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Review of David Cymet, History vs. Apologetics: The Holocaust, The Third Reich, and the Catholic Church

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2011

Review of David Cymet, History vs. Apologetics: The Holocaust, The Third Reich, and the Catholic Church (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2010). 489 pp. ISBN 978-0739132937.

By Robert Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

This book is a somewhat surprising entry in the ongoing wars over Catholics, the Holocaust, and Pius XII, especially in terms of the background and experience of its author. David Cymet, born and raised in Mexico City, traveled to the United States in 1944 as one of the first two Latin American students to study at an American rabbinical school. After four years at the Mesivta Torah Vodaath in Brooklyn, he returned to Mexico to study architecture, followed by an academic career teaching architecture at his alma mater, the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico, and then at the National University of Mexico. He also served the Mexican government in various capacities from the 1950s through the 1970s, for example, in the National Housing Institute and in the Ministry of Human Settlements. In the 1980s he moved to the United States, where he began working for the New York City Department of Education in 1986, also earning a doctorate at the University of Delaware in 1991. Described in his author’s note as “a student of the Holocaust since his earliest youth,” Cymet spent the first decade of the twenty-first century – presumably retired from his multiple careers – researching and writing this book.

We might be surprised when a trained architect from Mexico, after a distinguished public and academic career, writes a 500-page book on history for Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. We will be less surprised when the subject is the Holocaust. Furthermore, though it is almost fifty years since Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy became a first salvo in the Pius XII wars, the level of controversy has scarcely diminished. Thus we will not be surprised that David Cymet, a Jewish man raised in a Catholic country, has chosen to concentrate on the Catholic Church, theVatican, and the wartime Pope, and that he comes to harsh conclusions.

Cymet begins with the observation that Jews were not in a position to critique the Catholic Church in the first years after 1945. They had much more pressing concerns, such as immediate assistance to survivors, finding visas for DPs, and securing the place of Jews inPalestine(xi). Cymet then gives credit to major authors who began to probe the role of the Catholic Church, including Hochhuth, Saul Friedlander, Guenter Lewy, Klaus Scholder,  and Carlo Falconi, as well as later figures such as Michael Phayer, Gitta Sereny, and Fr. John Morley, SJ (xiv-xvi). “The aim of this study,” he says, “is to look critically at the polemic and present a view of the issues within the wider context of their contemporary political and ideological background” (xvi).

There is no doubt that Cymet tilts toward the more critical observers within the “wider context.” His opening statement about “defenders” of the Catholic Church, who provide the “apologetics” mentioned in his title, is harsh indeed: “Unlike their not-so-distant cousins – the Holocaust deniers – they did not claim that the Holocaust never happened, but rather chose to take cover behind half-truths, misrepresentations, and subtle distortions. At the margin of legitimate discussion beholden to historical truth, the defenders of all sorts aimed at derailing the discussion by creating a thick cloud of confusion and doubt” (xvi).

Flaws can be found in this book. In one chapter he mentions Guenter Lewy correctly, but then calls him Lewy Güenther in endnotes, repeating this mistaken last name and mistaken spelling through a sequence of five notes (13). He praises Doris Bergen’s work, but in his bibliography he cites her as the author of In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (2000), rather than correctly noting the editors, Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (461). He is careless of chronology at times, such as when he says Guenter Lewy “reacted” to We Remember (1998) and its claim that Cardinal Faulhaber was a defender of Jews. When Lewy, as quoted, called it “little short of falsification of history when Faulhaber’s sermons in 1933 are hailed . . . as a ‘condemnation of the persecution of Jews,’” Lewy may have been right; but his statement in 1964 was not a reaction to aVatican publication of 1998 (9).

Despite these lapses and despite Cymet’s occasionally impassioned prose, with words such as “mean-spirited” and “diabolical” signaling his point of view, his thorough and detailed telling of the story makes for a sobering read. He accepts David Kertzer’s view (The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, 2001) that Christian anti-Judaism cannot be seen as significantly different from racial antisemitism, and he finds many Catholic statements in Germany and elsewhere in which common cause with racial antisemites is clearly expressed. His chapter on “Catholic Europe ‘Defends’ Itself from the Jews” begins with Humani Generis Unitas, Pius XI’s unfinished encyclical often regarded as a significant attack on antisemitism. But Cymet notes the residual antisemitism in those parts which justify the “social separation” of Jews and the justification for Christians defending themselves against Jews, “as long as the unbelief of the Jewish people persists” (142). He then describes anti-Jewish legislation written with Catholic support in Poland,Italy,Hungary, and Slovakia prior to the war (150-63). In a chapter on “The Final Solution in Christian Europe” (305-74), he emphasizes the obvious, that this murder took place in Christian countries. He also points out the instances in which Catholic leaders protested in favor of Catholics of Jewish descent, but not, despite many entreaties, against the deportation and murder of Jews as Jews.

Cymet’s chapter on “Vatican Response to the Final Solution” first notes that the Klerusblatt in Germany described the Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935 as an “indispensable safeguard for the qualitative make-up of the German people” (375). He also describes Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary, Italy, and Vichy France as “clero-Fascist” countries which increased the severity of their anti-Jewish laws from 1938 to 1942, until they fed into the killing process itself. What was the Vatican response? Here Cymet points out the many avenues of information available to the Vatican, while stressing the silence that ensued. In a segment on “The Rome Deportations, a Paradigm of Vatican Policy,” he quotes Michael Phayer: “No other event placed Pius XII in greater physical proximity to the Holocaust than the deportation of the Roman Jews.” The paradigm for Cymet is seen in his conclusion that, here as elsewhere, “the Church stood calmly at the sidelines” (387).

Cymet makes extensive use of Kertzer, Morley, Lewy, Phayer, Saul Friedlander, and a host of others. I do not think he approached this project from a place of neutrality, with the thought that he might end up defending the Catholic Church, for example. However, he prepared his brief energetically. Those who would argue for the defense must acknowledge that his evidence for the prosecution weighs heavily. He identifies a burden of anti-Jewish prejudice, human insensitivity, and silence in the face of evil which fitted itself too comfortably within the Catholic nations, the “bloodlands,” of Central Europe.

 

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Review of Antonia Leugers, Jesuiten in Hitlers Wehrmacht. Kriegslegitimation und Kriegserfahrung

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2011

Review of Antonia Leugers, Jesuiten in Hitlers Wehrmacht. Kriegslegitimation und Kriegserfahrung, Krieg in der Geschichte, Band 53 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöning, 2009), 233 Pp. ISBN 9783506768056.

John S. Conway,University of British Columbia

The Jesuits in Germany had a roller-coaster history in the twentieth century. Persecuted by Bismarck in the newly-created German Reich, and later expelled from the country, they were re-admitted in 1917 as a concession to German Catholics in order to uphold their war efforts. In the inter-war period, they build up some notable schools and colleges, and re-established three Provinces. But when the Nazis came to power in 1933, their fortunes suffered a sharp downturn. Nazi radicals accused the Jesuits of being the Vatican’s shock troops, threw doubt on their loyalty to the “new”Germany, attacked their institutional life, particularly their youth work, and later on confiscated many of their properties. At the same time, the younger members, like all other German males, were conscripted for military service, even including those who were already ordained as priests. During their war-time service after 1939, these Jesuits regularly and faithfully wrote to their clerical superiors, relating their war experiences, and in return received circular bulletins from their Provincial headquarters.

The almost 3000 letters from the nearly 300 Jesuits who served in military units from 1939-1945, form the basis of Antonia Leugers’ research. However, the fate of these Jesuits in Hitler’s armies was strikingly affected by a secret decree issued from Hitler’s headquarters at the end of May 1941, shortly before the invasion of the Soviet Union. This ordered all soldiers belonging to the Society of Jesus to be demobilized forthwith, and returned to civilian life. Curiously Leugers does not investigate the reasons behind this remarkable edict, since she is interested only in its impact on the Jesuits themselves. The great majority were overwhelmingly dismayed. This implacable order seemed to challenge their loyalty to the army and the nation. It might well signal the escalation of the repressive measures against the Jesuit order already launched by the Nazi Party. No explanations were ever provided to the individual soldiers, and Leugers provides none to the reader.

Although her sample is very small, and lacks any comparative examination of other series of soldiers’ letters home from the front, Leugers systematically analyses how the war affected this particular group of dedicated Catholics. In particular she is interested in how these men justified their participation in Hitler’s aggressive wars, and how they reacted to the increasingly brutalizing conditions, especially after the German war machine invaded the Soviet Union. She shows that, surprisingly, even after Hitler’s decree, many Jesuits still continued to serve in the army. Their reports on how they reacted to the devastations inflicted on the Russian people are particularly illuminating.

Essentially, Leugers shows, Jesuits were influenced both by the traditional Christian justifications for war, derived from centuries-old models, but also by the more recent development of a youth culture which advocated comradeship and adventure in a romanticized setting and applied it to Germany’s national destiny. Both sets of justification were compressed into the slogan: “All for Germany,Germany for Christ”. The evidence provided shows clearly that Jesuits were eager to demonstrate their support of this slogan by serving in the military’s ranks, all the more since conscientious objection was illegal and carried a death penalty. Their enthusiastic desire to join in with their comrades in this God-blessed struggle against godless Bolshevism, or its handmaid, Jewish skulduggery, was limited only by the refusal to take part in the less moral pastimes of the common soldiery, such as drunkenness and fornication. But political scruples were absent – or at least were never reported to their superiors. Many Jesuits shared naive views about the war’s purposes. They could believe that the invasion of Russia would lead to its liberation from the evils of Communism, and to the re-Christianization of the people. So too they shared a widespread belief that a distinction could be drawn between service forGermany’s sake and the acceptance of Nazism’s ideology and practices. Most seemed to cling to the self-induced idea of the nobility of military service and to the notion of heroic sacrifice, if necessary, of their lives for their country.

