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Review of John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother. The revolution in Catholic teaching on the Jews 1933-1965

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

Review of John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother. The revolution in Catholic teaching on the Jews 1933-1965 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), Pp 376. ISNB 978-0-674-05782-1.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The most significant theological development of the twentieth century was the abandonment of the centuries-old Christian hostility towards the Jews and Judaism. There were two principal causes: the catastrophic annihilation of so many Jews during the Nazi-sponsored Holocaust, and the establishment of the independent State of Israel in 1948. The combination of these two political events, occurring within a few years of each other, profoundly, and it may be hoped permanently, changed the relationship between the Christian churches and the Jewish people. Theologians and scholars were obliged to reassess traditional attitudes that had held sway for many centuries. This revision included the abandonment of the age-long assertion that the Church had replaced the Jews as the Chosen People. Furthermore, the emergence of the State of Israel, where the Jews were again restored to their own homeland, sent a theological shock throughout Christendom, since it questioned the traditional Christian myth about the place of Jews in history.

ConnellyFromEnemyThe subsequent alteration of the Catholic Church’s teachings about Jews and Judaism was particularly notable, culminating in the famous declaration, Nostra Aetate, made in the context of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. How this was achieved is the main subject of John Connelly’s excellent account. He gives principal credit to the small group of theologians, most of whom were from Germany or Austria, and all of them converts. By one means or another, they escaped the Nazis’ persecution and were then resolved to challenge the long-standing prejudices about Jews in the Catholic Church, which they were all too well aware had played a significant role in fomenting the Nazi-led Holocaust. Indeed, Connelly is right to stress the fact that the deeply-entrenched anti-Judaic sentiments in the Christian churches only reinforced the wider and more virulent anti-Semitism and racism which had prevailed for many years. As he shows in his opening chapters, there were many prominent Catholics, especially in Germany, in the 1930s who embraced racialist ideas. They assumed that Jews were racially inferior, as well as theologically damned for their putting Christ to death. One noted Catholic professor of Tübingen, Karl Adam, for example, held the view that baptism was powerless to cure Jews of their racial taints. Bishop Alois Hudal was not alone in believing that, on racial-biological grounds, Jews could not have the same values and rights as the German people. Nazi Germany was effecting the will of the Almighty through its racial laws. In fact, apart from the handful of emigres, no one rose to challenge such Catholic racial views, neither in the Catholic press, nor among the Catholic bishops. A further difficulty was that, even if the opponents of Nazism so desired, they lacked the language and concepts with which to attack the popular prejudices. Technically, Jews were supposed to convert for the sake of salvation. But in fact many Christians were suspicious, on racial grounds, of the few who tried to take this course. One of the most difficult experiences for Jewish Christians was their rejection by other Christians because of their Jewish origins. Even after Nazism was overthrown, the vast majority of Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, felt no guilt for what had happened to the Jews.

This inauspicious climate was to continue in the immediate post-1945 years due to the singular lack of reflection amongst Catholics on the significance of the Holocaust. During all of the 1950s, indeed, the Catholic press, from the Vatican to the local diocesan papers, ignored this issue. Only when Israeli historians published irrefutable evidence of the Jewish sufferings, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann gained world-wide attention, did the situation begin to change. It was left to the small band of intrepid advocates for a different and much improved relationship between Catholics and Jews to take up the challenge of the legacy of Auschwitz. Connelly pays particular tribute to several of the leaders of this cause, all of whom were in some sense “outsiders” but ready to tackle the entrenched prejudices of the Catholic hierarchy and indeed laity also. All of them were converts either from Judaism or Protestantism, and all had experienced at first hand persecution from the Nazis.

Johannes (later John) Oesterreicher was a young Jewish student in Vienna who had been converted in 1922, was later ordained and served in various parishes in the Vienna region until forced to flee when the Nazis seized power in 1938. Thereafter  he launched a vigorous campaign to combat Catholic anti-Semitism, broadcasting from Paris with a combination of apocalyptic vision and intense political engagement. But when the German army invaded France, he had to make his escape across the Pyrenees and eventually resettled in New Jersey. There he learnt that both his parents had died at the hands of the Nazis. Oesterreicher was greatly assisted by Karl Thieme, an academic and former Protestant, who also had to take refuge in Switzerland, but who returned to Germany after 1945 and provided much of the academic theory for the struggle to improve Catholic relations with Jews. In the south German diocese of Freiburg he linked up with the redoubtable figure of Gertrud Luckner, who served as a courier for the bishop during the war, warning those in danger to move into hiding, and supporting those in need. She was eventually arrested by the Gestapo, and spent eighteen months in the women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück. After she was liberated, she resumed her work on behalf of the victims of persecution. Indeed she was to continue to do so for the next forty years. But perhaps more significant was her work in publishing, with the editorial assistance of Karl Thieme, the Freiburger Rundbriefe which from 1948 were compilations of sermons, statements, conference reports and other materials relating to Christian-Jewish relations in both the theological and political aspects. These Rundbriefe were an important source of information, and soon achieved an international audience, helping to overcome the embedded silence of many in the Catholic hierarchy. A further ally in this cause was another “outsider”, the  Church of England vicar, James Parkes, whose early study The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue was the first comprehensive analysis of the Christian origins of anti-Semitism. But he was widely shunned by his fellow Anglicans because of his extreme liberal views.

It is to the credit of this group of pioneers that they faced up to the legacy of anti-Judaic hostility in the churches’ record, as well as the Catholics’ continuing indifference to this issue. Talking to Jewish scholars and rabbis made them all well aware that the teaching of contempt had contributed to making Auschwitz possible. They were all the more zealous to change this pattern of Christian witness. For this purpose they organized a series of international meetings. These were small but crucial gatherings, especially one held in Seelisberg, Switzerland in 1946. The ten landmark theses of this conference are now recognized as the first important fruit of this dialogue between Christians and Jews.

But the impact of such statements was very limited for over a decade. Not until Pope Pius XII died and was replaced by John XXIII did a new climate emerge. It was helpful that Pope John had been Nuncio in Turkey during the war, and had assisted many Jews to flee from Nazi persecution. It was also helpful that he was willing to receive a leading French Jewish scholar, Jules Isaac, who urged the adoption of the Seelisberg programme for better relations with Jews, and the overcoming of the teaching of contempt. It was also helpful that by this time Catholics, especially in Germany, were more fully aware of the Catholic Church’s complicity by its silence during the Holocaust. In the shadow of Auschwitz, all ideas of Jewish deficiency or guilt sounded obscene. As a result, Thieme and his colleagues led the way in recognizing that combatting Christian anti-Semitism was not enough. They needed to go further to tackle the equally entrenched anti-Judaism. It was also helpful to this cause that the theological reverberations of the creation of the State of Israel meant that the age-long calumnies about the Jews being condemned to wander the earth  could no longer be maintained. Some went so far as to advocate the abandonment of Christian missionary efforts to Jews. Thieme and his friends began to argue that Jews should no longer be regarded as enemies but rather as the Christians;’ elder brothers in faith.

Furthermore, just as they had, as Germans, protested against accusations that all Germans were to be  branded as guilty of the Nazis’ crimes, so now the argument could be used against the collective guilt of the Jews for Christ’s crucifixion or the Jewish refusal to be converted to Christianity. It was also helpful that Pope John promoted the German Jesuit, Augustin Bea to be a Cardinal, and made him president of the newly-formed Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. In 1961 the Pope charged Bea with the task of formulating a new statement on the Church’s relations to the Jews. As Connelly rightly notes, for this new teaching, Cardinal Bea was the engineer, but Thieme and his friends in Freiburg were the real architects.

Connelly skillfully describes the process by which this declaration came through the preparatory stages and then the actual debates of the Second Vatican Council. To achieve this, Cardinal Bea had recalled Oesterreicher from the United States, who brought with him a talented young priest from Canada, Gregory Baum. Baum had been born in Berlin in a family of Jewish origin, had been evacuated as a teenager to Wales in 1939 on one of the Kindertransporte, but a year later had been interned by the British authorities as a suspect enemy alien and exiled to Canada. After his internment there, he converted to Catholicism and joined an Augustinian monastery in Nova Scotia.

Oesterreicher’s team and Bea’s Secretariat labored intensively to draw up a document which would embody the ideas percolating over the previous decade. But they encountered two major obstacles. They were opposed first by the Catholic conservatives, both in the Vatican bureaucracy and amongst the newly-arrived bishops at the Council, who were reluctant to abandon the language and stereotypes about Jews with which they had been brought up. They therefore made frequent efforts to suppress or water down parts of the document of which they disapproved. This defensive reaction was only intensified by the outrage aroused by the publication in 1963 of the play The Deputy by the young Swiss playwright Rolf Hochhuth   This drama was a vitriolic attack on Pope Pius XII for his alleged silence during the Holocaust, and by inference was a striking accusation of the Catholic Church’s intolerance and insensitivity towards the suffering of the Jews. But Oesterreicher came to believe that, after such an onslaught, the need for a strong pro-Jewish statement was all the more urgent. The bishops could have no illusions about the response of world opinion if the Council was silent on the Jews.

The second wave of opposition came from the bishops of the eastern Catholic Churches in Arab states, who were concerned about the future of their flocks, especially Palestinians, if any statement appeared to favour the Jews. They even enlisted the political support of their governments. The government of Syria, for example, protested plans to free Jews from the charge of deicide, and the Premier of Jordan threatened sanctions against any bishop who voted to absolve Jews from guilt for Christ’s crucifixion. But in fact such tactics caused a backlash among the more broad-minded bishops. Luckily in the great debates held over this document in 1964, a consensus rapidly formed that Jews were not to be held collectively responsible for the death of Christ. At the same time, Bea was at pains to make it clear that the document was solely religious in  tone and had no political implications at all. The terms Israel and Israeli were avoided wherever possible. Instead Jews were referred to as “the stock of Abraham”. On the other hand, it is clear that great pains were taken to assuage the sensitivities of the numerous Jewish observers, both in Rome and elsewhere.

When the bishops finally and overwhelmingly approved Nostra Aetate in October 1965, Oesterreicher regarded it as a “miracle’. Calling the Jews ‘beloved by God’ put an end to  centuries-old harmful teachings of the Church. God’s promises to the Jews were declared irrevocable. The inevitable corollary was to abandon efforts to convert Jews to Christianity but rather to embrace them in an ecumenical fellowship as no longer enemies but elder brothers.

In his concluding chapter Connelly again pays tribute to the handful of outsider pioneers who successfully broke the traditional pattern of Catholic prejudices about the Jews and Judaism. He attributes this success to their personal histories as they mobilized opposition first to Catholic anti-Semitism and then to Christian anti-Judaism. In the end they recognized that it was more opportune to convert Catholics than Jews but to seek to bind both in a more ecumenical relationship which would acknowledge both as God’s chosen people.

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Review of Steven M. Schroeder, To Forget It All and Begin Anew: Reconciliation in Occupied Germany, 1944-1954

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

Review of Steven M. Schroeder, To Forget It All and Begin Anew: Reconciliation in Occupied Germany, 1944-1954 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 237 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4426-1399-7.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

In To Forget It All and Begin Anew: Reconciliation in Occupied Germany, 1944-1954, Steven Schroeder provides a lucid account of the grassroots efforts of Germans from 1944 to 1954 to foster reconciliation with the former victims and enemies of Nazi Germany. Although the reconciliatory activities of these rather marginal grassroots figures in the churches, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other groups were not broadly endorsed by Germans and had little direct impact on the major geopolitical questions of the day, Schroeder maintains that they were surprisingly successful in overcoming the seemingly insurmountable barriers to reconciliation. More often than not the success was due to the willingness of the victims of Nazi aggression to take the first step in the reconciliation process by extending an invitation to Germans to begin a dialogue. It also helped to have the support of one or more of the Allies.

SchroederToForgetUnlike most of the studies of postwar Germany that focus on the origins of the Cold War and high stakes political maneuvering of the Allies, Schroeder takes a bottom-up approach that illuminates the less conspicuous reconciliation work of German groups such as the Association of the Victim of Nazism (VVN) and religiously-affiliated international groups such as International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR), Moral Re-Armament (MRA), Pax Chrisiti, the International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), and the World Council of Churches (WCC). His study compares and contrasts reconciliation, defined as “the establishment of peaceful – or at least non-hostile – relations between former enemies” in the four zones of occupation in the immediate postwar years and in East and West Germany after 1949.

The book’s title as well as the epigraph by Victor Gollancz, “For what matters is not a man’s motive but any practical result that may follow from his work,” makes clear that Schroeder does not believe that the success of German efforts at reconciliation were primarily the result of German altruism or good will. In most cases, reconciliatory work by Germans was calculated to placate the Allies by demonstrating that Germans had learned their lesson, wanted to contribute to postwar stability, and were ready to govern themselves. Schroeder refers to this as “pragmatic reconciliation” because the motive was not altruism but rather self-interest, particularly the desire to move on from the Nazi past.

During the first stage of reconciliation from 1944 to 1947 pragmatic reconciliation dominated. The Allied policies of non-fraternization, expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe, and de-Nazification treated Germans like pariahs, focusing on punishment and forced democratization. Allied policies did little to engender genuine feelings of contrition among a mostly unrepentant population. Reparation policies imposed by the Allies were another sore spot for many Germans, who were focused on their own needs.

Hans Asmussen, a Lutheran churchman and head of Protestant Church Chancellery, serves as Schroeder’s prototype of this type of pragmatic reconciliation. A central player in the Confessing Church’s struggle against the Nazis and their supporters in the churches from 1933 to 1945, Asmussen resented deeply the severity of Allied postwar policies, especially the Allies’ persistent efforts to compel Germans to atone for their Nazi past. Like so many of his countrymen, Asmussen believed that most Germans were not only innocent of Nazi crimes but were, in fact, victims of the Nazis and thus did not deserve to be bullied by the occupation authorities. In a January 1946 letter to the Allied Control Council he bemoaned that the world would not allow Germans “to forget it all and begin anew.” Instead the Allies insisted that Germans acknowledge their responsibility, accept their punishment, and engage in reconciliatory activities. Asmussen regretted this state of affairs but conceded that Germans had no choice but to appease the Allies.

The priority of the German churches in the immediate postwar years was to provide material and spiritual relief for their worshippers. To this end, the Protestant and Catholic churches created relief agencies in 1945 that offered food, shelter, and clothing to gentile Germans suffering from deprivations caused by the loss of the war and Allied postwar policies. Leaders of these agencies were willing to extend their aid to Christians of Jewish descent but not to Jews. Schroeder believes that these agencies and others like them contributed to interpretations of the Nazi past that ignored German responsibility for the plight of Jews in the postwar years.

Christian-Jewish reconciliation was rare indeed but not entirely absent. Pastors for the most part ignored Jewish suffering or if they had contact with Jews at all it was in an effort to convert them. There were exceptions such as Gertrud Luckner and Karl Thieme in the Catholic Church and Ernst Lichtenstein and Otto von Harling in the Protestant Church, who made significant strides in building bridges to the Jewish community and in bringing to light Christian anti-Judaism and its ties to modern anti-Semitism. The Western Allies played an important role in encouraging German participation in Christian-Jewish cooperation. Between 1948 and 1953 the American Religious Affairs Branch helped to establish thirteen Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation. The response by German Jews was understandably suspicious at first but they warmed up to the idea when they realized that their Christian counterparts were not interested in proselytizing but rather were serious about eradicating anti-Semitism in the churches and society at large. Prominent German Jews such as Benno Ostertag, Alfred Mayer, Hans-Joachim Schoeps, and Norbert Wollheim participated actively. Schroeder argues that the societies successfully launched Christian-Jewish reconciliatory work into the public sphere in West Germany, where it became part of the official agenda in 1949 when president Theodore Heuss called on Germans to take responsibility for Germany’s crimes against the Jewish people.

