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Review of Dietz Bering, Luther im Fronteinsatz. Propagandastrategien im Ersten Weltkrieg

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 4 (December 2019)

Review of Dietz Bering, Luther im Fronteinsatz. Propagandastrategien im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018). Pp. 229.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

Sometime in the late 1980s, when I was a PhD student researching the “German Christian” movement, someone told me about Dietz Bering’s Der Name als Stigma. Antisemitismus im deutschen Alltag 1812-1933 (1987; published in English in 1992 as The Stigma of Names). The book was a revelation, highly original and insightful, and reading it felt like a special secret, a feeling I would also get with Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) and Annette Wieviorka’s The Era of the Witness (1998), though I subsequently learned that all of these books were widely known and admired.

More than thirty years later, Bering is an acknowledged public intellectual whose 2010 book, Die Epoche der Intellektuellen, attracted significant attention. This newest book, about the uses and abuses of Martin Luther in World War I, does not have the cachet of a surprise discovery, but it shares with The Stigma of Names the author’s detailed attention to language – he is a linguist by training – his patience for quantitative and qualitative analyses, and a knack for moving from carefully presented evidence to bold conclusions. In this case, Bering examines a body of World War I writing in which Martin Luther features, literally counting the number of times certain words and phrases appear – “hammer”, “hero”, “manliness”, and many more – and layers his findings onto a sketch of the war as experienced by Germans. The result is an insightful elucidation of the transformation, or more aptly, weaponization, of the defiant monk and reformer into a nationalist propaganda, morale-boosting tool. As Bering shows, that process unfolded in one world war and left the Protestant reformer and his avatar primed for deployment in another.

Luther im Fronteinsatz is a tightly structured, amply documented essay on the origins of an ideology rather than a sustained historical investigation. Readers familiar with recent works by Christopher Probst, Hartmut Lehmann, Manfred Gailus, and Lyndal Roper, or the older scholarship by Martin Greschat, Gottfried Maron, and others are unlikely to learn anything new about Luther or his legacies in the twentieth century. Nor does the book re-interpret the social history of the Great War and its fall-out in Central Europe, as illuminated by Belinda Davis, Roger Chickering, Maureen Healy, Deborah Cohen, Annelise Thimme, and many others in a massive historiography in English and German. (Of the authors named in this paragraph, only Roper and Maron appear in Bering’s bibliography.)

Yet Bering’s book is still valuable for its compelling articulation of a process that injected Luther into the “idea of 1914,” metonymized as the “hammer” and lauded as the original “German personality” and the embodiment of “German loyalty.” Confronted with the setbacks and defeats of 1917-18, Bering shows, this set of images ossified in a new propaganda initiative, “instruction for the Fatherland” – Vaterländischer Unterricht. Bering devotes most attention to the leaders and shapers of a dynamic discourse: Ernst Troeltsch, Heinrich von Treitschke, Adolf von Harnack, and other prominent men. But he also examines opinion multipliers including military periodicals such as the Feldpressestelle, Deutsche Kriegswochenschau, Karnisch-Julische Kriegszeitung, and the Kriegszeitungen of the 4^th, 7^th, and 10^th armies, as well as grassroots popularizers, notably local pastors. Throughout his analysis, Bering weaves in a dialectical component. As he shows, enemy propaganda fueled a feedback loop: for example, accusations that German soldiers were unthinking automatons sparked an insistent emphasis on the concept of “freedom,” in particular “German freedom,” in contrast to the supposed shallow and individualistic freedoms of the French with their violent revolutions and British with their fixation on “Gold und Geld”.

Bering makes a convincing case, and the book is a lively read, especially the crisp opening chapter, “Deutschland auf der Suche nach sich selbst”. Still he raises many questions that remain unaddressed or are discussed only briefly. One involves Catholics. Given the many Catholics in Germany and the much more pronounced Catholic presence in the Austro-Hungarian military, they merit further attention. Bering does make some effort to show how the Luther-myth was adapted for a German Catholic audience, but it is not commensurate with the magnitude of the challenge. Patrick Houlihan’s study of Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922 (2017) would have been a useful conversation partner.

Another underexamined issue is antisemitism. In The Stigma of Names, Bering revealed a deep and nuanced understanding of how anti-Jewish assumptions, messages, and provocations were built into Christian signs, symbols, and names. This book includes some astute observations about how anti-Black and anti-Turkish racisms functioned in the weaponized Luther system but has surprisingly little to say about antisemitism. Yet antisemitism hovers just outside the frame in many of the quotations analyzed, from the stereotype of the materialist British (and their shadowy Jewish cousins) obsessed with “money and gold,” to the emphatic addition of German to modify the nouns “courage”, “character”, “loyalty”, and “faith”, and to exclude Jews and others constructed as the non- or anti-Germans. Luther’s 1543 screed, On the Jews and Their Lies, is not mentioned in the book, which made me wonder whether German World War I propagandists deliberately avoided that text or Bering chose not to address it.

A third underexplored topic involves reception. How did soldiers, their families and friends receive this instrumentalized version of the familiar figure of Luther? Bering observes that class divisions and failing morale were the reasons German opinion leaders adopted aggressive mythmaking in the first place. Censors found letters between home and fighting fronts to be rife with bitter complaints from people who felt hungry, used, and disregarded by the warmakers. Did the men and women who wrote such letters buy into the weaponized Luther? Did they ridicule and lampoon it, which must have been tempting given the heavy-handedness of its promoters? Observers were certainly aware of the religious elements in German chauvinism, as depictions of “Prussians” in Jaroslav Hašek’s 1921 novel, The Good Soldier Švejk, make hilariously clear.

John Conway, the founder of this journal, always insisted it was the discrediting of organized Christianity in Germany during World War I, with the jingoistic insistence that “God is on our side,” that opened the way for the ravages of National Socialism. This claim and Bering’s interpretation open a series of question central to any critique of populism. Were ordinary Germans and ordinary Christians victims or dupes? Were they silenced, manipulated, or won over so that they themselves become proponents of the nationalist bile? As an academic, I have been conditioned to believe that diagnosing a problem, unpacking a discourse to reveal its construction, takes away its power. But does that claim still hold if an audience prefers the discourse, lies and all, to its informed analysis?

Review of Sabine Arend and Insa Eschebach, eds., Ravensbrück: Christliche Frauen im Konzentrationslager 1939-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 4 (December 2019)

Review of Sabine Arend and Insa Eschebach, eds., Ravensbrück: Christliche Frauen im Konzentrationslager 1939-1945 (Berlin: Metropol, 2018). Pp. 294. ISBN: 9783863313821.

By Christina Matzen, University of Toronto

Ravensbrück: Christliche Frauen im Konzentrationslager 1939-1945 is an unconventional and significant tribute to the Christian women who were interned in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp during World War II. Editors Sabine Arend and Insa Eschebach curated this volume as an accompaniment to the Ravensbrück Memorial’s 2017 exhibit on Christian prisoners, which was part of a German Evangelical Church Kirchentag event in Berlin. In the context of this exhibition, the term “Christian” is a category of self-description and encompasses women from Eastern and Western Europe. Indeed, this inclusive approach lies at the heart of the book’s strength. Through the contributors’ attention to women and their religious lives before and during their incarceration, women victims of Christian faith are rightly made more visible in the history of Nazi Germany, Christianity, gender, and memory.

Resistance is a central theme of the book. Christian women in Ravensbrück tended to be involved in opposition within charitable associations and in education but have long been regarded as “apolitical, inconspicuous, and therefore irrelevant,” helping to explain the marginal attention paid to this persecuted group in historical scholarship (21). Most forms of resistance from Christian women entailed critical statements against the German government and expressions of solidarity with people attacked by the Nazi regime. As Manfred Gailus writes in his contribution on Protestant resistors, many religious women found themselves in a dual position of opposition: they criticized both Nazism and sexist religious conventions (206).

Dr. Katharina Staritz is just one compelling woman chronicled in the book. Born in Breslau in 1903, Staritz became a member of the Confessing Church in 1934 and by 1938 was blessed as a vicar. Shortly after the November Pogrom, Staritz took over leadership of the Breslau branch of Protestant theologian Heinrich’s Grüber’s “auxiliary body for non-Aryan Christians,” a welfare agency to help Jews who had converted to Christianity emigrate safely in order to escape deportations. Although Staritz was forbidden as a female vicar to perform baptisms, she nonetheless baptized Jewish women. In September 1941 she wrote a circular to the Breslau clergy asking them not to exclude parishioners marked with a yellow star. The Gestapo confiscated the circular, labeled her as “Jewish friendly and objectionable,” and arrested her the following winter (25-26). Staritz wrote after the war that while she was interned in Ravensbrück, she worshiped the Bible every Sunday and preached to a small group of women as they walked up and down the camp road (155). With Claudia Koonz’s seminal work in mind on how women could be both victimized by the regime and complicit in the regime’s murderous policies, one might wonder to what extent Staritz—an oft-cited figure throughout the book—is representative of Christian women who served time in Ravensbrück. Her story is profound and important, but readers who approach this volume without some familiarity of the complex roles of both women and religious institutions in Nazi Germany may be left with an incomplete impression of the scope of Christian women’s actions in the Reich.

The book is organized in three parts and is largely based on survivor accounts and judicial and police records. Eschebach provides an introduction on the social and religious contexts of Christians in the Ravensbrück. The second (and largest) section of the book explores religious practices in concentration camps and chronicles the lives of thirteen women who, inspired by their religious views, opposed the Nazi regime and were consequently arrested and incarcerated in Ravensbrück. The final section comprises six essays that cover topics such as the experiences of women in various Christian sects that were represented in the Ravensbrück inmate population (namely Catholic, Protestant, and Jehovah’s Witness, but other groups are referenced as well), religious life in Fürstenberg and Ravensbrück during the Third Reich, and the role of church remembrance and memorial work.

Analytical contributions of the book are strongest in regard to Christian social life in Ravensbrück. The authors argue that ecumenical efforts in the camp had a limited impact, and Christian convictions seldom resulted in prisoners overcoming confessional differences, national origins, educational milieus, and politically and religiously motivated concepts of community and resistance. Language skills and class distinctions tended to inhibit communication among Christian women in Ravensbrück, and multinational and pan-Christian discussions were predominantly initiated by individuals. All prisoners lacked holy texts and liturgical objects, and although Ravensbrück camp regulations did not explicitly prohibit religious practice, large group meetings outside the barracks were prohibited, limiting the possibility of collective services. Women resorted to creative responses and generated booklets with Bible verses and psalms from stolen office papers. Women also used plastic and aluminum to fashion miniature crucifixes and pendants with depictions of saints. However, these common struggles did little to unify observant women who hailed from other countries and engaged in dissimilar Christian practices.

An innovative and empathetic blend of public history and traditional scholarship, this book’s discussion of women’s struggles within their religions, within Nazi-dominated Europe, and within the Ravensbrück concentration camp is commendable. Additional information and especially archival citations for the thirteen biographies would have strengthened the volume since this book will certainly be indispensable for those seeking a deeper knowledge of the particular denominations and individuals highlighted in the book. Ravensbrück: Christliche Frauen im Konzentrationslager 1939-1945 nevertheless is a forceful and insightful overview that will be of great interest to a wide readership.

Review of Michael P. DeJonge, Bonhoeffer on Resistance: The Word against the Wheel

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 4 (December 2019)

Review of Michael P. DeJonge, Bonhoeffer on Resistance: The Word against the Wheel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 170 Pp. ISBN: 9780198824176.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Michael P. DeJonge’s book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theo-political vision of resistance is a concise response to recent conflicting invocations of a “Bonhoeffer moment” by both conservative and liberal Christians in the United States. Concerned about the lack of clarity concerning the legacy of Bonhoeffer’s political resistance and the narrow focus at present on Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the conspiracy to commit tyrannicide, DeJonge argues that “to associate his legacy exclusively with this conspiracy dramatically truncates his witness.” Indeed, “his participation in a conspiracy that intended violence was the endgame of a long resistance process, the final stop through an elaborate flowchart of resistance activity” (5). The author wants us to turn to Bonhoeffer for more than just inspiration for contemporary political activism. To that end, he seeks to go beyond narrating what Bonhoeffer did in order to ask what Bonhoeffer actually thought about political resistance, and to locate that within Bonhoeffer’s theology of church, politics, and resistance. In doing this, DeJonge seeks to fill a gap in the scholarly literature—the lack of a “comprehensive and accessible account of Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking” (7).

In fourteen short chapters, DeJonge guides his readers through Bonhoeffer’s theology of resistance, identifying no less than six types of resistance in the German theologian’s writings. The author begins with basic theological foundations—creation, fall, and redemption—then adds the Lutheran accents of the law and gospel, explaining them in terms of the categories of preservation and redemption. He then outlines Bonhoeffer’s belief in politics as a component of God’s preserving activity, complete with Bonhoeffer’s criticisms of politics as an order of creation (with linkages to Natural Law, an aberration he associates with Roman Catholics and with “pseudo-Lutherans” who see the Volk as an order of creation) or as an order of redemption (with links to the Kingdom of God, which he associates with the Reformed tradition and the “mistake” of treating the gospel as a blueprint for society) (31-34). Rather, as DeJonge argues, Bonhoeffer uses the Lutheran theological mainstays of the two kingdoms and the orders as a way to define and hold down a middle position in which state and church (along with the household) work together in the task of preserving and redeeming humankind (38).

Important to DeJonge’s account is Bonhoeffer’s insistence that the law and gospel, the orders, and the work of church and state needed to be reconnected in his time—brought back into cooperative harmony—having drifted apart into two entirely different sets of norms and values in the modern era. Drawing on Bonhoeffer’s 1932 lecture “The Nature of the Church,” DeJonge explains Bonhoeffer’s thinking about church and state as orders working together—the state to preserve external righteousness and create space for the service of Christ, which is the church’s specialized role. (45, 54). The church, for Bonhoeffer, is where Christ is truly present and where Christ is proclaimed through the preaching of the Word. Because Christ is lord over the whole world—including both church and state—and because the God’s Word (meaning both Christ’s presence and Christ preached) is of utmost importance, the church must be on guard to protect its role: “Obedience to the state exists only when the state does not threaten the word. The battle about the boundary must then be fought out!” (45). This idea is so central to DeJonge’s account of Bonhoeffer’s theology of resistance that it is worth quoting him at length here:

This remarkable understanding of the church’s proclamation is the anchor of Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking. For him, the most powerful form of political resistance is not any action in the ordinary sense of that word, whether that action comes in the mild form of nonviolent civil disobedience or in the drastic form of violent governmental overthrow. Rather, the most powerful form of political resistance is words, although these are words in a special sense, words that are themselves, paradoxically, the most fundamental kind of action. This is, specifically, the divine word entrusted to the church. This word is the centre of Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking and activity. When Bonhoeffer advocated or himself undertook any other form of resistance, it was in the service of this ultimate form of resistance. Because the word is the highest form of resistance, the church is the most important agent of resistance (48).

Chapters 5 through 14 analyze Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking in a series of key texts written between 1932 and 1943, during the time of the Nazi dictatorship and the German Church Struggle: “The Church and the Jewish Question” (1933), “What is Church?” (1933), “The Führer and the Individual in the Younger Generation” (1933), “On the Theological Foundation of the Work of the World Alliance” (1932), “False Teaching in the Confessing Church?” (1935-1936), “The Church and the Peoples of the World” (1934), Discipleship (1937), Ethics (1940-1943), “Protestantism without Reformation” (1939), “State and Church” (1940s), “’Personal’ and ‘Objective’ Ethics” (c. 1942), “State and Church” (c. 1941), “After Ten Years” (1943), “History and Good” (1940s), “The Concrete Commandment and the Divine Mandates” (1943), and “What Does It Mean to Tell the Truth?” (1943). Along the way, he identifies three phases of Bonhoeffer’s resistance activity and six forms of resistance in Bonhoeffer’s writing (9-10, 59). In the first phase, from 1932-1935, in which Bonhoeffer engaged in “resistance through the proclamation of the ecumenical church” (9), four types of resistance stand out: 1.) individual and humanitarian resistance to state injustice, 2.) the church’s diaconal service to the victims of state injustice, 3.) the church’s “indirectly political word” to the state, and 4.) the church’s “directly political word” against an unjust state (10). In the second phase, from 1935-1939, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany, entered the “second battle” of the church struggle, and engaged in a new form of resistance: 5.) resistance through discipleship in the church. Finally, in the third phase of his resistance, from 1939-1945, Bonhoeffer entered the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, and a final type of resistance: 6.) resistance through the responsible action of the individual (9-10).

As he works his way through these writings, phases, and types of resistance, DeJonge argues that Bonhoeffer was remarkably consistent in his understanding of resistance. He suggests that some of the confusion over seemingly contradictory statements made by Bonhoeffer—especially in “The Church and the Jewish Question”—can be reconciled through a proper grounding of the German theologian’s resistance thinking in his theology of the two kingdoms, the orders, and the relationship between church and state. The main problem, according to DeJonge, is that readers of Bonhoeffer (scholars included) have failed to attend to Bonhoeffer’s distinction between individual and humanitarian resistance on the one hand and churchly resistance on the other (59-68, passim).

Individual and humanitarian resistance are manifest in the first and sixth types of resistance identified by DeJonge. In the first type, as “The Church and the Jewish Question” makes clear, individuals and humanitarian groups (but not the church) can point out the specific injustices of state policies, “to make the state aware of the moral aspect of the measures it takes … to accuse the state of offenses against morality” (63-64).

The church, however, does not critique the state based on morality but based on the gospel. The church preaches and hears the gospel, and is defined by the presence of Christ (in conjunction with the proclamation of Christ, the message of the gospel) (62). But the church has both a preaching office and a diaconal office, and thus the second type of resistance (and the first offered by the church) is the diaconal “service to the victims of the state’s actions”—the work to “bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel” (66). This is accompanied by two other types of resistance (numbers 3 and 4 in DeJonge’s typology) arising from the preaching office of the church: the “indirectly political word of the church,” which flows from Bonhoeffer’s notion of the church “questioning the state as to the legitimate state character of its actions, that is, making the state responsible for what it does” (69); and the “directly political word of the church,” which is rooted in Bonhoeffer’s belief that in extreme circumstances the church might act “not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself” (79). These are not about challenging the state directly concerning the morality of specific policies or actions, but about working to define the boundary of state authority and calling the state to fulfill its God-given mandate to preserve external righteousness. Even in the extreme case (the status confessionis, or state of confession), the church is not usurping the role of the state, but offering a “concrete commandment” in a specific situation in which the state has overstepped its bounds (82-87). The goal of type 3 and 4 resistance is, to quote Bonhoeffer, to “protect the state from itself and preserve it.” As DeJonge puts it, “The goal of the concrete commandment is to reestablish ordinary times in which the state and church fulfill their respective mandates” (87). It is essential to note that DeJonge returns time and again to the importance of the two kingdoms and the orders, or divine mandates, as Bonhoeffer comes to call them, for judging both the actions and the legitimacy of the state, and for defining the responses of the church.

To continue with DeJonge’s schema, type 5 resistance is the last of the churchly forms of resistance. It is the resistance that dominated the period in which Bonhoeffer directed the illegal Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde, where he engaged in what he called the second battle of the church struggle, the battle to see the church enter into genuine discipleship to Jesus. This radical discipleship would in turn provide it with the spiritual foundation from which to speak the indirect and direct words of the church to the state (109-119). It is the idea of discipleship as resistance, an entrance into the suffering of Christ and into suffering for Christ. For Bonhoeffer, only the community radically devoted to Christ belongs to the body of Christ. Indeed, Bonhoeffer even argued that membership in the Confessing Church—the only true church—was a requirement for salvation (124).