Leugers does not explore how far – if at all – these sentiments were the means of avoiding any far-reaching crises of conscience. The extracts here given provide no hints of any psychological conflicts, although this may well be due to the writers’ awareness of their letters being censored. For the most part, the Jesuits failed to recognize how far they were being made accomplices of the Nazi terroristic regime. All too readily they accepted the Nazi propaganda about the enemy, while deluding themselves that they were fighting for a “better”Germany. The fact remains that only a handful of Jesuits recognized – too late – that active resistance was required against all forms of Nazi indoctrination and terror. The rest, captivated by their religiously-flavoured nationalism, were condemned to share the moral and physical disasters which overwhelmed Germany in the final years of Hitler’s Reich.

 

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Review of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932 – 1933: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 12

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 16, No. 4, December 2010

Review of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932 – 1933: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 12, ed. Larry L. Rasmussen, trans. Isabel Best, David Higgins, and Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 680 pp. ISBN 978-0-8006-8312-2.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The twelve months from November 1932 to October 1933 covered in this, the twelfth volume of Bonhoeffer’s collected writings, were to be of crucial significance, not just for the career of this young theologian, but for his nation as well. The political and social turmoil, which had resulted in violent clashes between rival gangs of Communists and Nazis in many of Germany’s major cities, culminated in the seizure of power by the National Socialists, led by Adolf Hitler, on January 30, 1933. It was the beginning of what Bonhoeffer, within a few days, was to describe as “a terrible barbarization of our culture”, the onset of what he later called “the masquerade of evil”. This insight was eventually to lead to Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler’s dictatorship and to his execution for high treason in April 1945. This period is therefore notable as marking the beginnings of his opposition to the Nazis’ imposition of totalitarian measures that were to have such fateful consequences.

This volume brings together the surviving letters, articles, papers and sermons from this short turning point in Bonhoeffer’s life. As before, the translation of the German original is excellent, and the editorial footnotes very helpful. In addition we are given a chronology of these months, a very full index of names, giving the positions held by those mentioned, as well as an exhaustive subject index. This volume’s value is enhanced by having not only Larry Rasmussen’s introduction, but also the translation of the afterword provided by the German editors. In addition, certain materials have been added since the original German edition was published. On the other hand, in contrast to the preceding volume 10, which covered Bonhoeffer’s stay abroad, this volume is less revealing. During these months in Berlin, Bonhoeffer was in close contact with his friends and family, so clearly most of the significant discussions and debates about his ideas and conduct were undertaken verbally and were not committed to paper or have not survived. Nevertheless, the remarkable number of his extant communications provides us with major clues, which of course were more fully explored in Eberhard Bethge’s full biography, first published in 1966.

If this volume contains only small items not hitherto known, it is still an impressive piece of scholarship. The centrepiece of this volume is the controversy over the future of the German Evangelical Church. This dispute greatly escalated after the Nazis came to power and particularly after the passage in April 1933 of the Law ordering the removal of people of Jewish origins from official positions. On the one side, the vociferous faction known as the German Christians sought to align the church as closely as possible with the new political regime. They supported Hitler’s goals for a renewed powerful Germany, and saw in him a leader who would restore the nation’s strength by boldly and forcefully attacking those they considered to be the national enemies, particularly Communists and Jews. By such a stance, they believed, the church would regain its popularity and demonstrate its loyalty to the state. On the other side were those whose conservative rootedness deplored such innovative departures from traditional Lutheran doctrines. From the beginning, as these documents make clear, Bonhoeffer championed this adherence to orthodoxy, and became, at the age of 27, one of the most vocal critics of the German Christians and their deplorable and false doctrines. He was thus caught up, as is clear from his correspondence and papers, in the turmoil and fluidity that assailed the churches. What is remarkable is the sense of foreboding reflected in his words from the early months of Nazi rule. He refused to share the widespread enthusiasm that swept through many sections of German conservative society, including the Evangelical Church. As early as February 1933, he was expressing his view that authoritarian leadership and ecstatic patriotism were dangerously misleading traits. Most particularly he now began to take issue with the German Christians’ attempts to introduce the state’s anti-Jewish regulations into the church by banning anyone of Jewish origin from holding offices in the church, and even by calling for their expulsion altogether. This led to his being invited in June 1933 to be one of a team drawing up a firm statement of orthodox belief, known from its place of origin as the Bethel Confession. Unfortunately the church leaders delayed its publication, and asked for revisions, so that eventually Bonhoeffer felt it had been watered down and dissociated himself. It was one of the factors that led him to decide to leave Germany and take over pastoring two German parishes in London in October 1933, which is where this volume ends.

We are not yet provided with a full account of the struggles that Bonhoeffer must have gone through to reach this decision. But it clearly meant leaving the two jobs he held, first the lectureship in systematic theology at Berlin’s university, and second a chaplaincy at the Technical College. The latter appointment was clearly a mistake since few students wanted counselling, and none appeared at his office hours. By contrast his students at the university were enthralled, even though Bonhoeffer lectured at 8 in the morning on Saturdays and Wednesdays! Fortunately several students preserved their notes from which a partial text has been reconstituted, which is included in this volume. But it is notable that Bonhoeffer carefully avoided any reference to current political events. Nor were the students consulted about his sudden career change.

No less striking is the material on Bonhoeffer’s extra-curricular engagements. In these months he diligently coached a confirmation class for young lads in a north Berlin slum district, and even moved there so that they could call on him in the evenings. No less significant was his involvement with the wider European ecumenical movement, particularly through the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches. Bonhoeffer had been appointed the World Alliance’s Youth Secretary for central Europe shortly after his return from America in 1931, and was responsible for organizing youth conferences designed to overcome national barriers and hatreds. But much to the regret of his mentors in this work, Superintendent Diestel and Professor Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, Bonhoeffer was too preoccupied with his other responsibilities to give much time to the World Alliance. His most significant action was to travel to a conference in Sofia,Bulgaria, in September 1933, where he urged the World Alliance leaders to adopt a resolution deploring the German state’s measures against the Jews and protesting against the German church’s readiness to adopt the so-called “Aryan paragraph” discriminating against anyone of Jewish origin. At this point, Bonhoeffer felt that his outspokenness on this subject might well land him in a concentration camp if he returned to Germany. His decision to accept his next ministerial assignment in England was therefore a judicious move.

But the World Alliance continued to mean much to Bonhoeffer. This was the period when he was wholeheartedly persuaded of the need for world peace. In this cause he was a pupil of Siegmund-Schultze, the leading pacifist of the German Evangelical Church. But Siegmund-Schultze was to be forcibly expelled from Germany by the Gestapo in June 1933, which must have been a great shock and bitter blow to Bonhoeffer and his friends. It was not until the following year, at the World Alliance’s conference in Denmark, that Bonhoeffer’s most significant contribution to the issue of world peace was expressed. This volume, however, only hints at his developing ideas.

Karl Barth, whom Bonhoeffer greatly admired, was opposed to his leaving Germany, and the letters between the two reveal Barth’s strong regret and Bonhoeffer’s apologetic tone. But certainly we can be sure that Bonhoeffer’s steadfast denunciations of the false doctrines of the German Christians, as expressed in the Bethel Confession, were to pay a role in May 1934, when Barth composed the equally stringent rejection of false doctrines in the Barmen Declaration.

Equally notable is the text of Bonhoeffer’s often misunderstood statement on “The Church and the Jewish Question” of June 1933. This undoubtedly reflects the Lutheran theological tradition about these “outcast” people, and calls for their eventual conversion. But it also challenges the church to oppose the harsh measures taken by the state, and if necessary to bring the apparatus of the unjust and illegitimate state to a halt. He then goes on to proclaim the necessity of not allowing the state to prescribe who can be a member of the church. In reality, the church consists of Germans and Jews standing together under God’s Word. Racial characteristics have nothing to do with membership in the church. Unfortunately Bonhoeffer left this vital topic unfinished and rarely returned to it in subsequent years.

Our thanks are due to the editors and translators for their excellent work in maintaining the standard of previous volumes. It is to be hoped that the whole series will soon be completed for English-speaking readers. For as Vicki Barnett, the General Editor, rightly notes: “These volumes are a significant contribution to twentieth century theological literature, church history and the history of the Nazi era”. They afford us a detailed view of “Bonhoeffer’s historical context and its great challenges for the churches and for all people of conscience.”

 

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Review of Ralf Retter, Zwischen Protest und Propaganda: Die Zeitschrift “Junge Kirche“ im Dritten Reich

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 16, No. 4, December 2010

Review of Ralf Retter, Zwischen Protest und Propaganda: Die Zeitschrift “Junge Kirche“ im Dritten Reich (Munich: Allitera Verlag, 2009), 387 pp.  ISBN: 978-3-86906-066-8.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Ralf Retter’s study of the Protestent journal Junge Kirche questions common historical assumptions about its role in the church politics of Nazi Germany. His detailed study of the periodical, which ran from 1933 to 1941, arises out of his doctoral dissertation at the Technische Universität Berlin. Drawing not only on his analysis of the publishing activity of Junge Kirche but also on the previously unpublished correspondence among those responsible for the journal, Retter tackles three discrete topics: the history of the German press in the Third Reich, the German Church Struggle, and the German Resistance. His main question is whether Junge Kirche was really just the mouthpiece of the Confessing Church and an organ of the church resistance to Nazism, as has been argued in the past. Like many other recent studies of the German churches under Hitler, his answers complicate our understanding of the relationship between Christianity and Nazism.

Junge Kirche was the leading Confessing Church journal in the Nazi era. More than that, it was one of the few supra-regional Protestant periodicals to survive in Hitler’s Germany, and was the Protestant periodical most likely to be read within Germany and circulated abroad. But how, asks Retter, did it function in the highly regulated press environment of the Third Reich? Clearly, it was oriented towards questions of theology, faith, and the proclamation of the gospel, avoiding subjects that spilled over outside the church and touching on state policy. However, given the anti-clericalism of the Nazi state and Junge Kirche’s insistence on the independence of the church to preach and teach according to Scripture, the journal found itself positioned against National Socialism (11). The key leaders who tried to steer the journal through the church politics of the Third Reich were Hanns Lilje, Fritz Söhlmann, and Günther Ruprecht, of whom only the first is fairly well known.