In Stalinist East Germany reconciliation efforts had little chance of getting off the ground if they didn’t coincide with the political interests of the Soviet Union.  The Association of the Victims of Nazism (VVN), the most active group in the East, advocated for reparations, including lump sums of money, food, clothing, and shelter, for Nazi victims. But in keeping with Communist ideology, VVN was concerned primarily with compensating those who had politically resisted the Nazis. Marginalized in the group’s discussions as “second-class victims,” Jews were forced to seek assistance from international Jewish organizations, such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Schroeder believes that although VVN and other groups operating in the Soviet zone were mostly fronts for Communist power, they did serve the reconciliation process in their own small way by bringing attention to Nazi crimes.

When the initiative for reconciliation came from non-Germans, often former enemies or victims, or from international organizations with religious affiliations, German participation tended to be more genuine and less forced. But as Schroeder points out “the effectiveness of all the organizations depended on their ideological alignment with the guiding politics in their sphere of operation” (98). The pacifist organization International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR), founded by the British Quaker Henry Hodgkin and German Protestant Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze in 1914, opened three chapters in Germany in 1948. Although the German chapters had several dedicated members committed to a religiously based reconciliation, their influence was not terribly significant. The World Council of Churches (WCC) also reached out to German Protestants after the war and sought to incorporate Germans into the growing ecumenical movement. German Protestants reacted warmly to this initiative with their famous Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in 1945 and participated in all of the postwar meetings of the WCC. Christian ecumenism was certainly a significant tool for breaking down old animosities but alone was only a partial answer. The Catholic movement Pax Christi had more success in West Germany than either IFOR or the WCC because its political affiliation was more in line with the western Allies. Although Pax Christi was a pacifist organization it was also decidedly anti-Communist and it focused on a central goal of the Allies, Franco-German reconciliation. German Catholics found Pax Christi attractive because its leader, the French Bishop Théas, did not focus on the Nazi past and encouraged French and German Catholics to focus on deepening personal piety and fostering international solidarity.

The most successful of the Christian-based international organizations was Moral Re-Armament (MRA). MRA strove for the moral rehabilitation of all Europeans, the advancement of Christian Democracy, and countering the spread of Communism. Schroeder believes that the Allie’s encouragement of MRA work was crucial to its success and coincided with the shift in U.S. foreign policy towards aggressively confronting the Soviet Union and containing Communism. MRA was particularly active in pursuing Franco-German reconciliation and even helped to arrange some of the early meetings between the German chancellor and French foreign minister that eventually led to the Schuman Plan of September 1950. Both Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman credited MRA with having done the groundwork that led to peaceful relations between the two countries.

With the exception of the Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, none of the above-mentioned groups focused on reconciliation with Jews. German politicians and church leaders showed very little leadership when it came to Jewish reconciliation work. It was left to Jewish groups in Germany and abroad as well as the state of Israel to pressure the German government to recognize Germany’s responsibility to compensate Jewish victims of Nazism. Political pragmatism, Schroeder believes, more than anything else led to the West German government’s 1952 reparations agreement with Israel, in which the Federal Republic agreed to pay Israel for the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime and to compensate for Jewish property that was stolen. Politics also explains why the East Germans refused to pay reparations to Jewish victims.

By examining the grassroots reconciliatory efforts of Germans during the decade following the end of the Second World War, Schroeder’s book offers a fresh approach to studying the period. His extensive archival digging has also yielded valuable new information about a number of the groups and individuals engaged in forging better relationships between German and her former enemies. The central thesis of the book, that reconciliation work pursued out of self-interest or compulsion could be as successful as altruistic acts of reconciliation, is counter-intuitive but Schroeder argues it persuasively and defends it with ample evidence.

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Review of Thomas Grossbölting, Der verlorene Himmel. Glaube in Deutschland seit 1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

Review of Thomas Grossbölting,  Der verlorene Himmel. Glaube in Deutschland seit 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013),  Pp. 320.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

This review appeared originally (in German) in Der Taggespiegel (1 July 2013). Our thanks to John S. Conway for his translation. The original can be found here: http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/land-ohne-himmel/8426976.html

What do Germans today still believe in and how?   Can we still talk of this being a “Christian country”?

GrossboeltingVerloreneThomas Grossbölting, who teaches at the University of Münster, poses these questions and puts them in the context of faith, church and religion after the catastrophe of National Socialism in Germany. This well researched study can be seen as the first up-to-date history of religion in the Federal Republic of Germany. His basic thesis is clear and hardly surprising. Anyone examining how and what Germans have believed in the past fifty years has to take note of a striking decline in the significance of religious consciousness. Although, in recent years, some observers have claimed that there has been a so-called religious revival, in fact anyone taking a longer view over the past five or six decades must conclude that a far-reaching secularization has taken place. The very idea of Heaven has been lost. As the author crucially points out in his introduction: “A Christian Germany no longer exists”. On the other hand, the elements of faith, church and religion have not disappeared from daily life in Germany. Rather they have been thinned out, pushed to the edge of society, and in many people’s lives they are completely or largely absent.

Grossbölting describes this transformation in religious life as taking place in three stages, to each of which he devotes an appropriate chapter. Firstly, there were the immediate post-war years, the so-called Adenauer era, when the old established Christian world still seemed to be at least partially in order, but which now looks really archaic. There followed the Swinging Sixties when the younger generation with their Beatles, their mini-skirts, their love of Karl Marx, and their rebellious behaviour in 1968, constituted a revolutionary change in life-styles. This was a turbulent period which saw a striking abandonment of religious customs and traditions. Finally, in the most recent decades, we have seen a further lessening of the ecclesiastical structures in both the major churches which used to possess a religious monopoly. Today the country is increasingly taking on the character of a multi-religious society. Amongst the most notable features in the religious statistics of this latest phase are the unstoppable growth of “non-confessionalists’, as well as the increase in the portion of the population which adheres to Islam, and the numerous colourful but often short-lived new religious movements. “From Church to Choice” may be an appropriate slogan for these dramatic changes, whereby individuals move from inherited church-going patterns to personal choices of faith and denomination.

The reader will surely be able to evaluate the main lines of this well-researched and convincingly argued study. But the author’s Catholic perspective should not be forgotten, which leads him to overlook certain scandalous aspects in the Catholic milieu. It is hardly justifiable that such a notable critic as Rolf Hochhuth, whose drama “The Deputy” aroused such a stir in the 1960s, should be ignored. And in fact this study concentrates primarily on West Germany, so that the religious developments in East Germany are cursorily treated at the end of the volume. Furthermore, the author’s treatment of the long shadow of National Socialism and the churches’ problematic responses during the Nazi era from 1933 to 1945 is too abridged. This experience was a fateful epoch whose repercussions in the post-war  world were, and to some extent still are, a dire legacy. But, at the same time, this attempt to give us a religious history of Germany since 1945 can be seen as a successful and well-informed survey.

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Review of Michael Wermke, ed., Transformation und religiöse Erziehung: Kontinuitäten und Brüche der Religionspädagogik 1933 und 1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

Review of Michael Wermke, ed., Transformation und religiöse Erziehung: Kontinuitäten und Brüche der Religionspädagogik 1933 und 1945 (Jena: IKS Garamond, 2011), 390 pp.  ISBN 978-3941854376.

Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

Standard works on German church history during the Nazi era often focus on the extent to which theologians, clergy, church administrations and church-run institutions supported, complied with, or resisted the aims of the Nazi state.  Also of interest is the degree to which Nazi ideology permeated, shaped or undermined religious life among ordinary Protestants and Catholics.  Transformation und religiöse Erziehung, edited by Michael Wermke, makes a valuable contribution on both levels through its investigation of the theory and practice of religious education before and during the Third Reich.  The research included in this volume was originally presented at the annual conference of the Arbeitskreis für Historische Religionspädagogik in 2010.  Although a few of the chapters are aimed solely at specialists in the history of religious education, most will be of wider interest to contemporary church historians as well.

WermkeTransformationTwo of the chapters are biographical studies of individual religious educators or professors at teacher training institutions.  Thomas Martin Schneider’s “Die Umbrüche 1933 und 1945 und die Religionspädagogik” takes up the story of Georg Maus, a religion teacher at an Oberschule in Idar- Oberstein.   Maus, who was associated with the Confessing Church, was accused of undermining the war effort because he failed to properly manage a class discussion of Jesus’ command to love one’s enemies.  He received a two-year sentence and died while being transported to Dachau.  Schneider contrasts Maus’ story with that of Reinhold Krause, also an educator, but most famous for his address to members of the German Christian Movement at the Berlin Sport Palace Rally in 1933.  Schneider finds that Krause both appropriated and violated aspects of liberal Protestant thought.  The cases of Maus and Krause, Schneider argues, call into question both the “conservative decadence model” that blames liberal Protestant theology for Nazi conceptions of Christianity and the “progress- optimistic model” that exonerates it of all charges.  Theological orientations, including diverse political theologies in the twentieth century, cannot be judged apart from their historical contexts.  Likewise, one should not reduce contemporary religious education to the narrow range of options that were present in the Third Reich, nor should one assume that those options will have the same value in all historical settings.

The second biographical study is Folkert Rickers’ “’Vom Individuum zum Volksgenossen’: Helmuth Kittel und die Jugendbewegung.”  In this work, Rickers explores the ideological orientation of Kittel, a youth movement leader, theologian, and professor of pedagogy.  Kittel’s postwar autobiography minimizes his association with Nazism, but his writings from the 1920s and 1930s (more than 90 titles) indicate enthusiasm for völkisch ideology well before Hitler came to power.  Contrary to his postwar claims, he seems to have experienced the Third Reich as the fulfillment of the goals of the German youth movement in which he played such a prominent role.

Jonas Flöter’s “Von der Landeschule zur Nationalpolitischen Erziehungsanstalt” examines the transition of the Landesschule Pforta, established in 1543, from an elite secondary school with a religious orientation to a de-Christianized training ground for political soldiers.  The Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung, und Volksbildung exploited internal conflicts and scandals at the school in order to replace most teachers and administrators, and in 1935, SS member Dr. Adolf Schieffer was entrusted with the transformation of the school into an NPEA.  However, religious services and religious instruction, including lessons in Hebrew and the Old Testament, were not abolished until 1937, and up to that point approximately two thirds of the students continued to participate in religion classes.  In order to carry out the transformation of the school, the Reichserziehungsministerium had to work around school personnel, parents, students, and alumni who were not always fully compliant.

Five of the chapters in the collection focus on trends in Protestant and Catholic religious education at the regional and national levels.  Werner Simon’s “Nationalpolitische Erziehung im katholischen Unterricht?” examines the writings of prominent Catholic theorists and contributors to Katechetische Blätter, a Catholic journal devoted to religious education.  Simon finds considerable interest in 1933 and 1934 for “national-political education in Catholic religious instruction” (77), but there was little emphasis on such themes before or after that two-year period.  In fact, articles published after 1934 were more likely to express opposition to what was seen as a Germanic narrowing of the faith or conflict between demands of the state and universal Christian ethics.

Joachim Maier’s “Traditionsbruch und Wandel religiöser Erziehung: Schule und katholischer Religionsunterricht in Baden 1933-1945” also suggests a blend of opposition and complicity on the part of German Catholics.  After the Nazis came to power, church holidays and school prayers were replaced with National Socialist holidays and slogans.  The new Hochschule für Lehrerbildung in Karlsruhe offered only minimal training in methods of religious education, and most teachers refused to teach religion in any case, especially if the Old Testament was part of the curriculum.  As a result, many pious Catholics who initially had expressed enthusiasm for Hitler’s regime now viewed it with suspicion.  Catholic leaders in Baden responded by publishing Katechismuswahrheiten (1936), a document that challenged Nazi racial ideology and stressed the importance of both the Old and New Testaments.  Unfortunately, it also reinforced a number of anti-Jewish stereotypes and declared that German Catholics should give special consideration to their own Volk.   Archbishop Conrad Gröber (Freiburg) sent mixed messages to the faithful by stressing obedience to the state and warning that “from the depravity and loss of faith among the youth  it is only a very small step to the world view of our bitterest enemies in the east” (115).  Nevertheless, Catholic authorities in Baden put up a more spirited defense of traditional religious instruction than Protestant leaders in the same region.

Desmond Bell’s “Ein Fehler im System? Das Alte Testament im preussischen Religionsunterricht nach 1933” illustrates the extent to which Prussian school curricula were stripped of religious content, especially that which was seen to be the result of Jewish influences.  The National Socialist Teachers’ Association opposed religious instruction in general and the Old Testament in particular, whereas guidelines from the Protestant Reich Church administration called for removal of the Old Testament from religious instruction except those cases where it could be used to “demonstrate” that Jesus came to do battle with Judaism.  Bell finds evidence that, in spite of these pressures, Old Testament material was still included in some religion texts as late as 1942.  However, the content was reduced dramatically over time, and what was left was severed from Judaism and reframed in such a way as to promote an antisemitic and National Socialist worldview.

Johannes Wischmeyer’s “Transformationen des Bildungsraums im bayrischen ‘Schulkampf’ 1933-1938” focuses less on the religious curriculum within schools and more on the abolition of Protestant denominational school in Bavaria.  In addition to curtailing religious instruction and removing clergy from teaching positions, both the state and the National Socialist Teachers’ Association put tremendous pressure on parents to send their children to Gemeinschaftschulen rather than denominational schools.  This pressure included multiple home visits by teachers who denounced confessional schools as “residual schools” or “peasant schools” (128).  The regional Bavarian Protestant Church responded with its own campaign to shore up support for denominational schools, but by 1936 only 2000 Protestant students remained enrolled, and the last denominational school was forced to close in 1937.

One of the most interesting contributions to the volume is David Käbisch’s, “Eine Typologie des Versagens? Das Personal und Lehrprofil für das Fach Religion an den nationalsozialistischen Hochschulen fur Lehrerbildung.”  In this article, Käbisch surveys the available data on 818 religion courses offered at teacher training institutes throughout Germany, comparing what was taught before and after 1933.  In addition to recommending approaches for further research, Käbisch identifies patterns that are already apparent.  For example, after 1933 it was more common to see topics such as “The Protestant Faith as a Particular Expression of the German Character, Demonstrated by Great Men of German History (Luther, Bach, Arndt, Lagarde, Bismarck, Hindenburg, etc.)” (175).  Of the courses offered between 1939 and 1945, 8 addressed explicitly Christological themes, 26 focused on Martin Luther, and 43 dealt with “contemporary problems.”  It is also possible to track changes in the priorities of individual professors.  For example, Fritz Hoffmann of the Pädagogische Akademie in Elbing taught courses on “The Kingdom of God in the Sermons of Jesus” and similar topics before 1933, but after 1933 he was teaching subjects like “German Christianity: State, Church and School” and “The German Concept of Honor  and Christian Morality” (169, 185-189).  Following Käbisch’s analysis, Appendix II (pages 174-214) includes a complete list of the individual courses, identifying the instructors, denominations, institutions, and dates.

One other chapter of interest to church historians is Hein Retter’s “Protestantische Milieus vor und nach 1933. Der Christlich-Soziale Volksdienst und der Reichsverband deutscher evangelischer Schulgemeinden e.V.”   Both the political party and the school association in this study emerged out of free-church, Biblicist, and Pietistic circles in Württemberg, Westphalia, Hanover, and the Rhineland.  Their supporters opposed rationalism, liberalism, and Marxism, yet they were also loyal to the Weimar Republic and willing to advance their culturally conservative agendas through a democratic process.  Although many in the Schulgemeindeverband initially expressed enthusiasm for the Nazi state, seeing it as a solution to moral decline, it was not long before they moved toward a more oppositional stance.  Retter applauds their publication of an agenda for religious instruction that was inspired by the Barmen Declaration, affirmed the important of both the Old and New Testaments, and refused to make National Socialism the standard for religious education.