Finally, with phase 3 and type 6 of Bonhoeffer’s resistance, DeJonge argues that Bonhoeffer leaves behind churchly resistance and returns to the resistance of individuals or groups. This last resistance is the resistance of individuals willing to take “free responsible action” in the world (142-143), to enter into extreme situations in which normal standards of guilt and innocence do not apply, because the ordinary relationship of the two kingdoms or the orders/mandates of church and state have been thrown into confusion (152-154). Such resistance accepts the fact that “it is impossible to avoid guilt and complicity” (154). Again, as in the church’s resistance, this free responsible action of the individual is directed to one aim: to re-establish the conditions of life—to return to the place where the two kingdoms and divine mandates are once again working in harmony (155).

As DeJonge identifies these types of resistance in Bonhoeffer’s life and writing, one of the thorny problems he tries to solve is Bonhoeffer’s seemingly contradictory statements about Jews. Chapter 9 is devoted to this specific issue—to understanding how Bonhoeffer can argue that the church has an “unconditional obligation toward the victims of any societal order, even if they do not belong to the Christian community,” but continue on to state that:

The church of Christ has never lost sight of the thought that the “chosen people,” which hung the Redeemer of the world on the cross, must endure the curse of its action in long-drawn-out suffering. “The Jews are the most miserable people on earth. They are plagued everywhere, and scattered about all countries, having no certain resting place” (Luther, Table Talk). But the history of suffering of this people that God loved and punished will end in the final homecoming of the people of Israel to its God. And this homecoming will take place in Israel’s conversion to Christ. (100-101)

DeJonge rejects the notion that this is a case of an inconsistent, early version of Bonhoeffer “working out his thinking about Jews and resistance on the fly” (101). Rather, DeJonge argues that “the relationship between the mistreatment of the Jews and resistance to the state is not immediate but rather mediated by other concerns. Specifically, these concerns are the two kingdoms (as illustrated in the first part of “The Church and the Jewish Question”) and justification (as illustrated in the second part)” (101-102). Within the context of these concepts, Jewish persecution is, then, first and foremost an issue of the state failing in its divinely-ordained mandate, and in two ways: first, in failing to provide enough order to protect the rights of its people (and to which the church must respond unconditionally, on behalf of Jews), and second, in overreaching its authority and encroaching on the church’s freedom to proclaim the gospel (for the salvation of all, including the Jews) (105-108).

In his conclusion, DeJonge attempts to clarify Bonhoeffer’s thinking about rights (“inviolable rights are not fundamental”), the state (state authority is grounded not in popular sovereignty but in God’s mandate), and the church (the church’s political voice focuses on the state’s mandate and does not follow the “ethical-political logic” of individuals or humanitarian groups) (158-159). He reminds us that, for Bonhoeffer, the most fundamental action is not found in “our own deeds” but in “God’s word” (159). His hope is that his readers will understand that, for Bonhoeffer, the church is at the heart of his resistance thinking, and that “seizing the wheel” is not about civil disobedience or overthrow.

DeJonge has engaged in a thorough analysis of Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking. Those of us who work on the historical side of the German church struggle would do well to incorporate his and other theologians’ insights into our work, to enrich our interpretations and aid us in the cultivation of an undistorted and unpoliticized interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s life and work.

Review of Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Review of Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018). 284 Pp. ISBN: 9780674047686.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

The Jobbik Party of Hungary. Greece’s Golden Dawn. The Neo-Confederate movement in the United States and countless other nationalist extremist movements. What unites all of them on a certain level is their adoption of the rhetoric chiefly associated in many people’s minds with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich: that of a worldwide Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy out to destroy traditional Christian morality and age-old civilizations. Paul Hanebrink’s examination into the origins and power of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth offers readers the opportunity to think – not about how true the Judeo-Bolshevik myth is, but rather, “to understand why it has been and remains so powerful” (5).

Hanebrink’s work has been influenced by the approach taken by Israeli historian Shulamit Volkov whose work on nineteenth-century Germany explained the rise of antisemitic language as part of a response to the many unsettling experiences caused by the late unification of Germany. No matter how quickly economic modernization, rapid urbanization, and cultural changes were dislocating people in Germany, Volkov argued that the use of antisemitic rhetoric and tropes about Jews were part of a “cultural code.” By addressing the “Jewish Question” an individual could then respond with solutions to the so-called problem. This often allowed many people to believe that the problems they were experiencing in their daily lives could be explained by one, all-powerful disruptor: the Jew. Hanebrink explores the use of the “Judeo-Bolshevik myth” over the course of different time periods and across various countries in Europe and the United States, allowing the reader to track how this destructive myth about Jews varied over the course of the twentieth century and to ponder why the myth continues to persist so powerfully into the twenty-first.

Following the unsettling and devastating impact of the First World War and the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, much of Europe seemed to be in a state of revolutionary flux. Much like the work of Robert Gerwarth,[1] Hanebrink opens his work with the reality that, for so many Europeans, the First World War did not really end in November 1918. War and revolution continued on in many places, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, so that the experience of many people was not one of peace and stability but simply a continuation of the violence of 1914-1918. With so many revolutions breaking out in such a time of instability and dislocation, the search was on for the root cause of such upheavals. The answer that presented itself to so many people was a simple one: Jews were the face of revolution and revolutions seemed to be breaking out everywhere. From Munich, Germany, to Hungary, Romania, Poland, Russia, left-wing attempts to take over governments and countries led to an atmosphere of the total upheaval of societal norms. The one element that so many could agree upon was the role that Jews played in leftist activity. Hanebrink does not deny the involvement of some Jews in each of these movements, but he works hard to refute the notion that Jews created Bolshevism, supported the radical movement, and therefore all Jews were to be held responsible for the crimes of Bolshevism (14). The idea of the “Judeo-Bolshevik myth” was linked to the centuries-old language of hatred directed towards and about Jews: the figure of the Jew was linked to being the creator of disorder, disruption, and fanaticism, and there were just enough men and women who could be identified as being Jewish in each revolutionary movement that the myth seemed to embody a core kernel of truth.

How did this myth impact actual Jewish lives? Hanebrink exams the pogroms that repeatedly broke out in various parts of Central and Eastern Europe. In Ukraine, for example, Symon Petliura argued that by fighting against the “Judeo-Bolsheviks,” Ukrainians would be able to unify into a National Republic. Others in Ukraine attacked Jews, not to form a new Republic, but to restore an older state. In either case, Jews suffered directly because of the belief that they were behind the forces of disorder and chaos in Ukraine. Judeo-Bolshevism as an international threat played a prominent role in the political calculations of various faction leaders not only in Ukraine but also in Poland, Hungary, and Romania in the interwar years. Adding to this fear was the imagined idea that all Jews were by nature conspiratorial and therefore untrustworthy as potential allies. Works by Timothy Snyder and Omer Bartov[2] underscore Hanebrink’s analysis: some Jews in the borderland regions were caught in a crossfire of competing armies. The one element that each army could agree on was that the Jews were a true obstacle to achieving their objectives. As a result, more and more Jews lost their property if not their very lives. In such a tumultuous atmosphere, Jews were perceived my many as posing both an internal as well as an external threat to a country’s gentile population. The fears that Jews could potentially contribute to revolution, threatening the national security of a newly-formed nation fueled and rationalized the violence perpetrated against local Jewish populations.

While violence and pogroms continued in Eastern European territories, the Judeo-Bolshevik myth took on its perhaps most destructive power under the influence of Hitler and the Nazi regime. Hanebrink rightly points out that it is perhaps no coincidence that the early Nazi party had its beginnings in Munich – a city that had been rocked by left-wing revolution in 1919. Hitler took the pre-existing imagery of the Judeo-Bolshevik and used it to animate his followers. He told them they were fighting to defend traditional German Christian society which Jewish-Bolsheviks threatened to overturn. In Hitler’s mind, fighting the power of a Jewish-Bolsheviks was a matter of life or death for Germans. In this way, the Judeo-Bolshevik myth took on it perhaps most lethal form yet. If Germans were to live, then Jewish-Bolshevik supporters had to die.[3] Lending support to the “reality” of a Judeo-Bolshevik plot to destroy all of Christian Europe was the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Here Hitler saw an opportunity to elevate the existential threat that Jews posed to Germans – now he could point to Catholic Spain and argue that all of Europe would succumb to Judeo-Bolshevism unless there was a mighty crusade (led by him) to destroy it.[4] Once again, the mere presence of some Jews in the Spanish Civil War lent an air of truth to the idea of a vast “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy. From the 1930s onward, the fight against Jewish Bolshevism would be tied to Nazi Germany, reaching its most destructive peak with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

It was in that event that Nazi propagandists could unleash the full force of their anti-Jewish-Bolshevik imagery. Layered upon Judeo-Bolshevik images was the portrait of Russia as an Asiatic, barbaric, foreign place that had been perverted by Jewish domination for decades. Jews were set in the role of saboteurs, conspirators, partisans, and the supreme proponents of Communism. Therefore, they were seen as the ultimate security threat. This helped the Nazis and many of their Eastern European allies participate in mass violence against Jewish populations, ultimately labeled as the Holocaust. Hanebrink also tracks the evolution that occurs – from the period of Nazi victories inside of the Soviet Union to the periods of Nazi defeat – and he provides examples of how Nazi propaganda would leave a long-lasting mark, particularly as the Soviet Red Army advanced further westward. The successful blending of images of Red Army soldiers as representative of Jewish vengeance, along with the notion that the Red Army was composed of “Asiatic barbarians” come to overturn all of European Christian civilization would have a long-lasting impact on areas that found themselves living in a post-WWII Communist-dominated territory.

In places such as Poland, Romania, and Hungary, the success of the Red Army meant one, ultimate thing: “Soviet occupation had brought Jews to power” (168). Jews who had survived the Holocaust emerged from hiding and many who had believed that Jews had been eradicated in the war now feared Jews would seek revenge for their suffering. This was coupled with the belief that Communist systems were led by Jews. There was even a tendency among post-war countries such as in the case of Poland, where leaders argued that Jews had supported Communism and they, therefore, had no one but themselves to blame for any hatred directed against them by the public. This line of argumentation was particularly useful when, in 1946, a charge of blood libel was made against Jews which resulted in the murder of at least 42 Jewish people. In yet another cruel twist of irony, local Communists also exploited anti-Jewish sentiments, particularly in Hungary where the economy was floundering and accusations of war profiteering were utilized to stir up crowds against “capitalist exploiters” whose images looked suspiciously like stereotypes of Jews. In these types of cases, Jews were associated with capitalism, exploitation, speculation, and the like. In the post-war environment, Communist leaders sought to shake free of the association of Jewishness with Communism.

For the post-WWII Western nations, the question that emerged was how to continue to fight against the growing spread of Communism without associating the fight with Nazism? Hanebrink explores the shifting of terminology in the West, going from fighting against “Judeo-Bolshevism” to embracing “Judeo-Christian civilization.” Now, instead of Hitler leading the crusade against Communism, the United States would be the lead fighter for Western Civilization. Intellectuals could still maintain that the Soviets and Communism, in general, represented “Asiatic barbarity” but they de-coupled the language of “Judeo-Bolshevism” from this fight. In the aftermath of the devastation of the war, many Christians in Europe and in the U.S. argued that Christianity could lead Europe out of the darkness it had fallen into under Nazi domination. Now the fight could be reframed as a battle against “atheistic Communism” with Christians and Jews working together, sharing a common biblical tradition that provided the seedbed for moral renewal. The concept of Judeo-Christianity was one that allowed Jews to align themselves in the battle of the Cold War against the forces of atheism. In this new way of thinking, Jews could become Cold Warriors. The idea of shared moral values between Christians and Jews connected with the idea of creating a more liberal, more tolerant society. This also impacted the way in which the memory of the Holocaust was addressed in public discourse.

In some instances, voices emerged in post-Communist societies that argued that the crimes committed under Communist regimes were ignored, while undo attention was given to specifically Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. In countries such as Poland, heated debates rose to the surface, asking why so much attention was given to Jewish victimhood at the hands of the Nazis while the victimization of gentile Poles at the hands of the Communist leaders was downplayed or ignored altogether? This line of argumentation brought back the specter that has haunted Europe for much of the twentieth and now part of the twenty-first centuries: that of the Judeo-Bolshevik. Right-wing and populist leaders demand an acknowledgement that Jews supported Communism, that Communism created categories of its own victims, and in this way, Hanebrink argues, “The Judeo-Bolshevik myth was reborn in post-Communist Europe as a tool for challenging the premises on which transnational memory of the Holocaust rested- and with those premises, the liberal civic ideals of multicultural toleration, human rights, and European integration that Holocaust memory culture had come to symbolize so powerfully” (273).

Hanebrink’s book is a valuable contribution to the intellectual history of the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism. The book could benefit from the addition of several items including maps of the areas he is discussing, some pictures of propaganda imagery, and, most importantly, the book needs a comprehensive bibliography. The work would be useful in classes of graduate students who have studied some of the history of antisemitism, intellectual history, and histories of the twentieth century.

[1] Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished. Why the First World War Failed to End (NY, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).

[2] See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (NY, NY: Basic Books, 2010) and Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (NY, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2018).

[3] See especially the work of Michael Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion. Violence Against Jews in Provinicial Germany, 1919-1939 (NY, NY: Berghahn Books, 2012) and also Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). These works explore the dynamic of “us vs. them” in Nazi ideology.

[4] See, for example, Beth A. Griech-Polelle, “The Impact of the Spanish Civil War upon Roman Catholic Clergy in Nazi Germany,” in Kevin P. Spicer, ed., Antisemitism, Chrisitian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 121-135 and Beth A. Griech-Polelle, “Crusade. The Impact of the Spanish Civil War and the Invasion of the Soviet Union on the Roman Catholic Church under the Nazi Regime,” in Glaube- Freiheit-Diktatur in Europa und den USA. Festschrift für Gerhard Besier zum 60. Geburtstag, eds. Katarzyna Stoklosa and Andrea Strübund (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 715-726.

Review of Karl-Joseph Hummel and Michael Kißener, eds., Catholics and Third Reich: Controversies and Debates

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Review of Karl-Joseph Hummel and Michael Kißener, eds., Catholics and Third Reich: Controversies and Debates, translated by Christof Morrisey (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2018), 315 Pp., ISBN: 9783506787866.

By Kevin P. Spicer, Stonehill College

In the “Preface to English Edition,” the editors inform the reader that Catholics and Third Reich is a translation of the 2009 (paperback reprint 2010) Die Katholiken und das Dritte Reich: Kontroversen und Debatten, with minor corrections and additions of only essential bibliographical citations. The editors’ intention in the original German volume was to offer an update of the classic, Die Katholiken und das Dritte Reich, edited by Klaus Gotto and Konrad Repgen (both of whom passed in 2017), published initially in 1980 and revised for a third and final time in 1990. Hummel and Kißener dedicated their volume to Repgen, to commemorate his eighty-fifth birthday. The editors of both collections endeavored to historiographically contextualize the current themes and debates about the Catholic Church under Nationalism Socialism through chapters that are “easy-to-read yet still academically sound…for a broad reading public” (8). Evidently, German academics have a different understanding of the term “easy-to-read” than their English-speaking counterparts. For example, a translated sentence from Christoph Kösters’ contribution, “Catholics in the Third Reich: An Introduction to the Scholarship and Research History,” reads: “While the during the 1950s and early 1960s the participant generation’s view of history still predominated, at least on the surface, behind the scenes the institutionalization and networking of an emerging community of contemporary historians was taking place, wherein Catholicism studies would establish itself as a branch” (41). Of course, it is the role of a translator to produce a text that is clear and readable. Sadly, it is missing here. In several chapters, Christof Morrisey, the translator, followed – evidently too closely – the grammatical structure of the original’s dense academic German that results in awkwardly phrased English. In turn, this affects the text’s clarity and naturally the overall presentation of the authors’ arguments. Even the title is strangely framed, Catholics and Third Reich, neglecting the determiner “the.” “Preface to English edition” again forgets “the.” Such stylistic errors are minor but nevertheless make the reading of the volume challenging. To be fair, the latter chapters flow more evenly. More importantly, too, is the choice of Ferdinand Schöningh to have this volume translated into English in the first place, without requesting significant revisions from the contributors to reflect the historiographical developments in the field. The essays in Hummel and Kißener’s volume, for example, are often contentious and dominated by older interpretive debates. A better choice to fulfill the editors’ goal would have been the more accessible 2011 (revised second edition, 2018) volume, Die katholische Kirche im Dritten Reich: Eine Einführung (The Catholic Church in the Third Reich: An Introduction), edited by Christoph Kösters and Mark Edward Ruff and published by Herder, a competitor of Ferdinand Schöningh. In any case, the volume before us is the text under review.

Hummel and Kißener have divided their volume into four sections: Overview, Controversies and Debates, Images of History, and Bibliography, the latter including insightful maps of the voting behavior of the German Catholic population in Germany during the crucial years of 1932 and 1933. In the Overview section, Michael Kißener, University Professor for Contemporary History at the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, introduces the volume by providing a historical chronological summary of German Catholics in Nazi Germany. According to Kißener, two approaches may be taken to evaluate the choices of Catholics and the Catholic Church under Hitler. The first approach proposes making a judgment about the moral conduct or “guilt” of the Church under National Socialism, which he recognizes as legitimate, but ultimately not historically sound. Instead, Kißener favors an approach that focuses on “understanding” by analyzing the “causal factors” and establishing “theories of developmental process.” The latter, he believes, allows us “to understand the time…on its own terms, rather than to ‘condemn’” (14). Kißener points out that in 1933, Catholics in Germany represented only one-third of the population. The influence of their tradition ended in a “grey zone” of intersection between religion and politics in which the Church was overly cautious to intervene. As other contributors to this volume emphasize, Catholicism “did not require its believers to choose martyrdom” and therefore should not be compared to religious bodies such as the Jehovah Witnesses (15). At the same time, despite the hierarchical nature of Catholicism, the Catholic Church in Germany faced numerous obstacles preventing it from forming a unified approach toward the Nazi state. For example, the Freising and Fulda Bishops’ Conferences were only consolidated into one joint conference in 1933 and, as a result, had not yet perfected its operational rules. Resolutions made by the united conference were “not yet binding for individual bishops” (16). Kißener places significant responsibility for the lack of a more aggressive stance toward National Socialism on Adolf Bertram, Cardinal Archbishop of Breslau and leader of the Fulda Bishops’ Conference, who, he admits, too swiftly accommodated the National Socialists. Kißener describes Bertam’s Eingabenpolitik (policy of petition) as “legitimate,” but ultimately “anachronistic and futile” as the Nazis solidified their power over the government (23). Regarding the persecution of German Jews, especially during Reichskristallnacht, Kißener asks, “Did [the bishops] fear that standing up for the Jews in the existing situation would provoke more violence against them? Or did they believe they were unable to help because it was assumed that, after the Jews, the Catholics would be the next target of Nazi attacks?” (26) Kißener finds the bishops’ reaction or lack thereof “difficult to explain” but assures the reader that it was “not the product of any racially based anti-Semitism adapted by the Church” (27). Throughout his essay, Kißener has adopted a tone that is protective of the Church and its shortcomings in the years of Hitler’s rule. Regarding resistance, he quotes a historian equally defensive, Hans Maier, who wrote, “‘one has to look at it soberly: that a church as a whole would join the resistance is not very realistic’” (34).