One of the challenging aspects of publishing during the Nazi era was censorship. Retter wonders how frequently and to what extent Junge Kirche suffered at the hands at censors, but also what role self-censorship played in the editorial process and (more controversially) to what extent those responsible for the journal might have identified with aspects of National Socialist ideology and rule. This raises the deeper question of whether Junge Kirche was really engaged in resistance against Nazism at all and, if so, whether its activities should be considered opposition (Widerstand) or merely non-conformity (Resistenz). Was it, Retter wonders, a force for the stabilization or destabilization of the regime (17)? In answering these questions, he devotes a good deal of attention to the argument that the journal was engaged in Resistenz between 1933 and 1936 (127), as it opposed the German Christian takeover of the church governments and supported the Barmen Confession, opposed both the introduction of the Aryan Paragraph in the churches and the abandonment of the Old Testament (188), 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 (208). Still, Retter is careful to point out that this Resistenz took place in a context of traditional German-national sentiment.

By 1936, however, as the Confessing Church split and the pro-Nazi Fritz Söhlmann assumed the sole editorship of Junge Kirche, the journal lost most of its character as a centre for Resistenz. In rejecting the Dahlemite branch of the Confessing Church, Junge Kirche found itself caught up in internecine struggles and little able to engage in any significant opposition to the German Christian Movement. Siding with traditional Lutherans who were unwilling to break completely from the German regional church governments and the Reich Church authorities, Junge Kirche ceased functioning as a mouthpiece for the Confessing Church, argues Retter. By 1939, the pro-Nazi tendencies in the journal which had been present even from the beginning were given more or less free reign (particularly after Lilje, who had taken a more critical line towards the regime, was ousted from his editorial post). The self-censorship of publisher Ruprecht and editor Söhlmann kept the names of leading Nazis from appearing in the journal’s pages. And when Junge Kirche combined the embrace of Hitler’s war aims with its mission to foster piety and provide spiritual encouragement for Germans caught up in the Second World War, it grew into a stabilizing presence in the Third Reich—quite the opposite of a force for resistance.

For Retter, the fate of Junge Kirche mirrored that of the Protestant churches as a whole. Like the churches, it was reduced to the role of preaching the Word. Like the churches, its defence of the Reformation Confessions was interpreted by the state as political disloyalty and opposition. And like the churches, it had to work to clarify its relationship with the state. By choosing to support the “intact” Lutheran regional churches of Württemberg, Bavaria, and Hanover, Junge Kirche chose for cooperation with the National Socialist regime—a stance that opened the door for it to function as a propaganda arm of the state. Thus it was that the early period of protest gave way (in the language of the book’s title) to propaganda—active support for the Nazi regime and its conduct of war—a transition which was more self-induced than censor-driven (365). Indeed, the propaganda effect of Junge Kirche was especially profound, argues Retter, since it was a confessional publication and not a Nazi Party periodical. Its readers might well have assumed that Nazism was quite acceptable to the Christian churches of Germany.

All of this raises interesting questions pertaining to the relationship between Christianity and Nazism, highlighting once more the conflicting messages and understandings of the religious situation among German Protestants (and perhaps among Nazis, too). Concerns over Nazi anticlericalism and warnings about the movement becoming a political religion are mixed with Confessing Church support for aspects of Nazi antisemitism and the foreign policy of Lebensraum as well as calls to preach and promote piety in a particularly German cultural manner consistent with the conservative nationalism that marked the Protestant churches. In highlighting the presence of these inconsistencies and hypocrisies within the publishing arm of the Confessing Church, Retter contributes to our understanding of Christianity and Nazism as both partners and rivals attempting to win the hearts and minds of Christians in the Third Reich.

 

 

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Review of Jürgen Elvert and Jürgen Nielsen-Sikora, eds., Kulturwissenschaften und Nationalsozialismus

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 16, No. 4, December 2010

Review of Jürgen Elvert and Jürgen Nielsen-Sikora, eds., Kulturwissenschaften und Nationalsozialismus. Historische Mitteilungen im Auftrage der Ranke-Gesellschaft, 72 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2008), 922 pp. ISBN: 978-3-515-09282-1.

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

This review appeared first in German History, Vol. 28 No. 2 (June 2010): 246-48, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.

At the collapse of the Nazi State, some Germans committed suicide, unwilling to face a world without their Führer; some Germans were brought to Nuremberg, where they were placed on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity; and most Germans began to act as if they had never been attracted to Adolf Hitler, despite sometimes copious evidence to the contrary. Already in 1946 Max Weinreich wrote Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People;  but most professors managed to cultivate the idea, common to a large portion of their German fellows, that they had played no role in Nazi crimes and had merely been caught under the boot of a totalitarian regime. This postwar denial endured largely intact for a generation or more. In the past two or three decades, however, it has been overturned by scholarship which shows that ‘good Germans’ of every sort succumbed to the attractions of Hitler and worked willingly within and for the Nazi State. Such an assessment clearly includes German professors and their universities. Despite purges of Jewish faculty, despite the burning of books, despite violations of academic freedom, the Nazi goal of ‘Gleichschaltung’ (coordination) within the universities is now widely thought to have been ‘Selbstgleichschaltung.’ It was professors who helped burn the books and professors who competed for preferment after their Jewish and leftwing colleagues had been removed.

Kulturwissenschaften und Nationalsozialismus is one of several recent attempts to focus on scholars in the humanities as one aspect of this problem. The plan for the book, formulated in 2000, involved thirty-five disciplines. Participants hoped to create a foundation for future scholarship, showing where research on each of these disciplines stood at the time and creating a sort of grid by which interdisciplinary comparisons could be made. Jürgen Elvert somewhat disarmingly admits that the goals of the project were not achieved (p. 17). No contributor could be found for some areas, some contributors agreed to produce a chapter but failed to deliver, and some contributors produced work unworthy of being printed. Nonetheless, this ‘failed’ project resulted in twenty-eight chapters plus an introduction, filling some 922 pages. It is a very useful work, though hardly a quick read and somewhat uneven in quality and thoroughness. Individual contributions vary from a low of thirteen pages to a high of sixty on standard topics such as history, sociology, literature and political science, with much attention to philology as well as fields as diverse as classical archaeology and modern theater.

Hans-Joachim Dahms, one of the contributors, was an early player in the uncovering of academic complicity. In 1987 he co-edited Die Universität Göttingen unter dem Nationalsozialismus and he has since written extensively on philosophy during the Nazi era. Here he gives a very useful assessment of that discipline, arguing that no actual ‘National Socialist philosophy’ emerged during the Third Reich, nothing to equal, for example, the anti-Jewish, anti-Einstein ‘German Physics’ pushed by two Nobel laureates, Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark. He blames this upon the quarrelsomeness of German philosophers and their ongoing arguments over neo-Kantianism, logical positivism, and other branches within their field. Many important philosophers, however, did endorse the Nazi state, most famously Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s supporters later argued that his famous pro-Nazi address in 1933 as Rektor atFreiburg had nothing to do with his philosophical ideas and represented merely an early, mistaken assessment. Dahms cuts him no such slack: ‘It has long been clear that his NS enthusiasm during the Third Reich never stopped and that even after 1945 he never distanced himself from National Socialism in general or from his own actions during that time’ (p. 43). Dahms sketches the careers of other pro-Nazi philosophers, such as Alfred Baeumler ofBerlin, who said at the time of the book burning in 1933: ‘What we remove today are poisonous materials which were collected during a time of false tolerance. It is our task to let the German spirit within us become so powerful that such materials can no longer be collected’ (p. 48).

Horst Junginger, taking on the discipline of Religionswissenschaft, illustrates some of the irony and complexity of the Nazi era. As a student of comparative religion, Junginger cannot approve the old tendency to study religion only from the perspective of orthodox Christian belief. He mentions Adolf von Harnack, for example, arguing a century ago for the primacy of the Christian point of view (p. 52). Junginger then bemoans the postwar influence of Karl Barth, whose Christology rejected all non-Christian faiths as false attempts to find the true God (p. 85). Comparative religion of the sort practiced today expects a more modern approach, more objective, based upon empirical evidence and similar to anthropology in its method. Ironically, Junginger finds that just that sort of open modernity produced a strange variety of racist and völkisch religious movements during the Nazi period. Many of the individuals he describes began as Protestants. They studied theology and then often spent time on a mission field, perhaps in India, as in the case of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer. Back in Germany their linguistic skills and openness to non-Christian religions allowed them to fill newly created university positions in comparative religion. Within the nationalistic and racist atmosphere of their day, however, they were likely to use their freedom from Christian orthodoxy to endorse syncretistic beliefs closely related to the Nazi Weltanschauung.  Some, like Hauer with his German Faith Movement, tried to return to a purer, pagan past. Others, like the Deutsche Christen within the official Protestant Church, used comparative religion to reach the unlikely conclusion that Christianity had no actual connection to Judaism, but had always been entirely and inherently anti-Jewish. Walter Grundmann, professor of theology at the University of Jena and founding director of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, worked at de-judaizing the Christian tradition and even Jesus himself (as described recently by Susannah Heschel in The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany). Dozens of professors attended conferences at Grundmann’s institute and contributed to its work. No scholar today would consider the work of Grundmann or the ideas of Hauer objective attempts to study and learn from religious traditions, yet many professors made that claim in the Nazi era and achieved success.