Altogether, the contributors to this volume present a fascinating account of both continuity and change in religious education following the Nazi revolution in 1933.  A few chapters address the postwar era as well, but overall this period receives less attention and the results are less striking.  Several contributors mention the challenges posed by incomplete records and the limited range of the sources.  For example, it is easier to identify the content of text books and course plans than to know what actually happened in the classroom and how it was experienced by children and youth.  In spite of such limitations, this collective effort by the Arbeitskreis für Historische Religionspädagogik provides important insights into how the policies of state and church played out at the local level among ordinary people.   They take us beyond institutional histories and church politics and into the world of students, teachers, professors, and parents, all of whom had their own role to play alongside religious and political leaders.

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Review of David Bankier, Dan Michman, Iael Nidam-Orvieto, Pius XII and the Holocaust: Current State of Research

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 4 (December 2013)

Review of David Bankier, Dan Michman, Iael Nidam-Orvieto, Pius XII and the Holocaust: Current State of Research (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2012).

By Jacques Kornberg, University of Toronto

This book, on an enduring controversy, offers something new.  Based on a workshop in 2009, which was jointly organized by the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem and Reverend Roberto Spataro of the Salesian Theological Institute of Saints Peter and Paul in Jerusalem, the book aims for dialogue rather deepening controversy. There is a story behind this unusual aim. Relations with the Vatican had deteriorated over statements in the Yad Vashem museum that Pope Pius XII did nothing about the genocide of European Jewry during World War II.  This charge led the Apostolic Nuncio to Israel, Archbishop Antonio Franco, to threaten to boycott the 2007 annual memorial ceremony on the Holocaust held at Yad Vashem.  Negotiations led Franco to withdraw his threat. In return, Yad Vashem somewhat softened its statement on the pope, mentioning another point of view, that papal neutrality might have helped the Church rescue Jews, and that final judgment awaits opening the wartime archives.  Still it stuck to its view that the pope’s record was one of “moral failure.”

BankierPiusThe workshop was a further attempt to mend frayed relations.  Yad Vashem and the Reverend Roberto Spataro (acting “on behalf of the Nuncio”) each chose five scholars for the workshop.  The latter: Andrea Tornielli, Matteo Napolitano, Grazia Loparco, Jean-Dominique Durand, and Thomas Brechenmacher; the former: Paul O’Shea, Michael Phayer, Susan Zuccotti, Sergio Minerbi, and Dina Porat.  Summing up at the end, the Reverend Spataro commented: “we met in an atmosphere of confidence, trust and mutual respect.”

The book is organized around key issues: Pacelli’s personality and the Jews, which also covers his policies as Secretary of State and later as Pope; Pius XII and rescue in Italy, which dealt with Vatican policies during the German occupation of Rome; post-war assistance to fleeing Nazis and policies on hidden Jewish children, which covers the infamous “rat-line” and Vatican policies on returning hidden Jewish children to families or to Jewish institutions.  All of these subjects have long been examined by scholars, but always bear re-assessment especially when new evidence emerges.

Though originating in political stroking and mutual deference, the book has a good deal of scholarly value. For one, it avoids the hyperboles of overheated debate. Discussion is focussed on key documents, thus firmly grounded, foregoing sweeping generalizations.  Of course a document’s meaning is not self-evident but subject to varying interpretations. This is what makes the book valuable.

Some participants introduce new archival documents; some reread old and well-known ones.   Andrea Tornielli argues that Pacelli acted to alleviate the Jewish plight. He points to a Pacelli letter of 16 November 1917 to the Foreign Minister of Bavaria. Pacelli,  Nuncio to Bavaria,  urged the Foreign Minister to safeguard the Jews of Jerusalem, endangered by Ahmed Gamal Pasha, the Turkish military governor of Syria (including Palestine), who threatened to expel them. Ahmed Gamal saw Zionism as an enemy of Turkish rule and took steps to remove Jewish settlements, as part of an overall policy of repression of Arabs and Armenians in Syria during World War I

Next, Tornielli notes a Pacelli letter of 1938 as Vatican Secretary of State, opposing a law forbidding Jewish ritual slaughter (shechita) in Poland.  Tornielli translates Pacelli’s words: the law “would constitute a real persecution against the Jews.”  The letter about shechita is published in the appendix to the book. Another report notes that Pope Pius XI brought up the matter in talks with Polish bishops.

These documents challenge long-held views, based on multiple documents, of Pacelli’s public silence over crimes against Jews, including the German pogrom of November 1938.  These long-held views are articulated by others in this book.

Jean-Dominique Durand also argues the case for Pacelli. He points to a document, this time a well-known report of 19 August 1933 by Ivone Kirkpatrick, British chargé d’affaires to the Vatican, to R. Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary of State in the British Foreign Office, recounting a conversation he had with the Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli. Durand quotes Kirkpatrick: “Cardinal Pacelli criticized the German government’s internal policy, the persecution of the Jews, their actions against their political opponents, and the regime of terror to which the whole nation was submitted.”   What Durand left out is crucial and weakens his argument.  Kirkpatrick wrote that Pacelli’s views were “for private consumption only. I do not think there is any question of any public expression by the Vatican of disapproval of the German government.”

It is gratifying to note that after over fifty years of scholarship on the role of the Vatican in the 1930s and 1940s, wide consensus has been achieved on some issues.  Most scholars now agree on Pacelli’s early assessment of Nazism as an enemy of civilization and of the Church. Few see the concordat signed with Nazi Germany in July 1933, as anything else than a harsh necessity.  The concordat did not carry any endorsement of Nazi rule.  Indeed, the Vatican sought a concordat with Bolshevik Russia as well, but failed to reach an agreement.   In addition, as Torielli points out, the first international agreement signed with Nazi Germany was not the concordat, but the Four Power Pact signed by Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany in mid-June 1933, requiring mutual consultations on all foreign policy issues in the spirit of the League of Nations, the Locarno Pact and the Briand-Kellogg Pact.

Other issues would be better illuminated by the opening of the Vatican archives for the pontificate of Pope Pius XII.  One controversy is about whether Pius XII acted out of any concern for the fate of Jewish-Italians, more particularly Jewish-Romans, during the German occupation of Italy.  We know that he was advised not to issue any protests against Germany during the occupation, because Hitler’s volatile rages may well have led to a German occupation of the Vatican.  Documents also show that Pius sought to dampen polarization between Italians and German occupying forces, because he feared a communist uprising in Rome.  But was rescuing Jews part of his strategy?

Consensus does exist on how to interpret the absence of a written papal directive to Catholic institutions to rescue Jews.   The pope would not have undertaken such a recklessly, transparent measure in view of the German occupation. Further, it was not papal policy to direct Catholics to risk their lives by helping Jews evade deportation. In summary: the pope wanted to distance the Vatican from anything provocative.  However, Grazia Loparco points to Vatican undersecretary Giovanni Montini’s  (later Pope Paul VI), response to a Jesuit request for guidance on whether to help rescue Jews, that it was their own responsibility.  She goes on to point out that we do not know whether or how much face-to-face personal encouragement  or approval Vatican officials provided on the issue of rescue.  Pius XII implicitly encouraged rescue in a statement to the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano of 25/26 October 1943, where he spoke of the “universally paternal charity of the Supreme Pontiff [which] …does not pause before boundaries of nationality, religion or descent.”  But he did not go any further than this.  He did not protest the round-up of Jewish-Romans on 16 October 1943,  though his defenders argue that the round-ups in Rome ceased  simply because he threatened protest through German diplomatic channels.   But the evidence for this, based on timing, is weak.  Indeed, after an interval, deportations of Jewish-Romans continued, though many by now had moved from their homes and were in hiding.  My own view is that rescuing Jews was far less important to him than having a non-confrontational German occupation.

A final controversy deals with the aid Vatican officials provided to Nazi war criminals seeking to flee to South America.  Michael Phayer poses the question: “Did the Pope know what was happening? ”  He makes a strong case for “yes.”  The reason: the pope hoped to supply South America with fervent anticommunists.

The lessons of this book are that documents are often slippery; they too often can support conflicting interpretations; that what is omitted in reading documents is as important as what is left in; and that further documentation through the opening of the wartime Vatican documents is essential.

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Review of Dietz Lange, Nathan Söderblom und seine Zeit

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

Review of Dietz Lange, Nathan Söderblom und seine Zeit (Göttingen and Oakville, CT, USA: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), Pp 480, ISBN 978-3-525-5701-5.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Lange-SoederblomA new biography has recently been published in Germany of Nathan Söderblom, the most prominent Protestant church leader in the decade of the 1920s. The author, Dietz Lange, is the emeritus professor of Systematic Theology in Göttingen, and in this laudatory but leisurely account of Söderblom’s career, the emphasis is placed on the evolution of Söderblom’s intellectual ideas and his relations with other scholars and theologians of his time. Lange supplements but does not supplant the standard biography in English, written nearly half a century ago by Bengt Sundkler, which concentrated on Söderblom’s main claims to fame, his championships of the peace endeavours during the first world war, and his leadership of the ecumenical movement in the aftermath.

Lange traces Söderblom’s energetic and often fervent debates about the theological novelties at the end of the nineteenth century, when the impact of German Protestant scholarship, at the hands of such men as Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack, was at its height. Although brought up in the rather narrow evangelicalism of a Swedish pastorate, Söderblom quickly took advantage of the new and wider horizons of this contentious German Protestantism. At the same time, he retained his original attachment to the forms of Swedish piety of which he became the prime exemplar. His talents led him early in his career to take on new opportunities for service, first as chaplain to the Swedish community in Paris for seven years, and later on, for two years, as visiting Professor of Church History in Leipzig University. These postings gave him insight into the rival militaristic and nationalistic sentiments in Europe, which did so much to lead to open hostilities in 1914.

Söderblom returned from Paris in 1901 to take up the chair of Comparative Religious History in Uppsala, when, as Lange describes, his main interest was in the development of religious ideas and practices amongst earlier civilisations or societies, which led to a close examination of such themes as the godhead, eschatology, the appearance of ethical systems, or the relationship between such theologies and magic.

But in the summer of 1914, Söderblom’s career took a wholly unanticipated turn when he was appointed Archbishop of Uppsala and Primate of the Swedish established church. A few months later the outbreak of war on the continent imposed new and burdensome international responsibilities. He quickly gave his support and that of his church to Sweden’s position of neutrality. He gave strong leadership to the efforts to stop or mitigate the hostilities, and deplored the readiness of churchmen in both camps to claim that God was on their side. At no point was he prepared to believe that divine approval should be claimed for either side’s military ambitions or their effects. War to him was nothing less than a disaster. As a result he sought to mobilize the Christian churches in the neutral countries to put forward peace proposals, which however were rejected by one side or the other. But such efforts gave him an international prominence and a determination to make reconciliation and reconstruction his top priority in the post-war years.

Lange’s biography recapitulates the well-known story of Söderblom’s initiatives and leadership which resulted in the creation of the Life and Work movement of the churches. To his great regret he was unable to gain the support of the Roman Catholic Church, but effectively drew together the Protestant and the Orthodox churches in an unprecedented commitment to ecumenical co-operation, which was to become the basis for the future World Council of Churches.

The high point of Söderblom’s influence came at the notably famous Stockholm Conference of 1925, when for the first time since the end of the Great War churchmen from all different denominations and groupings were able to meet to consider how to make plans for a more harmonious and effective church witness. It was surely due to his generous and inspiring leadership that the churches were encouraged to set aside the resentments and grievances caused by the war, and to focus on the positive steps which greater ecumenical co-operation could produce. In this regard, he strongly urged that the churches support the work of the newly-established League of Nations. But the German delegation, consisting mainly of stanchly conservative nationalists, refused all such panaceas. They maintained a wholly pessimistic view of the future, and loudly protested against the so-called injustice of the Versailles Treaty. Lange lets them off very lightly.

Söderblom’s chief hope was that the ancient divisions within the churches would be replaced by a new spirit of evangelical catholicity. But, as Lange admits, neither the theological climate nor the political circumstances of the 1920s were propitious. The rise of Fascism and Nazism in the 1930s destroyed most of Söderblom’s optimistic world-view. He died in 1931 and his influence ebbed rather quickly. The renown and reputation earned by his indefatigable witness, which had brought him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1930, was all too soon forgotten. But the hope of calling the churches together for a more effective witness to Christian life and work still remains as Söderblom’s lasting legacy. We can therefore be grateful to Professor Lange for recalling the numerous contributions to this cause made by this redoubtable world churchman.

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Review of Daniel Gawthrop, The trial of Pope Benedict. Joseph Ratzinger and the Vatican’s Assault on Reason, Compassion and Human Dignity

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

Review of Daniel Gawthrop, The trial of Pope Benedict. Joseph Ratzinger and the Vatican’s Assault on Reason, Compassion and Human Dignity (Vancouver. B.C.: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013), 315 Pp, ISBN 978-1-55152-527-3.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

It is rare, in our practice of church history, to be invited to review a book which is so filled with hostility towards its subject as is Daniel Gawthrop’s The Trial of Pope Benedict. Gawthrop was brought up in a traditional Catholic family, but as a boy and young adult was much influenced by ideas derived from the Second Vatican Council. His bishop had been appointed in 1962 as the youngest and newest Council Father, and participated fully in all its sessions. On his return to his Pacific Coast diocese, this bishop sought to implement the spirit and the reforms suggested at the Council. As a young Catholic activist, Gawthrop wanted to carry this process still further in the hopes of bringing the Catholic Church into the modern world, and rejuvenating its following. But he became disillusioned when the steps he hoped for were not taken. He now considers himself an ex-Catholic atheist. Among the changes he wanted to see were the abolition of clerical celibacy, the ordination of women, a permissive attitude towards homosexuality and same-sex marriages, the removal of the prohibition on abortion, and even the permission to engage in voluntary euthanasia. But all of these so-called “reforms” have been condemned by the Church authorities. Instead of recognising that such fantasies are derived from his own cloud-cuckooland wishful thinking, Gawthrop lays the blame on Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the one individual in the Vatican hierarchy, he believes, whose sinister policies effectively undermined the impact of the Second Vatican Council, and turned the church into a breeding ground for reactionary, ultra-orthodox conservatism.

Gawthrop-TrialWriting with considerable journalistic flair, but of course without any Vatican official documentation, Gawthrop presents us with a highly critical account of Ratzinger’s career. To be sure, he allows that, during the Council’s sessions, Ratzinger, then a theological advisor to one of the German Cardinals, supported many of the reformist ideas. But only a few years later, while he was teaching at Germany’s most prestigious university of Tübingen, he was deeply offended by the virulent student radicalism embracing a “Marxist messianism”. As a result he turned away from his colleagues such as Hans Kung and other progressive theologians. Shortly afterwards he retreated to the rural backwater of Regensburg in his native Bavaria, and began to prepare his theological counter-offensive to Vatican II.

In May 1977 Ratzinger was promoted to be Archbishop of Munich, and a month later was made a cardinal. He was thus in place to attend the two conclaves of 1978, following the death of Pope Paul VI. Gawthrop obviously has a liking for Pope John Paul I, a clerical populist, who promised to carry forward the reforms so long blocked by his predecessor. But only a month later he was found dead in the papal apartment. Gawthrop still seems to believe that this sudden death was not natural, despite the evidence produced in David Yallop’s book. Possibly this is because this development put an end to Gawthrop’s unfulfilled wishful thinking for a progressive new Catholicism.