In the second overview essay, Christoph Kösters, a research fellow at the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte in Bonn, tackles the monumental job of offering a summary of the decades of scholarship procured on the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany. More recently, Mark Edward Ruff dedicated an entire book to this topic in his authoritative study, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany 1945-1960 (Cambridge, 2017), which Kösters does cite. Meanwhile, the editors have afforded Kösters just a little more than twenty pages to address the same topic. While Kösters provides a fair sketch of the topic, he primarily directs his critical comments toward four authors: Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, a German jurist, Gordon Zahn, an American sociologist and pacifist, Guenter Lewy, an American political scientist, and Olaf Blaschke, a German historian. Ironically, Kösters feels the need to point out that Lewy is “Jewish,” “born in Germany,” and later “emigrated to Palestine” (47). While Kösters presents a reasonable assessment of Lewy’s thesis, not all contributors follow suit.

The editors have assigned the next nine essays to the category, Controversies and Debates. In a rather mistitled essay, “Racist Ideology and Völkisch Religiosity,” Wolfgang Altgeld, professor emeritus of Modern History at the Julius-Maximilian University in Würzburg, rehearses the arguments he made in his earlier study, Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum: Über religiös begründete Gegensätze und nationalreligiöse Ideen in der Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus (Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism: On Religiously-Based Contrasts and National-Religious Ideas in the History of German Nationalism; Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1992). Altgeld finds the reaction of German Catholicism to National Socialism deeply rooted in the centuries-long denominational tensions in Germany between Protestants and Catholics. The overwhelming support of National Socialism by Protestants led Catholics to see Nazism virtually as a “Protestant milieu Party.” This outlook thus enabled Catholic clergy and laity to perceive themselves as living amid a “second Kulturkampf” (81).

Matthias Stickler, director of the Institute for the Study of Higher Education (Institüt für Hochschule) of the Julius-Maximilian University in Würzburg, also develops the idea of Kulturkampf in his contribution, “Collaboration or Ideological Distance? Catholic Church and Nazi State.” According to him, the “traumatic memory of the Kulturkampf” fueled Catholics’ response to Nazism in 1933. In return and to protect the Church, the German Catholic hierarchy supported a Concordat with the Nazi government. Stickler refutes historian Klaus Scholder’s theories regarding the Reich Concordat’s connection with the disbandment of the Center Party and the German bishops 28 March 1933 pronouncement by citing six historical examples. In part, these points highlight the violence against members of Catholic associations and the extensive debate over the political issues behind Concordat articles 31 and 32. For Stickler, the time spent discussing such issues reveals the “precondition of the existence of Catholic political parties” (92). Alongside these arguments, Stickler emphasizes the essential role of the Concordat in permitting the Catholic Church to function in National Socialist Germany. To support his argument, he notes the extensive limitations and persecution the Austrian Catholic Church bore after the Reich Chancery declared the Austrian Concordat of May 1934 defunct.

In “The German Bishops: Pastoral Care and Politics,” Karl-Joseph Hummel, a retired director of the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte in Bonn, discusses the problems that arise when attempting to interpret the Church’s response to National Socialism. Chief among these issues is the failure both to contextualize primary sources correctly and to credit the Church for the “resistance of individuals against the Nazi regime” while, at the same time, hold the Church “accountable for the failures of individual bishops” (104). Building upon Michael Kißener’s insights on the organizational weaknesses of the Fulda Bishops’ Conference, Hummel relates how the united Conference met only fourteen times during Hitler’s rule. Outside of these limited meetings, all business had to be coordinated by the “time-consuming” process of postal mail (105). Hummel admits that although pastoral care was of the utmost concern for the bishops, any notion of selfish “milieu egotism,” the caring of one’s milieu alone, should be rejected. To support his claim, he cites the willingness of bishops Petrus Legge of Meißen and Johannes B. Sproll of Rottenburg to suffer at the hands of the state over issues larger than those that were directly linked to Catholicism. The state, for example, found Legge guilty of breaking foreign currency transfer rules and fined him significantly. Sproll refused to support the Anschluss plebiscite and corresponding Reichstag election in April 1938 and had to flee his diocese in fear of persecution. While the example of Sproll possibly supports Hummel’s argument, that of Legge does not. Hummel adds that despite the lack of direct persecution against other German bishops, a significant number of Catholic priests from Germany ended up imprisoned in Dachau, often as “proxies” for their bishops (106). In addition, a few Catholics bishops from occupied countries were not spared internment in Dachau nor were numerous members of their clergy shown mercy. What Hummel does not mention is the ethnonationalistic tensions that existed in Dachau between German Catholic clergy and clergy of other countries, especially from occupied Eastern Europe (on this point, see Adam Kozłowiecki, SJ. Not und Bedrängnis: Als Jesuit in Auschwitz und Dachau. Lagertagebuch, edited by Manfred Deselaers and Bernhard Sill, translated by Herbert Ulrich, Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2016). Hummel’s larger point is that the bishops did not possess a mandate “for the moral order of society at large or for advocacy of the persecuted” (110). Here he quotes Heinz Hürten, who, before his recent passing, was the doyen of modern German Catholic Church history. In this vein, Hummel speculated, “When there was no involvement, as on 1 April 1933, there may have been other reasons besides ‘silence’, ‘passivity’, ‘naivety’, or ‘egotism’. For example, in early 1933 Faulhaber appeared so convinced that the boycott of Jewish businesses was un-Christian that, in his view, not the official Church but rather every individual Christian should protest against it of his own volition. In Faulhaber’s view, there were far more important contemporary issues for the Church’s leading authorities, such as the schools, the preservation of Catholic associations, or the question of sterilization” (109-110). Ultimately, such argumentation significantly grants the benefit of the doubt to the choices the bishops made under National Socialism

Thomas Brechenmacher, professor of modern history at the University of Potsdam, takes up the broader issue of the Catholic Church and Jews under National Socialism. He rejects what he views as common points of departure for historians covering this topic: the Church “failed morally…by not speaking out and not acting” and, in turn, “violated its own duty to ‘Christian’ love; it failed politically by becoming “blinded by anti-Bolshevism” and viewing “Nazism as a natural ally in the struggle against Soviet communism; the Church was only concerned with itself and therefore could be charged with “milieu egotism”; and lastly, the Church was antisemitic and therefore refused to respond to the plight of Jews (127-128). Reviving the eternal debate among historians about the nature of hatred toward Jews, Brechenmacher rejects any argument that does not make a clear distinction between anti-Judaism, which he describes as “older” and “religiously motivated,” and antisemitism, which he defines as “newer, socioeconomic or racially based” (128). Despite this distinction, he readily admits, “Undoubtedly, there are connections and even a flowing interchange between an older Christian tradition of religiously motivated hostility toward Jews – in other words, anti-Judaism – and the new ‘anti-Semitism’, with its economic and racist argumentation” (130-131). Nevertheless, he ultimately concludes that theologically, anti-Judaism “could have never led to [the] genocide of the Jews. Nor could it have inspired devout Christians to deduce that the Jewish people must be exterminated through murder” (131). Instead, Brechenmacher reasons, only the “older, religious anti-Judaism” helps to explain “the ‘ambivalence’ with which many Catholics…occasionally responded to the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews” (131). He cites, for example, the reaction of Bertram and Faulhaber to the 1 April 1933 boycott as an example of the latter. While Brechnmacher’s essay is one of the stronger ones in the volume, overall, he and his colleagues seem surprisingly out of touch with the impact of Holocaust Studies on the writing of the history of church and state under National Socialism. In addition, the citations throughout this volume testify to the narrowness of the contributors’ secondary source material, especially in relation to more recent studies in English on the Church, National Socialism, and the Holocaust.

In “The Catholic Milieu and Nazism,” Christoph Kösters examines the ever-changing milieu of German Catholicism. As reflected in more recent English-language studies, Kösters portrays the milieu as “dynamic” and “not a stagnant system” nor a sealed off “Catholic ghetto” as it is often portrayed (152-153). Though it might appear as anti-democratic and “hostile to secularization,” Kösters argues that it merely “braced itself against the developments of modern society” (153). In the same vein, Kösters rejects secularization theories that portray Catholic conflicts with the Nazi regime as arising from “traditional anti-modernization reflexes and ‘secularization conflicts’ within the Catholic milieu” (153-154). For him, the Church should not be viewed as “a moral authority and institution that focused only on its own survival [and] failed to recognize the ‘signs of the times’, in contrast to the politically resistant socialist milieu.” (155). Instead, Kösters insists that the main conflict was over the “idea of race as a core component of the Nazi worldview” (156). He continues, the Nazis ultimately wanted to “eliminate Christianity and its organizational carrier, which opposed the core idea of race” (157). Truly, this would be amazing if the Church had taken such a stance, but unfortunately extant primary documents do not consistently support such a definitive conclusion in relation to the Church’s conflict with National Socialism.

In “Is ‘Resistance’ not ‘the Right Word’?,” Michael Kißener takes aim at Georg Denzler, emeritus professor of church history at the University of Bamberg, and his work, Widerstand ist nicht das richtige Wort: Katholische Theologen und Priester im Dritten Reich (Resistance is not the Correct Word: Catholics Theologians and Priests in the Third Reich, Zurich: Pendo, 2003). Focusing on the cases of Konrad von Preysing, bishop of Berlin, and Willi Graf, a student and member of the White Rose resistance movement, he concludes, “‘resistance from within the church environment can only be grasped in individual cases” (175). Confirming this stance, he repeats the statement by Hans Maier, which he quoted in his introductory essay to the volume, namely that the Church “as a whole” would not realistically “enter the resistance” (175).

In his second contribution, Thomas Brechenmacher examines Pius XII and World War II. For him, Pope Pius XII engaged in the principle of Inter Arma Caritas or “Christian charity between the weapons” as a departure point for the Vatican’s response to the war. In September 1939, the pope also set up an “Office of Information” whose purpose was to offer “concrete assistance, visits to prisons and concentration camps, deliveries of food, clothing, and medicine” (182). Though taking a public position of neutrality, Pius XII likewise engaged in behind the scenes activities that were far from impartial. Such endeavors included overtures to President Roosevelt in 1938 around the time of the Munich agreement; establishing contact in early 1940 between the resistance in the German military and the British government; and in May 1940, sending telegrams to members of the royalty in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, which denounced invasions by the German army. Though such actions were unknown to most of the world, Brechenmacher does not find Pius XII silent in face of the horrible atrocities of the World War II period. Rather, Brechenmacher argues that Pius XII never deviated from his basic message: “damning the war, urging peace, calling for a new order for state and society based on Christian values, condemning modern pagan totalitarianism, demanding the observance of divine and human rights, entreating and prayer for innocent victims” (196). An important insight, yet, Brechenmacher neglects to admit that Pius XII, despite his Christmas 1942 message, never directly and specifically condemned the persecution and murder of European Jews.

In her contribution, Annette Mertens, a research fellow at the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, examines the choices of German Catholics during the Second World War. At the outset, she states that no book has ever been produced on this subject. However, since this volume’s publication, Oxford University Press has published Thomas Brodie’s study, German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945, which I reviewed in the last issue of CCHQ. Mertens informs the reader that “650 military chaplains” along with 20,000 clerics, monastics, and prospective priests were serving at the front, mostly as military medics” (199). She makes a clear distinction between serving the fatherland – the German nation – and serving the Nazi regime, then assures the reader that the emphasis of the Church hierarchy was on the former. Unfortunately, the bishops were not privy to any outlook that enabled them to approach the war differently than in the past. The Peace League of German Catholics (Friedensbund Deutscher Katholiken) had only been founded in 1917 and banned in 1933 and, according to her, had not yet made enough impact to alter traditional thinking toward war. She concludes, that for the Catholic Church “as a national church, a general summons to martyrdom would have been unthinkable” (204).

In the final essay of the second section, Karl-Joseph Hummel examines how the German Catholic Church dealt with its past under National Socialism. He stresses that the German Catholic bishops were the first group to issue a post-war confession of guilt in August 1945. Yet, he fails to point out that their statement made no reference to the murder of European Jews. For him, doubt over the Church’s role in World War II “came under suspicion” seriously in the 1960s, primarily because it was an institution (237). This is an important insight, but it lacks any contextualization in the tumultuous events of the 1960s that upended many traditional institutions and modes of thinking.

The third section of the book, “Images of History,” contains but one essay, once again by Karl-Joseph Hummel. Entitled, “The Church in Pictures: Historical Photos as a Means of Deception,” the chapter describes the history behind several images that have appeared in more recent books about the Catholic Church under National Socialism. Among these photos is one that the editors at Northern Illinois University Press used for the cover of my book, Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism (2008). The photo features Abbott Alban Schachleiter, OSB, a Benedictine and emeritus abbot of Emmaus Monastery in Prague, giving the Hitler salute to SA men. Hummel not only criticizes the use of this historical photo but also misrepresents the book’s content.

Overall, the contributors to the volume do endeavor to fulfill the goal of the collection’s title by offering an overview of the state of debates and controversies regarding research on the German Catholic Church under National Socialism. Generally, the contributors’ arguments and interpretations are favorable to the Church and the choices of its leaders during this tumultuous time period. A more critical eye would have strengthened the collection. Nevertheless, as with any edited collection, one needs to consider that the chapters are, at times, brief, unnuanced summaries of more detailed arguments. The editors could have also taken steps to strengthen the English language edition by deemphasizing controversies that are long past and by revising chapters to include the depth and breadth of the current historiography (in both German and English) on the Catholic Church in the Third Reich. In addition, as I pointed out above, the translation lacks style and fluency in English, the target language, which makes the volume, at times, challenging to read and not advantageous for use in the classroom. Finally, and more practically, the book, a paperback at that, is priced at over $70.00. In recommending the book, such imperfections cannot be shaken off too easily, if at all.

Review of Anita Rasi May, Patriot Priests: French Catholic Clergy and National Identity in World War I

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Review of Anita Rasi May, Patriot Priests: French Catholic Clergy and National Identity in World War I (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), X + 162 Pp., ISBN: 9780806159089.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

More than 33,000 French priests and members of religious orders served in the First World War. Although many of them were government-appointed or volunteer chaplains, the majority were involved in other ways—as stretcher-bearers, nurses, and combatants. Anita Rasi May draws on the memoirs, letters and biographies of thirty-three of these individuals in order to shed light on their subjective experiences. She begins with a survey of anticlerical policies during the prewar Third Republic, a “culture war” situation in which the French Catholic Church saw its status and privileges significantly curtailed. She follows up with analysis of the responses of French priests to the outbreak of war, the variety of ways in which they participated, and their perceptions of the war’s meaning for France and the church. As she assesses the consequences of the war on church-state relations, she concludes that “in the postwar period there emerged a new relationship between the priests and the people due in large part to the memory of the priests’ wartime service and to their key role in memorializing their many fallen comrades. This newly won respect provided the atmosphere in which both the government and church leaders worked out compromises in their ongoing relationship” (10).

The anticlerical policies of the prewar era provide an important backdrop for understanding the mentalities and motivations of French priests, bishops and members of religious orders during the war itself. From the 1870s forward, French political leaders feared that Catholic clergy and institutions “did not form patriots but rather encouraged loyalty to monarchical government and to an international organization, the Catholic Church, based in Rome” (16). They responded by dissolving the Jesuits and other religious orders, abolishing the military chaplaincy, and ending priests’ exemption from military service. The Catholic Church’s dubious role in the Dreyfus Affair provided the pretext for further anticlerical measures, including the abolition of church schools and the formal separation of church and state. The government’s open hostility to the Catholic Church was accompanied by a long, steady decline in religious observance, especially among people of the working class, and among men of all classes.

In light of such troubling developments, French clergy saw the Great War as an opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism and prove their worth to national community. Like their counterparts in other belligerent countries, French priests believed their nation’s cause was just, but an equally powerful motivation for supporting the war was the prospect of restoring the Catholic Church to its former prominence and reversing the secularization of state and society. May cites the example of a Franciscan seminarian who believed that the war would lead to a rebirth of “the France of years past, that is to say, the true Christian France” (50). As ordinary people flocked to religious ceremonies and cheered for priests who volunteered for war service, many clergy believed they were witnessing a revitalization of religious life and an end to anticlerical hostility. These hopes and expectations help explain why so many priests volunteered for combat and non-combat roles, why French bishops gave their assent, and why so few French clergy opposed the war and the phenomenon of the soldier priest.

May’s research gives us a glimpse into the inner world of those clergy who spent time at the front. For example, Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who went on to become one of the twentieth century’s most prominent philosophers, was a stretcher-bearer with the 8^th Regiment of Moroccan Riflemen. He saw the war as a “baptism into reality” (52) and hoped his position would give him influence among the men with whom he served. A Franciscan chaplain named Édouard de Massat described the war itself as “a missionary whose voice is more eloquent than our own” and expressed the hope that France would emerge from the struggle “with a new soul” (56). As time went on, priests grew more realistic about the prospects of mass conversion and religious renewal, and their efforts at evangelizing gave way to an emphasis on pastoral care and service to their comrades in arms. This was as true of soldier priests and medical personnel as it was of chaplains.

May notes that most priests adjusted well to military life and found it easy to combine patriotic fervor and military service with their Catholic faith. This was also true of those who experienced combat. May provides numerous examples of priests who were promoted to officer status, led assaults on enemy positions, and participated actively and sometimes enthusiastically in killing. Although none of May’s thirty-three priests were pacifists, all were aware of the horrors of war (especially the damage it inflicted on their own countrymen) and occasionally struggled over the ethics of killing. Although May asserts that “in these memoirs, journals, autobiographies and biographies…there is no love of war for itself” (78), she also quotes a chaplain named Jean Lagardère who said of the front: “I am happy here: the friendship of the men, the rattling of arms, the noise of the cannon, the whistling of bullets, the view of the trenches, their infected mud delights me, thrills me, makes me quiver. I am only at home there, I only breathe there, I only do good there. I only feel myself a man there” (78). They knew the horrors of war, and some loved it anyway.

Priests’ reactions to the war were complicated and contradictory on a variety of levels. For example, they expressed contempt for men who refused to fight or mutilated themselves to avoid military service, yet some of them intervened on behalf of soldiers condemned to death for breaches of discipline. Some regretted killing the enemy, or regretted enjoying it, but few gave much thought to the humanity of the enemy. Most preferred to focus on the French soldier’s self-sacrifice rather than his role as a perpetrator of violence, and they made frequent comparisons with Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. A war sermon by chaplain Louis Lenoir was one of the more eloquent and revealing expressions of this blend of faith, war, and nationalist euphoria: “Like that of Christ, this ‘beautiful blood of France’ was today, as it has always been in history, ‘liberating blood’…spread across Europe and to the extremities of the earth to defend nations against injustice and support religious and social freedom…search all the corners of the world where violated liberty has called for help, everywhere you will find traces of French blood” (85).

Whether they were chaplains, medical personnel, or soldiers, French priests took their apostolic work seriously. They administered the sacraments, counseled individual soldiers, mailed or hand delivered letters, procured books and personal items, established social spaces where soldiers could relax, visited soldiers’ families when on leave, and conveyed gifts from those families to soldiers with whom they served at the front. They heard confessions, granted absolution, and gave communion before attacks, and in the aftermath, they performed last rites for the dying, presided over burials and masses for the dead, and helped with the mapping of cemeteries. Not surprisingly, the pastoral ministry of priests at the front seems to have been the role that was most widely appreciated and accepted, even among persons who had left the church and had no interest in returning.