Every chapter in this book acknowledges the affinity of German scholarship for the ideas of the Nazi state, though authors differ in their assessment of culpability and in the breadth of their critique. Most academics never cooperated with the regime quite as much as the regime would have liked; most retained some loyalty to the ideals of their profession. Yet the story remains grim and much closer to the one told by Max Weinreich in 1946 than defenders of academia might like to think. This book is an important source for insight into the phenomenon. As is often the case, these German authors could have paid more attention to scholarship produced in Britainand America. However, most made good use of archival records, correspondence, and other forms of primary documents. Kulturwissenschaft und Nationalsozialismus thus takes its place beside similar volumes, such as Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwissenschaften (Hartmut Lehmann and Otto Gerhard Oexle, eds., 2004) and Die Rolle der Geisteswissenschaften im Dritten Reich, 1933-1945 (Frank-Rutger Hausmann, ed., 2002), in helping us understand the failure of humanities scholars in Nazi Germany to be humane.

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Review of Emmy Barth, An Embassy Besieged: The Story of a Christian Community in Nazi Germany

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 16, No. 4, December 2010

Review of Emmy Barth, An Embassy Besieged: The Story of a Christian Community in Nazi Germany (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, Plough Publishing, 2010), 306 pp. ISBN 13: 978-1-60899-879-1.

 By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The Bruderhof was the name given to a small Christian experimental community established in 1919 by Eberhard Arnold, a charismatic teacher and preacher, as a protest against the militarism and nationalism which had led to Germany’s recent defeat. He sought to recreate a community based on the ideas of the radical Reformer, Jakob Hutter, whose disciples had long since been banished from Europe and survived only in small groups in the Dakotas and western Canada. They aimed to follow Tolstoy’s lead in living a communal life without individual property, but witnessing in unity to their common piety and pacifism. In the 1920s this group settled on a dilapidated farm in a remote corner of Hessen near Fulda and began to propagate their idealistic vision as best they could. At first, this alternative life-style attracted a number of young people both from Germany and from other parts of Europe, drawn together in fervent discipleship of brotherly love according to the Sermon on the Mount. By 1933, the community had grown to over 100 persons.

The advent of the Nazi Party to power drastically altered the Bruderhof’s fortunes. Eberhard Arnold was quite clear about the incompatibility of his vision with Nazi ideology. It was not long before the local authorities began to harass the community, making use of allegations that they were a bunch of crypto-communists or even drug users. Already in November 1933, the farm was raided by armed policemen who openly declared that the Bruderhof had no place in Hitler’s Germany. The Bruderhof’s charitable status was revoked, their fostering of children at risk was suspended, and various sanctions damaged the profitability of their farming operations. In early 1934, they were forbidden to operate a separate Christian school, so that the school-age children had to be evacuated to Switzerland. In the following year, the introduction of military conscription led to the emigration of all their young men, whose pacifist beliefs prevented them from joining any military force. At first, a refuge was found on a remote hillside farm in Lichtenstein, until the authorities there bowed to Nazi pressure. Another section of the community then went to England in 1936, where they were befriended by Quakers and relocated to a farm in the Cotswolds. Unfortunately Eberhard Arnold died of a botched operation in November 1935, but even without his inspiring leadership the group managed to maintain their spiritual integrity. However, this was not enough to alter the Nazis’ resolute determination to get rid of them all. In April 1937, the police again raided the Bruderhof in force, declared its property to be confiscated, and ordered the community’s immediate disbandment. Three of the leaders were imprisoned for nearly three months, but were eventually released. The survivors emigrated from Germany to England and began to reorganize their witness once again.

This whole sad story is excellently told by Emmy Barth, one of Eberhard Arnold’s descendants, who is the community’s archivist in what is now their main centre in upper New York State. She has skillfully woven together and translated the surviving material of Arnold’s sermons, speeches and letters, and has been able to discover in Berlin the relevant documents in the records of the Reich Ministry of Church Affairs for 1936-37. While this book is entirely written from the point of view of those affected and tells us little that is new about the Nazi persecution of these minor sects, nevertheless her story is a valuable illustration of self-reliant spiritual strength refusing to capitulate in the face of ruthless and unfeeling paranoia.. Thanks to Eberhard Arnold’s prophetic vision, the Bruderhof movement continues to survive and indeed flourish. Emmy Barth’s sequel to this book, No Lasting Home: A Year in the Paraguayan Wilderness, continuing the story of their subsequent wartime flight from England to Paraguay, was reviewed in our March 2010 issue (Vol. 16, No. 1).

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Review of Richard Bonney, ed. and trans., Confronting the Nazi War on Christianity: The Kulturkampf Newsletters, 1936-1939

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 16, No. 4, December 2010

Review of Richard Bonney, ed. and trans., Confronting the Nazi War on Christianity: The Kulturkampf Newsletters, 1936-1939. Studies in the History of Religious and Political Pluralism, Vol. 4 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), 578 pp. ISBN 978-3-03911-904-2.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

This volume presents a fascinating primary source on church-state relations in National Socialist Germany from the remilitarization of the Rhineland in early 1936 to the eve of World War II.  The full title of the newsletters collected here was “Kulturkampf: News Bulletin of the Religious Policy of the Third Reich.” As Bonney explains in his introduction, these newsletters were published in London in English by the Kulturkampf Association, also known as the League for the Defence of Christianity, with funds from Erwin Kraft and encouragement from Bishop George Bell. Bonney estimates a circulation of about 2,500 copies. The English edition was translated from a French original, the work of German Catholic exiles in France. Karl Spiecker, a former chief of the German press service, was the editor. No doubt his experience was key in giving the bulletin its professional quality. Some of the newsletters have already been published in German, edited by the distinguished church historian Heinz Hürten: ‘Kurturkampf, Berichte aus dem Dritten Reich, Paris’. Eine Auswahl aus den deutschsprachigen Jahrgängen 1936-1939 (Regensburg: F. Pustet, 1988). Bonney’s book now makes this material available in English, along with some portions that Hürten did not include.

The newsletters are remarkable in their depth of coverage and analytical sophistication. Spiecker and his contributors, none of whom are identified, were surprisingly well informed on everything from international affairs to local developments. They devote what comes to almost 150 pages in the book to the Anschluß of Austria and its ramifications for the churches yet also note the significance of quotidian matters, such as the July 1938 attempt by a German merchant to “Aryanize” his daughter’s name, Judith, by lopping off the “h.” Consideration at three levels of courts left the outcome uncertain (416-7). Many of the newsletters reproduce passages, some of them extensive, from Nazi speeches and publications: Der Stürmer and Das Schwarze Korps, but also others that are no longer well known. Readers interested in any aspect of life in Nazi Germany in its understudied “middle period” are certain to find pertinent tidbits and possibly even major insights here.

The broad outline of the position presented in the newsletters is fairly predictable. Informed readers will be able to anticipate the central claims already from the titles – of Bonney’s volume, with its reference to the “Nazi War on Christianity” and of the newsletter, with its invocation of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf. The newsletters depict National Socialism as an ideological, institutional, and moral assault on Christianity that evolved from crude frontal attacks led by pagans and neo-pagans to a much more dangerous scheme to create a nazified, national church. For the people who assembled and distributed the bulletins, what must have been incredibly difficult and also risky work held out the promise of rallying forces beyond Germany in support of the churches, in particular the Roman Catholic Church and its most beleaguered elements. For Bonney, publishing this material now is a way to pay tribute to clergy who did not give in to Nazism (the book, like the German edition of Raul Hilberg’s Täter, Opfer, Zuschauer, is dedicated to Bernard Lichtenberg). It also appears to be a response to Richard Steigmann-Gall’s “revisionist position” (23), to which Bonney refers at numerous points.

Like every rich primary source, the Kulturkampf newsletters also contain surprises. The authors demonstrate an impressive grasp of the complex and dynamic connections between Nazi treatment of the churches and Hitler’s foreign policy. They devote a significant amount of space and understanding to developments within German Protestantism and to fostering a spirit of Christian solidarity. Rather than preaching the now familiar contention that the Roman Catholic hierarchy, led by an anti-CommunistVatican, settled for Hitler as the “lesser of two evils,” the newsletters explicitly reject that view. National Socialism was totalitarian, they insist, and as an ideologically conceived religion or substitute for religion, it posed an absolute and mortal threat with which there could be no compromise. The authors of the newsletters clearly recognized the centrality of antisemitism to the Nazi program, but in their analyses, the persecution of Jews is always a point of departure for discussion of the position of institutionalized Christianity. Most telling perhaps is the lengthy coverage of Hitler’s infamous speech of January 30, 1939, in which he “prophesied” that the next world war would result in the annihilation of Jewry. That part of Hitler’s tirade goes unremarked here, as the newsletters focus on another threat he made: that continued “misbehaviour” on the part of the churches would result in complete separation of church and state in Germany (488).

The usefulness of Bonney’s volume is unfortunately limited by the brevity of the introduction – much more could have been done to explain exactly what the newsletters were and how they were produced and received – and the paucity and unevenness of the footnotes. Nevertheless, this is a valuable contribution that provides much to ponder for all students of National Socialism.

 

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More reviews of Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 16, No. 4, December 2010

More reviews of Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 384 pp., ISBN: 978-0-691-12531-2.

Susannah Heschel’s book about Walter Grundmann and the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (1939-1945) continues to attract attention and stimulate debate. Below are links to four reviews (two we’ve already published and two that are new to us) that we believe will be of interest to readers of the ACCH Quarterly:

1. Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., Professor of New Testament at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, in the predecessor of the ACCH Quarterly, John Conway’s ACCH Newsletter, available here.

2. Björn Krondorfer, Professor of Religious Studies and the Department Chair for Philosophy and Religious Studies, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, in theologie.geschichte and ACCH Quarterly (Vol. 16, no. 2), available here.

3. Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Associate Professor of History, Bowling Green State University, on the listserv H-German, available at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=25673.

4. Bernard M. Levinson, Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies and of Law, University of Minnesota, and Tina Sherman, Brandeis University, in Review of Biblical Literature, available at  http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/7576_8280.pdf.

