Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 32, Number 2 (Summer 2026)
Review of Simon Unger, ed., Katholizismus am Eisernen Vorhang: Der Vatikan, Westdeutschland und der Kalte Krieg, 1945-1965. (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2026). pp. 237.
By Maria D. Mitchell, Franklin & Marshall College
Edited by Simon Unger, Assistant Professor of Modern European Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary and Principal Investigator of the research group The Global Pontificate of Pius XII at the German Historical Institute in Rome, this volume significantly enriches our understanding of the Vatican’s role in the Cold War. While the authors offer fresh information and insights – more than half the chapters showcase documents released in 2022 by the Vatican Apostolic Archive (Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, AAV) on Pius XII (1939-1958) – the book’s larger framing of conflict between conservatives and reformers paints “a differentiated picture of Catholic Church history in the postwar era” (22). With West Germany as its focus, the collection not only complements existing studies on Vatican foreign relations, but its revelations and analyses shed important light on Cold War politics.
If Pope Pius XII looms large over any consideration of twentieth-century relations between the Vatican and Germany, Unger’s consideration of the Vatican’s role in Europe’s reconstruction, the early Cold War, and decolonization argues for a broader, if paradoxical, view of Pius XII beyond “World War Pope.” On one hand, the Vatican remained silent about the Holocaust and forged close relations with dictators such as Franciso Franco. On the other hand, Pius XII was “the first pope to speak positively about democracy, encourage the Church’s globalization, and promote processes of decolonization” (7). Apostolic Nuncio to Bavaria (1917-1920) and Germany (1920-30) before negotiating and signing, as Cardinal Secretary of State, the Reichskonkordat in 1933, Pius XII’s embrace of the Federal Republic and, in particular, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s government would inspire his nickname Papa Tedesco, the German Pope.
The editors argue that Faulhaber’s development reflects the intellectual and practical development of conservative German Catholics in the first half of the twentieth century. At his core, Faulhaber never lost his conservative and hierarchical preference for monarchism, but adjusted pragmatically to serve the needs of the church and its faithful. In particular, the editors claim, Faulhaber’s development reflects the changing relationship between religion and politics, and between Catholicism and political ideologies, particularly National Socialism. Finally, studying Faulhaber illuminates the “theological and denominational history of the times as well as its structures and networks” (11).
This church history dissertation, now available and supervised by Thomas Kaufmann in Göttingen, is a 500-page book that provides sufficient clarity. Marahrens, whose tenure as bishop largely coincided with the Hitler era, was an avowed Lutheran and, at the same time, a staunch National Socialist who revered and admired Hitler. He could be called a doubly-professed National Socialist Christian. Many contemporaries today believe that such a mental balancing act simply does not add up. The Hanoverian church leader Marahrens and many other renowned Protestant theologians of the Third Reich show that such dual faith was indeed possible and can even be considered a specific characteristic of the Nazi era.
Researchers and readers new to the topic will appreciate Bürger’s two introductory chapters, in which he situates the volume within the regime’s broader campaign against religious institutions. Repressive measures included the currency and morality trials, the closure of schools and novitiates, and the compulsory use of church properties during World War II. 
Co-editor Martin Keßler provides more detail on the concept in his individual contribution. Following Karl Mannheim, Max Weber, and most recently Dieter Henrich, the term “constellation” is to be understood as 
This, however, is exactly what Brandon Bloch presents in his book on Protestant Germany, a sweeping project that is part political, theological, and intellectual history and part social analysis that reassesses Protestant viewpoints and influences in postwar Germany, interspersed with occasional biographical materials on Protestant clergy and theologians as well as Protestant intellectuals and politicians. Bloch traces the wave of religious nationalism that swept up German Protestant during Hitler’s dictatorship and how the defeat of Nazi Germany required a reorientation among German Protestants which, as he convincingly argues, was both a break with the past as well as a continuation of previous Protestant mentalities. 
This book – or booklet – is the third of five publications thus far in Cambridge’s series “Elements in Modern War.” These 
This monograph advances several well-articulated claims. Its primary focus is to show that “even though Christian writers portrayed their engagement with each other as an egalitarian process, ecumenism was also deeply rooted in efforts to preserve hierarchies” (4). This study sheds light not only on the degree of interconfessional conflict and cooperation, but also on how opposition to class equality, feminism, and independence of African and Asian colonies prompted increasing ecumenical outreach. An additional thesis is that the rise of Nazism catalyzed change in confessional outlooks and caused an earlier shift toward cooperation between Catholics and Protestants than some previous histories of the subject suggest. 