In terms of long-term impact, the priests’ expectations only partly coincided with reality. When the war began, many of them believed they would have the opportunity “to evangelize men who were not the usual churchgoers in early twentieth-century France” (64). They also hoped to demonstrate that they were just as manly and patriotic—and as much a part of the national community—as other French men. Although the mass conversions did not occur, priests did develop “bonds of brotherhood” with many soldiers, “based more on mutual respect than on shared faith. They also found in themselves a capacity for violence and for being swept up into the exaltation of battle, which strengthened their feelings of brotherhood and empathy for their fellows” (109). As an institution, the French Catholic Church enjoyed a slight improvement of its status in the postwar era. The state and the education system remained secularized, but members of religious orders who had returned from exile to fight for France were allowed to remain there when the war had ended. The French government also restored diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and though anticlerical laws remained on the books, they were not always rigorously enforced. In fact, when the government of Édouard Herriot attempted to do so in 1926, veteran priests played an important role in the protests that forced the state to back down. May credits these successes to the fact that priests enjoyed a new level of respect and status due to their wartime service.

May’s book offers a fascinating glimpse into the fears, frustrations and hopes of Catholic clergy during the First World War. The priests themselves are a stark example of the “self-mobilization” that was so prevalent in the “war cultures” of Europe during this period.[1] At the same time, the book suffers from a number of shortcomings in terms of framing as well as the selection and interpretation of sources.

First, it relies too much on priests’ own perceptions of their impact without considering other kinds of data. For example, it would be helpful to see information on baptisms, confirmations and other indicators of religious observance before, during and after the war. To what extent did the war service of priests and the rapprochement between church and state disrupt or mitigate the long, steady decline in public, corporate worship? May also refers to wartime rumors and disinformation in “anticlerical newspapers and speeches” (116) but does not comment on the intensity of anticlerical discourses at different points in time. Tracking changes and continuities in the anticlerical press would be another way of assessing whether the priests’ war service had an impact on popular opinion (i.e. whether they achieved the respect and recognition they longed for or merely imagined it).

A second shortcoming is the fact that May engages the question of clerical violence on only the most superficial level. She notes that soldier priests killed and sometimes expressed regret for killing (or for enjoying it) and follows up with the claim that these experiences made it easier for priests to identify with and minister to other men who had been in combat. May does not explore the long tradition of Catholic theological reflection on violence, nor does she acknowledge that there were many other possible areas of shared experience (visiting brothels, for example) from which priests were expected to abstain. What made military violence different?

May’s temporal framework is also problematic. Her story ends in 1926 at what appears to be a comeback moment for Catholics in France’s culture wars—a happy ending of sorts. Extending the study to 1940 or 1945 would complicate things, as May would have to grapple with those segments of the Catholic Church that supported far right movements, cast their lot with the Vichy regime and celebrated the demise of the Third Republic.

Finally, May’s study adopts an exclusively national perspective with only the briefest references to other European states and the wider world. Comparative analysis across European cultural and religious landscapes would make it more difficult to affirm the validity of bargains in which clergy supported questionable regimes and policies in exchange for acceptance and influence. The response of many German clergy to their country’s “national renewal” in 1933 should serve as a cautionary tale. Likewise, May fails to incorporate insights from a large body of recent research on the global dimensions of the war. Though she notes the existence of colonial troops, she offers no meaningful discussion of their religious and cultural identities or their wartime experiences. Several of May’s priests (including Teilhard and Lenoir) embraced their role as missionaries and affirmed France’s “civilizing mission” throughout the world, but May does not indicate the context in which those efforts and assumptions played out. For example, the majority of France’s colonial soldiers were forcibly recruited through processes that did great violence to them, their families, and their communities. After arriving in Europe, they were deployed as shock troops in an effort to lower the death toll among white French soldiers.[2] We cannot understand the ideas and actions of priests like Teilhard and Lenoir apart from these realities. By neglecting them, May’s book remains confined to the same limited horizons as the priests’ own accounts of the war and its meaning.

[1] See John Horne, “Public Opinion and Politics,” in A Companion to World War I, ed. John Horne (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004), 280-281.

[2] See Joe Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999).

Review of James Enns. Saving Germany: North American Protestants and Christian Mission to West Germany, 1945-1974

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Review of James Enns. Saving Germany: North American Protestants and Christian Mission to West Germany, 1945-1974 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017). 328 Pp. ISBN: 9780773549135.

By Rebecca Carter-Chand, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum*

From the perspective of North American Protestants in 1945, Germans needed “saving” on a number of fronts: from the lingering effects of Nazism, from the potential allure of communism, from the seemingly inevitable pull of secularism, and perhaps most urgently, from the vast material destruction and deprivation in the wake of Germany’s defeat in World War II. James Enns’ 2017 book, Saving Germany: North American Protestants and Christian Mission to West Germany, 1945-1974, analyzes the role of North American Protestant ecumenical and mission agencies that participated in the reconstruction and spiritual rehabilitation of West Germany in the first three decades after World War II.

Enns examines a range of Protestant missionary responses to postwar Germany and divides his subjects into three broad categories. Ecumenical missionaries were mainline Protestants who worked primarily through the Religious Affairs Section of the American Military Government in Germany, the World Council of Churches (WCC), and the Church World Service. They were invested primarily in relief and reconstruction, particularly helping to rebuild the Evangelische Kirche Deutschland (the main Protestant church) as a pillar of German society. Denominational missionaries represent the second approach, and here Enns focuses on the Baptists and Mennonites. These denominations used pre-existing ties to their German counterparts and sought to build up these communities and their standing in German society. The third category is conservative evangelical missionaries who worked through independent mission organizations of a mid-century fundamentalist bent. The impact of organizations like Youth for Christ and Janz Team Ministries is not well known and the author does a good job integrating these organizations in the larger narrative.

Although he uses the terms “missionaries” and “missionary activity,” Enns is careful to distinguish the growing rift about the missionary endeavor within American Protestantism. By this period, mainline Protestants who supported the ecumenical movement had moved away from traditional practices of evangelizing and civilizing toward a model of humanitarian self-help (9). At the other end of the spectrum, conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants remained committed to converting the “unsaved” and promoting an individualized personal faith.

What all these approaches had in common, especially in the first postwar decade, was the goal of promoting democracy. In Enns’ assessment, the Cold War context hovered over all of these various relief and mission endeavors – the motivation to bulwark Germany against communism was much stronger than the desire to help Germans come to terms with their Nazi past. Each group understood the role of Christianity in different ways: ecumenical Protestants were committed to the WCC’s Christian internationalism; Baptists and Mennonites believed their congregational models of church governance best promoted democracy and religious freedom; and conservative evangelicals believed that “inviting Christ into your life” fostered the personal freedoms of democracy (104).

I applaud the author’s integration of Germany’s Freikirchen (independent churches) into the broader narrative of German Protestantism and his ability to juggle several denominations, ecumenical bodies, and ministries in a coherent narrative. The book draws out the powerful transnational influences of individuals like Billy Graham to the growth of a German Evangeliker identity (a neologism that connotes “evangelical” in the North American sense of the term, as opposed to evangelisch, which has always referred to the main Protestant church in Germany).

The analysis is less strong when it relies on the denominational mission agencies’ own articulation of what they were accomplishing in Germany. Regarding the North American Baptists’ efforts to restore Baptist church buildings, he writes that “[t]hey were helping German Baptists claim a legitimate place in the religious life of the communities in which they were resident and thus be agents of spiritual renewal to their own people” (84). The historical actors involved may well have believed the German Baptists to be agents of spiritual renewal, but such a claim should be analyzed in a broader context of German complicity. Ten pages later the author does address the German Baptists’ involvement in Nazi society, but prefaces the discussion with the erroneous claim that German Mennonites were not “compromised by Nazi ideology” (94). A plethora of new research on Mennonites and the Holocaust suggests that Mennonites were indeed compromised by Nazism in many ways.

These criticisms notwithstanding, Saving Germany makes an important contribution to our understanding of transnational religious history in postwar Germany and does so by taking seriously the full diversity of the German religious landscape.

* The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Review of Maria Anna Zumholz and Michael Hirschfeld, eds., Zwischen Seelsorge und Politik: Katholische Bischöfe in der NS-Zeit

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Review of Maria Anna Zumholz and Michael Hirschfeld, eds., Zwischen Seelsorge und Politik: Katholische Bischöfe in der NS-Zeit (Münster: Aschendorf Verlag, 2017), XII + 817 Pp., ISBN: 9783402132289.

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

This hefty tome, running past eight hundred pages, is a valuable contribution to the fields of German history, church history, and theological studies. Its inception was a conference held at the Catholic Academy Stapelfeld, in Cloppenburg in November 2016. Considering its subject – individual biographies of the Catholic bishops of Germany between 1933 and 1945 – its length is perhaps not surprising, though its editors caution us against treating it as exhaustive or comprehensive. For this reason, the reader may notice some sizeable gaps or curious omissions: Lorenz Jaeger, archbishop of Paderborn from 1941 into the postwar period, is not included (though his predecessor, Caspar Klein, is), nor are the bishops of Speyer, Aachen, Limburg, and Augsburg. Some chapters seem relatively cursory or incomplete: the chapter on Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber by Peter Pfister, director of the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising and an expert on this subject, runs a scant twelve pages, only six of which deal specifically with the Third Reich; similarly, the chapter on Clemens August Graf von Galen, bishop of Münster, focuses mostly on his pre-1939 biography.

The editors, Maria Anna Zumholz and Michael Hirschfeld, discuss significant forthcoming works on both von Faulhaber and Jaeger to account partly for the brevity of the studies here (13). And while there is a detailed chapter by Raphael Hülsbömer on Vatican Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli – later Pope Pius XII – and his relations with the German bishops, there is no attempt to integrate the episcopate into Vatican politics or consider the complicated, at times strained relationship between the wartime pope and the bishops as a collective. The editors justify this in part by referencing the closed archives covering the wartime pontificate of Pius XII; they could not have known that the year following this volume’s publication, the Vatican would finally announce the much-anticipated opening of these “secret archives” in 2020.[1]

Taken together, though, these gaps fail to significantly undermine what the volume brings to existing scholarship. Twenty-six German scholars, the majority with doctorates in history or theology (or both), several of whom direct diocesan archives or affiliated institutes, have produced twenty-one biographical chapters on twenty-three bishops.[2] Conscious that historical literature over the past seven decades has focused consistently on the political behaviour of the bishops, sometimes individually but more often as a group, and particularly on what the bishops failed or neglected to do – namely, explicitly condemn the Nazi regime’s human rights abuses and especially its persecution of the Jews – the contributors to this volume concentrate instead on studying the central purpose of the bishops: the exercise of their priestly, magisterial, and pastoral offices, which encompassed their zeal to preserve the teachings of the church and its values from distortion, and to immunize Germany’s Catholics against the Nazi world view.

In this, the contributors build on Antonia Leugers’ seminal 1996 study, which pointed to the bishops’ remarkably homogeneous backgrounds as a partial explanation for their lack of collective resistance to the regime’s policies during the war.[3] This volume goes further and acknowledges the distinctions not just between the bishops but also between their dioceses, exploring such diverse factors as age, health, the size of non-Catholic or non-German populations, the varied impact of industrialization and secularization, even the regional nature of German Catholicism, contrasting north versus south and centre versus periphery.

Despite these strong differences, the editors emphasize that the bishops remained united in thinking that the real lapse (Sündenfall) of Nazism was not its turn away from democracy, but its rejection of God and complete disregard for his commandments (11). They were not ignorant of the broader arena in which the Church was under attack by those intent on exterminating religion: events in Russia, Spain, and Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s urged the bishops to prepare for an existential battle within Germany up to the outbreak of war, a point made by Joachim Kuropka (to whom the volume is dedicated) in his introductory chapter.

This underscored the bishops’ commitment, at once individual and collective, to maintaining their office as pastoral care providers, even at the expense of becoming political actors. As pastors, they consistently identified their primary goal as confronting and limiting the insidious impact of Nazi ideology on German Catholics. They recognized Nazism, with its absolute political rule and its feverish attempts to claim universal jurisdiction over the construction of all worldly meaning, as a grave threat to the autonomy of the Church in Germany. They wielded an array of methods, from sermons to pastoral letters to a rigorous defense of the independence of Catholic youth organizations, to try to keep their flocks immunized against Nazism (die Immunisiering gegen die NS-Ideologie, 7). In this they were successful: there was no steep drop in the number of Germans identifying as Catholic throughout this period, to which the useful diocesan statistics in the appendix testify. Kuropka references Gestapo reports that describe a spiritual battle between the regime and German Catholics, which, he insists, the former lost (27).

Despite this uniform commitment to pastoral work, the bishops were not a uniform group, as their biographies emphasize. In his study of the two bishops of Fulda (Joseph Damian Schmitt and Johannes Baptist Dietz), Stefan Gerber argues that the most prominent members of the episcopate – Clemens von Galen, Michael von Faulhaber of Munich and Freising, Konrad von Preysing in Berlin, Joannes Baptista Sproll in Rottenburg – were in many ways exceptions and therefore are not helpful in reconstructing the self-perceptions, motives, expectations, and frictions of the “so-called second row” bishops (347). Indeed, von Galen, bishop of Münster, spoke publicly and forcefully against the regime’s euthanasia program in the summer of 1941 (Kuropka, the chapter’s author, gives this incident short shrift, more interested in other aspects of von Galen’s personality; he does not stress that von Galen spoke on his own, and not as a representative of the bishops), but he was the only Catholic bishop to do so. Other bishops designated assistants to spearhead efforts to help the victims of Nazism, particularly Catholics who had converted from Judaism and who were thus Catholic in the eyes of the Church, but Jewish in the eyes of the regime: Conrad Gröber in Freiburg, Cardinal Adolf Bertram in Breslau, and von Preysing in Berlin all took this route.

Other authors wrestle with source-based or historiographical problems. Thomas Flammer’s study of Joseph Godehard Machens, in the diaspora diocese of Hildesheim (its population in 1933 was less than 10% Catholic; the only diocese smaller than this, according to 1933 numbers, was Berlin) points to contradictory descriptions of the bishop’s personality: scholars have called him warmonger and Nazi and, according to his employees, he was both vain and humble, egotistical and shy, and “trusted very few people and counted even fewer among his friends.” (381) But upon his death in 1956, the Bundestag held a moment of silence, calling him a warrior against Nazism, and the Jewish community of Lower Saxony spoke of him as a friend and a great Catholic bishop.

Christoph Schmider wrestles with the legacy of Conrad Gröber, archbishop of Freiburg, which swings between the poles of “brown Conrad” (for his early openness to working with Hitler’s regime) and of “warrior of the resistance” (411). Schmider concedes ultimately that such a personality abjures a simple black-and-white characterization but instead requires “numerous gray tones so that, depending on the view of the observer, sometimes the gloomy and sometimes the brighter nuances prevail” (433).

Ulrich Helbach writes about how Cardinal Karl Joseph Schulte, the archbishop of Cologne who died during a bomb attack in 1941, has been consistently overshadowed in scholarship by his successor, Josef Frings, and his detailed analysis of Schulte centers on his personality, the challenges of leading one of Germany’s larger dioceses, and the impact of a serious heart attack (at the relatively young age of fifty-six, in 1927, six years into his tenure as archbishop) on his vocation and his reactions to Nazism. His observation about Schulte’s tendency towards compromise and conflict reduction (161), strengths which served him well in the 1920s, were a completely different matter under Nazism, and one that might be applied to other bishops as well.

All contributors treat diocese and region as integral to understanding the personality and behaviour of the bishop in question, and do not shy away from posing difficult historical and theological questions. In one of the longest chapters, Bernhard Schneider situates Bishop Franz Rudolf Bornewasser’s particular difficulties partly in the task of shepherding the peripheral diocese of Trier. So, on the one hand, Bornewasser was deeply involved in formulating a church-based approach to the pro-German campaign of the 1935 Saar plebiscite, a task for which his ardent love for the Fatherland (which he distinguished from “unchristian nationalism”) prepared him well and which seemingly put him in step with the regime (260). On the other hand, in September 1941 he preached about the prohibition against killing, referring to the T4 program and referencing other episcopal writings (including von Galen’s, indirectly), apparently willing to risk the wrath of the regime in doing so.

Andreas Hölscher writes of Jacobus von Hauck as decisive in shaping the archdiocese of Bamberg for the twentieth century; in 1933, when he was seventy-one, he was the second-oldest and second-longest serving of all the German bishops, having been archbishop since 1912. Since the 1990s his reputation has been shaped by accusations of accommodation with Nazism and a failure to speak out on behalf of human rights. But as Hölscher argues, these questions can, and should, be asked of all the bishops, and of the Church as a whole: what was, and is, the Church’s mission in connection to the defense of human rights? Does the Church have a clearly defined mission beyond the recognized and accepted ecclesiastical milieu (kirchliches Umfeld, 615)? Hölscher and other contributors address these issues, but mostly by way of concluding remarks, and do not attempt to wrestle with them at length. It should be noted that these questions have risen largely in hindsight, after 1945, and that it is far from clear that any of the German bishops at the time entertained them, either in the safety and security of their own minds or, with less security, in conversation with each other.

While the volume fails to tackle these questions directly, its contributors and editors might claim, with justification, that they lie beyond the scope of their objective, which is to consider each bishop in the context of his diocese. They have eschewed overly moral or hagiographic narratives in favour of critical historical analyses of how each bishop approached his office as pastor, and how this shaped his interactions to the Nazi regime, from accommodation to opposition. In some cases, this spectrum is apparent even within an individual case (the best example is Gröber). This is the real strength of the book as a whole: each chapter demonstrates the significance of background (birthplace, education, family history, friendships) and location in helping to determine the course of action a bishop took. Ultimately the image of the episcopate as a group that emerges is not simply one of collective silence in the face of murder and atrocity, as previous histories stress, but also of collective concern for the preservation of the Church in Germany, a concern that co-existed, sometimes with considerable tension, alongside individual hopes and fears, private dissent and frustrations, and physical and emotional limitations. United they may have been in presenting a unified front to Hitler, but behind this façade these men were individual humans, with myriad strengths and weaknesses.

The tendency throughout the volume is to rely on archival material, though the contributors and editors have also relayed relevant historiographical information, detailing shifting interpretations of episcopal actions and reactions across several decades. Michael Hirschfeld’s introductory essay is particularly illuminating in this regard, tracing the post-1945 history of the bishops under Nazism through three distinct phases that affected the broader narrative of the history of the Catholic Church under Nazism between the end of the war and twenty-first century. In this he echoes, though with far less detail, some of Mark Ruff’s findings in his recent book, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980, which appeared in print a year before this volume. Hirschfeld does not cite Ruff (likely the book was not available in time), and the secondary literature included in the bibliographies is entirely in German. This reflects the state of the field, in which – predictably – German scholars have undertaken the great bulk of writing the history of their Church leaders.

This book is currently the most up-to-date collection of biographical chapters on the German Catholic bishops during the Third Reich. Its dedication to highlighting revelatory contextual information by plumbing their personal backgrounds and integrating them more fully into their diocesan environments is invaluable, and is rendered explicitly, as Hirschfeld tells us, to reflect a growing trend: the rejection of the easy, unambiguous understandings of historical figures that our contemporary information society peddles in order to “embrace the grey tones that make possible a nuanced image of the respective personalities of the bishops” (49-50). Many contributors acknowledge this trend as well, and reference research projects of various sizes that are underway, for example of Jaeger and Faulhaber, as already mentioned, but also of Machens and Sproll. Thus the volume will hardly be the final word on many of the individual histories. So too we must anticipate that the opening of Pope Pius XII’s “secret archives” next year will generate a new wave of questions and challenges about the Catholic Church’s leaders in Germany and their relationship with the Vatican during the war. Until then, Hirschfeld and Zumholz and their host of contributors have given those of us interested in the Catholic bishops and their historical legacy much to consider.