 

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Review of Dyron Daughrity, The Changing World of Christianity

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2010

Review of Dyron Daughrity, The Changing World of Christianity (New York, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 290 pp. ISBN 978-14331-0452-7.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Dyron Daughrity teaches World Christianity at Pepperdine University in southern California. He rightly believes that such a course should now be taught from a global perspective and no longer with the earlier emphases on Europe or North America. Today there are far more Christians in Africa than in Western Europe or North America. The region of Latin America and the Caribbean is easily the most Christianized part of the world. These facts represent a changing of the guard. So this new text book reflects these new positions and stresses not only the geographical spread of Christianity, but also the fact that it is the most global, most diverse and perhaps the most influential religion in history. Such a comprehensive survey in the space of less than three hundred pages requires not only a skilful absorption of secondary sources, but also an ecumenical and eirenic disposition and an ability to adopt a judicious balance between the various components of such a study. It is good to say that Daughrity admirably displays these characteristics. While there is no complete bibliography, each chapter has extensive footnotes for the sources used, as well as questions appended for analysis which are designed to prompt further discussion. Despite some passages which call for greater precision and depth, Daughrity’s lucid style makes for easy undergraduate reading.

Daughrity’s approach is geographical, dividing the world into eight regions, but beginning with the historical evolution from the Middle East and ending in Oceania, suitably for the world’s largest faith. Following the lead of such current scholars as Lammin Sanneh and Philip Jenkins, Daughrity traces the shift in numbers from the northern hemisphere to the south, when he sees the tipping point as occurring around 1980. The reception of the Christian message as brought by earlier northern missionaries made all the difference, and demography will maintain the momentum. While he warns that religious growth is uncontrollable and unpredictable, he is clearly optimistic for the future of Christianity, especially in its more free-flowing Pentecostal forms.

His survey of each region begins with a general description of the political and social background, followed by a section on the background of Christianity in this area. He then moves to an examination of present-day Christianity, followed by a short piece on each country. This allows him to make interesting and sometimes provocative comparisons. For instance, he suggests that the present weakness of Christianity in the Middle East can be traced back to the divisions in Christian ranks at the time of the Muslim conquests. The solidarity of Islam and its tighter control over its adherents has prevented any Christian resurgence. By contrast, the defeat of Muslim forces in Spain in the late Middle Ages can be attributed to the solidarity – fanaticism? – shown by the Catholics of that region. He even suggests that, had Ferdinand and Isabella failed, then the whole exploration of the New World might well have been undertaken by Muslims.

In Eastern Europe, Daughrity of course welcomes the overthrow of Communist rule with its attendant persecution of the churches, but suggests that in Russia, the residue of the Soviet oppression of faith is like a cultural mist which does not evaporate instantaneously. In Hungary, however, the overthrow of Communist rule has revived freedom of religion and made that country a leading example of religious pluralism.

Turning to Western Europe, Daughrity explores the reasons why this region, which was Christianity’s heartland for so many centuries, is presently experiencing a period of increased scepticism and secularism. Europe for so long provided the leadership corps, widened the theological and scholarly horizons and mobilized the missionary forces which carried Christianity to all corners of the globe. But in recent decades a widespread disillusionment with “organized religion” has been notable. In part, the political changes of the last two centuries have almost everywhere broken the ties between Church and State which were increasingly seen as barriers to individual freedom, or to some at least a hindrance to spiritual growth. Furthermore the rapid changes in immigration and demographic patterns have led to a pluralisation of religious allegiances in Europe. Many people now fear that Islam may become the predominant religion in twenty-first century Europe. The “De-Christianization of Europe” is already being discussed. At the same time, the two major wars of the last century undoubtedly challenged all authority patterns. Dietrich Bonhoeffer provocatively argued in favour of a religionless Christianity, one where Christian social ethics would be practised without the burden of authority or doctrine. Daughrity supports the view taken by Grace Davie that Western Europeans are in a phase of “believing but not belonging”. When humanitarian movements strikingly follow Christianity’s prophetic voice, one could argue that, in this sense, Christianity is being reinvented.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, despite the brutal even genocidal manner of Christianity’s introduction five centuries ago, this region nevertheless now encompasses the heartland of Christianity. Paradoxically, this legacy imposed by the European conquerors is now vibrant and indigenized. But it still contains overtones of injustice, especially towards the original native peoples. Predominantly Catholic,Latin America nevertheless has seen an explosive growth of Protestantism, especially Pentecostalism. This community has the advantage of a much more flexible church polity and is free from the regrettable burden of Catholic history.

In his account of Christianity inNorth America, Daughrity lays stress on the darker side of the impact on native peoples and the long support for slavery. Nevertheless, its ethos is very different from that found inEurope. The absence of any politically dominant state church led to an amazing plurality of Christian endeavours, particularly in revivals, which have continued to the present. This resilient tradition, he hopes, will be enough to counter the corrupting influence of acquisitive capitalism.

The remarkable fact about Asiais that Christianity, as brought by European colonialists, has expanded rapidly now that the imperial era is finished. The successful indigenization of this originally Asian faith has seemingly been able to avoid the kind of syncretism which has weakened Christian witness elsewhere. Yet Asiais still riven by religious conflicts, especially in Muslim majority areas, and the future of Christianity remains problematic.

Africa is now second to Latin America in having the most Christians in a cultural block. Again, this growth has accelerated after decolonization. While Ethiopiacan boast of a continuous Christian adherence without European intervention since the early centuries, most of the continent’s Christians resulted from the nineteenth century missionaries’ activities, both Protestants and Catholics, of such well-known figures as David Livingstone. Today,Africa as a whole struggles to find political and social models of its own. The lack of success may perhaps be attributed to past colonialism, or to the effect of the slave trade, or to the indigenous poverty which hampers the kind of developments seen in Asia. Nevertheless, the faith thrives. Daughrity’s survey of the background of African Independent Churches is very helpful. His conclusion that Africa is suffused with religion seems well documented.

Finally there is Oceania, where a multiplicity of Christian influences has spread across the many archipelagos, making Christianity the most universally accepted and integrated cultural force. But this process is severely understudied, due to the marginalization of Christian missionary work by anthropologists who concentrated on tribal indigenous cultures. Daughrity pleads for a more balanced account of Christianity’s contribution to this fascinating and far-flung area.

One hundred years ago, Protestant missionaries were calling for the “evangelization of the world in this generation”. Daughrity claims that this goal has now been achieved in that every part of the globe has heard the call of Christ and the responses are still reverberating. Christianity, in its various and sometimes conflicting forms, affects virtually every country and society. Daughrity’s survey of the various factors involved in this world-wide process will be appreciated by students as a valuable guide for further and deeper investigation.

 

 

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Review of Tanja Hetzer, “Deutsche Stunde”: Volksgemeinschaft und Antisemitismus in der politischen Theologie bei Paul Althaus

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2010

Review of Tanja Hetzer, “Deutsche Stunde”: Volksgemeinschaft und Antisemitismus in der politischen Theologie bei Paul Althaus (Munich: Allitera Verlag, 2009), 296pp.  ISBN: 978-3-86520-328-1.

By Christopher Probst, Howard Community College

Tanja Hetzer’s in-depth study of the widely published, genteel Erlangen theologian Paul Althaus originally appeared as the author’s Ph.D. dissertation for the University of Sussex.  It is a work of intellectual history in the finest sense of that term.  In addition to shedding new light on his personal development and career, Hetzer mines a broad range of Althaus’s works, providing rich analysis of his thinking about Jews and Judaism over the course of a career that spanned many decades.  The fullness of the biographical information is woven together with Althaus’s developing thought, giving the reader a full-orbed picture of this crucial but bleak aspect of his life and work.

During the Nazi era, Althaus self-consciously occupied a place in the Protestant “middle.”  That is, he did not align himself formally with either the generally Nazi-wary Confessing Church or the largely pro-Nazi German Christians.  Even so, argues Hetzer, the Protestant middle propagated many of the same völkisch and antisemitic tropes and cultural codes as did their counterparts in the German Christian movement.  This realization is heightened by the fact that Althaus sought consciously to build bridges between the middle and the more “moderate” members of the German Christian movement (17, 241).  In impressive fashion, Hetzer situates Althaus’s urbane and theologically sophisticated antisemitism in the intellectual environs of neo-conservative Lutheran theology but also in the broader cultural currents of anti-egalitarianism, anti-liberalism and the “Wilhelmine mentality of authority, power and severity” (40).  The author thus forwards the picture of a theologian who traded in antisemitic stereotypes, but whose worldview was nonetheless fairly complex.  This was no rabble-rouser on the margins of Protestant Christianity.  Althaus was a gifted and revered theologian with a public face.

Althaus maintained that the Protestant churches “greeted the German turning point of 1933 as a gift and miracle of God,” ascribing theological significance to the ascent of the Nazi regime, and marveling that the German people had been saved from both “the abyss” and “hopelessness” (23).  He also co-authored the Erlangen Opinion on the Aryan Paragraph (1933), in which he and his colleague Werner Elert called for the implementation of the Aryan Paragraph in the church, demanding that Jewish Christians refrain from taking “official positions” in the Protestant church.  In the early postwar era he at first chaired the denazification committee at Erlangen, then was suspended from his university post (largely due to his anti-democratic, pro-Nazi pronouncements in Die deutsche Stunde der Kirche (The German Hour of the Church, 1933) and Obrigkeit und Führertum (Authority and Leadership, 1936)), and finally was re-instated to his chair approximately one year later (20).  Such important biographical details are coupled with detailed analysis of his theological writings and represent the book’s greatest strength.