Against the backdrop of rampant right-wing extremism in Saxony, it is all the more surprising that the government of Saxony does not wanted to provide any money to renovate the remaining buildings of the Sachsenburg concentration camp for an on-site memorial.
The work under review is his revised dissertation, which the late Thomas Großbölting supervised before his untimely death. Like most German dissertations, it begins with a lengthy discussion of existing literature and investigatory approaches. The author asserts that the concordat of 1933 was one of a series of treaties negotiated between churches and the German state in the twentieth century. Generally, the concordat is not considered a Staatskirchenvertrag, as those concluded by the German government and the Protestant churches are. Most historians of the concordat consider it a diplomatic agreement between two sovereign entities.
Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London. She is a familiar and respected contributor to scholarship on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In this work she avoids teleological interpretations of events and rejects simplistic categorizations. She endeavors to tell the story of German bystanders “from the inside out” through “selected accounts of personal experiences” (16). She tells the stories of individuals. In so doing, she humanizes history. Victims and bystanders had names. They had stories. They were not a grouping of data points on a chart. Fulbrook’s subjects are profoundly human, and their complex stories challenge facile characterizations of society in Nazi Germany. Fulbrook’s primary sources for Part I are autobiographical essays from 1939 written on the theme “My life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933.” These essays give a broad range of everyday experiences before such memories were shaped by knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust. Likewise, in Part II she employs a variety of firsthand accounts and memoirs to tell stories from the ground level. Fulbrook argues well for the value and limitations of her source base in her introduction.
The primary argument of the book is that conservative student activists, and especially leaders of the Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten (Association of Christian Democratic Students or RCDS), were not only present during the 68er generation’s protests but were meaningful actors that shaped many of the era’s signature events. The photographs and opening anecdotes to each chapter alone convincingly prove this point. The cover photo shows a famous debate in Freiburg between the older liberal academic Ralf Dahrendorf and young Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentbund (SDS) figurehead Rudi Dutschke. Lurking in the margins of the photo are young Christian Democrats, Meinhard Ade and Ignaz Bender, who helped organize the event and participated in the debate. Von der Goltz emphasizes how these two students are rarely recognized and sometimes even cropped out of this famous photo to illustrate how the primary subjects of her inquiry have been overlooked. The presence of Ade and Bender at the debate is nonetheless significant. On the one hand, they positioned themselves against their generational spokesperson, Dutschke, and spoke out against left-wing radicalism. On the other hand, their willingness to dialogue with left-wing students and their embrace of the liberal Dahrendorf distinguished them from the older generations of Christian Democrats. Another chapter opens by revealing that the RCDS had organized the visit of the South Vietnamese ambassador in 1966, which Rudi Dutschke and the SDS interrupted, to intentionally draw national attention to the New Left’s unpopular protest tactics. Additionally, the fifth chapter opens with a description of when RCDS chair Gerd Langguth held his ground, condemning the constitutional threat posed by the Marxist Student Association Spartakus while being pelted by cheese curds in 1972. Such examples highlight the often-forgotten role of the right in these moments of protest and illustrates how young Christan Democrats initiated dialogue about reform in the 1960s, imitated many of the theatrical tactics of their left-wing adversaries, and eventually condemned the far-left’s militant turn in the 1970s.
Based on her 2017 dissertation in Protestant theology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Loos presents a meticulously researched, insightful, and densely written work on German Protestant attitudes toward communism in general (ideas, ideologies, organizations) and Soviet communist-Bolshevism in particular. Occasionally referencing pre-World War I events, her focus is Germany’s political transition through the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, tracing the intensification of anti-communist rhetoric on the eve of World War II and the eventual military assault on the Soviet Union in 1941. While the opening chapter points to a few academic-theological debates at the turn of the century on possible family resemblances between the ideals of early Christian and communist communities, the last chapter briefly outlines post-war developments in the Protestant churches until the mid-1950s, with anti-communist stances, though more restrained, remaining largely intact.