[1] “Pius XII: Vatican to Open Secret Holocaust-Era Archives,” BBC World News, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47444293, last accessed 30 May 2019.

[2] Hirschfeld and Zumholz define the German episcopate from 1933 to 1945 as consisting of 9 archbishops and 25 bishops, using the Altreich (1937) borders of Germany (pg. 2). The study therefore excludes the Austrian bishops and dioceses integrated into Germany following the 1938 Anschluss.

[3] Leugers, Gegen eine Mauer bischöflichen Schweigens : Der Ausschuß für Ordensangelegenheiten und seine Widerstandskonzeption 1941 bis 1945 (J. Knecht Verlag, 1996).

Review of Thomas Brodie, German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Review of Thomas Brodie, German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945 (Oxford/NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 288 Pp., ISBN: 9780198827023.

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

In German Catholicism at War, Thomas Brodie, lecturer in twentieth-century European history at the University of Birmingham, has produced a valuable examination of Catholicism in Germany during the Second World War. Similar in approach to Patrick Houlihan’s World War I study, Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922 (Cambridge, 2015), Brodie’s work aims to explore “Catholicism’s social, cultural, and political roles in German society during the Second World War” (3). Rather than tackle Catholicism in Germany as a whole, Brodie conducts a regional study focusing upon Catholics in the Rhineland and Westphalia, specifically in the archdiocese of Cologne and the dioceses of Aachen and Münster. He explains his selection by writing, “These regions represented heartlands of German Catholicism, with Cologne nicknamed the ‘German Rome’ and its archbishopric featuring the largest Catholic population of any in the Reich” (11). In these regions of the home front during the war, Brodie wishes to examine Catholic “devotional practices and confessional communities” (10) to understand “how far Catholics supported their nation’s war efforts as its genocidal dimension unfolded, and whether they were able to reconcile national, political, and religious loyalties over the tumultuous years from 1939-1945” (3-4).

According to Brodie, few scholars have dedicated attention to such questions. Certainly, Brodie is correct that there is no monograph that singularly examines Catholicism on the German Home Front during the Second World War. At the same time, he excludes from his bibliography studies by individuals such as Thomas Breuer, Ernst Christian Helmreich, and Heinrich Missalla, which have endeavored, at least, partially but perceptively, to address related issues. He also is quick to dismiss much of the recent historiography on the churches, deeming them too focused on the “German Churches institutional relationship with the Holocaust,” too preoccupied with “religious leaders and theologians,” and too often written in a “moralizing argumentative tone” (8). Brodie laments that many recent works on Germany under National Socialism, especially recent titles focusing on the German Volksgemeinschaft (national/racial community), have completely ignored the impact of religion on German culture and society. By contrast, Brodie sets out to build upon the works of Dietmar Süß (Death from the Skies, Oxford, 2014) and, his Doktorvater, Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation under Arms (London, 2015), which, as a part of their larger narrative, address the role religion played in German society during the Second World War.

From the outset, Brodie makes a series of claims that challenge much of the existing historiography on the Catholic Church under National Socialism. While the Church experienced restrictions and confiscation of its properties, Brodie asserts that its clergy was a part of the “national community” and not a “persecuted minority beyond its boundaries” (18). He notes, “In marked contrast to the Kulturkampf, no German Catholic bishop was imprisoned during the Third Reich” (18). Active resistance was “far from uniform” and only reflected “the commitments of individuals and small groups rather than a coherent trend across the milieu” (18-19). The Nazi leadership had no plans to “demolish” or “dismantle” the Churches after the war. More likely, Brodie suggests, “Hitler and Goebbels had less violent measures in mind,” such as the “withdrawal of state financial support” (17). Ultimately, Brodie insists that one cannot misleadingly describe the German Catholic milieu as an “impermeable” sub-culture and place it in juxtaposition against “anti-clerical” National Socialist leaders (20). Rather, one must conceive of the Catholic milieu as multi-faceted and permeable. Within it, existed individuals across the political and social spectrum. As Armin Nolzen finds (and Brodie quotes), “most members of the party and its auxiliary organizations were affiliated with the Christian Churches during the Third Reich” (20). Such definitive claims are provocative. Throughout the study, Brodie endeavors to defend them. At times, he succeeds; at others, he is less convincing. Still, he offers much for the reader to consider and for historians to explore further.

In his initial chapter, “Prologue 1933-1939,” Brodie introduces the reader to the history of church-state relations under National Socialism. Though Catholics had participated in Weimar democracy, Brodie explains that authoritarian thought had increasingly crept into Catholic intellectual discourse. He attributes this openness to conservative-authoritarian ideas primarily to the Church’s Neo-Scholastic theology, which he explains, “Located the evils of a godless modernity in the secularizing trends unleased within European society since the enlightenment and French Revolution” (24). Brodie’s use of Neo-Scholasticism is perhaps misplaced. He uses it again and again as if to explain the nature of the statements and pastoral letters of the bishops, to clarify the motivations of the Catholic clergy, and to describe reticent actions of Church leaders toward the state.

In general, Brodie makes little differentiation in his presentation of theology throughout his work and, in my opinion, does not fairly consider its implications. Perhaps, he would have done well to consult Robert Krieg’s Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany (New York, 2004) or a similar study to learn more about the diversity of Catholic theology at that time. (To be fair, he does cite an article by Krieg, but this article is limited in scope and not as broad a work as Catholic Theologians.) Klaus Breuning’s classic study, Die Vision des Reiches (Munich, 1969), could also have assisted Brodie more convincingly to contextualize his analysis of Catholic intellectual-theological bridge-building with National Socialism. Instead, Brodie writes, “The Nazi regime enjoyed considerable support among Catholic intellectuals, both clerical and lay, in the Rhineland and Westphalia during its initial years of power” (25). Such sweeping statements are not helpful in his otherwise insightful analysis.

According to Brodie, the initial years of National Socialist rule experienced little tension in church-state relations. Even the 1934 murder of Erich Klausener, the leader of Catholic-Action in Berlin, during the Röhm Purge, or the increasing number of infringements against the Reich-Vatican concordat does not warrant much concern. Recalling Ian Kershaw’s insight, Brodie writes, “Catholics extensively believed that Nazi anti-clerical policies were the work of Party radicals, and deemed Hitler innocent of involvement in their introduction” (26). A valid point indeed. Yet, such analysis enables Brodie to understate state-church tensions and to emphasize the nationalism of Catholics. For Brodie, Catholics proudly exhibited their nationalism as the National Socialist state remilitarized the Rhineland, gave assistance to the nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, and annexed Austria. Catholics deeply longed to be a part of the “national community” and eagerly supported its endeavors. In the latter 1930s, this even led Catholic clergymen “to defend the Catholic Church from hostile Nazi propaganda” by downplaying “the faith’s Jewish heritage” and by stressing its “national reliability” instead (28).

While these are legitimate facts, they are perhaps presented one-sidedly while ignoring the wealth of studies on Catholic resistance. Yet, even in the face of a definitive thesis, Brodie does point out that there is evidence Catholics did not as a whole support violence toward Jews during Kristallnacht nor did they condone increased tensions in church-state relations in the latter 1930s. Brodie concludes his prologue – a pattern he follows in each chapter – by leaving space for conflicting interpretations, stating, “Relations between German Catholics and the Nazi regime were accordingly complex on the eve of the Second World War in summer 1939” (30).

In Chapter One, “The Years of Victory, 1939-1940,” Brodie investigates how German Catholics responded to the outbreak of war in Poland and German victory in France. In comparison to the enthusiasm for war shown by the bishops in 1914, in general, the Catholic hierarchy in the Rhineland and Westphalia were generally more reserved and focused on the “fulfillment of duty and a “swift end to the conflict” (33). If anything, the bishops viewed the war “in universal terms as a divine punishment for sinful, secular humanity” (35). Brodie attributes the bishops’ interpretation to the influence of Neo-Scholastic theology but also points out that there was an exception to this outlook. Bishop Clemens August von Galen of Münster, for example, made statements and produced pastoral letters that incorporated forceful language with “overtly nationalist sentiments,” a trait he continued throughout the war, even into the post-war period (33). In this observation, Brodie confirms the arguments first put forward by Beth Griech-Poelle, which have been unfairly maligned by Joachim Kuropka and his Münsterland colleagues (primarily in German language works).

In their statements and letters, the bishops were myopic, almost self-centered, focusing on the “future fate of the Church in Germany,” not the “current situation in Poland” (37). They showed no concern for their Polish confreres, even though the Bishop of Katowice had sent at least two reports about the plight of the Polish clergy to the Fulda Bishops’ Conference. Michael Phayer first emphasized this fact, though Brodie does not cite him at this point in his narrative. If anything, German Catholics only showed sympathy toward co-religionist Polish forced laborers in their midst. (Again, Brodie makes this point without referencing the pioneering work of John J. Delaney on this subject.) In general, German Catholics showed little or no concern toward the plight of the Poles under Nazi occupation. The greater concern for the bishops and clergy was the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact and how it might impact the Church. Yet, despite this development, the German hierarchy, lower clergy, and laity continued to support the German state, especially after the fall of France in June 1940. The bishops even placed the resources of Caritas, the German Church’s charity organization, at the disposal of the Reich government.

Toward the end of the first chapter, Brodie emphasizes the impact antisemitic propaganda had on Rhineland and Westphalian Catholics. As evidence, he cites antisemitic and nationalistic articles from the Kolpingsblatt that he admits is “hardly representative of episcopal policy” (54). In turn, Brodie discusses the response to the 1939 lecture on the German Catholicism by theologian Karl Adam, a priest of the Regensburg diocese, who called for closer alignment between German nationalism and Roman Catholicism. While ignoring much of the existing historiography on Adam, Brodie fixates on a Düsseldorf Gestapo report that describes how Adam’s lecture had enthused younger clergy but produced opposition from the German hierarchy and more ultramontane-inclined older clergy. Brodie makes much of this statement, especially the insight he believes it offers on the response to the lecture among parish priests and Catholic laity. For him, this response is an example of the permeability of the Catholic milieu and the divisions that existed among the clergy in relation to acceptance and rejection of National Socialism. Unfortunately, Brodie can offer no further evidence to substantiate the Gestapo report nor can he present additional substantial evidence when he returns in chapter three to similar points of tension among the clergy.

Chapter Two, “Confrontation and its Limits,” focuses primarily on the three widely known sermons delivered by Bishop von Galen in the summer of 1941, following a period of intense church-state conflict. Brodie regrets that in the past the examination of von Galen has focused on “a moralizing debate concerning Galen’s individual status as a resister of Nazism” (65). Indeed, the bishop’s words were clear and stood in contrast to the “highly abstract and intellectual Neo-Scholastic language normally” used by the bishops in their pastoral letters; yet, Brodie insists they cannot be viewed as “articulations of outright opposition to the Nazi regime” (71-72). Instead, Brodie argues, Galen “skillfully positioned his protests within mainstream German nationalist opinion” (73). As such, German Catholics could agree with them, especially as many Catholics had first-hand witnessed the confiscation of monastic and Church properties. Similarly, fearing the forced euthanasia of their own institutionalized family members or wounded sons coming back from the battlefield, lay Catholics could easily relate to the bishop’s criticisms of the T-4 euthanasia policy. Despite such agreement, Brodie uncovers criticism recorded by SD and Gestapo agents from individuals who worry that von Galen has “undermined the home front” (81). Such concerns were quickly forgotten as Brodie reports that the sermons had little lasting effects, at least according to the Gestapo. By late fall, both the state and von Galen had reached a modus vivendi as Goebbels noted in his diary in mid-November, “The theoreticians in the Party must be put back in their cupboards” (86-87). Similarly, by late 1941, German Catholics “viewed their chief priority as securing their place inside the ‘national community’” (92). According to Brodie, this also meant that Catholics were not going to protest the state’s persecution of Jews.

Chapter Three, “The War Intensifies, December 1941-June 1944,” examines Catholic response to the war from the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and the subsequent onset of systematic murder of the Jews through German military defeat at the battle of Stalingrad in early 1943 and the D-Day invasion of June 1944. The German hierarchy’s responses follow established general patterns. No longer playing the role of a resister, in March 1942, von Galen issued a pastoral letter for Heroes’ Memorial Day, which praised the fallen against Bolshevism as “Christian martyrs in a ‘Crusade’ against ‘a satanic ideological system” (95). Frings of Cologne did his best to “avoid confrontation with the Nazi authorities,” even though past scholars have portrayed the bishop as a resister. In December 1942, Frings did issue a pastoral letter, The Principles of Law, meant to confront the state’s racial policy, but its “abstract intellectual” language failed to sway Catholics in any significant manner. Frings’ response was indicative of the stances taken by most of the German bishops. Even though faced with accurate reports on the mass murder of Jews, they remained indecisive and at odds with each other on how to respond. Though this issue has been exhaustively investigated by Antonia Leugers in Gegen einer Mauer: bischöflichen Schweigens (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), Brodie does not cite her but relies on more general sources for his narrative.

Over the course of 1942, the Nazi state lessoned its anti-clerical policies. This change did not go unnoticed by the bishops or the clergy. Still, the parish clergy, who had to deal with the regime daily on the ground level, maintained a “special hostility towards individual members of the Nazi regime” who, they believed, were behind anti-clerical measures (100). Their anger was frequently directed at Himmler and the SS and not toward the German government and, therefore, according to Brodie, betraying the “self-interested perspectives of the clergy, with the Nazi regime’s anti-clerical record being the primary source of their discontent, not its genocidal and imperial projects under way in eastern Europe” (101). Once the anti-clericalism subsided, Brodie argues that clergy were more accommodating of the regime. Utilizing a case study of two priests from Corpus Christi parish in Aachen, Brodie arrives at the far-flung conclusion that clergy who resisted or consistently held “negative attitudes towards the Nazi state and wider war” were in the minority (104), offering little nuance in his analysis. As evidence, he turns to the case of Dr. Johann Nattermann(es), a priest of the Cologne archdiocese, who gave outright support to the war. Brodie seems to have no knowledge of Nattermann’s pro-Nazi sympathies, his pro-National Socialist work with the Kolping Association, or his contributions to a 1936 pro-Nazi publication, Sendschreiben katholischer Deutscher an ihre Volks- und Glaubensgenossen.

After the February 1943 surrender of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the mood of the Catholic population and clergy toward the war changed. The bishops continued to support the war but also increased the language of sin and judgment in their pastoral letters. Meanwhile, the Gestapo and SD received frequent reports about unrest among the parish clergy whose criticism of the war appeared to be growing. Lay Catholics, too, complained, often about their bishops, especially for not condemning Allied bombing of Germany and for admonishing Catholics not to resort to language of “revenge.” In the end, Brodie’s analysis attempts to support dual interpretations, as he writes, “Whereas many Catholic clergymen and members of the laity were increasingly pessimistic concerning the war’s development, others continued to believe in, and hope for, German victory” (120).

Chapter Four, “Religious Life on the German Home Front,” examines the impact of the war on parish and diocesan church life on the home front. Brodie does not agree with the conventional historiography that posits an increase in piety and religiosity as German Catholics retreated inwardly in the face of total war. By contrast, Brodie portrays a gradual break-down of diocesan and parish structures that supported Catholics’ faith. While, soon after the war began, the number of withdrawals from official Church membership (Kirchenaustritt) decreased, at the same time, the number of young men entering the seminary also substantially decreased, especially with general mobilization. State laws, such as the October 29, 1940 air raid ordinance for religious services, placed restrictions on the public practice of religion. Such measures limited the availability of Masses for Catholics and thus affected religious practice.

Still, Brodie finds evidence of lay Catholics turning to their priests for guidance and protection during air raids, such as requesting the presence of clergy strategically positioned throughout air raid shelters. Other Catholics turned to religious medallions and devotions for solace during Allied bombing. What existed of parish activity was often championed by lay women Catholics who maintained their religious practices and parish involvement. Despite the state attempting to limit religious practice and even organize state funerals for victims of bombing, Brodie argues that “local parish priests remained for most Catholics a primary source of comfort in times of bereavement” (162). Funerals, he argues, should not be interpreted as promoting “defeatist sentiment or overt cultural retreat from Nazism,” but presented opportunities for an “overlap between Catholic ritual and Nazi ideology,” both which supported the state (163). In certain areas, such as Cologne, clergy and Nazi authorities cooperated to provide “mass public funerals for air-raid victims” (164). Brodie stresses that, “Catholic piety did not so much afford a space for cultural retreat from Nazism, as contribute to a ritual performance of national solidarity and victimhood, co-existing with the iconographies and languages of the NSDAP as well as older nationalist traditions” (165).

Chapter Five, “The Catholic Diaspora – Experiences of Evacuation” is an excellent chapter that breaks new ground in its description of the evacuation experience of Catholics to escape Allied bombing. As Brodie explains, Catholics from western Germany were temporarily relocated to Thuringia, Saxony, Brandenburg, and lower Silesia. Many of these areas were heavily Protestant and unwelcoming, or even hostile, to Catholics. In addition, as one National Socialist Welfare official commented on the relocation of Catholic children, “Finally we can get our hands on the children and separate them from the priests” (173). Though the western dioceses sent priests to minister to the transplanted Catholics, the task for the clergy was daunting. Geography was one of the main factors preventing contact between clergy and laity with some priests being required to cover wide stretches of territory often using poor public transportation. Many other obstacles existed. Such challenges led priests to describe their pastoral tasks in “martyrological language.” Brodie believes the use of such language prepared the clergy later to adopt it to explain their “self-understanding as victims of Nazism,” once the war ended (191).

In the sixth chapter, “Of Collapses and Rebirths,” Brodie recounts the well-documented post-war experience of the German Catholic hierarchy. As the Catholic Church’s infrastructure lay in ruins, the German bishops sought to find redemption. One path they chose was embracing the language of suffering as Brodie explains, “By evoking Christ’s passion and the Book of Job as metaphors to make sense of the fate befalling the Catholic Heimat, Frings and Galen strengthened and legitimized Catholic Germans emerging self-understanding as innocent victims of the war” (208). Such analysis offers evidence of the singularity of Brodie’s theological interpretation.

As the Allied troops moved eastwardly, the local clergy often became trusted contacts. Goebbels cynically noted this fact in a March 8, 1945 diary entry (224). After the conflict ended, the German bishops publicly promoted the language of victimhood and rejected collective guilt. Pope Pius XII supported such efforts to promote the image of a suffering German Catholicism by elevating Frings and von Galen to the college of cardinals soon after the war ended. Even Bernard William Griffin, Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, contributed to this interpretation by inviting Cardinal Frings to preach in London’s Westminster Cathedral in September 1946. Frings’ homily focused on the “severe persecution” the Catholic Church in Germany” had endured under National Socialism (225). Whatever ground the Church had lost under National Socialism, it seems to have regained it in post-war Germany.

Brodie has produced a helpful study of the German Catholic Church at war. For it, he has consulted an impressive array of church and state archival sources. Most interesting is his use of clerical Gestapo V-Männer reports held in the North-Rhineland-Westphalian State Archive (Rhineland Division) to ascertain the climate of both ordained and lay Catholics. Brodie is cautious in his use of this material and generally informs his reader of its use, especially when analyzing and drawing conclusions. Often such reports are the only avenue by which to gauge the opinion of lay Catholics. Brodie does supplement such reports with quotes from published and unpublished diaries, memoirs, and letters of both ordained and lay Catholics. All of this, he weaves together in an engaging and insightful narrative. His bibliography is extensive, but something about his sources does not sit right with me. At key points in the narrative, as I have pointed out above, he seems to be neglectful or unaware of important secondary sources, especially those focusing specifically on the Catholic Church in Germany under National Socialism. By contrast, his integration of more secularly based secondary works is impressive and contextualizes his study well into the historical events of Germany under war. At times, Brodie’s terminology is odd for a study on German Catholicism, referring: to a “curate” as a “trainee clergyman” (49); to a “religious community” as “holy orders” (67); to a “seminarian” as a “trainee priest” (135); to a newly appointed pastor as a “trainee pastor” (136); to “rectory” as a “parochial house” (146); to a “Vicar General” as a “General Vicar” (223). I know that I might sound punctilious, but I link this concern to Brodie’s ubiquitous use of Neo-Scholasticism to explain repeatedly clerical theological motivation. From the outset, Brodie makes it clear that he does not wish to engage in moralizing, but in the end, he has produced a sententious narrative that in itself does not fully elucidate the multifaceted nature of Catholicism under National Socialism.

