pastors spoke out for the Jews or against the Nazi regime, or as was too often the case, simply kept silent.

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Call for Papers: 2014 Annual Karl Barth Conference

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

Call for Papers: 2014 Annual Karl Barth Conference

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

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

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

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