Another strength of the book is the author’s convincing portrayal of Althaus’s long-term ideological development.  Crucial to this is her discussion of Althaus’s Weimar-era writings.  Hetzer demonstrates convincingly that “his worldview solidified far before the seizure of power of the National Socialists” (11).  A key component of this worldview is Althaus’s theologically sophisticated concept of the “orders of creation” (Schöpfungsordnungen).  In his 1934 work Theologie der Ordnungen (Theology of the Orders) Althaus described these orders, which include family, Volk and nationality, as divinely sanctioned forms which represent “essential conditions of the historical life of mankind.”  Hetzer demonstrates both that Althaus’s orders of creation theology was well-established by the time the Nazis came to power and that the Erlangen theologian connected the orders to his refined system of theological ethics (17, 143).

In the mid-1920s, German Protestantism’s relationship to the “völkisch question” was “still in many respects unsettled” (149).  Due in large part to Althaus, the issue moved from the margins of the Protestant discussion to the center.  His experiences with the German völkisch movement while he served as a military chaplain in occupied Poland during the First World War had helped to shape his views about the Volk.  Then, in 1927 the 39-year-old Althaus delivered a lecture titled “Kirche und Volkstum” (“Church and Nationality”) to a church congress at Königsberg.  The lecture, argues Hetzer, signified a “caesura” with respect to Protestant attitudes toward the Volk and indeed toward the so-called “Jewish Question” (151ff.).  Here, Althaus offered a carefully constructed new political theology in which he complained of an “invasion by foreigners” (Überfremdung) in the areas of the arts, fashion and finance which he believed had led to a disintegration of the national community (Volksgemeinschaft).  The present distress of the German Volk, he railed, was due to the “Jewish threat.”  Even while generally avoiding open and direct antisemitism, Althaus “theologically legitimized and stylized” hatred of Jews (154).

The author includes an insightful discussion of the heated controversies engendered by Althaus’s antisemitic “entanglements” during the Third Reich (15-18).  It appears that this dark facet of Althaus’s past did not really begin to come to light until at least the late 1970s.  Also included is a very helpful and thorough bibliography of Althaus’s works, arranged chronologically (266-278).

This excellent study substantially augments our previous knowledge about the Erlangen theologian – and by extension the Protestant “middle” – during Weimar and the Third Reich.  There are no radical interpretive departures from previous literature on Althaus (e.g., Robert Ericksen’s Theologians Under Hitler).  Yet, the beauty of Hetzer’s book lies in its richness, depth and breadth – all of which enhance considerably our understanding of the anti-Judaism and antisemitism present within the Protestant church during Weimar and the Third Reich.  An English translation would enable students and others without facility in the German language access to this work, which is essential reading for anyone interested in German Protestantism during the first half of the twentieth century.

 

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Review of Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2010

Review of Hubert Wolf, Pope and Devil: The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich, translated by Kenneth Kronenberg (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 325 pp.  ISBN: 978-0-674-05081-5.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

In this English translation of Papst und Teufel (first published in 2008), Hubert Wolf successfully challenges the conspiracy theories and sensationalism of a number of playwrights, novelists, journalists, and historians who have assessed the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nazi state.  Remarkably, he does so without letting Catholic leaders off the hook or covering up their very real moral failures.  Making use of recently released materials from the Vatican Secret Archives, he has produced a provocative and highly readable account of the “view from Rome” during the turbulent decades between the two world wars, as well as new insights into the way Pope Pius XI and Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) understood, interpreted, and responded to the early stages of a catastrophe that culminated in world war and genocide after 1939.

Wolf begins with an analysis of Pacelli as nuncio in Germany from 1917 to 1929.  The failure of Benedict XV’s peace appeal in 1917 seems to have convinced Pacelli that direct papal intervention in the Great War (and future conflicts) was ill-advised.   Pacelli’s reports from this period also reveal his preoccupation with the ills of modernism (ranging from liberalism and socialism to contraceptives and coeducational sports) and his desire to make state-oriented German Catholic bishops more responsive to Vatican directives.   Although Pacelli was anti-democratic and anti-socialist, he was pragmatic enough to recognize the need for the Catholic Center Party to work with the Social Democrats in the Weimar Republic, and although he displayed a level of anti-Semitism that was typical among European Catholics in this era, he strongly condemned the virulent racism of völkisch groups he encountered in Germany during the 1920s.

Wolf follows up with an assessment of attitudes toward Jews and Judaism in the Vatican during the 1920s.  Unlike Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who posits a uniform and essentialist Catholic anti-Semitism, Wolf finds evidence of diverse views ranging from the philo-Semitism of Amici Israel, a Catholic organization promoting Jewish-Christian reconciliation, to the vehemently anti-Jewish orientation of Raffaele Merry del Val, head of the Holy Office under Pius XI.   Unfortunately, Pius XI took the side of the Holy Office in a controversy over reform of the Good Friday liturgy, leading to the censure of philo-Semites in the Congregation of Rites and the dissolution of Amici Israel.  Pius XI’s famous condemnation of anti-Semitism in 1928 was an attempt to deflect accusations that might emerge when he dissolved a pro-Jewish Catholic organization, as well as a way to distinguish between an “acceptable” Catholic anti-Judaism and racist anti-Semitism.   The back story Wolf reveals to Pius XI’s decree is a more nuanced story of moral failure than the one Goldhagen tells, but it still seriously undermines simplistic representations of Pius XI as a courageous opponent of anti-Semitism.

Wolf’s chapter on the Concordat of 1933 challenges the “package-deal thesis” promoted by Klaus Scholder, who suggested that Pacelli, as Papal Secretary of State, pressured German bishops to lift the ban on Catholic membership in the Nazi Party and encouraged the Center Party to support the Enabling Act—both in order to secure passage of a Concordat with the German government.   Nuncial reports as well as Pacelli’s notes on meetings with Pius XI and various ambassadors to the Holy See reveal that Pacelli was caught off guard by the German bishops when they announced they were lifting the ban.  Wolf argues persuasively that if Pacelli had been pulling the strings, he would have demanded something in return for this concession.  Instead, he had to negotiate the Concordat without some of his key bargaining chips.

In the end, both Pius XI and Pacelli made unpalatable compromises in order to preserve the Church’s ability to provide pastoral care under hostile regimes.   It was easy for them, as well as the German episcopate, to condemn Nazi ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg, but much harder to openly condemn a head of state—even Adolf Hitler.  In such cases, they preferred indirect approaches, refuting ideas that were contrary to Catholic teaching without naming the authors of those ideas.  Even in the context of race war and genocide after 1939, Pacelli (by then Pope Pius XII) indicated that he preferred public action by German bishops to direct intervention by the Vatican.   When such action was insufficient, Pius XII still considered his own hands tied.

Pope and Devil, by revealing the decision-making processes in the Vatican in such rich detail, presents us with a nuanced story that includes moral successes and failures as well as a large gray zone in between.   Wolf’s theological training, ordination, and prior years of experience in the Vatican Archives work to his advantage as he assesses the interplay of individual personalities and institutional dynamics in the Catholic hierarchy.  His ability to transmit his scholarship to specialists and non-specialists alike earned him the Communicator Award from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2004, and it continues to play out in his leadership of a critical online edition of Pacelli’s reports to Rome during the latter’s years as nuncio in Germany.  Some American readers will be disappointed that Wolf does not do more to engage credible scholarship on this side of the Atlantic, but perhaps his priority was to address readers who are more likely to have heard of figures like Goldhagen, John Cornwell, and Dan Brown—even though such authors make relatively easy targets.  In any case, the book is a refreshing contribution to a longstanding but still unresolved debate about the Vatican’s responses to National Socialism, particularly where Pacelli was involved.  It will not end the “Pius war,” but by demolishing the most egregious misrepresentations on both sides, it points the way toward more productive discussions in the future.

 

 

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Review of Shalom Goldman, Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2010

Review of Shalom Goldman, Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 367 Pp. ISBN: 9780807833445.

By Steven Schroeder, University of the Fraser Valley

In Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land, Shalom Goldman highlights the work of a wide variety of Zionist sympathizers—from diplomats, humanitarians, and literary figures, to mystics, rabbis, Christian preachers, and religious radicals—who served the goal of Jewish statehood, albeit with varied intentions. He argues that “Jewish Zionism would not have succeeded without the help of Christian Zionism” (p. 99), and illustrates this claim in six accounts; three from ca. 1850 to the founding of Israel in 1948, and three from 1948 to the present day.

An introductory chapter precedes these accounts, in which the reader will find a thorough historical overview of Christian and Jewish views of the Holy Land. Goldman stresses the less studied aspect of how the diverse, but overlapping, religious views of Christian and Jewish Zionists served the Zionist cause. He asserts that the two groups started out in very different positions in the late nineteenth century—with Christians focusing on pre-millennial dispensationalism, and Jews on the security of the Jewish people—but slowly merged their efforts in a more intentional and overt way from the 1970s on.

The first half of the book focuses on the century leading up to the creation of the state ofIsrael, highlighting the work of Christian and Jewish Zionists, the relationships forged between these two groups, and the results of their individual, and combined, efforts. The central figures in this section, and throughout the book, reveal many atypical thoughts and actions vis-à-vis the traditional views of their co-religionists, and the status quo at the time. For instance, the first chapter focuses largely on the work of British journalist and politician Laurence Oliphant, who attempted to establish a Jewish state in Palestine via Zionist settlement and diplomacy. Oliphant was a gentile humanitarian who claimed to have left Christianity in the 1850s in favor of a self-styled eclectic mysticism (p. 61). His unqualified support for the establishment of a Jewish state was an anomaly during a time when nearly all Christian Zionists assumed the accompanying conversion of Jews to Christianity.