Review of Michael E. O’Sullivan, Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Review of Michael E. O’Sullivan, Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 344 Pp., ISBN: 9781487503437.

By Kevin P. Spicer, Stonehill College

For every Marian apparition approved by the Vatican, such as at Guadalupe, Mexico (1531), La Salette, France (1846), and Lourdes, France (1858), there are numerous that remain under study or are refused recognition by the Church. Nevertheless, the lack of approbation cannot contain the fervor of many believers from seeking an intimate connection with the supernatural or, put in theological terms, miraculous intervention for the relief of malady or burden. In Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, Michael E. O’Sullivan, associate professor of history at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, examines the nature and impact of Marian apparitions and the phenomena of stigmatic ecstasies on German Catholicism from the time of the establishment of the Weimar Republic up through the middle of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Though these occurrences are notable in nature and unique in theological understanding, they share a supernatural commonality that O’Sullivan recounts as events of “miraculous faith” (4). O’Sullivan rightly argues that historians, even those who specialize in church history, have for too long neglected incidents of miraculous faith in their analysis of German history. In his fascinating study, O’Sullivan endeavors to fill this void. For him, miraculous faith events both reflect and intensify the institutional, political, cultural, and gender tensions within German Catholicism.

O’Sullivan concurs with historians, such as Oded Heilbronner, who view post-WWI Catholicism already in decay, documented, in part, by communion statistics and lessening of participation in urban male Catholic associations. At the same time, for O’Sullivan, the miraculous faith events also reveal, “an upsurge in devotion and a revolt by traditionalists against mainstream religious and political leaders that ultimately contributed to the church’s fragmentation and transformation of Christianity’s role in politics” (4). To this end, the events of miraculous faith “disrupted three major elements of German history: religious secularization, Christian politics, and patriarchal gender roles” (4).

Disruptive Power departs from standard secularization theories and posits a “braided,” twisting path of secularization, which O’Sullivan defines as “the process by which religion becomes less central to the world view, mentalities, and institutions that shaped the everyday lives of modern historical subjects” (5). Explaining further, O’Sullivan writes, “secularization followed a hybrid path in the modern age where the secular and sacred existed side by side” (5). To clarify this point, O’Sullivan turns to Robert Orsi’s concept of “lived religion,” which focuses on how generations transmitted, subordinated, or rediscovered devotional practices. According to O’Sullivan, Orsi surmises that “religious worlds, subcultures, and mentalities” need not be portrayed as “isolated and separate from other aspects of society and experience” (8). Rather, twentieth-century German Catholicism reflected German society and its regional differentiation. In this respect, it is incorrect to portray it as a rigid monolith or a single all-encompassing milieu.

Such insight on milieu reflects similar perspectives argued in other recently published works on German Catholicism, most notably by Jeffrey Zalar in Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770-1914. However, O’Sullivan emphasizes the role of milieu much less than Zalar.

More important for O’Sullivan is the conflict among and between competing groups for influence over differentiated Catholic milieus. To illustrate such struggles, O’Sullivan makes use of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “‘religious field’ of competition” between clergy and laity over “legitimation and the ‘goods of salvation’” as various groups and individuals vie for power and authority within Catholicism (11). Such applications enable O’Sullivan to make connections between miraculous faith events and the fluctuations of power in and influence of Catholic political parties, especially during Weimar and the Federal Republic of Germany.

Similarly, tensions in ecclesial power play often uncovered cracks in the gender dynamics of the church as religious authority vacillated between traditional female and male ecclesiastical roles. In particular, O’Sullivan makes it clear that he rejects anachronistic portraits of “piously Catholic women” and instead endeavors to present them “as empowered agents negotiating a perilous but evolving patriarchal power structure” (15).

In twentieth-century Germany, the Catholic woman who best negotiated the patriarchal structure of German society and the German Catholic Church was the stigmatic, seer, and mystic, Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth, from Bavaria, in the Regensburg diocese. She serves as the focus of O’Sullivan’s study by offering a lucent example of how “pious women negotiated spheres of power while embracing strict moral codes and paternal hierarchy” (7). Unlike Neumann, lesser-known mystics, such as Anna Maria Goebel, failed to maneuver adroitly through the numerous obstacles facing them and, generally, have been forgotten. By contrast, Neumann is still quite well known. In 2005, after much debate and at least forty-thousand requests, Bishop Gerhard Müller of Regensburg had Therese Neumann declared a “Servant of God” by opening an official beautification process for her (https://www.bistum-regensburg.de/news/eroeffnung-des-seligsprechungs-verfahrens-von-therese-neumann-296/). O’Sullivan’s study uncovers why Therese Neumann and her supporters – commonly identified as the “Konnersreuth Circle” – are unique and so memorable.

In Chapter One, “Germany between Apocalypse and Salvation: Bloody Images and Miraculous Cures,” O’Sullivan describes the rise of events of miraculous faith in post-World War I Germany. Existing Marian pilgrimage sites at Neviges (Ruhr district) and Kevelear (Rhineland) received an upsurge in visitors as Catholics visited them out of a quest for meaning amid a changing political landscape and rising secularism in German society. New events of miraculous faith also took place in Aachen and Bickendorf (Eifel), all of which captured the imagination of German Catholics. In 1920, in Aachen, a visiting excommunicated French priest, Argence Vachère, who had a history of seeing images of Christ and consecrated hosts bleed, together with several lay Catholics, witnessed a picture of Jesus and a religious statue shed blood for several days. This “Blood Miracle” of Aachen also attracted the attention and support of the followers of Barbara Weigand of Schippach (near Würzburg), a mystic, who, following her beatific visions, criticized clerical authority and advocated for a less patriarchal church. Around the same time, in the tiny village of Bickendorf, Anna Maria Goebbel began to endure profuse bleeding and experienced religious visions.

For O’Sullivan, these seemingly disparate phenomena illustrate larger tensions for Catholics in German society. The eccentric unwieldy nature of the mystics made them problematic for the German bishops of their respective dioceses, fearing that they might “jeopardize Catholic attempts to integrate nationally” (29). O’Sullivan argues that the bishops preferred to uphold their hierarchical, patriarchal power structure by organizing their own contained celebration of events of miraculous faith, such as when the Trier diocese placed the Holy Tunic of Christ on display in the summer of 1933. In the chapter’s conclusion, O’Sullivan posits that this struggle over the control of the “goods of salvation” unintentionally “reduced the power of the formal church and its leadership” (52). An interesting claim, one repeated often in the book, but one for which clearer evidence is needed.

In Chapter Two, “The Rise of Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth during the Weimar Republic,” O’Sullivan introduces the miraculous story of Neumann, nicknamed, “Resl.” Beginning in 1926, Neumann experienced the stigmata following years of sickness and personal tragedy. Like clockwork, on Friday afternoons, Neumann would experience “suffering” from a mixture of stigmata, head wounds imitating Jesus’ crown of thorns, and ecstatic visions of Christ’s Passion. Thousands journeyed to her humble family home to wait in line for hours to witness personally the spectacle. Neumann also claimed to subsist solely on consecrated hosts.

Unlike other mystics whose cause floundered, Neumann attracted a powerful group of male supporters who publicly defended her against criticism and doubters. The list of hierophants is significant, including Father Joseph Naber, the pastor of St. Laurentius, the Catholic parish in Konnersreuth; Erwein Freiherr von Aretin, an editor with the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten; Father Franz Xaver Wutz, a professor of Old Testament at the Philosophical-Theological College in Eichstätt; Friedrich von Lama, an eccentric conservative free-lance journalist; and Fritz Gerlich, an author and journalist who subsequently founded the anti-Nazi, Der gerade Weg.

O’Sullivan devotes the greatest attention to Gerlich who left his Calvinist faith and hedonistic lifestyle (yes, the two are mutually contradictory) after meeting Neumann and joined the Catholic Church. He argues that these advocates, along with thousands of other supporters, were able to experience “God directly through Neumann without confession, communion, and other sacramental formalities” (55). In turn, for those Catholics who positively encountered Neumann, she “replaced the church as the primary focus of their prayers and they set their own rules with flexibility regarding official doctrine” (75-76). O’Sullivan repeatedly emphasizes this point about the usurpation of power by Neumann and the Konnersreuth Circle from the institutional Church. Indeed, Neumann’s witness and testimony became the impetus for many individuals to return to the practice of their Catholic faith. Many Catholics also turned toward Neumann to have clearer access to the “sacred.” As O’Sullivan instructs, such avenues fell outside official Church channels, becoming of great concern to the bishops. Nevertheless, while many Catholics sought out the guidance and counsel of Neumann, in the end, they practiced their faith through the traditional sacramental forms of worship—a point that O’Sullivan describes but neglects to make.

In Chapter Three, “Saving Souls and Making Enemies: The Struggle over Konnersreuth and the Downfall of Political Catholicism,” O’Sullivan builds upon Stephen Schloesser’s Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919-1933, which examined intellectuals, such as Jacques Maritain and Georges Rouault, who turned to Catholic mysticism to cope with the aftermath of the First World War. O’Sullivan believes the Konnersreuth Circle did the same in Germany. Despite such support, Neumann also encountered numerous critics, including Father Johann Baptist Westermayr, a priest of the archdiocese of Munich and Freising and the Freising seminary rector, and Father Georg Wunderle, a priest of the Eichstätt diocese (O’Sullivan incorrectly identifies him as a Franciscan), a professor of apologetics at the University of Würzburg, and, from 1932-1933, rector of the university [Wolfgang Weiß, “Wunderle, Georg,” BBKL 36 (2015): 1538-1550]. Both desired to protect the “church’s control of the ‘goods of salvation’” (85).

Likewise, Bishop Michael Buchberger of Regensburg, in whose diocese Konnersreuth resided, remained skeptical and arranged, in July 1927, for an official medical exam of Neumann. After a fourteen-day observation in Neumann’s family home, and in the presence of four nuns, the doctors concluded that the religious nature of her experiences were in doubt and should be explained through “the growing field of parapsychology” (86). O’Sullivan suggests that the doctors desired “to defend the faith from embarrassment” and thus chose to define Neumann’s experiences through a “genuinely modern belief system” (87). Despite this verdict and the urging of a representative from the Apostolic Nunciature in Munich, Buchberger never excommunicated Neumann nor did he transfer Father Naber from the Konnersreuth parish.

Other factors, too, supported Neumann and her circle. Her family had strong ties with local and state politicians from the Bavarian People’s Party. In turn, the Konnersreuth Circle regularly directed its defense of Neumann primarily against left-wing criticism, while generally ignoring that of the right. O’Sullivan concludes that such forms of defense, “bolstered Catholic conservatives that opposed Centre Party republicanism, and contributed to the Nazi rise to power” (107). While one might draw this conclusion, the evidence presented does not firmly support such a definitive interpretation.

Chapter Four, “Between Feminine Agency and Moral Utopia: Gender and Sex in Konnersreuth,” examines the role of gender in the events surrounding Neumann and the Konnersreuth Circle. According to O’Sullivan, Neumann was “neither a feminist advocate of emancipation nor a powerless pawn of traditional patriarchs” (116). Instead, he argues that Neumann “manipulated the gender norms of her time to survive as a public and holy figure where other mystics faded and accumulated more spiritual capital than just about any other Catholic female of her era” (116).

What is not completely clear is the distinction between Neumann’s manipulation of the gender norms and the existing gender dynamics within Bavarian society. For example, though Neumann “expressed her own willingness” to submit to Bishop Buchberger’s request for a second medical examination, at the same time, she remained obedient to her father, Ferdinand, who forbade any additional examinations (119). Her family and the Konnersreuth Circle also weaponized Neumann’s chastity to prevent medical investigation and to discredit her critics. Evidence for this may be seen when the Neumann family accused Father Georg Wunderle of “touching Neumann’s breasts inappropriately during an examination of her stigmata” and thereby denied him “future access to their home” (136). Despite the pressure placed upon Neumann, her family, and upon the Konnersreuth Circle, no second examination was ever undertaken.

In Chapter Five, “Disruptive Potential: Catholic Miracles under the Third Reich,” O’Sullivan first briefly presents previous interpretations of Neumann and the Konnersreuth’s response to the National Socialist state. Popular opinion has presented Neumann and her Circle as a “‘nest of resistance.’” By contrast, anthropologist Ulrike Wiethaus believes Neumann “represented the resistance of a rural culture against a modernizing and centralizing nation-state.” Historian Thomas Breuer adds, “rural Catholic discord with Nazism constituted a protest against modernity rather than NS ideology.” O’Sullivan finds neither completely satisfying and argues that the response of Neumann and her Konnersreuth Circle to National Socialism “contained too many layers of ambiguity to be exclusively labeled anti-Nazi or anti-modern” (141).

Elaborating on this conclusion, O’Sullivan embraces traditional interpretations on the response of Catholics to Nazism. He writes, “While the vast majority of Catholics supported the regime’s campaign of law and order and aggressive foreign policy, they bristled as the Third Reich limited the role of organized Christian churches” (142). Such limitation on the churches resulted in the temporary destruction of many of its traditional supportive structures such as associations, youth ministry, and charitable programs. O’Sullivan finds that from this dismantling evolved “a more personalized and private faith that possessed dynamism but became increasingly free of formal church control” (142). For him, Neumann is a perfect example of this occurrence. Unfortunately, neither the remaining church institutions nor the personalized private faith did much to “obstruct vast human rights violations against Jews, communists, and others” (143).

Still, the Konnersreuth Circle did not survive National Socialist rule unscathed. The SS murdered Gerlich during the Röhm Purge in retaliation for his anti-Nazi journalism. Other members endured arrest, Gestapo interrogations, internment in concentration camps, and death.

Nevertheless, the legacy of Konnersreuth leaves more than a vestige of ambiguity in connection with National Socialism. Therese Neumann, for example, had contacts in the Gestapo and local Nazi Party who protected her from arrest and informed her about impending house searches. Similarly, like her Church, Neumann continually perpetuated religious antisemitism through her Friday “sufferings” by including “anti-Judaic themes of Jews as tormenters of Christ” (160). Still, O’Sullivan points out that “none of this evidence indicates an alignment between the Konnersreuth Circle and the Third Reich on racist antisemitism” (160).

Chapter Six, “Miraculous Times in West Germany: Marian Apparitions during the Early Federal Republic,” discusses the increased number of Marian apparitions across Europe following the aftermath of the Second World War. Eleven such instances occurred in Germany alone. O’Sullivan argues that these events of miraculous faith emerged not only as a “reaction to the Cold War, but also to anxieties about Americanization, consumerism, and Catholic narratives about the Nazi past” (174).

Such events of miraculous faith were not the only response to the new world order. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian counterpart, the Christian Social Union (CSU), which brought together the former Centre and conservative and liberal Protestant political parties, sought to redefine the political landscape by projecting the image of West Germany as the “New Christian Occident (Abendland) defined by rigid social hierarchy, religious morality, and…opposition to materialist forces in modernity.” Coupled with this outlook was a fear of “growing consumerism and Americanization,” which “threatened clerical control of moral values.” Such a worldview led to the “reassertion of patriarchy and normative gender roles for women,” and, at the same time, to a reassessment of the “ambiguous Nazi past by inaccurately depicting religion as the exclusive bulwark against National Socialism” (175).

To illustrate these themes, O’Sullivan examines Marian apparitions in Heroldsbach (Bavaria), Fehrbach (Rhineland-Palatinate), Niederhabbach (Rhineland-Westphalia), and Rodalben (Rhineland-Palatinate). These events of miraculous faith shared similar characteristics with previous ones, including supporters usurping authority traditionally held by bishops and priests, the encouragement of the conversion of sinners to a life of faith, and vocal support by strong male figures, acting as “spiritual advisors and publicists” (192).

Interestingly, neither Church authorities nor Christian political parties supported the apparitions and their adherents. To counter such resistance, those devoted to Marian apparitions “drew parallels between the Nazi suppression of free speech and institutional efforts to discourage miracles not sponsored by the Vatican” (201). Repeating the failed 1933 Trier (Holy Tunic) attempts to control the miraculous, Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne organized a “traveling Madonna” linked to Fatima to more than three-hundred parishes in the Rhineland. Despite a successful “tour,” the archdiocesan controlled Marian celebrations failed to produce any lasting positive effects among Rhineland Catholics. Likewise, O’Sullivan notes that such enthusiasm for miraculous apparitions and visions “faded with the growing economic and political stability of the Federal Republic” (210).

In the final chapter, “Therese Neumann between Catholic Traditionalism, Cold War, and Economic Miracle,” O’Sullivan recounts the uniqueness of Neumann’s experience that transcended the epochs of twentieth-century Germany to survive political upheaval, National Socialism, World War, and American occupation. Neumann became an unofficial ambassador to the American troops, as well a sign of German-American reconciliation in post-war Germany as GIs of all ranks flocked to Konnersreuth to see the miraculous stigmatic in action. Moreover, O’Sullivan argues that in Neumann’s projection of a regional Bavarian identity “where local traditions and modern economics intermingled,” she “assisted the secular turn of the CSU and fostered some of the consumerist trends that overwhelmed clerical authority by the time of her death” (212).

Disruptive Powers deals with a myriad of themes in a complex, ambitious narrative based to a great degree on primary sources from numerous state and church archives. O’Sullivan also valiantly endeavors to offer equal attention to the three major issues: religious secularization, Christian politics, and patriarchal gender roles. At times, the balance works well; at other times, the narrative integration of all three together seems forced. Still, O’Sullivan gives us much to ponder in his thought-provoking, challenging work. In the end, whether or not the Church will ever declare Therese Neumann a saint remains to be seen. For now, however, one may conclude that O’Sullivan offers a convincing work to show that Therese Neumann, her Konnersreuth Circle, and other miraculous faith events cannot remain on the periphery of this time, but are essential to interpreting gender dynamics and power structures within twentieth-century German Catholicism.

Review of Ian M. Randall, A Christian Peace Experiment: The Bruderhof Community in Britain, 1933-1942

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Review of Ian M. Randall, A Christian Peace Experiment: The Bruderhof Community in Britain, 1933-1942 (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018), 241 pp., ISBN: 9781532639982.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

The ideals and experiences of the Bruderhof community have, perhaps inevitably, hovered in the background of histories of international religion in the early twentieth century. The inspired creation of the German internationalists, Eberhard and Emmy Arnold, much associated with the Hutterites and responsive to all forms of evangelical Protestantism, the Bruderhof offered a practical piety and a new vision of Christian authenticity. It sought to maintain firmly a principle of removal from the world and yet was constantly and perseveringly at large in that world, searching out new friendships, useful connections, and necessary alliances. Already in the 1920s, the community had become known to British Quakers working in Germany. It also found new friends and allies in the pacifist and internationalist circles which broke out after the First World War. It was a son of the Arnolds, Hardy, who provided the crucial link with Britain before 1933, preparing the way for the movement to set down new roots in foreign soil. The growing encroachments of the new National Socialist state – in particular, the compulsory conscription into military service – undermined the German Bruderhof by insistent degrees and in 1936 the two principal communities there were shut down, precipitating an exodus, through the Netherlands and across the English Channel, to a new home.