The accession of John Paul II brought a wholly different and staunchly conservative leader to the Vatican, marking in Gawthrop’s view “a decisive turn to the right which would ultimately put the torch to Vatican II”. The new Pope soon recognized he had an ally in Ratzinger, and shortly after in 1981 summoned him to Rome to be put in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He was thus responsible for maintaining the church’s orthodoxy and blocking the introduction of novel or heretical ideas. While John Paul II played the role of a rock star, Ratzinger had to deal with liberal dissenters or undisciplined priests and professors. It was a part which he relished and played with increasing doctrinaire policies for the next twenty-four years. Over these years Ratzingrer would expel at least 107 theologians through defrocking, removal of teaching privileges, or official silencing through denouncement. Many others, including bishops, would be called to Rome and carpeted for “instruction”. Such behaviour was particularly galling to the victims, since there was no means of challenging Ratzinger’s authority, no appeal process, but only continuing disgrace and relegation in the church.

His first targets were those in Latin America who supported the ideas of liberation theology, especially Leonardo Boff and Gustavo Gutierrez. But to Ratzinger, liberation theology replaced the Christian promise of redemption with a Marxist programme for secular salvation through revolution. It also challenged the internal hierarchy of the church by aligning priests with the poor instead of with Rome. By definition, liberation theology supported leftist political movements, and in Ratzinger’s view substituted political criteria for more spiritual goals. Such tendencies had therefore to be suppressed.

Similar dogmatic rigidities were expressed in Ratzinger’s policies with regard to other Christian denominations and other faiths, most notably in the year 2000 declaration Dominus Iesus, which stated that non-Catholic Christian ecclesial communities are not “churches” in the proper sense. Such a comment was naturally ill-received by both Protestants and Orthodox churchmen, and revealed the narrowness and intolerance of Ratzinger’s approach. Even more criticism was voiced about his views on other religions, which he claimed were seriously deficient in their access to the means of salvation. His well-known gaffe in a lecture in Regensburg in 2006 when he characterized Muslims as given to violence—admittedly in a historical context—caught world attention. To be sure, he carried on with John Paul’s desire to encourage better relations with Jews, and even visited Israel. But he made no reference while there to the long history of Christian anti-Judaism which contributed at least in part to the Nazi atrocities. Gawthrop is naturally scathing about such instances.

In the same vein, Gawthrop is highly critical of Ratzinger’s attempts to maintain the orthodoxy of the Catholic faith with his suppression of such forward-looking theologians as Matthew Fox with his ideas about creation spirituality, or Thomas Reese who advocated the ordination of women in his weekly Catholic journal, America. Likewise Ratzinger’s steadfast view that homosexuality represents an “intrinsic moral evil” was drawn from “the solid foundation of a constant Biblical testimony”. Gay rights activists are, in Ratzinger’s view “guided by a vision opposed to the truth about the human person, and reflect a materialistic ideology which denies the transcendent nature of the human personality as well as the supernatural vocation of each individual”. Gawthrop inevitably differs and asks whether such a view is fitting for pastoral care in the current century.

Gawthrop’s chapter on the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church provides damning evidence of the Vatican’s official culture of denial, cover-up and shaming, going back over half a century. From his position of authority for more than thirty years, Ratzinger could have done something about this. But his responses were unconvincing, overly defensive or too little and too late. In Gawthrop’s view a married clergy and female priests would produce a healthier and more balanced Catholic theology of sexuality, and would surely do something about the rapid exodus of priests from holy orders, as particularly seen in Ireland in recent years. But the demonization of homosexuality, the attempt to suppress the truth, the denials of local bishops, the reshuffling of accused priests to another assignment have all contributed to a disastrous situation.

Finally Gawthrop turns to the latest Vatican scandals with what the Vatican officials themselves called the “Vatileaks”. Gawthrop suggests that this was the final straw which led Pope Benedict to offer his resignation. But he has little hope that the institution has the courage to put matters to rights. The policies of ultra-orthodox conservatism have clearly failed. But whether Pope Francis, who is no less doctrinally conservative than his two predecessors, and is a Vatican neophyte to boot, can possibly provide the impetus for a more sweeping reform is very much open to question. In his epilogue Gawthrop suggests that the new Pope should summon a Vatican III which would reignite the fires of reform, decentralize power, and reopen the questions of priestly celibacy and women’s ordination. Such measures, he believes would do a lot to solve the troubling issues which now beset the church and might even enable some disillusioned ex-Catholics like himself to take another look inside the church’s doors.

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Review of Carsten Linden, Die Bedeutung des Beziehungsgeflechts der Osnabrücker ev.-luth. Pastoren für den Verlauf der Osnabrücker Kirchenpolitik 1907-1936

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

Review of Carsten Linden, Die Bedeutung des Beziehungsgeflechts der Osnabrücker ev.-luth. Pastoren für den Verlauf der Osnabrücker Kirchenpolitik 1907-1936 (Hamburg: Dr. Kovac Verlag, 2012), 2 Vol., 960 Pp.

By Hansjörg Buss, Universität des Saarlandes

Carsten Linden’s work, accepted by the University of Osnabrück as a doctoral thesis in 2012, examines the networks of protestant pastors in the Osnabrück church district in the first third of the twentieth century. As to method, it is based on social network analysis (in the sense that concept is used by German historian Wolfgang Reinhard), attributing to the interpersonal relationship between these pastors great importance in determining issues of church policy (p. 17). Despite some changes in these relationships, there was a lot of continuity: of nine pastors serving their parish in 1910, four still held their ministry in 1936.

 Linden-BedeutungThe work is divided into four “complexes” which Linden has assigned to the years 1907-1910, 1920, 1926-1930 and 1933-1936 respectively. According to the author, these times saw greater changes in inter-pastoral relationships than did the political watersheds of 1914, 1918 and 1933. Linden explains the beginning of the time period considered by referring to comprehensive changes in the churchly life of Osnabrück, especially the increasing passivity of the laymen and therefore the increasing importance of the pastor in the parish. By contrast, why the time period ends in 1936 is not explained. According to the attached short biographies, there was no significant change to church staffing in that year with the exception of Rudolf Detering, who went to Goslar for a better position. However, Linden states at the end that the intensity of the relationships had decreased since 1935, with increasing isolation leading to fewer opportunities for networking or cooperation (p. 793).

 Linden first quickly introduces the history of the Protestant Church in Osnabrück, reaching back into the reformation years in 1542/1543, and explains the standing of local Protestantism in the early twentieth century. He then describes certain main events and conflicts concerning the several chapters, which he analyzes in terms of his chosen method of social network analysis. Examples for the years 1907-1910 are the reorganisation of churchly offices and changes in church staff. For the “complex 1920”, he refers to the public conflicts between the minority of so-called churchly “Positivives” and the majority of liberal pastors. Finally, for the years 1926-1930, he refers to the reorganization of pastoral care in special care institutions, the use of the Apostles’ Creed in worship, and (once again) the staffing of pastoral offices. In the expansive fifth chapter (1933-1936), which forms the main part of the book, Linden provides an overview of the general development of church affairs in the Reich as well as the church of Hannover, before turning to their impact on the Osnabrück church district. Above all, this concerns the formation of religious and church-political groups and the attitude of the church towards the NSDAP and the Nazi state. This is followed by a short review of the position of Osnabrück superintendent Ernst Rolffs, by a survey of conflicts in the Luther-Gemeinde, a newly independent parish, in the years from 1929 to 1933, and finally by the longest sub-chapter (one single section of two hundred pages) on “process and relationship structures” during that time period. In sum, the way the book is structured is unconvincing, a problem that extends down into individual sections. Furthermore, Linden is unable to give a short and concise statement of his results beyond a repetitive and somewhat tiresome recapitulation.

 From this reviewer’s perspective, the main problem is that the method chosen by the author cannot carry the work. It is of course true that group building processes and networks, interpersonal relationships, the enforcement of common interests, and not least personal sympathy or antipathy play an important role in social processes, especially in a more or less clearly defined socio-moral milieu. This is well known from the research of contemporary church history. There is also no doubt that these processes strongly influence decisions and actions. But the very narrow way in which the topic is considered here, exhausting itself in an isolated and decontextualised observation of relevant actors, does not do much to help enlighten the social and historical decision-making processes. The voluminous and detailed description of the historical background does not seem to be linked to the real object of the study, the structure of relationships of protestant pastors of Osnabrück, and remains a mere accessory part. Even the pastors are hardly made tangible beyond their position as actors within a social network, since explanations for their actions are not provided.

 If non-consideration of the existing results of research into social history and history of mentalities is generally a problem of Linden’s work, this is exacerbated by the fact that he does not offer any guidance or orientation, refusing to put his results into context. To give one example, Linden describes in quite some detail the social commitment of liberal pastor Friedrich Grußendorf against the widespread abuse of alcohol, which he convincingly explains as a result of the pastor’s personal experiences (pp. 134-154). But the social function of this ecclesial commitment remains unmentioned, as does its being a part of a romanticized and backward-looking utopia propagated by the church under the popular term of “morality”. This lack of context becomes quite clear in the consideration of the play ‘It will be fine in the end’ (Es wird noch werden gut), penned by Grußendorf and first shown in 1914, on the well-known closure of the mine in neighbouring Piesberg (1898). Grußendorf, in a work containing some anti-catholic undertones, had explained this closure as the result of a strike which in turn was caused by a witch seducing the coal miners with a poisoned drink (i.e. alcohol). Linden does mention contemporary criticism of Grußendorf’s “falsification of history”, but he does not state that the closure was in fact approved by the shareholders simply because the mine was not profitable anymore after several water leaks. But the social significance of the play lies precisely in the fact that it misrepresents a calculated business decision as a necessity caused by (alleged and real) alcohol abuse of the coal miners.

 Such inadequate classifications as well as other assessments which invite questioning can be found throughout the work. For example, the interpretation of a local protest event of the Protestant League against a meeting of the Catholic Church (1901) as motivated “primarily” by the need to express the displeasure of Osnabrück’s liberals with the positivism of the church (i.e. as primarily motivated by intra-protestant reasons) is hardly convincing (pp. 106-108). Another example is the early (September 1917) membership of liberal pastor August Pfannkuche in the German Fatherland Party (Deutsche Vaterlandspartei, DVLP); shortly before the end of the war Pfannkuche even found himself on the national executive committee of the party. Linden describes this engagement as a change in political attitude which “gave more consideration to the interests and ideological motives of the traditional conservative centre, without however formulating a break with the working class” (p. 131). He does so unaffected by the nearly undisputed results in research literature, according to which the function of DVLP was that of a bridge between the conservative right of the German Empire and the extreme and strictly antidemocratic right of the Weimar Republic. Indeed, well-known German historian Ulrich Wehler has characterized the DVLP as the “first right-wing proto-fascist party of the masses”. Such an understanding is absolutely vital in order to define the standing and actions of the Protestant Church in Osnabrück society along with the relationships within the protestant milieu and between pastors.

 The second volume, which deals with the early years of the Nazi state, also suffers from inaccuracies, lack of classification and unlinked narrative threads. This is exacerbated by a failure to consider the research literature on the topic. The big syntheses of Kurt Meier and Klaus Scholder are named, but hardly considered in fact, and numerous recent studies do not find any attention at all. For example, on the issue of the “German Christian Movement,” the standard works of by Kurt Meier, Doris Bergen, Peter von der Osten-Sacken and Manfred Gailus are not considered at all. The same holds true for the issue of “Protestantism, Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism”.

 It should also be mentioned that the author employs a style of writing which this reviewer found quite exhausting. Many sections are full of details, but devoid of structure and largely have the character of a retelling, losing the sense for what’s important. Also, it would have been desirable for the summaries to include more than a repetition of what has already been said, namely a targeted synthesis and, where applicable, a few words on new questions arising from the results. The permanent description of the pastoral relationships with words like “clique”, “prestige”, “activation”, “integration”, “insurance”, “coalition building”, “disturbance”, “resource development”, “weak” and “strong ties” , “in-“ and “outdegrees”, etc. are not only exhausting to read in their almost formal-seeming clustering, they also do not help one gain a better understanding of the relationship structures considered. It seems that a nomenclature is over-used without leading to any new insights, rather ending up in the middle of nowhere.

 This criticism also extends down to the smallest details of the book. In one case, Linden acknowledges a critique, formulated in 1925 by a female social democratic journalist, of a church event with former papal chaplain Bruno Doehring, known for his national-conservative and anti-catholic views and thus controversial even within the Protestant Church, with the following words: “Especially her classification of the sermon as ‘inciting the people to hatred’ was hardly suitable to begin an open-minded communication with the Osnabrück pastors” (p. 293). This fails entirely to consider the relationship between the Protestant Church and the Social Democrats, or the anti-democratic, largely nationalist and revanchist actions of prominent representatives of German Protestantism, of which Doehring was a very eloquent example. Doehring’s public appearances were no more likely to foster an “open-minded conversation” than was the coverage in the social democratic press. Indeed, neither party intended to have an “open-minded communication,” something Linden does not seem to recognize.

 Elsewhere, one wonders whether certain formulations can be considered appropriate. For instance, Linden refers to Osnabrück pastor Paul Leo, who was forced into retirement by the church in 1938, was later incarcerated in Buchenwald and finally emigrated from Germany, as a “Jew” rather than as a baptized “non-Aryan” (this is still the most correct terminology), despite being aware of the importance of this difference (p. 822, 866). To give one last example, after the spate of arrests in March 1935 (at the very latest), large parts of the Protestant Church, especially in and around the Confessing Church, no longer held any illusions about the Gestapo. For many pastors, even beyond the borders of the churches of the Old Prussian Union, sometimes existential experiences and a variety of pressures would follow, to which they reacted with a variety of strategies. The author’s formulation that Osnabrück’s pastors tried, by way of “anticipatory good conduct”, to “reduce to a minimum” acts by the Gestapo (p. 810) does not do justice to this situation.

 In sum, the present reviewer can find hardly anything positive in the work under review. The author has conducted intensive and meticulous research into the historical sources and he introduces many new people and events from local church history, but he does not succeed in binding his results together into a well-thought-out whole. Because he refrains from classifying his results or comparing them to others, his study floats in a vacuum and raises more questions rather than it answers. Certainly, the work did nothing to dispel this reviewer’s general doubts whether social network analysis is suitable for furthering historical research.

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Review of Hartmut Ludwig, An der Seite der Entrechteten und Schwachen: Zur Geschichte des “Büro Pfarrer Grüber” (1938 bis 1940) und der Ev. Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte nach 1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 2 (June 2013)

Review of Hartmut Ludwig, An der Seite der Entrechteten und Schwachen: Zur Geschichte des “Büro Pfarrer Grüber” (1938 bis 1940) und der Ev. Hilfsstelle für ehemals Rasseverfolgte nach 1945 (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2009), Pp. 195, ISBN 978-3832521264.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Ludwig-AnderSeiteThe record of the German Evangelical Churches, including the Confessing Church of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in failing to mobilize opposition to the Nazis’ violent attacks on the Jews is a shameful one. It has been excellently researched in the recent book by Robert Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany. In the post-1945 period, when the horrifying facts of the Holocaust were revealed, the Church was overwhelmed with a deep feeling of guilty shame. The subject was to be avoided. It took many years before the details emerged of one of the more significant, if belated, efforts in the Protestant ranks, namely the establishment in 1938 of an office to assist the persecuted Protestant victims of Nazi oppression. Hartmut Ludwig’s contribution in retelling the story of the “Büro Grüber” is therefore much to be welcomed.