Reverend William Hechler, Herbert Danby, and Arminius Vambery were other key Christian Zionists who stood out due to their pioneering work. Hechler, a chaplain in the British embassy in Vienna during the late nineteenth century, had joined forces with Oliphant in supporting Jewish pogrom victims in Russia during the 1880s. In Vienna, he utilized his position to further the Zionist cause by brokering meetings between his friend Theodor Herzl and the Grand Duke of Baden, as well as Kaiser William II. Unlike Oliphant but like most Christian Zionists, Hechler’s interest in Jewish affairs and Zionism was steeped in Christian dispensationalism. He declared that Jewish Zionists “were unaware that they were fulfilling Christian messianic expectations” (p. 103). Continuing in this vein in the next chapter is the work of Herbert Danby, who published works (e.g. in Bible Lands, a journal he founded) that explicated Christian Zionism. He also translated, from Hebrew to English, Rabbi Joseph Klausner’s path breaking book, Jesus of Nazareth. Klausner’s book and Danby’s translation were intended to defuse Christian-Jewish antagonism and convince Jews and Christians that they served the same God and the same political goals of the Zionist movement. Arminius Vambery held similar beliefs while serving as a British agent in the Ottoman Empire, where he furthered Hechler’s ambitions by arranging for Herzl an audience with Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1901. To be sure, Vambery, like Oliphant, was not a typical Christian Zionist, but rather a man of Jewish descent who adhered to a wide range of spiritual beliefs.

Nearly all of the Jews in this study had abandoned their assimilationist views to embrace Zionism in the wake of antisemitic pogroms throughout Europe during the late 1800s. The author stresses that these Zionists benefitted from Christian Zionist support. Jews who are highlighted in the first half of the book were mostly secularists, reflecting the majority Zionist view during the period in question, and they are presented as secondary figures to the Christian Zionists at this time. Nephtali Imber was a marginal Zionist figure, claiming fame for writing Hatikvah, a famous Zionist anthem that became the Israeli national anthem in 2004. Theodor Herzl’s and Joseph Klausner’s writings and work factored more significantly, but the author stresses that they relied heavily on gentile support (e.g. Hechler and Danby).

The second half of the book focuses on numerous individuals who continued to support the state of Israel after its founding in 1948, along with some present day figures who have taken up the cause. Most of the cases in this section reveal the significance, and continuance, of the work highlighted in the previous section and feature some individuals who broke with tradition and some who deepened it. Catholics Gilbert Keith (G.K.) Chesterton and Jacques Maritain are credited for breaking the mould of Vatican anti-Zionism and contributing to the radical shifts in postwar Catholic teaching, particularly during the 1960s (p. 198). Conversely, we find in the Protestant camp a strengthening and deepening of Hechler and Danby’s teachings in the thought and action of the likes of Pat Robertson and John Hagee, who unequivocally support the state of Israel—including the expansion of settlements in Palestinian territories—seeing it as a harbinger of the mass conversion of Jews to Christianity and the second coming of Christ. Ignoring these latter components, adherents of the Jewish settler movement (e.g., Gush Emunim, p. 286), find strong allies in these fundamentalist Christians.

Zeal for Zion is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship that examines both Christian and Jewish contributions to the Zionist enterprise. To be sure, some readers will question how representative of each respective group these individuals were, how cooperative Christian-Jewish Zionist work has been, and what, particularly, binds all of the disparate people and groups in the overall development of the Zionist project. Still, each account reveals important details and many surprising elements of Zionist history. Taken together with the author’s personal experiences (e.g. the influence of gentile pro-Zionist writers like Jorge Luis Borges during the 1960s and 1970s), it makes for a fascinating, significant book.

The valuable findings in this book provide numerous possibilities for future researchers, including further exploration of the ambivalent, if not antagonistic, base of this Christian-Jewish relationship in the Zionist movement. Indeed, the bases for Christian and Jewish Zionism have changed little since the nineteenth century, with each side serving its own purposes, with few exceptions. Religious radicals from both faiths have not fostered peace and mutual recognition in the Palestine/Israel conflict, or in Christian-Jewish relations. Moreover, the long-term ramifications of their views have not been explored in much depth. Within this book, Goldman has provided numerous examples of exceptional individuals who, while serving their respective goals, inadvertently engendered innovative engagement in Christian-Jewish dialogue—innovations that could be explored further and utilized for peaceful purposes.

 

 

 

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Review of Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 3, September 2010

Review of Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), pp. 608, ISBN 1595551387.

By Victoria J. Barnett, General Editor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition and Director of Church Relations, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

This is a badly flawed book. On one level it is simply a popular retelling of Bonhoeffer’s life drawn from familiar sources such as the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English edition, the Bethge biography, and Love Letters from Cell 92. Metaxas has also looked at the outtakes of the Doblmeier documentary interviews with Bonhoeffer’s students, so there are a few new anecdotes here. Much of the book, however, is a familiar patchwork of lengthy direct citations from the DBWE volumes, the Bethge biography, and Love Letters. It is also a consciously evangelical (in the U. S. context) interpretation of Bonhoeffer, his life, and times.

Neither of these factors are obstacles per se to a good new look at Bonhoeffer. A shorter biography of Bonhoeffer for the general audience is long overdue, and this one is readable enough. And there is certainly room for an evangelical examination of Bonhoeffer’s theological development in the context of his life and times. Bonhoeffer’s spirituality, his eloquent articulation of the life of discipleship in the world, and his powerful witness have always given him a wide following among evangelicals, and the trajectory of his theological and political development definitely has the character of a spiritual journey. A solid evangelical examination of Bonhoeffer in the historical context of what was happening to churches and theologians, both in this country and in Germany, would be fascinating—particularly if it dealt with the still under-researched discussions about Nazism that occurred among Baptists, Pentecostals and others at the evangelical end of the spectrum.

Unfortunately, that’s not the book Metaxas has written. There are two central problems here. The first is that he has a very shaky grasp of the political, theological, and ecumenical history of the period. Hence he has pieced together the historical and theological backdrop for the Bonhoeffer story using examples from various works, sometimes completely out of context and often without understanding their meaning. He focuses too much on minor details and overlooks some of the major ones (such as the role of the Lutheran bishops and the “intact” churches). The second is that theologically, the book is a polemic, written to make the case that Bonhoeffer was in reality an evangelical Christian whose battle was not just against the Nazis but all the liberal Christians who enabled them (in fact, Metaxas is much kinder to the secular humanists, but that’s probably because they were members of the Bonhoeffer family).

The result is a terrible oversimplification and at times misinterpretation of Bonhoeffer’s thought, the theological and ecclesial world of his times, and the history of Nazi Germany. There are numerous errors, some small, some rather stunning. The most glaring errors occur in his account of the church struggle, which is portrayed as the battle between the Nazi-controlled German Christians against Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who here leads the Confessing Church together with Martin Niemoeller. In Metaxas’ version, the Barmen declaration repudiates Nazi anti-Semitism, the Confessing Church breaks away from the Reich Church, and the neutral or intact churches are completely absent from the scene (there are not even index entries for Bishops Wurm, Marahrens, or Meiser, the last of whom is referred to but not named). Bonhoeffer of course leads the way, both in the name of true Christianity and on behalf of the Jews. This oversimplification of the battle lines and the complexities of the church struggle (and of Bonhoeffer himself) characterizes the portrayal of the entire period. National Socialism and its leaders are of course unambiguously anti-Christian. Most of the generals in the resistance against Hitler, we learn, are “serious Christians”. Luther’s anti-Semitism is attributed to his digestive troubles, and Metaxas does not address how anti-Semitism, whatever its source, had permeated the mindset of German Protestantism and the wider culture. There is a brief nod to the fact that Franz Hildebrandt is Christian but of Jewish descent according to the racial laws. Elsewhere, however, there is little distinction between converted Jews and secular or observant Jews, and his entire discussion of the persecution of the Jews and the churches’ responses is clueless. In some places it is offensive, as when Metaxas argues that supporters of the Aryan paragraph were not really anti-Semitic: “Some believed that an ethnically Jewish person who was honestly converted to Christian faith should be part of a church composed of other converted Jews. Many sincere white American Christians felt that way about Christians of other races until just a few decades ago.” (Why, some of their best friends …). Along the way Metaxas inserts shorthand summaries that range from the silly (Luther as “the Catholic monk who invented Protestantism”) to the bizarre (the difference between Barth and Harnack is compared to contemporary debates “between strict Darwinian evolutionists and advocates of so-called Intelligent Design”).

All of this, however, leads to a selective misreading of Bonhoeffer’s theological development and a profound misunderstanding of what happened to the German churches between 1933 and 1945. The failure of the GermanEvangelicalChurchunder Nazism was not that it was filled with formalistic, legalistic Lutherans who just needed to form a personal relationship to Jesus, but that it was filled with Christians whose understanding of their faith had so converged with German national culture that it tainted both their politics and their theology. (As an interesting aside, when I first interviewed Eberhard Bethge in 1985 he explicitly compared this kind of Protestantism to what he had seen of the American religious right. A thoughtful evangelical reading of the development of Bonhoeffer’s extensive writings on the church-state relationship and the public role of religion would be a major contribution to the field, but Metaxas doesn’t even mention that aspect of Bonhoeffer’s thought). What Metaxas fails to grasp is that there were many devout, well-educated, Bible-reading Christians in Germany who read their Losung each morning and fully supported National Socialism.

Moreover, Bonhoeffer’s theology, precisely because it was the theology of a devout, reflective, and faithful Christian, was far more complex than the narrow ideological confines to which Metaxas tries to restrict him. While Metaxas spends a lot of time on Bonhoeffer’s role in the ecumenical movement, he ignores the fact that many of Bonhoeffer’s ecumenical allies were precisely the kinds of “social gospel” Christians (and in some cases of a “liberal” bent) that he so despises. He also ignores the pacifism that shaped ecumenical leaders throughout Europe and dismisses its influence on Bonhoeffer himself. While Bonhoeffer may not have become a complete pacifist, he took it seriously, and his reflections on pacifism decisively shaped his readings of certain texts and it certainly shaped his early ecumenical activism. Metaxas grounds much of his theological argument upon Bonhoeffer’s early critique of American theology, particularly when he was at Union Seminary in 1931-32. Yet as critical as Bonhoeffer was of his professors and fellow students, he himself acknowledged how much he had gained from that year, and it’s striking that when he returned in 1939 it was with a nuanced acknowledgment of the strengths of U. S. Christianity (in light, I think, of the failures he had witnessed within German Protestantism). His essay “Protestantism without Reformation” reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of U. S. Protestantism at all points of the American church spectrum, not just the liberal end. Nonetheless, according to Metaxas, by the time Bonhoeffer leaves New York in July 1939 he has had an epiphany: the plight of the fundamentalists in the United States is just like the battle of the Confessing Church back home. “Here they were fighting against the corrupting influences of the theologians at Union and Riverside (Church), and at home the fight was against the Reich church.”