The suppression of the Bruderhof in Nazi Germany was not unobserved in Britain: there were protests and interventions by figures as diverse as the eminent Anglican laymen Sir Wyndham Deedes and the Baptist internationalist J.H. Rushbrooke. Friends of all kinds now proved effective, particularly in practicalities. By May 1936, the Bruderhof could be found in a farm near Ashton Keynes in the Cotswolds where a new community comprised sixteen Germans, fourteen British friends, and one Austrian. At the height of its quiet prosperity there, in October 1939, the community included as many as 119 Germans, 116 British members, 30 Swiss, 17 Austrians, and stray individuals from the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, France, Sweden, Italy, and Turkey. All came with their own stories and for their own reasons. All sought to be useful. A miner from the coalfields of Durham cycled three hundred miles to join them and was promptly set to work picking potatoes; another new arrival was a Lancashire poultry farmer who was also a Methodist lay preacher and admirer of the Indian Christian mystic Sundar Singh. In choosing the Cotswolds, a deeply rural area which possessed something of the character of an English arcadia, the community chose well. Birmingham, the second city of the country and a bastion of Quakerism and Free church life and worship, was not far away. Ashton Keynes also had a railway station. Visitors and longer-term guests could come and go as they chose – and they did.

This book is especially valuable for showing the extent to which the whole venture at Ashton Keynes depended upon the kindness of strangers: the supportive Assistant Secretary at work in the Aliens Department of the British Home Office, the sympathetic estate agent at nearby Cirencester, the manager of the local building society, the local architect and builder, the many private benefactors and well-wishers. It was not only Quakers who found in the Bruderhof something of real spiritual and moral significance: Leyton Richards, the leading Congregationalist and minister of Carr’s Lane church in Birmingham, had from the earliest days in Germany proven an admirer and a steadfast ally.

In sum, for a few years there followed a brief flourishing, a great many activities, initiatives and meetings, a good deal of dairy farming, Bible reading, dancing and ‘sharing’, a manufacturing of what the British could regard as ‘arts and crafts’ products, an association with the Peace Pledge Union and other Christian pacifist organizations, a successful new journal (The Plough) and, increasingly, an adoption of other refugees from Nazism (twenty by December 1938). Children were born there and began to grow up. Inevitably, not everything went well and not everybody was happy. Local opinion could be sullen and resentful of expansion and there were skirmishes in the newspapers. One antagonist, a nearby farmer, was particularly belligerent. But the founding ideals could still be found alive and well. The representative of a national Jewish youth organization visited the Bruderhof and rejoiced to think that it was very like a kibbutz.

It was the war which challenged and then extinguished all of this. Local criticism grew more hostile and more bizarre. Then came internment. For marrying a German, one of the leading lights in the community, Freda Bridgwater, now found herself classified as an ‘Alien’: eight days after her wedding she was removed peremptorily by the police to the Isle of Man. The situation faced by the little community turned up in questions in Parliament and became a part of a vigorous national debate on internment altogether. In the midst of such pressures, the Cotswold Bruderhof lost its confidence. Complicated negotiations to find sanctuary across the Atlantic were soon underway; by the end of 1940 the first members of the community were arriving in Paraguay and the last members joined them in the following April. Even as the members departed, new enquirers and seekers turned up at Ashton Keynes, only to find much of the settlement now in the hands of the London Police Court Mission.

Something of the vision evidently remained even after its adherents had gone. Indeed, as Ian Randall observes at the end of the book, today the Bruderhof has over 2,900 members living in twenty-three international communities, most of them across Europe and North America. The rich archive of the movement is to be found in Walden, New York. The time is surely ripe for a gathering of these strands and the telling of this story.

This is an intricate, meticulous and compassionate book about the haphazard fortunes of communities of renewal and revival across the first half of the twentieth century; communities which sought separation from the world but remained caught up in its turmoil; communities which sought a new simplicity of life only to commit hours of labour to the complexities of adjustment, assistance and survival in a threatening world of totalitarian politics, international war, and social intolerance. For all these reasons, it certainly deserves a wide audience and a place on many shelves, both institutional and personal.

Review of Matthew D. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor who Defied the Nazis

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Review of Matthew D. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor who Defied the Nazis (New York: Basic Books, 2018). 322 pp. ISBN: 978-0-465-09786-9.

Reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen

Matthew Hockenos, a mid-career historian of modern Germany, has provided us with a new and much-needed book about Martin Niemöller, one of the best-known Protestants to speak out against Nazi church policies, who then suffered imprisonment from 1937 to 1945 as a result. This work, published by Basic Books, is carefully researched, well argued, very nicely written, and deserving of a broad audience. It also will reward academics and others interested specifically in the role of German Protestants in Nazi Germany.

For those of us focused on contemporary church history and Nazi Germany, Martin Niemöller is a pretty famous guy. Matthew Hockenos (one of the editors of this Contemporary Church History Quarterly) is fully aware of that. However, he begins his book by acknowledging that Niemöller’s so-called “confession” is far, far better known than Niemöller himself. Beginning “in the late 1970s and the early 1980s,” he argues, human rights activists and secondary school teachers made these lines ubiquitous. “College students adorn their dorm-room walls” with these words, he writes, and the statement is “prominently displayed” in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and elsewhere (2-3). Hockenos borrows a small portion of these famous words from Niemöller for his title. The more complete version also forms his epigraph for the book:

First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. (1)

Hockenos is certainly correct to assume that millions of people who know these words do not know Niemöller. His book also makes the implicit claim that many who know Martin Niemöller do not know him well enough.

Part of the problem with “knowing” Niemöller involves hagiography. In our postwar search for Christian heroes within the confines of Nazi Germany, he naturally attracted attention. Niemöller was an important co-founder of the Confessing Church, that 20 percent of Protestants in Germany who resisted the Nazified distortions of Christian theology pushed by the enthusiastically pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen. Within the Confessing Church, he was a leader in what became known as the “radical Niemöller wing,” a rump group that also included the even more famous Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They were less willing than many in the Confessing Church to combine opposition to Nazified heresies (such as throwing the Old Testament out of the Bible or removing Christian pastors “of Jewish descent” from the clergy roster) with ongoing enthusiasm for the political leadership of Hitler. Hockenos comments, “Previous biographies (two in German and three in English, to date) have done little to probe the depths of this complicated man, preferring instead to present him in a mostly heroic light.” He then describes his book as,

a revisionist biography that weaves together Niemöller’s personal story with the great dramas of the twentieth century that drove his moral and political evolution. It seeks neither to vilify him nor to add to the existing hagiographies, but rather to understand him and his confession and to reveal what his transformation from Nazi sympathizer to committed pacifist tells us about how and under what circumstances such reversals are possible. (3)

The second part of the problem in Niemöller’s biographical treatment, according to Hockenos, is also rooted in the hagiographic impulse: a tendency to focus primarily upon Niemöller’s life from 1933-1945. Hockenos devotes about one-third of his book to Niemöller’s life before 1933. During this period, Martin Niemöller mirrored virtually all of the characteristics that led so many Christians to welcome Adolf Hitler as a savior of Germany from its many troubles. Martin’s patriotism and reverence for authoritarian leadership had been nurtured by his father, Heinrich, a Lutheran pastor in Lippstatt and then in Elbersfeld, both in northwestern Germany. In 1892, the year of Martin’s birth, his father visited Wittenberg to attend the 375^th anniversary of the Reformation, organized as a special, national celebration by the recently installed Kaiser Wilhelm II. “With the crowds cheering, a young pastor in his robe and collar, overwhelmed by the patriotic religious experience, hurled his hat toward the kaiser’s entourage, where it landed amid the honorary guard.” This was Martin’s father. Though chastised by the captain of the honor guard, Heinrich later would tell this story and add, “But I would do the same again” (15).

In 1898 Martin’s father again had the unexpected pleasure of sharing an event with the Kaiser. Wilhelm II, nurturing the robust expansion of Germany’s military and colonial place in the world, organized a trip to Jerusalem to inaugurate on Reformation Day the German-built Lutheran Church of the Redeemer. Heinrich had to travel on a British steamer, hired by the German Protestant Church, rather than Wilhelm’s royal yacht. However, though only a simple pastor among more important church officials, he was awarded the last spot on this steamer by the Protestant Consistory of Prussia. Mostly thanks to donations from his parishioners to pay the necessary fee, this chance to visit the Holy Land for such an auspicious occasion became one of the most treasured memories of Heinrich Niemöller. Hockenos then fits this early event in Martin’s life, his awareness of his father’s deep love for Germany and respect for the Kaiser, into the story as follows:

The German Protestant pastorate claimed that it was apolitical and above party politics, but in fact the vast majority of pastors were intensely loyal to the Hohenzollern monarchy and supported right-wing anti-Semitic parties. To celebrate Reformation Day in Jerusalem in the presence of His Majesty was an unforgettable benchmark in Heinrich Niemöller’s life. That his trip was as much a celebration of German power and prestige as a religious pilgrimage is evident in certain entries in his ornate memory book, Up to Jerusalem. . . . The consecration of the Redeemer Church itself was a milestone in the history of German Protestantism . . . . Nothing could better demonstrate the alliance of throne and altar, in his view, and that of many others. (18-19)

A second phase of Martin Niemöller’s political education came when he joined the German navy, an experience he later described in his 1934 memoir, From U-Boat to Pulpit. Martin had dreamed of joining the navy ever since his toddler years when he wore his sailor suit to church on Sundays. He became a naval cadet at the age of eighteen, after finishing at the “top of his class” at Gymnasium (a common experience for the intelligent and disciplined Martin). He graduated and received his rank of lieutenant in 1913 at the age of twenty-one (22-25). One year later this placed him at war, and Hockenos’s chapters on World War One and its aftermath show us how the milieu and attitudes Niemöller imbibed from his father shaped him during that fraught period of German history.

Hockenos introduces the background to World War One by describing Kaiser Wilhelm’s great desire to make Germany a world power, especially including the creation of a navy to rival that of Great Britain. He then uses a quotation from Admiral von Tirpitz to give us a window on the logic: “The pressure exerted on England, just by the presence of our fleet—the threat to their position as a world power–better than anything else, ensures peace.”[7] This came in April 1914, so that the peace von Tirpitz thought Germans were ensuring by their aggressive naval build-up and their challenge toward England lasted a bit less than four months. Hockenos also highlights both the irony and the complexity of Niemöller’s exultant response, as a naval officer, the son of a pastor, and a future pastor, to his part in the sinking of British ships and the toll of the dead. He listed death tolls in individual actions from dozens to hundreds. In one case of 1916, after laying underwater mines which sank nine ships, Niemöller later wrote in his memoir (long after the heat and adrenalin of battle), “Revenge is sweet” (36).

Niemöller did not approve of Kaiser Wilhelm’s abdication and flight from Germany, to the extent that he himself considered his naval officer’s oath of loyalty to the Kaiser still in place until Wilhelm’s death in 1941. He also resented the advent of democracy and creation of the Weimar Republic. He and his brother Wilhelm, a (soon-to-be) fellow pastor and future historian of the Confessing Church, both sympathized with and participated briefly in the Freikorps, rightwing paramilitaries opposed to the Weimar Republic. Then, though it might seem jarring to those who know Niemöller as an opponent of Hitler, both Martin and Wilhelm gave early support to Hitler, Wilhelm even joining the Nazi Party in 1923. Both of them voted for Hitler and celebrated Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Refusing to give Niemöller too easy an out for his early politics, Hockenos writes,

He was a middle-aged man who had read Mein Kampf and knew very well what Hitler stood for. And even after he watched Hitler abolish the national parliament, ban political parties and trade unions, and persecute his opponents, Niemöller refused to distance himself from radical nationalism and anti-Semitism—even on occasion after 1945. (264)

However, Hockenos also admires Niemöller’s gradual change in the years after 1945:

His transformation from nationalist to internationalist, from militarist to pacifist, and from racist and anti-Semite to champion of equality all evinced a more general transformation—from provincial, narrow-minded chauvinist to compassionate, open-minded humanitarian. In this, Niemöller is to be admired and his evolution celebrated. Committed as most of us are today to particular beliefs, we would do well to engage with the life of a man who changed his—even if that effort ultimately falls short of the truly heroic. (5)

I have focused here on that early portion of Martin Niemöller’s life, that which tied him most closely to the world of his father’s German nationalism and rightwing politics. This is the sort of thing that helps explain his early willingness, and that of very many Christians in Germany, to accept the leadership of Adolf Hitler, even with enthusiasm. These products of Wilhelmine Germany faced the high costs and wrenching defeat of World War One, followed by the challenge of democratic norms and cultural openness under the Weimar Republic, including specific difficulties and disappointments experienced during that period. Hockenos tells us that, and it tends to put Niemöller and many of his colleagues on the wrong side of history. Hockenos also tells us, however, of the heroic Martin Niemöller, especially his courage and intransigence in the face of Nazi ideologues interfering with church government and his freedom of belief. Then Hockenos gives us four chapters devoted to Martin Niemöller after 1945.

I like this choice: three important chapters on Niemöller before 1933; three chapters on Niemöller’s struggle against and suffering under the Nazi state, for which he is rightly famous; and then four chapters on those nearly four full decades in which he was a world celebrity. Beginning with his release from Dachau, Niemöller was an important figure in helping the postwar German Protestant Church deal with its past. This began with the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in 1945, followed by gradually facing up to the implications of the Holocaust and leading finally to a dramatically new theological stance on the relationship between Christians and Jews. Niemöller served as President of the Church in Hessen and Nassau from 1947 to 1964 and as President of the World Council of Churches from 1961 to 1968. He was active in the international peace movement already in the 1950s, becoming friends with the Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, among others. He became known for his support of the 1968 generation and its liberalizing efforts, his opposition to America’s war in Vietnam, his visits to Hanoi, and his visits to Russia.

It is no surprise that Hockenos extends his examination of Niemöller into these postwar years and beyond. This was the time in which Christian churches began a dramatic reckoning with the past, spurred on, of course, by the reality that a Christian nation had murdered six million Jews. Hockenos shows respect for Martin Niemöller as he describes the nine tumultuous decades of his life, but he is right to say that this is no hagiographic treatment. It is rather, a clear-eyed, well-informed look into nine dramatic decades in German history and in the history of the German Protestant Church, nine decades that corresponded with and were impacted by Niemöller’s ninety-two years.

Review of Roger J. Newell, Keine Gewalt! No Violence! How the Church Gave Birth to Germany’s Only Peaceful Revolution

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Review of Roger J. Newell, Keine Gewalt! No Violence! How the Church Gave Birth to Germany’s Only Peaceful Revolution (Wipf & Stock, 2017), 212 pp. ISBN 978-1-5326-1282-4.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

The origins of Roger Newell’s book lie in a study tour to the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig some years after the tumultuous events of 1989. But the book also represents a sensitive discussion of the many strands of argument and interpretation which have emerged across the English-speaking world in response to the tides of German history across the twentieth century. In such a meeting of personal and academic dimensions does Keine Gewalt! offer something of a personal odyssey as well as an exploration of the continuing themes of Church and State, theology and society, conformity and revolution in modern Europe and beyond. The fundamental question is never far from view: how might a church that was so effectively marginalised by a dictatorial power after 1945 become a focal point, and a catalyst, for a great movement of peaceful change across the whole of the German Democratic Republic?

This sense of observing and interpreting like a guest whose eyes are being opened by degrees to something new and unexpected is certainly one of the strengths of the book. It makes Newell himself something of a tourist – in the best sense – and equally an attractive introducer to readers coming to the same questions afresh. The vital presence at the heart of the story is the pastor of the Nikolaikirche himself, Christian Führer, who in 1989 opened the doors of the church to all people – and, in particular, to many who were disaffected by the Communist state – so that they could meet together, light candles, share what was important to them all and find new ways to insist upon these things in a world of repression and intimidation.

What were the roots of such a ministry and the historical and theological context in which such a moment lay? In a remark to Newell, mediated through his wife, Monika, Führer himself replied that much could be comprehended in the three names of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, and Karl Barth. It was here that German Protestantism found an accumulating tradition of theological understanding which was rich enough to bear fruit in a new context and age. Was the Nikolaikirche at last a realisation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s vision of a Church that existed for others? But, as Newell finds, this is no simple inheritance and there were others who played their part in this accumulating history of ideas and experiences, particularly Albrecht Schönherr, Helmut Thielicke, Heino Falcke and Barth’s protesting adversary, Emil Brunner. He views them squarely in turn, and often sympathetically, even where doubts are obvious. To be sure, there are few villains in this book and no grinding axes – and it is all the better for it. The eirenic tone never falters.

The structure of the book responds to this agenda, offering chapters first on Bonhoeffer and then Niemöller before concentrating much attention on Barth in successive phases of his life and thought. Barth, indeed, provides a cantus firmus for the whole study, moving restlessly through the foreground or background, first of National Socialism and the Barmen Declaration, then the post-war crisis and the Stuttgart Declaration and the Darmstadt conference of 1947, and then the deepening confrontations of the Cold War and the troubled (and troubling) search for a ‘third way’ between the worldly powers of Communism and Anti-Communism. It is the two final chapters which confront the peaceful revolution itself, an escalation of principled protest and public mobilization and a deterioration of political will culminating in the disastrously misfiring fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the GDR on 7 October 1989. If pastors like Führer had once brought the people from the street into the sanctuary, now they all took to the streets clasping their candles, returning violence with piety and securing an unexpected revolution which would transform a continent. ‘We were ready for everything except prayers and candles’, reflects a rueful President of the People’s Chamber, Horst Sindermann. The story still possesses the power to move, however much it may have been trimmed, qualified and modified by sober analysis and argument.

Newell’s discussion does much to show what long years of study by western historians and scholars have made possible for a creative Anglo-American minister reflecting on the place of theology in the world. The labours of John Conway, John Moses, Charles Maier, and Matthew Hockenos are particularly conspicuous. Other striking influences also show up in the words and ideas of Herbert Butterfield and of his own teacher, James Torrance. In a well-judged Epilogue, Newell challenges triumphalism and self-righteousness and observes what the world since 1989 has all too obviously become. Yet at the last he is not desolate, finding the figure of Karl Barth waiting for him with words of assurance, ‘When the great hope is present, small hopes must always arise for the immediate future.’

There are many fine qualities to admire in this book, but in its blending of undemonstrative curiosity, personal idealism and uncomplicated intellectual honesty it presents an admirable model of a kind.

Review of Jeffrey T. Zalar, Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770-1914

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Review of Jeffrey T. Zalar, Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and the German Historical Institute, 2019).

By Kevin P. Spicer, Stonehill College

In 1984, when David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley published The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984), a revised version of their 1980 work in the German language, they challenged the prevailing historiography, much of which had embraced the Sonderweg thesis. For Blackbourn and Eley, the German bourgeoisie did not experience any abnormalities of growth and development in the nineteenth century, which set them apart from their European counterparts and enabled Germany to pursue a unique path of national development that ended in war and destruction. As we might imagine, much debate ensued.

In Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, Jeffrey Zalar likewise boldly challenges the existing historiography concerning the German Catholic milieu and its culture of reading, a topic that perhaps is less central to historians of modern Germany, but still important, nevertheless. For those who study religious history, especially that of the Catholic Church in Germany, Zalar’s findings have major implications for understanding the inner-workings of the Catholic milieu. For years, historians have portrayed the milieu as “an insular subculture, whose boundaries were policed by an authoritarian clergy” (8).