By 1938 the escalation of Nazi violence had alarmed many individual churchmen, including Bishop George Bell in England, who was deeply concerned for those Protestant pastors of Jewish extraction, who were now threatened with eviction or discrimination. Bell sent his sister-in-law, Laura Livingstone, to work with the Quakers in Berlin and to provide, at a minimum, advice about resettlement and emigration. But the German church authorities, including those of the Confessing Church, were still too eager not to offend their political masters, and refused any engagement on this issue. Not until the summer of 1938 was Pastor Heinrich Grüber designated as contact person for a nation-wide network to offer guidance and assistance to Protestant church members of Jewish descent. Grüber was in charge of a parish in eastern Berlin, where he had been much engaged in social work. Since he could not expect any approval from the church bureaucracy, he decided to set up his own independent office. He called for help from a group of lay persons of both sexes from the local parishes, almost all of whom were themselves drawn from the target group of Protestants of Jewish origin.

The onslaughts of the notorious “Crystal Night” pogrom in early November impelled Grüber to take immediate and unauthorized steps to provide assistance to those victims who needed to emigrate from Germany as soon as possible. Many of the Christians of Jewish descent had expected that since they were not part of the Jewish community and, in many cases, had not been for many years, they would be exempt. “Crystal Night” destroyed this illusion. Grüber’s office now found itself overwhelmed with applicants. Grüber himself travelled to England in December to see what opportunities existed for Christians of Jewish origin to emigrate there. In the following months, until the outbreak of war in September 1939, his office expedited as many cases as they could, although the exact numbers are unclear. He also recruited over thirty assistants to help with the complicated paper work required to overcome the bureaucratic obstacles preventing the emigrants from leaving Germany.

Despite their plans to expel the Jews as quickly as possible, the Nazi authorities’ hostility to anyone who sympathised with the plight of Jews only increased. The escalation of military operations from 1939 to 1941 made emigration opportunities ever more difficult. Grüber’s educational and social work had to be stopped. In late 1940 the first deportations of Jews from Germany were begun to Poland and also to southern France. Grüber was alarmed but powerless to prevent these vindictive measures. In December 1940 the Gestapo peremptorily ordered his office to be closed, while he himself was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen. The office files were confiscated and later destroyed. In September 1941 all Jews were ordered to wear the Yellow Star, and in October the Gestapo prohibited any further Jewish emigration from Germany. Instead they were to be deported to unknown destinations in the east. Fourteen of Grüber’s co-workers were among those deported and subsequently murdered in one concentration camp or another. The author gives each of them a short biographical tribute on the basis of carefully-reconstituted evidence.

Fortunately, Pastor Grüber himself survived, and already in June 1945 was back in Berlin determined to continue to care for the very few remaining Jewish Protestants, some of whom had been in hiding, and others married to non-Jews in the so-called “privileged marital status”. All of them needed help to rebuild their shattered lives. And many had to contend with the wounding disparagements of neighbours who still maintained the prejudices of the previous regime. The new Protestant church authorities refused to acknowledge any special responsibility towards those who had been so let down by their predecessors. The task of combating anti-Semitism remained.

In the post-war years Grüber achieved renown as the Provost of Berlin, and for nine years the chief negotiator for the Protestant Church with the Communist government in East Berlin. But he also saw to it that his relief agency for assistance to the formerly racially persecuted continued to operate, even after Berlin was politically divided. The agency still exists, helping with restitution cases, supporting old age homes, and fighting racial prejudices. It is a continuing obligation in Grüber’s memory.

Harmut Ludwig began his researches on this topic twenty-five years ago, while he was a graduate student at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. After the fall of Communism, he was able to gather new sources on both sides of the former Berlin Wall, as well as to interview survivors, their relatives, or the relatives of victims. The record of the dangers and, often, calamitous disasters which befell these victims of Nazi ruthlessness is now more or less complete. But so too is the evidence of the dedication and compassion shown by Grüber and his assistants, who constantly strove to follow their role model of the Good Samaritan, and thereby to atone, if only in part, for the scandalous dereliction of the wider Church.

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Review of Akten deutscher Bischöfe seit 1945, Kommission für Zeitgeschichte

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 2 (June 2013)

Review of Akten deutscher Bischöfe seit 1945, Kommission für Zeitgeschichte

Ulrich Helbach (Bearbeitet), Akten deutscher Bischöfe seit 1945: Westliche Besatzungszonen, 1945 – 1947, I (Paderborn: Schöningh Verlag, 2012), 764 pp.

Ulrich Helbach (Bearbeitet), Akten deutscher Bischöfe seit 1945: Westliche Besatzungzonen, 1945 – 1947, II (Paderborn: Schöningh Verlag, 2012),  pp. 765- 1495.

Annette Mertens (Bearbeitet), Akten deutscher Bischöfe seit 1945: Westliche Besatzungszonen und Gründung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1948/1949 (Paderborn: Schöningh Verlag, 2010), 901 pp.

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

By any measure, these three volumes, Documents of the German Bishops since 1945, represent a massive achievement. Spanning the years 1945 to 1949, these collections of primary-source materials from the three western zones of occupation in Germany appear in the highly-regarded documentary editions of the  “Blue Series” put out by the German Catholic historical association, die Kommission für Zeitgeschichte (or Association of Contemporary History.) These volumes are integral parts in a new seven-volume documentary series for the postwar era, for which two additional volumes, including a separate volume for the Soviet occupation, will appear  in the coming years. These seven volumes represent the continuation of a series of documentary editions begun in 1968 by the researcher Bernhard Stasiewski and carried through to the year 1945 by the historian Ludwig Volk, SJ, in 1985.

Helbach-AktenThe research behind these editions is tremendous. These three tomes collectively occupy approximately 2400 pages and bring together nearly 725 documents from more than fifty archives, including more than 40 church archives in Germany, German state archives, private papers and two archives from the United States.  Before making their final selections, the archivists and research teams assisting them had to wade through thousands of folders of documents and pre-select more than two thousand documents for possible inclusion. The documents themselves include correspondence and addresses not only in German but also in English, French and Latin, as the bishops were in regular correspondence with occupation officials from the Western Allies and the Vatican.  Fortunately, the two editors, Dr. Ulrich Helbach, the director of the archive for the archdiocese of Cologne, and Dr. Annette Mertens of the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, ensured that adept translations into German were provided for the foreign documents.

This brief description should make clear that these three volumes are far more than a simple compendium of documents hastily slapped together. The editors intended these to provide not just a launching pad but a sure-proof foundation for significant research into the Roman Catholic Church’s past in the immediate postwar era. Helbach’s two volumes resemble a biblical concordance thanks to his cross-references to other documents, short biographical sketches of the documents’ authors and subjects, descriptions of these documents’ origins and discussions of other versions of individual letters.

These three volumes overflow with primary-source material because the Roman Catholic Church arguably reached the zenith of its political power and influence in the immediate postwar years. At a time when other political authorities had collapsed, both churches emerged as mouthpieces for the defeated German nations and regular negotiators with the Western Allies over charged questions of refugees, prisoners of war, food rations, war trials, denazification and educational reform. Dozens of these documents testify to the sometimes cordial but more often than not rancorous discussions over these subjects; many were resolved in a manner not always to the church’s immediate liking but to its ultimate and long-term favor.

At the same time, these documents also shed light into the process of reconstruction both on the ecclesiastical and national level. They show how church leaders approached the rebuilding of churches, ancillary organizations dissolved by the Nazis, political parties, including the CDU, CSU and the Center Party. Few of these efforts at rebuilding proceeded without conflict. In some cases, they summoned up intra-denominational rifts and tensions dating back to the Weimar era. In other cases, they led to feuds with leaders from ideologically hostile political parties, including the Social Democratic Party, the liberals and the Communists. Debates over the confessional nature of the public school system and the validity of the Reichskonkordat on the floors of the Parliamentary Council meeting in Bonn between September 1948 and May 1949 underscored just how contested the political agenda of the church could be. Its efforts to enshrine into the new West German constitution guaranteeing parents the rights to send their children to schools segregated confessionally (at least in theory) foundered on the opposition of the liberals, Communists and socialists. Mertens accordingly makes the Roman Catholic contributions to the West German Basic Law a chief focus, with all of the messiness, wrangling and politicking that the work on this constitution entailed.

To their credit, the editors make no effort to whitewash the past. They include voices critical of the church as well as documents that do not always present church leaders at their finest.  Helbach, for instance, included one English-language report found in the papers of John Riedl at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Riedl was an American occupation official who interviewed four of the German bishops, including Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne, Archbishop Lorenz Jaeger of Paderborn, Bishop Johannes Dietz of Fulda and Bishop Albert Stohr of Mainz, during the meeting of the Fulda Bishops Conference between August 19 and 21, 1947.  His fellow occupation official, Richard G. Akselrad, asked for their response to a critical article by Eugen Kogon in the Frankfurter Hefte, the journal Kogon co-edited with Walter Dirks.  Kogon  argued that the German church leaders, “should have defended their stand during the Third Reich with more courage and determination.” Kogon was a concentration camp survivor, and Stohr attempted to diminish Kogon’s witness by casting doubt on the motives of many concentration camp inmates. Few were genuine martyrs, he argued: “Many of them were thrown in concentration camps against their will as a result of indirect utterances and secret actions. Also, many of them became victims of their own imprudence and rashness which have nothing to do with courage. I am far from counting Dr. Kogon among the latter. I know him personally very well and value him highly as a courageous and true Catholic. But I have the impression that this article is the expression of a concentration camp psychosis which had not remained without influence even on such a sharp and analytic mind as Dr. Kogon’s.”

In sum, these volumes are a must-have for any serious research library. They come with a staggering price-tag–216 Euro alone for Helbach’s two volumes and 138 Euros for Merten’s work–but they are an investment worth making for any university library. They provide neither an apology nor a denunciation of the church’s conduct in the immediate postwar era. Rather, they serve as a meticulous and indispensable foundation for rigorous scholarship.

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Review of Philip E. Muehlenbeck, ed., Religion and the Cold War: A Global Perspective

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 2 (June 2013)

Review of Philip E. Muehlenbeck, ed., Religion and the Cold War: A Global Perspective, (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), xxii + 314 Pp., ISBN 978-0-8265-1853-8.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

Religion and the Cold War: A Global Perspective is a collection of essays that establishes not only that religion influenced Cold War disputes and policies in significant ways but more importantly that the Cold War was profoundly religious in nature. The very fact that the Cold War was not a “hot” war but rather a war between competing ideologies and systems of governance meant that victories were won not on the battlefield but rather by convincing peoples and states that life was better, freer, and more fulfilling on one side or the other of the Iron Curtain. Consequently, it was advantageous for Americans and West Europeans to contrast their devotion to Christian values and the free expression of religious belief with Communism’s repression of religion and spiritual bankruptcy. For the Western Allies, the Cold War was from the very start conceived of as both a war over religion and a religious war. Although this review will not address the global manifestations of the role of religion in the Cold War, one way that this collection breaks new ground is by expanding the traditional focus on the Christian Churches in Europe and America to examine some states affected by the Cold War in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, where Christianity was not always the dominant religion.

Muehlenbeck-ReligionThree essays from this collection that focus on the Catholic and Protestant churches in Europe and America will be of particular interest to CCHQ readers. In his essay, “The Western Allies, German Churches, and the Emerging Cold War in Germany, 1948-1952,” JonDavid Wyneken maintains that the political leaders in the US, Britain, the Soviet Union, and in East and West Germany paid close attention to the stance of German church leaders and at times shaped their policies with the churches in mind. At the end of WWII the German churches believed that they deserved a prominent role in postwar reconstruction and promoted themselves to the Allies as offering a faith-based alternative to the appeals of atheistic Communism. Although the Allies, especially the Americans, found this appealing, they refused to grant the churches the comprehensive role they desired and imposed harsh occupation and denazification programs in their zones of occupation. Church leaders voiced strong opposition to what they called “victors’ justice” and bemoaned that the Western Allies were just making Communism more appealing to a desperate and disgruntled population.

As the Cold War heated up American policy shifted its focus from punishing Germany to addressing the Communist threat in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. The Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, and the Anglo-American response to the Berlin Blockade all made clear the West’s commitment to fighting Communism. Under the leadership of Konrad Adenauer, Catholics in Germany, the vast majority of whom lived in the western zones, rallied behind the new anti-Communist policy and eventually embraced the division of Germany between East and West and the rearming of West Germany. Many Protestant leaders, however, undermined American objectives by refusing to offer their full endorsement of the anti-Communist policies of the West and instead advocated a dialogue between East and West. Distressed by the prospect dividing Protestant lands between two Germanies, they hoped to avoid or undo division and rearmament. Even a staunch anti-Communist like Bishop Dibelius of Berlin, who criticized Communist control of youth activities and political arrests of religious leaders, championed a less aggressive approach toward the East German state fearing reprisals against Protestants in the Eastern zone. He offered to mediate between Adenauer and Ulbricht but this never materialized.

Far more critical of the Allies were Protestants who gathered around the leadership of Martin Niemöller, Karl Barth, and Gustav Heinemann. They earned the wrath of American policy makers because of their vocal opposition to Adenauer’s leadership, the division of Germany, and rearmament. They advocated neutrality and reunification. East German authorities and the USSR believed that they could use Niemöller’s soft stance on Communism to their advantage. The Western Allies worried that Niemöller and his colleagues had become dupes and sought to win over more conservative Protestants. The 1951 Protestant Kirchentag in Berlin heightened their concerns when Wilhelm Pieck, the East German president, gave a speech at its opening calling for unification. Adding fuel to the fire, Niemöller traveled to Moscow in January 1952 at the invitation of the Russian Orthodox patriarch. He said his visit was for ecumenical purposes and that he had undertaken the trip to promote peace through church channels. When he returned he reported on the vitality of Russian church life. Washington was not happy. Adenauer was furious. Bishop Meiser was apoplectic. One Bundestag member ridiculed Niemöller’s visit and called the Moscow patriarch “nothing more than Hitler’s Reichbischof Mueller.”

With the rejection of the Stalin Note by the Western Allies in the spring of 1952, the Russians and East Germans no longer needed to court the churches or cultivate Dibelius and Niemöller for publicity. The election of Eisenhower in 1953 and the crushing of the June 1953 East Berlin uprising just solidified the complete break between East and West and any chance that Germany would act as a bridge between the two sides as Niemöller had hoped. Wyneken concludes that, “Although this series of events ended any ability of the German churches to independently affect changes in East-West relations, the Western Allies continued to believe that both church bodies could still play a role in undermining Communism in East Germany.”

If Niemöller’s refusal to condemn Communism and to endorse the Christian West in the early years of the Cold War caused headaches for many of his church colleagues, they could be grateful that they did not have Hewlett Johnson the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral as a colleague. David Ayers’ essay, “Hewlett Johnson: Britain’s Red Dean and the Cold War,” describes Johnson as an ardent Communist who failed completely to grasp the true nature of Communism despite the growing list of well-documented crimes and atrocities carried out by Stalin and other Communist leaders. Although he never joined the British Communist Party, he repeatedly praised Stalin and believed that Communism was the practical realization of Christianity.

Appointed Dean (not Archbishop) of Canterbury in 1931 by Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald, Johnson could not be fired and remained in the position of relative importance until 1963 when he retired at the age of 89. His colleagues in the Anglican Church frequently tried to oust him from his position but he always refused to resign.