Well. There’s something going on here, but it doesn’t have much to do with real history and it’s certainly not Bonhoeffer. This book is clearly intended as theological biography, but it fails because Bonhoeffer’s theology cannot be read ahistorically (as Andrew Chandler’s astutely noted in his 2003 review of the Bonhoeffer Werke, “The Quest for the Historical Bonhoeffer”), and it certainly can’t be understood without addressing the complexities of Bonhoeffer’s thought as he struggled with the realities of his times.

That, in fact, is both the challenge and the potential for reading Bonhoeffer. Looking at Bonhoeffer in historical context removes him from any narrow theological box, evangelical or liberal. Bonhoeffer was deeply pious in a way that some liberal Christians (again, in the contemporary U.S. sense of that word) might find hard to connect with and it’s that piety that speaks directly to evangelicals around the world. At the same time, he was a highly intellectual and critical Christian, and therein lies his appeal for Christians on other points of the spectrum. More importantly, Bonhoeffer had witnessed firsthand what happens when faith and ideology converge. Thus, during the dark war years, when some church leaders, including his ecumenical colleagues, called for a “rechristianization” of Europe and a return to Christian values, Bonhoeffer explicitly repudiated it, both in Ethics and in his prison letters. He also warned his students at Finkenwalde against the dangers of an individualistic “personal relationship” to Christ. Bonhoeffer’s central concern remained the life of Christian faith in the world, yet his understanding of Christianity had been shaken and altered by the failures of his church under Nazism. In 1942 he wrote of “a Christendom enmeshed in guilt beyond all measure” and I personally think that any interpretation of his famous discussion of “religionless Christianity” needs to start there. A thoughtful and honest evangelical analysis of the complete Bonhoeffer, not just the parts that go down easy, would be useful. But Metaxas has simply pulled together the passages he likes and ignored anything that might complicate the picture he wants to create—the same thing of which he accuses others, when he writes on page 466: “Many outré theological fashions have subsequently tried to claim Bonhoeffer as their own and have ignored much of his oeuvre to do so … (they) have made of these few skeletal fragments something like a theological Piltdown man, a jerry-built but sincerely believed hoax.” Yes, indeed.

 

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Review of Michael Hirschfeld/Maria Anna Zumholz, eds., Oldenburgs Priester unter NS-Terror, 1932 – 1945. Herrschaftsalltag in Milieu und Diaspora

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Review of Michael Hirschfeld/Maria Anna Zumholz, eds., Oldenburgs Priester unter NS-Terror, 1932 – 1945. Herrschaftsalltag in Milieu und Diaspora (Münster: Aschendorgg Verlag, 2006), 818 pp. ISBN: 3-402-02492-6.

By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

This review appeared first in the Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 96 No. 1 (January 2010): 160-161, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.

This mammoth volume details the persecution of Roman Catholic priests in Oldenburg during the years of National Socialist rule.  Containing nearly 80 separate accounts of individual priests and clergy who ran afoul of the Nazi state, this compilation is a Festschrift for Joachim Kuropka, the historian at the local University in Vechta known for his regional histories of the Oldenburg region in Northwestern Germany and his scholarship on the Cardinal of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen.

This dense volume centers on Oldenburg, a long, slender sliver that technically belonged to the diocese of Münster but was cut off geographically by the diocese of Osnabrück. The northern sections were part of the Catholic diaspora, an almost exclusively Protestant bastion known for his strong support for the Nazis. In contrast, the southern regions, which included the regional centers of Cloppenburg and Vechta, was home to a thriving Catholic milieu.  With than 90 percent of the population consisting of registered Catholics, the Catholic parishes there boasted thriving ancillary organizations and a dynamic parish life.

The editors, Michael Hirschfeld and Maria Anna Zumholz, leave little doubt that the strength of the Catholic milieu in these southern regions contributed to the efficacy of actions that thwarted Nazi efforts to dismantle the building blocks of this Catholic subculture. They argue that the milieu in this region did not erode. The “indicators” of religious strength – the number of priests in a region, Easter attendance, etc. – show that the milieu, in spite of significant persecution, more than held its own. Nor did clergy contribute to an attitude of uncritical obedience to the Nazi state. Instead, they were in the forefront of the resistance to Nazi ideology, seeking to counter the anti-Christian attacks launched by the Nazi ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg. As such, these priests earned the special enmity of Nazi enforcers in the Gestapo, who cracked down – sometimes methodically, sometimes sporadically – on Catholic institutions and their associates.

To be sure, this focus on persecution – the arrests, the threats, the disruptions to parish life – is an indispensable part of the story of the Catholic church under Nazi rule. For in fact, as the section on regional Nazi perpetrators in the Gestapo, party and the courts makes clear, hardliners sought to eradicate nearly all traces of religious influence on German public life.

But this is a selective lens with which to view this era, one which is by definition, incomplete. The focus on persecution necessarily precludes an analysis of accommodations to the Nazi state made by other clergy either by choice or out of necessity.  Absent are what might be termed the grey areas in the relationship between the church and National Socialism. To what extent were these priests representative of the clergy as a whole and were there areas in which they granted their approval to the other aspects of the Nazi agenda and state? The editors pay lip service to these questions, but their answers ultimately hearken back to works of earlier eras. The narratives they create are those produced already in the 1940s by chroniclers such as Johannes Neuhäusler : the patterns they use were laid out in the 1980s and 1990s in the voluminous works, Priester unter Hitlers Terror, produced by the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte in Bonn.  This is not to negate their findings but to suggest that this is but one part – and a necessary part – of a larger picture.

 

 

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Review of Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and the Early Nazi Movement in Munich

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Review of Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and the Early Nazi Movement in Munich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 312 pp. ISBN: 0195390245.

By Beth Ann Griech-Polelle, Bowling Green State University

For many people the National Socialist movement is forever embedded in their minds with neo-pagan revivals and pseudo-sacral rituals. Derek Hastings’ work, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism, attempts to prove otherwise.Hastings’ research reveals a distinctly Catholic overtone in the early development of the Nazi movement in Munich and its environs and he argues that, up until the failed 1923 Beerhall Putsch, the movement was overwhelmingly Catholic in its orientation.Hastings’ greatest contribution here is to provide well-researched evidence that addresses the very early moments of the NSDAP’s formation, something that has hitherto been largely neglected by historians of the Third Reich. He also makes a major contribution by providing portraits of individual Catholics, both from the clergy and the laity, in order to demonstrate how the early movement was intertwined with Catholic identity. Once again,Hastings makes an enormous contribution in that most studies, when addressing the foundations of the Nazi movement, ignore the reality of Catholic-dominated Munich and seek to portray Nazism as incompatible with Catholicism. Finally,Hastings is also able to show how the movement eventually lost its Catholic orientation and along the way, many of its original Catholic supporters.

One of the many strengths of Hastings’ work is his ability to “break the mold” and prove that Munich Catholics were not “typical” in that they were generally opposed to ultramontanism and especially rejected political Catholicism. This resulted in many Catholics rejecting the Center Party and also in the development of a distinctive Catholic culture, which emphasized “religious Catholicism” in opposition to that of the perceived hypocrisy of political Catholicism. Through the exploration of pre-WWI Catholic trends, Hastings convincingly argues that Reform Catholicism became a type of “fighting,” nationalistic movement around Munich and that Reform Catholicism was able to link itself to the more nebulous “Positive Christianity,” which the early Nazi movement incorporated into the 1920 party platform. In the third and fourth chapters of his work, Hastings makes a compelling argument that although Nazism stressed interconfessionalism, the movement was flourishing in a Catholic environment where Nazi publications stressed that their members should attend Catholic masses, ceremonies, and demonstrations. He also shows, through short biographical sketches, various Catholic priests who energetically stepped forward to encourage their parishioners to join the Nazi movement. All of this Catholic overlay began to dissipate once Hitler made the decision to allow Erich Ludendorff and the Kampfbund to become involved in the attempted putsch of 1923.Hastings traces the decline of Catholic influence and the drifting away of many of the early and most vocal Catholic supporters of the Nazi movement. Once the Nazi movement was refounded, a more secularized version of political religion supplanted what had once been intimately tied to a Catholic-Christian world view.

Derek Hastings has made a significant contribution to the field of German history with this manuscript. His work makes an excellent companion piece to Kevin P. Spicer’s Hitler’s Priests, as Spicer’s work tracks many of these same Catholic supporters of Nazism, albeit in a later time period. Also, Hastings’ work will complement the work of Richard Steigmann-Gall since Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich seeks to argue that many Nazi leaders thought of themselves as practicing Christians—but Steigmann-Gall focuses primarily on Protestants which again places the work in a later time frame. In addition, Hastings has been able to effectively argue, through the use of excellent archival sources, that the early Nazi movement was in fact dominated by a type of German Catholicism and that this perspective on the world should not be overlooked simply because of an antagonistic relationship that developed between the Catholic Church and Hitler’s regime in the latter years of the Third Reich. Perhaps most importantly,Hastings work will challenge German historians to re-think what made many German Catholics believe that they could be both “good Nazis” and “good Catholics.” His work goes a long way in showing how that connection was in fact possible, particularly when the parish priest was giving the blessing over swastika flags and officiating at various Nazi ceremonies.

 

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