He acknowledges that some historians, such as Rebecca Ayako Bennette, have begun to view the milieu’s boundaries more fluidly. Nevertheless, Zalar argues that “the core of the milieu idea, however, the narrative at its most tenacious, remains unchallenged” (8). For Zalar, an all-pervasive milieu theory simply cannot be supported by the existing body of evidence. He continues, the body of evidence is “too small, at least to justify the kinds of claims that are routinely made about lay submission to reading disciplines, which have never been demonstrated with documentary or archival evidence” (11).

Zalar advises that he has critically followed John Connelly’s warning not to pluck “‘either disturbing or exonerating phrases out of the church’s murky past’ to satisfy the demands of a thesis when these phrases, if taken in isolation from one other, ‘tell us nothing about how people lived in a past that exists beyond our mental horizons’” (16; quoting From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965, Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2012, 10).

Instead, Zalar sets out to discern the reading of Catholics from all economic classes, especially uncovering the reading habits of the “intellectually invisible people” of the lower classes by using the “widest possible methodological breath” (12). His evidence, rich and broad in scope, includes state and diocesan church archives, contemporary publications, and numerous parish archives (often neglected by historians), which uncover seemingly lost correspondence, library questionnaires, borrowing statistics of parish libraries, and other forgotten documents. Geographically, Zalar’s study covers the Rhineland and Westphalia, Prussia’s two western province’s that it incorporated formerly at the Congress of Vienna (1815). For Zalar, these provinces “along with Bavaria and parts of Silesia” constitute the “‘core regions’ of German Catholicism,” with the “highest degree of clerical authority and established thickest network of lay associations” (14).

Further into his study, Zalar reveals a second motivation for his study. He writes, “Accordingly, in the 1970s and 1980s, empiricist social and cultural historians seized the field from the Kirchenhistoriker [Church Historians]. But their antipathy to theology was so complete that they disqualified not only its prescriptive encroachments but its descriptive components as well” (57). Like my own research efforts, Zalar redeems the impact of theology and a religious worldview as a causal agent in history. In this, he is quite successful.

Zalar divides his study into eight chapters. He begins by describing the foundation of reading culture in Prussia, which consisted of a contrasting, confessionally marked outlook on reading. The Protestant bourgeoisie defined their reading habits with the terms Geschmack (fine taste and enlightened) and Bildung (education and culture). Reading was a means to educate and refine oneself both to advance in society and to advance society. Protestant reading culture was richly complex. There were terms for those who read too much, read indiscriminately, or read too superficially. Protestant readers who embraced such an outlook looked upon individuals who did not share their perspective as Geschmacklos, exhibiting bad taste. Central in this grouping were Catholics, who Protestants, in general, viewed as “clerically dominated, undereducated, and impoverished” (39). Less clear for Zalar is the place of the Catholic bourgeoisie in society and their relationship with Catholics of the lower classes. Such economic issues are not of central concern to the study. Rather, Zalar explains that there are historical reasons for the limitations that Catholics faced in Prussian society, most notably the 1803 secularization that closed eighteen Catholic universities, confiscated monastic libraries, and eventually placed three million German Catholics under Protestant rulers. Geographic location also negatively affected Catholics who resided disproportionately in rural, agricultural areas, to which the government dedicated fewer educational resources, and who pursued trades that did not allow for significant advancement in bourgeois society.

In his second chapter, Zalar examines the Catholic alternative to the dominant Protestant bourgeois reading culture. He acknowledges that it is partially true that, unlike Protestants, Catholics did not experience a reading revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and cites numerous reasons for this. Catholicism was reticent to promote lay literacy, in part, due to concerns that it might spread Protestant theology through written works. The baroque piety of German Catholicism was “overwhelmingly nonverbal,” encompassing pilgrimages, processions, memorized prayers, and illustrated catechisms (58). More importantly, are the goals of Catholic reading, tied directly to theological concerns. Zalar explains, “Salvation…did not depend upon acquiring right knowledge but upon the practice of virtue in a holy lifestyle that united one to the merits of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and resurrection” (66). Reading then had a spiritual function quite different in nature to Geschmack and Bildung. Its aim was to assist Catholics in their efforts to follow Christ and so achieve eternal salvation. Zalar develops these notions in more detail in Chapter Three (117-119). There he explains that reading imparted an experience of delectatio (delectation), which Zalar defines as “the deliberate accommodation of oneself to these gifts [transcendentals gifted by God] in obedience to God’s will through bracing encounters with good, beautiful, and true objects” (118). Yet, reading could no longer be limited or controlled once it was done in the privacy of one’s home, even when spiritual growth and clerical oversight was emphasized. As a result, personal interpretation and discernment became a part of the reading experience. Although clerics attempted to control and mediate this experience, even in this early period there is evidence of Catholics and Protestants sharing books.

Chapter three concerns Catholic reading habits following the Congress of Vienna and under Prussian rule. While article sixteen of the Federal Constitution guaranteed civil rights for all subjects, Catholics did not receive equal treatment. Rather, Protestants who held most government administrative positions looked down on Catholics as uncultured savages who had to be managed and controlled. A dominant view was that Catholics were incapable of contributing to the Kulturnation (cultural nation). Some public discussions even insinuated that Catholics were “obstacles to economic growth” and politically unreliable (105). Educational deterrents promoted such outlooks and kept Catholics from advancing in society. Gradually, there were changes as more Catholics took advantage of education, but it was a gradual and arduous process. German Catholics did resist such stereotypes and restrictions through their press and journals, portraying Protestants as undermining morality and poisoning society. Amid this confessional antagonism, Catholics broadened the titles they read. Ironically, rectory libraries often contained books purchased by priests that fell outside the confines of spiritual or approved reading. Catholic book clubs also developed that focused upon texts approved by local clergy but also upon religious fiction. Though these clubs often were led or involved clergy, Zalar argues they “ultimately subverted unity” by allowing discussion and consideration of ideas and texts gained from outside sources, thus allowing numerous influences on the formation of Catholic consciences. In the first part of the Nineteenth Century, the Catholic bourgeoisie rejected clerical oversight and moved closer to their Protestant contemporaries, embracing the concept of Geschmack even more. At the same time, reading increased substantially. Zalar notes that students reading in the evening often “spent more on candles than they did on books or coal for heating” (128).

Chapter four focuses on the 1845 foundation of the Association of Saint Charles Borromeo, the Borromäusverein, under the initial leadership of August Reichensperger, a Cologne lawyer, and Max Freiherr von Loë, a Landrat in Siegburg. The namesake was apropos as Borromeo had been a catechist and staunch supporter of the Counter-Reformation. Though the society had many lofty goals upon its establishment, it eventually became a book club with local chapters relegated to promoting and distributing lists of spiritual reading. Its founders and clerical supporters hoped the Association would counter the effects of Catholic lay exposure to Protestant Enlightenment ideals and values. Though meant for all classes, the bourgeoisie generally did not become members as the Association’s goals seemed to oppose their own. Zalar argues that under the Borromäusverein, “never before had or never again did the German church come so close to realizing the Catholic readerly ideal” (155). Yet, in 1870, the Association had only 54,000 members or 1.5 percent of the Catholics living in Westphalia and the Rhineland. Still, the ideals of the Boromäusverein reflected the great chasm that existed between the reading cultures and outlook of German Prussian Protestantism and German Catholicism, especially on the eve of the Kulturkampf. In line with Zalar’s challenge of traditional historiography, he also rejects the notion of Catholics becoming ghettoized during the Kuturkampf, viewing such a concept as “too simplistic, as well as misleading.” Rather, he describes Catholics as tending to “huddle behind an edgy defensiveness” (157). Along with many Catholic institutions, the Borromäusverein was not spared losses and membership because of state persecution. Lay reading discipline also weakened during this period, a point that Zalar emphasizes by countering previous interpretations with documents recording the increase of the volume of reading and clerical denunciation of such activity (171-172). As Zalar argues, the “milieu may very well have been clericalized,” but citing, for example, a priest scolding a parishioner, it is “hardly evidence of lay submission to it” (173). At the same time, Zalar relates that the entire act of censorship had become extremely unpopular with society. Censors, he argues, had earned a reputation as “ignorant, misinformed, fumbling, zealous extremists who mindlessly applied and more often misapplied feckless rules they themselves did not always understand” (178).

Chapter five examines the transformation of Catholicism under Imperial Germany in the context of Catholic reading culture. Industrialization and urbanization rapidly altered the landscape of German society. Nevertheless, the centuries-old animosities between Catholics and Protestants remained. Such tensions and limitations in a Protestant-dominated society forced German Catholics to become more introspective. Zalar argues that Catholics “did begin to trace their peripheral existence to the attitudes and disciplines of their church” (194). After the 1890s, when more educational opportunities opened for Catholics, they could no longer blame the government for discriminatory policies. Even the German bishops realized their denomination’s plight and, in 1896, assembled in Dortmund to discuss the situation. The result of this discussion, both among clergy and laity, was a greater openness among Catholics to modernization and education. The German Catholic Church founded new associations to promote Catholic scholarship, education, and engagement with secular culture. Eventually, the number of Catholics attending university increased. Such advances not only impacted the upper classes but also the lower classes as new professions opened to them. Some priests, too, participated in promoting new vocational and employment opportunities. Even the Prussian Ministry of Culture and Public Instruction, in 1876, instructed public libraries to become confessionally neutral.

Chapter six documents the fall of the Borromäusverein, locating it even before the beginning of the Kulturkampf. Zalar points out that this did not mean that Catholics had foregone religious books. The texts that had merit were already sacralized in their homes, available to read at moments of crisis and for spiritual discernment. As educational opportunities and the desire for the consumption of knowledge increased, the Association simply did not meet the needs of German Catholics who desired to read more broadly. The craving for advancement led Catholics from all classes to open their minds and hearts to the notion of Geschmack, reading now for personal and societal advancement. Similarly, the introduction of electric lighting, mass entertainment, and the like, expanded Catholics’ experience of the world. By 1897, the executive committee of the Borromäusverein knew that it had to find a different path to pursue to keep their organization relevant. The committee members drew up new statutes and then hired Father Hermann Herz, a Swabian priest, author, and editor, to implement them. Conservatively Catholic to his core, Herz also realized that he had to engage modern culture to capture the attention of Catholic readers. Though Herz was not afraid to stand up for his faith, he also sought to avoid antagonizing Protestants. To this end, none of the publications of the Borromäusverein mentioned the May 1910 encyclical of Pope Pius X, which “condemned the Protestant Reformation as “an enemy of the cross of Christ’” (263). If anything was to be condemned, it was “dirty and trashy literature,” which the Association endeavored to root out (263).

The final two chapters examine the impact of the reconstitution of the Borromäusverein within the context of the changing reading habits of the Catholics of western Germany. Though great advances were made in expanding the libraries to include largely non-religious collections, the Verein still only engaged a minority of the Catholic population. Those who were members came from all classes, though the lower middle class patronized the Verein’s libraries the most. Clerics gradually turned over their leadership and oversight roles to lay volunteers, especially to young Catholic women. Father Herz also encouraged chapters to move their libraries out of rectories to more neutral locations, in order to remove any lingering suspicion of clerical censorship. Despite such efforts, Zalar admits that “a chapter might change in orientation overnight with the arrival of a new priest” (289). Such contradictions are present throughout Zalar’s narrative; yet, to this reader, they are not problematic, but only reveal the realities of German Catholic society as changes gradually took place within the milieu. Modernity crept into the daily lives of German Catholics and as it took root, multi-layered unrest developed. Thus, on the eve of the First World War, Catholics were not far apart in their reading habits as their Protestant counterparts after having replaced the spiritually rewarding delectatio with Geschmack. Zalar concludes that now laity “controlled the word” and were the “new ‘rulers of men’” (363).

With the scarcity of English language works on nineteenth-century German Catholic culture, Zalar’s study is truly welcomed. He has produced a brilliant sophisticated examination of the changing reading habits of Catholics over two centuries. Throughout his narrative, he successfully contextualizes his discussion of books and reading within the larger narrative of Catholic efforts to gain parity in the Protestant-dominated German society of that period. At times, I wanted to learn more about the internal class struggles of Catholics that took place within this narrative. Zalar does provide hints of this tension, especially between the bourgeoisie and lower classes, but I had hoped for more details. However, this in no way reflects negatively on the book’s overall argument. Zalar is persuasive and compelling in his objection to the dominant clerical milieu thesis, pointing out that, at least in their reading habits, German Catholics did not always follow the Church and its clergy’s clearly demarcated boundaries. At least for the nineteenth century, our understanding of the German Catholic milieu must be rethought and reexamined. Likewise, Zalar’s findings and reinterpretations are important to our interpretation of German Catholicism in the Weimar Republic and under National Socialism. It would be very interesting to learn how Zalar interprets the Catholic milieu during these periods, considering the existing historiography. With all this said, I highly recommend Zalar’s work.

Review of Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: Language, Rhetoric and the Traditions of Hatred

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Review of Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: Language, Rhetoric and the Traditions of Hatred (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). 284 pp. ISBN: 9781472586919.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Beth A. Griech-Polelle’s book enters the market of Holocaust history as a thoroughly accessible and carefully constructed overview of the Shoah, beginning quite properly in the long history of antisemitism that lay behind the mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators. The author states from the outset that she is interested in “the theme of the power of language and how language and rhetoric can result in deadly actions” (1). Drawing on the work of the French political scientist Jacques Semelin, Griech-Polelle notes that a society’s ideological concerns around “identity, purity, and security” can be impacted by “destructive legends, myths, and stereotypes” that generate caricatures which create fears that “enemy outsiders” will “defile, pollute, and destroy … us” (1). In like manner, she uses Thomas Kühne’s work on persecution as community-building and Saul Friedländer’s notion of redemptive antisemitism to argue that “language and rhetoric influenced the construction of ‘the Jew’ as eternal enemy” and that “language led to the violence and annihilation of European Jewry in the Holocaust” (2). Anyone familiar with Alon Confino’s insightful book A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015) will recognize Griech-Polelle’s approach and be reminded of the ways in which language contributed to the creation of a culture—a social imaginary, to invoke Charles Taylor’s term—that made possible the Nazi persecution of the Jews and, ultimately, the Holocaust.

Griech-Polelle begins with the rise of religious antisemitism—rooted in the concept of Jews as “Christ-killers’’—in the biblical accounts of Jesus’ arrest, death, and resurrection. With the emergence of Christianity came the belief that the Early Church was the “New Israel” which replaced the Jews as God’s chosen people (10-11). Tracing the loss of Jewish rights in the late Roman Empire, the author shows how the Codex Theodosianus began to impose restrictions on Jews and to generate the segregating language that would shape the medieval era. Through the period of the crusades and on into the Middle Ages, Griech-Polelle explains important incidents in the history of Jewish persecution, but beyond that, she endeavours to outline the way a particular kind of antisemitic language emerged in, for example, tropes like the Wandering Jew or the blood libel. A short section on Thomas Aquinas shows how he built on Augustine’s notion of the preservation of the Jews as a witness to the truth of both the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian gospels, adding that the Jews were people with souls that needed to be saved. “Somehow, Jews were to be converted voluntarily—despite the persecutions and horrendous depictions of Jews as being in league with the devil, desecrating the Host, and reenacting the crucifixion of Jesus” (20). This chapter on the history of religious antisemitism continues with the medieval expulsions of Jews from various European countries and follows the story through the Renaissance and Reformation, the emergence of a substantial Jewish community in Poland, and the impact of the Enlightenment, French Revolution, modern nationalism, and post-1848 reactionary politics. It closes with the persecution faced by Jews in Tsarist Russia.

I’ve focused closely on this opening chapter (chapter 2 in the book, since the Introduction is chapter 1) to indicate how Griech-Polelle—a scholar both of German Catholicism in the Third Reich and of the Holocaust—handles this important topic of the Christian antisemitic foundation upon which later antisemitisms and (in the end) the Holocaust itself rested. A third chapter follows the story of how cultural and especially political antisemitism developed from the nineteenth century through the First World War and the Weimar era in Germany. Key concepts are the coining of the term antisemitism itself, the notion of “scientific” antisemitism, and “the Jew” as the outsider. What becomes clear is that antisemitism was a tool used by European political parties to spur the growth of nationalism within European mass society.

Other chapters cover the topics one would expect in an introduction to the history of the Holocaust, though in ways that enable Griech-Polelle to highlight her theme of the role of antisemitic language and rhetoric. Chapter four includes everything from the rise of Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party to Hitler’s views on Jews, the seizure of power and early phase of Nazi rule, and Nazi Jewish policy through 1935. Chapter five is called “Turning Points,” and argues that although Jewish life had been deteriorating from 1933 onwards, the period from 1936-1938 was marked by exclusionary policies which reinforced “the notion that to create the Volksgemeinschaft [national community], anti-Jewish actions were required” (111). Emigration, the growing refugee crisis, expulsion, the Kristallnacht Pogrom, and the beginning of the Second World War are all surveyed here. Chapters six to eight cover the heart of the Holocaust, from “Resettlements, Deportations, and Ghettos” to “Einsatzgruppen, Executions, and ‘Evacuations’ to the East,” to “The Final Solution,” with its emphasis on the death camps in Poland. Throughout, Griech-Polelle treats a host of subtopics briefly but conscientiously, meaning that her history of both antisemitism and the Holocaust comes to only 232 pages of nicely formatted text, making it easy to read.

Two features of the book are worthy of note. First, throughout her work, Griech-Polelle employs material from various volumes of the important new series Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context, sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Series Editor: Jürgen Matthäus), and in particular the five volumes entitled Jewish Responses to Persecution. The result is that she is able to present the history of antisemitism and the Holocaust from multiple perspectives, incorporating the experiences of Jewish victims along with those of Nazi perpetrators. For instance, in her description of the opening phase of Nazi antisemitic policy, she recounts the reflections of Mally Dienemann, whose diary describes the “unvarying … fate” of the Jews: “now we are [supposedly] harming Germany with fairy tales about atrocities, while in the Middle Ages it was we who were supposed to have poisoned wells, etc…. Could people really do this to each other?” (89, editorial insertion and ellipsis in the original). Likewise, during her account of the Kristallnacht Pogrom, Griech-Polelle uses the testimony of Margaret Czellitzer, whose home was invaded, radio broken, china smashed, beds overturned, mattresses ruined, and valuables stolen (124). In this sense, Griech-Polelle’s introduction to the Holocaust reflects current best practices in the field of Holocaust Studies, which attempt to balance perpetrator accounts with victim voices.

Second, at the close of each chapter, the author includes a short section entitled “For your consideration,” in which she combines short primary source texts with reflection questions. For instance, in chapter 2 on religious antisemitism, she offers biblical texts from Matthew 27 and John 8 and excerpts from Martin Luther’s “Concerning the Jews and Their Lies” (1543). On the gospel texts, questions revolve around the descriptions of Jews, their role in the sentencing of Jesus, the naming of particular groups of Jews, and the link between these depictions and the rise of the myth of deicide. With respect to the Luther text, questions involve Luther’s picture of the Jews, his use of medieval prejudices, and the potential influence his writings might have had. These texts and questions at the close of each chapter would work well for undergraduate classroom discussions or reflection assignments.

Rooted in the history of antisemitism, written in accessible prose which encompasses multiple perspectives on the events of the Holocaust, accompanied by primary texts, reflection questions, suggestions for further reading, and a helpful glossary, Griech-Polelle’s Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust will serve uninitiated laypeople and undergraduate students as a helpful introduction to the events of the Holocaust and the discourse of antisemitism which prepared the way for the annihilation of the Jews.