Communist countries understood his usefulness in improving the image of Communism and invited him frequently to dinners and public events. He was a popular and frequent contributor in the public sphere in England and America, where spoke to large audiences on the affinity between Communism and Christianity. He praised Stalin’s anti-racism, nationalist policy, and the 1936 constitution, which Johnson called, “the most liberal the world has yet seen.” He ignored any reports that mentioned Stalin’s reign of terror and he claimed that religion could be practiced relatively freely in the USSR and Eastern Bloc. He also defended the Left’s attacks on the Church by arguing that the Church was sometimes on the wrong side.  Foreigners often confused his position as dean with that of the archbishop and so thought he was speaking on behalf of the Anglican Church.

When Hitler invaded Russia in 1941 and Russia became England’s ally, Johnson was in great demand as a speaker and was able to say, “I told you so” to his many critics. His position was further boosted by Stalin’s friendly overtures to the Orthodox Church in 1943, when Stalin restored the Moscow Patriarchate. Johnson went to Moscow in May 1945 to celebrate Russia’s victory.

Like Niemöller, he tried to foster good relations between East and West after the war. But unlike Niemöller, Johnson made patently absurd claims about Communism and sided unapologetically every time with Communist regimes. Although Niemöller was sometimes referred to as “Germany’s Red Dean,” the two men had very little in common. In contrast to Niemöller, Johnson’s thought progressed very little in his lifetime and had very little influence on the Cold War strategy of either the Anglican Church or the British Government. From the time of the Russian Revolution until his death in 1966 his loyalty to Moscow never wavered. Ayer’s concludes, “He essentially regarded religious freedom as secondary to the progression toward Communism.”

Jonathan P. Herzog’s essay, “From Sermon to Strategy: Religious Influence on the Formation and Implementation of US Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War,” makes the case most convincingly that religion was central to Cold War strategy, at least for the United States. He begins his excellent essay with the anecdote of the US in 1953 launching 1000’s of balloons bearing Bible verses over the skies of Eastern Europe with the hope that oppressed Eastern Europeans would find some solace from the verses or perhaps even inspire some to rebel against their Communist oppressors. Although two fundamentalist Protestant radio preachers conceived the project, it was the recently inaugurated President Eisenhower who rescued the project from the trashcans of the State Department and gave the project his authorization. Although the balloon project seems small and insignificant, it demonstrates the extent to which the president had come to view the religious struggle between East and West as an integral part of the Cold War. As Herzog argues, with Eisenhower’s imprimatur, “the balloons became less the half-backed notion of two evangelists and more the long arm of US foreign policy.”

Herzog shows how it was religious leaders from various denominations who first interpreted Communism as a type of religion. In the 1930s church leaders from Cardinal Spellman to Billy Graham, “portrayed Communism as a spiritual threat and bemoaned the secularization sapping US society of its sacred vigor.” Communism was an “arch-heresy” that had its own missionaries, theologians, songs, and faith.

Policy makers such as George Kennan, Paul Nitze and John Foster Dulles as well as presidents Truman and Eisenhower were thoroughly convinced by this reasoning. They picked up on the narrative created by religious leaders and portrayed the Cold War as a war between the Godless and Satanic Communists and the God-fearing and God-loving Americans. Various policies, strategies, and tactics were developed to translate this belief into foreign policy. As early as January 1946 position papers were circulated within the security community that viewed the USSR as a nation with a Messianic goal that held great appeal for people suffering the effects of a devastating war. Nitze in 1950 maintained that the Soviets were “animated by a fanatical faith.” In this “perverted faith” Communist society “becomes God, and submission to the will of God becomes submission to the will of the system.” Truman’s Psychological Strategy Board declared that, “The potentialities of religion as an instrument for combating Communism are universally tremendous.” And Eisenhower campaigned on the belief that, “our battle against Communism is a fight between anti-God and a belief in the almighty?”

Herzog concludes that alongside the military-industrial complex created by Truman and Eisenhower there was a “religious-industrial complex” that consisted of “a fusion of religious ideas, national resources, and state policy.”

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Review of Wilhelm Damberg, ed., Soziale Strukturen und Semantiken des Religiösen im Wandel

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 2 (June 2013)

Review of Wilhelm Damberg, ed., Soziale Strukturen und Semantiken des Religiösen im Wandel (Essen: Klartext, 2011), 224 Pp.

Originally reviewed for H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online (H-German).

By Lauren N. Faulkner, University of Notre Dame

Religious Transformations in the Post-War World

In 2003, an interdisciplinary group of historians, theologians, sociologists, and educators in religious studies met at Bochum University, one of Germany’s pre-eminent research institutions, to commence an ambitious study of religious processes of transformation. In addition to religion, their specific focus was die Moderne, usually translated as “the modern” and, insofar as its definition is concerned, much open to debate in any language. With the support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), this collection of essays, Soziale Strukturen und Semantiken des Religiösen im Wandel, edited by Wilhelm Damberg (Essen, 2011) is deliberately presented as an interim account [Zwischenbilanz] focused on the German republic. The larger research project is meant to produce several more volumes in the coming years, moving beyond the current volume’s chronological framework (1949-1989) as well as embracing transnational perspectives.

Damberg, a professor of church history at Bochum, edited the volume with the aid of Frank Bösch, Lucian Hölscher (who provides the final essay on secularization), Traugott Jähnichen, Volkhard Krech, and Klaus Tenfelde, who passed away shortly after its publication. Damberg is the author of the very detailed introduction, in which he both sketches the broad contours of the Bochum group’s project and offers useful overviews of the essays and their place within the larger context of the project. In pursing an investigation of the transformation of religion in Germany after the Second World War, several themes run concurrently through the essays: the sociology of religion, including analyses of the processes of secularization, democratization and privatization; the emergence of “new histories” and their attention to religion (as opposed to older histories, particularly of West Germany, which treated religion as a separate, unintegrated chapter); and theological developments, innovations, and controversies, including the impact of Vatican II and the attempts of the Protestant churches to come to terms with the recent German past.

Damberg-SozialeMany of the authors offer inter-denominational (that is, Protestant and Catholic) comparison, with an emphasis on the rise and influence of mass media, and the nature of the discourse about the role of religion and spirituality in the daily lives of individuals, including its participants and changes over time. These reflect the ambitions of the larger Bochum project: to produce a detailed examination of the religious sphere and its gradual change over the years and decades since the last world war, and to evaluate the multiple influences of geography, gender dynamics, political contexts, economic realities, and the fluctuating strengths and weaknesses of ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical institutions. Above all, the project highlights the interdependence of the social and the cultural worlds, which are treated as concurrent, overlapping spheres rather than distinct entities. The processes and influences under consideration are situated in a six-point matrix that has a vertical dimension, divided into macro-, meso- and micro-levels, and two broad sociological dimensions, semantics and social structures (a helpful diagram is provided on 23).

The essays themselves can be grouped into three distinct categories. In the first, devoted to religious socialization, Dimitrej Owetschkin takes on the changing role of priests, pastors, and the “priestly image.” Markus Hero examines the evolution of alternative religious forms, including non-institutional spiritual movements of the private, popular, and individual natures. Although Owetschkin and Hero are focusing on very different actors – one the lower clergy of institutional churches, the other new and unprecedented spiritual figures who had nothing to do with these churches – both locate the 1960s as an important nexus of the necessary transformative processes. Social engagement and criticism, a growing sense of “world responsibility”, the need for the churches to become more expansive and horizontal, and less vertical (concentrated on hierarchy and authority), the drop in the number of regular church-goers, and the growth of the service industry are a few of the several factors that Owetschkin and Hero cite in their analyses.

The second category deals with changes in the “business” of religion. Andreas Henkelmann and Katharina Kunter’s article examines the breaks with tradition in the fields of charity work and social welfare. Uwe Kaminsky and Henkelmann continue the study of social welfare trends in looking at the evolution of psychological counseling, and the emergence of church-run counselor services in the 1950s as a new kind of charity. Rosel Oehmen-Vieregge investigates the development of women’s synods across (Western) Europe from the 1970s on. Sebastian Tripp’s article confronts the challenge of globalization to the institutional churches, the impact of decolonization on church missions, and changing perceptions of the Third World. Initiatives and pressures external to church leadership play a key role in each article. For Kunter, Kaminsky, and Henkelmann (who co-authored both pieces on welfare and charity), church-run organizations and clergy remained intrinsic to these kinds of operations, but demands for professionalization and the availability of new kinds of education, particularly in the discipline of psychology, meant increased involvement of lay professionals, including women. Oehmen-Vieregge underscores the role that women played in becoming more active in church life via the formation of various women’s synods from the 1970s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, and Tripp follows with an analysis of the new initiatives and kinds of legitimacy that emerged among Third-World groups and missions after the disintegration of the colonial world. None of these articles goes so far as to suggest that traditional church leadership was overtly challenged, but all point to various new agents who had little to no relationship with church leaders, who gained mounting influence in operations that for decades had been under the prerogative of the churches.

The final category considers religion in the age of mass media and “the public” [die Öffentlichkeit]. Sven-Daniel Gettys discusses changes in church policy regarding journalism and information sharing. Thomas Mittmann examines the ways in which the traditional churches attempted to maintain their social influence while simultaneously acknowledging the need for increased democratization through the use of popular events and the introduction of new liturgies and worship services. Nicolai Hannig studies the role of the media in shaping religious beliefs in an age of rapidly-developing media technology. Benjamin Städter’s article a good complement to Hannig’s, focusing on the production of visual images of Vatican II and their proliferation and impact. Whereas Gettys and Mittman are interested in exploring the self-perception of the institutional churches by looking at hierarchical attitudes towards different forms of media, journalism, and church congresses, Hannig and Städter focus on the types of media that have tried to make the churches and religion more accessible, via documentaries, opinion polls, and the magazine Stern’s public survey about religion in 1965, and via the publication and dispersal of photographs of popes, the church hierarchy, and the opening of Vatican II.

Lucian Hölscher’s article serves as a conclusion to the volume, examining various understandings of the slippery term “secularization” during the long 1960s. Hölscher’s investigation of the idea of secularization provides a terminological reflection on a word that appears in most of the essays in the volume, introducing the reader to a brief history of the term and suggesting that, if we accept that “secularization” is one of the twentieth century’s central concepts, more study must be conducted on the relationship between state and society in view of the religious sphere (and not merely on the social aspects of religion and the churches).

Readers should be aware of what the book is not: it is not a series of essays about people themselves who effected change. This volume deals with concepts – the transformation of semantics and structures, as the title indicates – rather than individuals. The authors are focused on processes and shifts over time in beliefs, attitudes, and modes of expression about religion and faith. There are very few named individuals, and none at all who serve as the explicit subject or focus of a study. The result is a volume that is oddly bereft of people, despite its interest in the ways people individually (the micro-level, as stipulated in the introduction) and collectively (the meso- and macro-levels) experience and communicate about religion.

The book’s self-proclaimed aim, to study religious transformation in the modern era, means that its subject is large, ambitious, and not uncontroversial. And admittedly, there are some gaps. Damberg concedes in the introduction that the absence of East Germany in this study is notable, though he points to separate studies that are in the works. Yet the volume’s attention to comparison, and the willingness of some of the essays to discuss the post-1990 period, leaves the reader thirsting for an idea of what was going on with East Germans and how they contributed to the post-1990 happenings. With few exceptions – Oehmen-Vieregge mentions the participation of Muslim women in some women’s gatherings; Hero discusses non-traditional spiritual figures, including gurus, shamans, and astrologers – the “religious sphere” is confined to and defined by the Christian religions, leaving one impatient for the volumes (which are forthcoming) dealing with non-Christian ones, particularly the impact of Muslims and Jews in Germany in the last third of the twentieth century.

One may also criticize the book for being jargon-heavy, though the authors do provide definitions and explanations, sometimes quite detailed, especially if the word is controversial, of most of the terms in use (Eventisierung, featured prominently in Mittmann’s article, may be the only concept that has no ready English equivalent). In fact, this exercise in probing definitions is one of the book’s true strengths, since it invites the reader to rethink and challenge longstanding assumptions about different aspects of religious change in the twentieth century. In selecting “transformation” as the leitmotif of the book, normative concepts are destabilized, poked and prodded, and interrogated in innovative and enlightening ways. While the definition of words like modernization and secularization remain variable, their meaning and impact on events and people, from psychologists and journalists to parish priests and pastors, is made clearer. Other terms, including liberalization, democratization, and pluralization, are given added coherence as individual articles demonstrate how they emerged to become important vehicles of change over time.

The book is also a successful example of distinctive approaches to the same subject: it is a solid showcase for effective interdisciplinary research and writing. The various methodologies emphasize the different research fields and specialties of the authors, who hold degrees in sociology, history, theology, philosophy, economics, and political philosophy. A list of publications of these authors is included at the back; perhaps in future volumes, a list of short author biographies will also be included (biographies of authors for this book are found easily online, on the DFG-Forschergruppe website dedicated to the Bochum Project). Because of the different questions, agendas, and research tools on display in these articles, they yield a multi-faceted, detailed, broad-reaching book that stays true to its core mission: underscoring the displacement, alteration, and relocation of church infrastructure in West Germany between 1949 and 1989, and the instabilities in and changes to religious meaning and interpretation. Moreover, the authors do not attempt to offer the final word on any of the subjects under consideration; this is the opening of a discussion rather than its conclusion. If this book sets the standard for the Bochum Project’s coming volumes, which the editor insists will expand beyond the borders of West Germany and Europe, and beyond the four-decade timeframe featured here, then a significant new series is in the making, and anyone with an interest in the relationship between society and religion needs to take notice.

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Review of Christopher J. Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Review of Christopher J. Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), xiv + 251 Pp., ISBN 978-0-253-00098-9.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Probst-DemonizingChristopher Probst has written an insightful analysis of the ways in which Protestant reformer Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish writings were used by German Protestants during the Third Reich. Fundamental to Probst’s work is his consistent use of Gavin Langmuir’s distinction between non-rational anti-Judaism (antipathy rooted in theological differences or other symbolic language which stand apart from and not against rational thought) and irrational antisemitism (antagonism rooted in factually untrue and slanderous accusations against Jews). In contrast to the idea that pre-modern anti-Jewish thought was generally religious and therefore anti-Judaic while modern anti-Jewish thought is political or racial and therefore antisemitic, Probst sees both anti-Judaic and antisemitic elements in the language of Luther and the twentieth-century German theologians, church leaders, and pastors who invoked him (3-4, 6, 17-19). In light of this, Demonizing the Jews is a book about historical continuity.

One of Probst’s important contributions is to show how complex and paradoxical antipathy towards Jews could be in Nazi Germany. Indeed, Demonizing the Jews begins with two snapshots from the life of Pastor Heinrich Fausel of Heimsheim, Württemberg. First, we learn that in 1934 Fausel gave a public lecture on the “Jewish Problem” in which he recycled Martin Luther’s harsh pronouncements against the Jews of his day. Then, we discover that in 1943 Fausel and his wife sheltered a Jewish woman during the Holocaust. What was it about his attitudes towards Jews, Probst wonders, that enabled him to condemn Jews as a “threatening invasion” of a “decadent” people and yet rescue one of them? (1) Was Fausel antisemitic or anti-Judaic?

More importantly, Probst asks what role Luther’s writings about Jews and Judaism might have played in the life of Fausel. More broadly, he wonders: “Was the generally anemic response to anti-Jewish Nazi policy on the part of German Protestants due at least in part to the denigration of Jews and Judaism in Luther’s writings, to a more general traditional Christian anti-Judaism, or to some other cultural, social, economic, or political factors particular to Germany in the first half of the twentieth century?” (8). Here Probst has identified an important gap in the literature, for he has found no study which has thoroughly analyzed the use of Luther’s anti-Judaic and antisemitic writings in Nazi Germany (6). This he sets out to do, employing not the classic texts of Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Karl Barth, but rather less prominent writings which he argues more completely capture the “conventional views” of German clergy (7, 19-20). No doubt many scholars will assume, with the author, that “surely many Protestants in Hitler’s Germany might have read Luther’s recommendations and sensed the congruities with the gruesome antisemitic program unfolding around them” (13).

Probst analyzes the history of German Protestant anti-Judaism and antisemitism in six well-organized chapters. And overview of Protestantism in Nazi Germany and a careful examination of Luther’s writings about Jews set the stage for his analysis of the twentieth-century appropriation of the sixteenth-century reformer’s ideas. Four chapters make up the heart of the work—one devoted to academic theologians from across the church-political spectrum and three devoted to clergy from the Confessing Church, the German Christian Movement, and the non-affiliated “middle”—the largest group within the German Protestant clergy of the Nazi era.

Overall, what Probst finds is that German Christian clergy, theologians, and church leaders “consistently embraced Luther’s irrational antisemitic rhetoric as their own, frequently pairing it with idealized portraits of ‘Teutonic’ or ‘German’ greatness, anti-Bolshevism, and anti-Enlightenment sentiment” (14). Confessing Church clergy and theologians tended to emphasize “Luther’s non-rational anti-Judaic arguments against Jews” but generally remained silent about his antisemitic outbursts and usually tried to distance themselves from the racial antisemitism of the German Christians and the Nazi state. Clergy from the middle of the church-political spectrum drew on both anti-Judaic and antisemitic aspects of Luther’s Jewish writings, often sliding into xenophobic stereotypes of Jews, such as the Jew as usurer (14).

In his opening chapter on Protestantism in Nazi Germany, Probst draws on Shulamit Volkov’s argument that antisemitism became a “cultural code” in Wilhelmine Germany, deeply embedded in society even during times when political antisemitism waned. He also highlights the importance of the ongoing publication of the Weimar edition of Luther’s Werke, including volume 53 containing On the Jews and Their Lies and On the Ineffable Name and on the Lineage of Christ, which was published in 1919. Probst also explains the importance of the “Luther Renaissance,” the revival of scholarly interest in Martin Luther which unfolded in the interwar era, noting its openness to nationalistic and antisemitic sentiments (26). As an example of the nationalistic, political, and even racial nature of German theology in the Weimar and Nazi eras, Probst assesses three works of the Erlangen theologian Paul Althaus: “The Voice of the Blood” (1932), Theology of the Orders (1934), and Völker before and after Christ (1937).  What stands out here is the importance Althaus gave to the notion of the racial or blood-bound Volk as an elevated community established by God. It is in this context that Luther became important for German Protestants during the interwar era, both as national hero and (less so) as an antisemitic model (37-38).

Many readers will appreciate Probst’s careful analysis of Luther’s Judenschriften. Importantly, Demonizing the Jews strives to place Luther and his anti-Judaic and antisemitic rhetoric in proper historical context, noting the prevalence of negative stereotypes of Jews in the later Middle Ages, the frequency of accusations of host desecration leveled against Jews, the extent of anti-Jewish prejudice among church leaders (including reformers like Martin Bucer and Andreas Osiander), and the presence of important anti-Judaic and antisemitic publications, including Anthonius Margaritha’s The Whole Jewish Faith, in which a converted Jew made numerous provocative charges about his former coreligionists. Probst surveys Luther’s writings on Jews from the moderate and somewhat philosemitic That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew (1523) to the sharply anti-Judaic and crudely antisemitic On the Jews and Their Lies and On the Ineffable Name and on the Lineage of Christ (both 1543), demonstrating both the importance of Luther’s theological opposition to Judaism and the extent to which his harsher attacks were “steeped in late medieval anti-Jewish paranoia” (50). While Probst places Luther carefully in his sixteenth-century context and cautions against various simplistic interpretations of Luther’s anti-Jewish writings (early vs. late Luther, anger over the absence of Jewish conversions, declining health and increasing upset in old age), he refrains from offering a decisive explanation for Luther’s antipathy towards Jews and Judaism (51-58). What is clear is that the Luther’s antisemitic social program was ignored for over three hundred years, until it was revived in a completely decontextualized manner by Nazi propagandists and Weimar-era Protestant writers.

Turning his attention to academic theologians from both the Confessing Church and the German Christian Movement in chapter three, Probst again sets his historical discussion carefully in context, briefly explaining the politicization of German universities and academic theology in the Third Reich. Surveying four theologians—Eric Vogelsang of Königsberg University; Wolf Meyer-Erlach of Jena University; Hermann Steinlein, pastor of Ansbach; and Gerhard Schmidt of Nuremberg Seminary—the author finds that “German Christian theologians usually adopted Luther’s irrational antisemitic rhetoric as their own, often coupling it with notions that included idealized portraits of ‘Teutonic’ or ‘German’ greatness and anti-Enlightenment sentiment” (81). Confessing Church theologians tended to employ Luther’s anti-Judaic arguments only but still usually supported the Nazi state’s antisemitic program, which mirrored Luther’s own antisemitic recommendations. As Probst concludes, “We have seen here that a Confessing Church pastor, a Confessing Church theologian, and two German Christian theologians all agree that Luther was ‘correct’ to be antisemitic, or at least ‘anti-Jewish’” (82).

Chapters four through six ask how Confessing Church, German Christian, and non-aligned parish and higher clergy used Luther’s anti-Jewish writings in the course of their parish duties or church leadership. Probst returns to the subject of the opening pages of the book, Pastor Heinrich Fausel, who was in fact a member of the Confessing Church. The Heimsheim pastor espoused a relatively apolitical theology, though one marked by the theology of the orders of creation. Like so many of his colleagues from across the Reich, Fausel advocated the close connection between the German Volk and the Christian God. The resurrection of Germany “after bad times” (Probst’s words, not Fausel’s) depends on Christian devotion to God, which Probst describes, perhaps optimistically, as “explicitly scriptural and spiritual—and in no way political.” (94) Probst goes on to explain how, in the course of wartime suffering and the destruction of property, Fausel proclaimed the name of Jesus to be the source of forgiveness, healing, and victory. Statements like these, I would argue, are in fact much more political than the author suggests, given the context in which they arise.

When Fausel gave a public lecture on the Jewish Question in 1934, he refused to engage with biological notions of Jewishness but limited his discussion to the spiritual realm, where the person of Christ determined the fate of the Church, the peoples of the world, and the Jews. Fausel highlighted Jewish disobedience and stubbornness, using Isaiah 5 and its description of God’s vineyard, which Israel neglected to care for. Even as he began to discuss Jews in the New Testament, Fausel explained the “Jewish Question” as a “besetting” problem and described the “terrifying foreign invasion” of Jews since the nineteenth century as a threat Germany had to defend itself from. That said, Fausel affirmed that opposition between Jews and gentiles in the New Testament was only about Christ and not about race. Still, Israel’s rejection of Christ was, in Fausel’s words, a “unanimous rejection by an entire Volk, its leaders included,” even though (as the pastor explained) Jesus came to earth as part of the Jewish Volk (96). When Fausel discussed Luther’s views about Jews, he noted the reformer’s early positivity, but then explained how Luther dissociated himself from Jews and later unleashed his “full wrath” on them (96-97). Fausel noted how Luther saw the Jews as Christ’s enemies, how he recommended that the political authorities undertake severe measures against them, and how he lost hope for their conversion (97).

Throughout this section, Probst is careful to note that Fausel drew not only on Luther’s theological (non-rational) anti-Judaic sentiments, but also on his socio-political (irrational) antisemitic recommendations. Indeed, Fausel went on to speak approvingly of the state’s efforts to protect the German Volk from the Jews. He opposed Jewish-gentile intermarriage and supported restrictions to the number of Jewish civil servants in Germany. Though his arguments derived primarily from theology (for Probst, non-rational anti-Judaism), the practical outworking of this theology was Fausel’s approval of the distinctly antisemitic social and political measures undertaken by the Nazi state.

Most curiously (again), despite these views, Fausel and his wife later hid and cared for a Jewish woman during the Second World War, an act Probst has no real explanation for, on account of the lack of clear evidence. Rightly, he notes that people often act at variance with their stated beliefs, noting also that Fausel may have had something of a change of heart, given that he later signed the Württemberg Ecclesiastical-Theological Society’s 1946 Declaration on the Jewish Question—a frank confession of collective guilt from Protestants who realized they had been bystanders to the persecution of Jews (97-99, 171-172).

Probst agrees with Wolfgang Gerlach that even Confessing Church clergy did not support protection for Jews in Nazi Germany (113). Though he argues that they focused primarily on the biblical or theological aspects of Luther’s anti-Jewish writings, he adds that they reached “too easily for irrational and/or xenophobic reasoning in their writings and lectures” (116). If this was the case for Confessing Church clergy, Probst demonstrates that German Christian clergy were even more likely to draw on the explicitly antisemitic aspects of Luther’s writings. “The German Christian literature is overwhelmingly laden with strident attacks on Jews based on irrational conceptions about them. They are said to possess ‘fanatical hatred’ and ‘pernicious power.’ They are the ‘scum of mankind.’” Indeed, German Christians used terms like “Jewish Bolshevism” while urging the Nazi state to wage a “defensive struggle” against Jewish “Volk-disintegrating” power. Probst concludes: “Ultimately, many in the German Christian movement believed it was a matter of annihilate or be annihilated.” (142) As might be expected, non-aligned clergy from the Protestant middle landed somewhere between the Confessing Church and German Christian positions—more likely to invoke Luther’s non-rational anti-Judaic arguments against Jews but also more likely to elevate the German Volk as an order of creation and generally ready to support National Socialism and to identify Jews with Bolshevism (168-169).

One criticism of Demonizing the Jews might be its limited research base. It is to the author’s advantage that he analyzes individual anti-Jewish writings in good depth, but it is somewhat problematic to draw nuanced conclusions about the differences between Confessing Church, German Christian, and non-aligned clergy from such a small sampling of theological writings. That said, nothing I have seen in the parish archives of church districts from diverse regions of Nazi Germany would contradict Probst’s findings.

In the end, it is easy to agree with Probst’s conclusion that the anti-Judaic and antisemitic writings and lectures of German Protestant clergy “reinforced the cultural antisemitism and anti-Judaism of many Protestants in Nazi Germany” (172). Most importantly, however, by applying Langmuir’s more sophisticated definitions of anti-Judaism and antisemitism—both sentiments existed in the writings of Martin Luther and in those of his twentieth-century followers in Nazi Germany—Probst has demonstrated how deeply the continuities of anti-Jewish sentiment stretch from Nazi Germany back through the centuries to Luther and beyond. Surely there can be little question that Christian anti-Judaism and antisemitism contributed significantly to the dehumanization of the Jews, fueling the ideological fire that became the Holocaust.

 

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Review of the Internet website “Evangelischer Widerstand”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Review of the Internet website “Evangelischer Widerstand,” http://evangelischer-widerstand.de.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

EvangelischerWiderstand01The interactive website “Evangelischer Widerstand” (www.evangelischer-widerstand.de) is a powerful presentation of the Protestant Christian resistance to Hitler in both German and English. Automatically detecting my country of origin, the English website loaded a moving audio-visual introduction: “Imagine that your desperate exhortations go unheard. Would you nevertheless repeatedly call for solidarity with persecuted individuals?” The answer to this question is a short narration about Elisabeth Schmitz, a Berlin high school teacher who appealed to Confessing Church leaders to help Jews, wrote an important memorandum on the topic, aided persecuted Jews, and quit her teaching position in protest against the National Socialist system. Three similarly worded questions follow, on the subjects of refusing to endorse the Nazi regime, rejecting the values of the Nazi legal system, and voicing anti-war convictions during the Second World War. In turn, these questions are answered with biographical snippets about Otto and Gertrud Mörike, a pastoral couple; Martin Gauger, a Confessing Church lawyer; and Johannes Schröder, a Confessing Church military chaplain who became an anti-war activist. Bridging to the motto, “Resistance!? Protestant Christians under the Nazi Regime,” the splash page dissolves to reveal an attractive map of the Third Reich covered in icons of men and women.

EvangelischerWiderstand02This is the website developed over the past couple of years by the Evangelische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte (Protestant Working Group for Contemporary Church History) in Munich, under the leadership of Dr. Claudia Lepp, along with Drs. Siegfried Hermle, Harry Oelke, and a host of other notable German scholars. It is sponsored by the Evangelical Church in Germany, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria, the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau, and the Köber Foundation of Hamburg, and supported by a long list of academics, Protestant notables, archives, memorial sites, and other institutions. It contains information on no less than three dozen (as of March 2013) individual or group resisters, along with a timeline, a series of fundamental questions, photos, documents and audio clips. It is a rich and growing set of resources, tied to a substantial bibliography of German-language publications on the topics of resistance and the German churches under Hitler. (Hopefully, over time, the bibliography will grow to include many of the important English-language studies on the German churches in the Nazi era.)

There is much to commend about “Evangelischer Widerstand.” The Protestant Working Group for Contemporary Church History is entirely correct in its awareness of the need to tell the story of the German churches under Hitler in new ways to new generations. This website is far more likely to reach young German Protestants than any of the excellent histories which continue to be written by scholars in Germany, Britain, North America, and elsewhere. The compelling questions posed in the introduction to the website raise fundamental moral questions and anticipate a website that presents meaningful stories of unambiguous Christian resistance to Nazism.

The inclusion of photographs, documents, and audio clips adds to the interest, and the decision to tell the story of Christian resistance largely through bite-sized biographies of famous (and not so famous) Germans is surely the most engaging approach available. Included are the expected personalities like Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, Wüttemberg Protestant Bishop Theophil Wurm, and the Kreisau Circle, along with Catholic Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen and Anglican Bishop George Bell, to provide some international and ecumenical flavour. But there are also lesser known Christians: attorney Hans Buttersack, vicar and teacher Ina Gschlössl, teacher Georg Maus, and vicar Katharina Staritz. The witness of their lives and opposition to Nazism within the ecclesiastical realm demonstrate that there were indeed members of an “other Germany” who did not bow to Hitler or abandon persecuted Jews.

EvangelischerWiderstand06In the “About the exhibition” section of the site, Claudia Lepp and her colleagues explain their historical assumptions and methodology. They argue that the resistance against National Socialism “continues to be one of the most volatile chapters of twentieth century German history,” express their concern about “the progressive loss of communicative memory from eyewitnesses to events,” and note “the problematic nature of resistance.” Delving into the historiography of the German churches under Nazism, they identify a shift during the 1980s away from a focus on the Confessing Church and towards four new issues: 1) the role of resistance in the everyday life of Christian congregations and the question of who was motivated by their Christian faith to aid the victims of persecution; 2) the significance of “less noted” groups like the Religious Socialists, liberal Christians, Christians in the National Committee for Free Germany, conscientious objectors and those who deserted on account of their Christian faith; 3) the personal faith of resistance members and its relationship to their ethical and political thinking; and 4) the proper historical presentation of resistance “detached from forms of heroization.”

In response to these questions, the Protestant Working Group for Contemporary Church History hopes their online academic exhibition will cover “the entire range of Protestants’ resistance under the Nazi regime, including its manifestations and ambivalences.” Here the scholars behind the exhibition focus on “Christian resistance,” which they define as “resistance engendered by the Bible and bound by traditional fundamental Christian values.” And they identify several forms of resistance,

from partial discontent to disobedience and protest up through coup attempts, resistance in the narrower sense of the word. At issue was defending the Church’s right of existence and the authenticity of the Christian message from the threat of ideological dictatorship as well as defending the rule of law and human dignity in an unjust regime.

The rationale closes with the claim that “the exhibition clearly establishes that resistance motivated by Christian faith was invariably the exception among the wide range of options for Christian and ecclesiastical action in the Nazi era.”

Except that it doesn’t. Visitors to the “Evangelischer Widerstand” website are unlikely to leave with the impression that Christian resistance was the exception in the Third Reich. I have quoted extensively from “About the exhibition” because it explains two basic flaws that run right through the website: the definition of resistance and the assumption of resistance.

Concerning the definition of resistance, nowhere does the site actually define the term. This is baffling, given that historians have been debating the definition of resistance intensively since the 1970s, employing or critiquing terms like resistance, opposition, non-conformity, dissent, protest, or immunity. Throughout the English website, however, resistance is employed almost universally; opposition is used a handful of times, but non-conformity and dissent are absent. There is one article on “Everyday Protest” in which discusses “minor forms of social disobedience,” but also uses both the words “resisted” and “protest and assertion,” avoiding clarity on the issue. On the German site, Widerstand is used throughout, with Opposition, Resistenz, and Verweigerung showing up occasionally, though they are never defined. The German article equivalent to the “Everyday Protest” article is even more confusing, for the article itself is called “Verweigerung im Alltag,” but includes the words “widersetzten sich,” “sozialen Ungehorsams,” and “Nichtteilnahme.”

The result of the near-universal employment of Resistance and Widerstand is to suggest that every church protest against some specific Nazi policy or particular encroachment into the ecclesiastical realm was akin to a principled opposition to National Socialism as a movement or to a forcible attempt to overthrow the Hitler regime. The professional historical scholarship on the German churches in the Third Reich abandoned this simplistic interpretive approach decades ago. There’s no good reason why the Protestant Working Group for Contemporary Church History, filled with excellent scholars, should employ such an outdated interpretive concept of resistance today.

The second weakness of the website is the assumption of resistance. The treatment of individuals and topics runs from heroic resistance to compromised resistance, but never to indifference, compromise, or collaboration, which were in fact the normative responses of Christians in Nazi Germany. For instance, in the “Fundamental Questions” section of the site, the introduction begins with a window called “Action at the Margins,” which states that “Resistance in totalitarian regimes means action at the margins: The divide between (un-)lawfulness and justice, between courage and foolhardiness, between reasons of state and conscience. Christians’ resistance against National Socialism is no exception here.” The introduction moves on to discuss “Christian Resistance” within the context of a totalitarian Nazi regime, “Action in Obscurity.” Another window on “Fundamental Questions” briefly mentions that the questions of resistance are not merely about “black and white or good and evil.” After that, however, there follow several more windows on motivations for resistance, Christian and Church resistance, and denominational and ecumenical resistance.

Further along, a “Contradictions” area notes how Christian faith could also “crush the potential for resistance.” Yet even here the authors of the text do not consider indifference, compromise, or collaboration. They only note that resisters grappled with the command of Romans 13 to obey political authorities and debated “the ethical justifiability of tyrannicide.” The text continues: “This ambivalence is reflected in many biographies, even ones where faith initially made supporters of the NSDAP out of individuals who later turned their backs on National Socialism and became its opponents.” So ambivalence is present, but generally appears to have been overcome in the lives of Christian resisters. Other parts of the “Fundamental Questions” section treat issues such as Christian ethics, defense of others, consideration of consequences, gender-specific resistance, and contrasts between clergy and laity. But the net result is still a site devoted only to resistance, and not to a consideration of the wider range of responses to Nazism among Protestants—or Catholics, for that matter.

EvangelischerWiderstand05A similar analysis could be made of the timeline. Here the web historians offer up three streams of articles—on the “Regime,” on “Majority Protestantism,” and on “Christian Resistance.” There are entries about Hitler’s misleading pro-Christian statements, the German Christian Faith Movement, and other aspects of the history of Protestant collaboration with the Hitler state. Still, in the crucial 1933-1934 section, the 19 articles devoted to aspects of Christian Resistance are almost double the 10 entries given over to the compromised majority Protestants, once more creating the impression that Christian Resistance was, in fact, the most obvious Christian response to the Nazi dictatorship.

One might protest that the aim of “Evangelischer Widerstand” is just that—to highlight Protestant resistance. Fair enough, but when the stated goal of the Protestant Working Group for Contemporary Church History is to “appeal to users with different educational backgrounds and interests and of different ages” (i.e. to engage a younger, web-surfing generation) for the purpose of “educating the general public about the problematic nature of resistance,” such an unbalanced telling of the story creates a false impression on uninitiated viewers of the website. Coupled with the misleading use of the term resistance for all forms of ecclesiastical opposition, “Evangelischer Widerstand” as a flawed educational resource.

EvangelischerWiderstand03Because of these two weaknesses in the website’s approach to presenting the history of the German churches in the Third Reich, “Evangelischer Widerstand” works best when it tells the stories of the heroic, deeply-principled Christians who acted decisively against the regime and its policies. Elisabeth Schmitz is a good example. Just as Manfred Gailus has recently argued in his fine history Mir aber zerriss es das Herz. Der stille Widerstand der Elisabeth Schmitz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), Elisabeth Schmitz was a remarkable figure. A member of the “World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches” from 1928 on, she conscientiously taught religion, history, and German to high school students but refused to join the National Socialist Teachers’ Association. Instead, she joined the Confessing Church, soon criticizing its spokesmen for their disparaging comments about Jews and challenging its leaders to intervene on behalf of “non-Aryan” Germans. This protest culminated in her 1935 memorandum “On the Situation of German Non-Aryans,” described by the website as “arguably the most explicit protest within the Confessing Church against the persecution of Jews.” Schmitz wrote that the German Church was “inescapably entangled in this collective culpability” and could hardly expect forgiveness when “it forsakes its members in their desperate straits day for day, stands by and watches the flouting of all of God’s commandments, does not even venture to confess the public sin, but instead—remains silent?” Alongside this work within the Confessing Church, Schmitz courageously quit her teaching position in 1938. Applying for early retirement, she informed the Berlin school board that, “I have become increasingly doubtful whether I can teach my purely ideological subjects—religion, history, German—as the Nazi state expects and demands of me,” adding that, “this constant moral conflict has become unbearable.” She spent the rest of the war years aiding persecuted Jews, returning to the classroom once again after the Hitler regime had been swept away.

“Evangelischer Widerstand” is less effective in more complex situations, as in the case of the journal Junge Kirche (Young Church). Ralf Retter’s thorough study of the Confessing Church periodical, published as Zwischen Protest und Propaganda: Die Zeitschrift “Junge Kirche“ im Dritten Reich (Munich: Allitera Verlag, 2009), argues that the journal was engaged in Resistenz (non-conformity) though not Widerstand (opposition) between 1933 and 1936. During this time, it opposed the German Christian takeover of the church governments, promoted the Barmen Confession, opposed both the introduction of the Aryan Paragraph in the churches and the abandonment of the Old Testament, affirmed the traditional historical narratives defending the long-standing presence of Christianity in Germany, supported the emergent ecumenical movement, and even criticized Nazi interference in the realm of the church. However, Retter also details the ways in which Junge Kirche abandoned the more radical Dahlemite branch of the Confessing Church after 1936, and how by 1939, its pro-Nazi editorial tendencies were growing clearer and clearer.  When Junge Kirche linked its embrace of Hitler’s war aims with its mission to foster piety and provide spiritual encouragement among German Protestants during the Second World War, it’s editors turned it into a stabilizing presence in the Third Reich—quite the opposite of a force for resistance.

In contrast to Retter’s nuanced portrayal, the online article “The Magazine ‘Junge Kirche’” (part of the “Christian Resistance” stream) explains how the church press “played a crucial role in communication and the exchange of information within church opposition.” It explains how Junge Kirche served as a “forum for opinions within the Confessing Church” and a source of information about wider German church life. It describes, quite rightly, how Nazi censorship limited the journal’s ability to report on church news and how the editors circumvented regulations by quoting Nazi or German Christian press reports, publishing the journal under a separate “Verlag Junge Kirche” in order to protect the real publisher, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. However, the decline of the journal as a forum for protest is greatly minimized, while there is no mention of its support for aspects of Nazism. The online text reads as follows:

Pressure on the editorial staff of the “Junge Kirche” to conform increased steadily, especially after the Nazi government changed its church policy in 1935. The balancing act between conformity and self-assertion grew more and more challenging. Government regulations had become so drastic by 1938 that the still remaining independent church press no longer had any latitude to report independently. The Reich Chamber of the Press eventually ordered the discontinuation of all religiously motivated magazines in the summer of 1941 on account of the war.

In the end, then, the website “Evangelischer Widerstand” is a bold and innovative attempt to present the history of Christian resistance to a new generation. It holds great potential to become the leading online educational site for the history of German Protestantism under Hitler. For that very reason, it is incumbent upon the editors from the Protestant Working Group for Contemporary Church History to define and contextualize their use of “Christian Resistance.” Doing so would make their dynamic website into the premier Internet source of information about all aspects of the history of German Protestantism in the Third Reich—from the heroic to the disgraceful.

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Review of Sonya Grypma, China Interrupted. Japanese Internment and the Reshaping of a Canadian Missionary Community

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Review of Sonya Grypma, China Interrupted. Japanese Internment and the Reshaping of a Canadian Missionary Community (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), xvi + 305 Pp., ISBN 9781554586451.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

china-interuptedIt is surely regrettable that the considerable contributions made by the Canadian churches to the early twentieth century missionary endeavours are now largely forgotten, or in some cases deplored as an example of “imperialist cultural aggression.” In fact, a hundred years ago, in proportion to their size and resources, the churches of Canada sponsored more missionaries at home and abroad than any other nation. The young men and women who volunteered their services were responding to the popular call for “the evangelization of the world in this generation.” China was the preferred destination, and indeed became the flagship of European and North American missionary expansionism.

This proved to be a short-lived endeavour, spanning only from 1890 to 1950. It was both rewarding and life-threatening. In 1900 the Boxer Rebellion forced many missionaries to flee from their postings. In 1926 a similar political turmoil led to a widespread, if temporary, evacuation. But the most serious challenge came after the Japanese had occupied much of eastern China. When war broke out in December 1941, all those missionaries, like other British, Canadian, American and Dutch civilians, who had chosen to remain at their posts, were interned for the duration of hostilities.

Sonya Grypma is a professor of nursing in British Columbia, and her interest was drawn to a small coterie of half a dozen Canadian missionary nurses who were interned for nearly four years in exceedingly horrendous and degrading conditions. Her account is based on the surprising amount of survivors’ personal and written records which she has blended into a convincing narrative and commentary. Though necessarily focusing on these interned nurses and their partners, she seeks to place their experiences in the wider context of mission history. She regrets that the closure of the North China Mission as a result of the civil war and communist take-over in 1949 triggered a silencing of the historical record and only helped to keep the tragedy of internment from Canadian public attention. This silence was deepened by the fact that no Japanese apology or reparation was offered to these interned civilians. Grypma’s study is therefore a most welcome corrective and one which throws light on this small but significant episode in Canadian Church history.

Her account is also notable in that she carefully avoids the kind of hagiographic treatment so often found in missionary histories. Instead, she adopts a warmly sensitive but critical evaluation of the sufferings endured, particularly by the women internees. She rightly notes that the majority of these Canadian nurses were “mishkids”, that is, they were the children of missionaries who had gone out to China a generation before. These women had been born and brought up in China, but returned to Canada for their professional training. Their decision to return to China in the late 1930s was their response to the call for nurses, so urgently needed throughout China, in the same spirit that had inspired their parents. Nursing was a chance to return to the land of their birth. Also, Grypma surmises, they hoped to find amongst the eligible bachelors in the mission field a refined and dedicated partner. Indeed many did.

The younger missionaries were impatient with the pietistic approach of their parents. They believed that practical service was as effective a witness as preaching. They were also more sensitive than their elders to the consequences of western imperialist exploitation of China. At the same time they enjoyed living comfortably in the mission compounds. They were not free from the paternalistic mentality of doing good to their charges, with whom they did not much socialize. Even though the missionary cohort was upheld by its sense of compassion for the poor and sick, until internment they had had no direct experiences of the humiliations and poverty of China’s millions.

When the war broke out in Europe in 1939, China seemed relatively calm. In 1940 when Godfrey and Betty Gale were married near the missionaries’ seaside resort, life seemed very pleasant. But in 1941 the situation in Asia grew much tenser. The consular offices urged women and children to be repatriated before it was too late. Betty Gale, now expecting a baby, was undecided. She packed her trunks, but then unpacked them again. To stay meant increased risk; to depart guaranteed loneliness. Her colleague Florence Liddell decided to take her two children back to Canada, but could not tell when she and Eric, the Olympic champion runner, would be reunited. In fact, they never were. Eric died of a brain tumour in February 1945, still in captivity. But Betty determined that she would stay and support Godfrey, in the hope that their marriage would be enhanced even in such terrible times. It was a choice she never regretted—at least in public. Instead she claimed that the years of internment had provided a test of their character and perseverance. It was a difficult but invaluable opportunity to understand God’s purposes for their lives.

The first few months after Pearl Harbor saw the missionaries confined to their quarters, though they were still able to have the services of a Chinese cook. But in September 1942, when they were moved to Shanghai, their expectations that they would be repatriated were dashed, even though Betty’s missionary father was one of the lucky ones. They had to recognize that an internment camp was as much of a mission field as anywhere else, though their forbearance was sorely tried when they were placed along with hundreds of the snobbish and wealthy Shanghai internees, who made no secret of their hostility and even contempt for missionaries. They had difficulty shaking the perception that they were bizarre creatures eager to evangelize. Conditions were stark; the dirty and contaminated buildings were infested with insects. While Godfrey was called on to treat patients, Betty sought ways to escape some of the more repulsive aspects of camp lie by busying herself with care of their daughter. She was even able to take up some nursing duties.

Their final two years were spent in even more pernicious conditions in the bomb-damaged, rat-infested warehouse of Pudong Camp across the river from Shanghai’s Bund. As the Japanese prospects for victory faded, so conditions for their prisoners only grew worse. By 1945, bombing raids on Shanghai were an incessant danger. But even more ominous was the shortage of food, as was the effect on their health of the complete lack of privacy. The facilities were sparse, dirty and cold. In this camp, the internee population was more crude, aggressive and at times violent. As camp physician, Godfrey was in constant demand. But even his strength was sorely weakened by an attack of tuberculosis, which was to take many years to heal. The lethal negligence of the Japanese authorities undoubtedly contributed to the deaths of thousands throughout the internment camp system.

Despite all, Betty Gale sought to make the camp “a happy place” for the children. She brought to the task the resources of the Christian tradition for seeing suffering as a redemptive experience. By such means she resisted victimization and defeat. And after liberation she never engaged in recrimination. Her faith enabled her to come to terms with the meaning of the disasters she and her colleagues had endured.

Grypma’s account of the harrowing experiences of these missionary nurses adds further details to the magnificently comprehensive study by Greg Leck, Captives of Empire: The Japanese Internment of Allied Civilians in China, 1941-1945 (Bangor, PA: Shandy Press, 2006). Her achievement is both to bring alive the personal dimensions of these families, as well as to analyze the wider setting of their China years. China, for them, was a place where committed Christians went to live out their faith in tangible ways. In the 1940s the internment camps became social laboratories for testing the Christian principles of kindness and long-suffering under the most trying conditions. The interruption of this dedicated service was a deplorable and cruel disaster. And it was equally regrettable that, for these missionaries, the opportunity to return to complete their years of service never occurred again. But we can be grateful to Sonya Grypma that she has so capably laid out for us the record of these young Canadians’ service overseas, and had broken through the veil of silence which has for so many years prevented their story from being better known.

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