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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.

 

 

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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 8th 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).

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 375th 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.

 

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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.

 

 

 

 

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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.

 

 

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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.

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Review of Dirk Schuster, Die Lehre vom ‘arischen’ Christentum: Das wissenschaftliche Selbstverständnis im Einseacher ‘Entjudungsinstitut’

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

Review of Dirk Schuster, Die Lehre vom ‘arischen’ Christentum: Das wissenschaftliche Selbstverständnis im Einseacher ‘Entjudungsinstitut’ (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2017)

By Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College

Scholarship on the pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen (DC), the German Christian Movement, began slowly in the postwar years, but has been growing and adding considerable new information to our understanding of the history of Christian theology and the role of the German churches during the Third Reich,

With the excellent new book by Dirk Schuster, the scholarship reaches an important milestone. The apologetic tone is entirely absent and instead we have a work by a very thoughtful scholar who examines archival data, weighs and evaluates new evidence, and draws sharp and strong conclusions. Schuster represents a new generation of young German scholars seeking historical accuracy rather than defending the church or making excuses for individual theologians.

Breakthroughs in the scholarship on the churches during the Third Reich came with publications by several North American scholars for whom racism and antisemitism were central to the history of National Socialism and whose academic careers were not dependent upon pleasing church officials. The first breakthrough was Robert Ericksen’s masterful and widely read 1985 book, Theologians Under Hitler, that described in clear and careful detail the work of three highly influential Protestant theologians in Germany: Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch. Ericksen analyzed the writings of each, demonstrating the nature of the theological support given by each man to the Nazi regime, as well as the consequences each suffered after the war. The second major contribution was a study of overall DC theology by Doris Bergen in her magisterial 1996 book, Twisted Cross, which made extensive use of published and unpublished DC materials that had been deposited after the war in an archive in Minden, Germany. Bergen argued that three elements characterized the theology of the DC: it was anti-doctrinal, antisemitic, and wanted a manly church. A third breakthrough was the massive and detailed study of the Protestant churches in Berlin undertaken by Manfred Gailus, the German social historian, that demonstrated far greater support for the DC than anyone had ever imagined. More recently we have additional important work: Kyle Jantzen’s analysis of the pastorate, Charlotte Methuen’s study of church architecture during the Third Reich, Anders Gerdmar’s study of German biblical interpretation, among many others.

I came to the topic during the late 1980s, as I was finishing my doctoral dissertation about the German-Jewish theologian Abraham Geiger and the reception of his work among Protestant theologians in the nineteenth century. While browsing in a Berlin library, I came across a volume of articles by German Protestants edited by Walter Grundmann and published in 1942 by the “Institut zur Erforschung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche christliche Leben.”

At a conference convened by Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz at the Evangelische Akademie in Arnoldshain in 1990 on the German Protestant theological faculties during the Third Reich, I asked several senior scholars, including Kurt Meier and Kurt Nowack, both from Leipzig, about the Institute. The answer was uniform: this was a marginal, unimportant Institute; the archives had entirely disappeared; the topic was not worth pursuing. I received a similar response a few months later from the Canadian historian John Conway. Nonetheless, I persevered and discovered material about the Institute in the central church archives in Berlin. In 1991 I traveled to Eisenach, where the Institute had been headquartered, and found additional bits of material in the church archives of Thuringia. The archivist was discouraging, claiming to have nothing substantial, but as I traveled to university, state, and local archives around Germany in subsequent years, thanks to a series of travel grants, I discovered more and more documentation, especially at the University of Jena archives. The archivist in Eisenach, managed to locate additional documents–bits of letters, memoranda, manuscripts. Little of the material had been formally catalogued by the archive, and no one had as yet asked to read it. I gradually pieced together an ugly story of antisemitic propaganda, written by theologians and pastors, in support of the Nazi war effort.

During the years of my research on the book I eventually published, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, I would show copies of the documents I had unearthed to an older, prominent Protestant theology professor in Berlin whom I had long viewed as a mentor. As someone deeply engaged in Christian-Jewish relations, he was surprised and shocked to discover that Grundmann, whose Gospel commentaries had long been required reading of pastors and theologians, had been a Nazi propagandist. However, I soon discovered that this professor appropriated my topic, went to the archives I had discovered, and published the material without crediting or thanking me.  An unpleasant and not unique academic experience but heightened by the nature of the topic and by the history of German treatment of Jews, including of my own family.

Now, a new generation has taken up the topic. Oliver Arnhold’s two-volume study ignores the English-language scholarship entirely and claims the Institute was formed in opposition to neo-pagan groups rather than its stated purpose, to rid Germany of Jewishness. Roland Deines, a New Testament scholar, blames the Jews for Grundmann’s antisemitism. Deines argues that Grundmann took his claim that Jesus was Aryan from Heinrich Graetz, the noted German-Jewish historian of the nineteenth century, who presented Jesus as a Galilean. The obvious difference between a nineteenth-century Jewish scholar calling Jesus a Galilean and a Nazi-era Protestant scholar calling Jesus an Aryan–precisely in an era when “Aryan” was lifesaving and “Jew” was a death sentence–seems to have evaded him.

Schuster’s book is all the more refreshing thanks to his pointed critique of prior, apologetic scholarship, a critique fully supported by the evidence he carefully presents. Situating the Institute squarely in its time and place–Nazi Germany–he does not try to hide its antisemitism under the fig leaf of nationalism as so many others have done, from Kurt Meier to Robert Morgan. There are moments when he might have added relevant data, such as Nazi party, SA, or SS membership, that is easily procured from my own book, but such data is often missing from German publications about the church because it is still not easy to secure such membership information.

In these days of ‘fake news,’ Schuster points to a similar concept employed by some of the pro-Nazi DC theologians. That Jesus was thought to be a Jew was a falsification that occurred, they claimed, because Jews had inserted fake, pro-Jewish passages into the Gospel texts in antiquity; they now promised to restore the “correct” text. Schuster demonstrates that Nazi racism regarding “the Jew” was transported by Institute theologians to antiquity and claimed as objective, scientific “reality” demonstrated by their “scholarship”–whereas all other scholarship that demonstrated the Jewishness of Jesus and early Christianity was false. Thus, the Institute created Christianity as a religious expression of Aryans–that is, the religion of the German Volk–and Judaism as its negative opposite (249). Creating an understanding of Christianity as Aryan involved a host of scholars from a range of fields, including theology, history, linguistics, archeology, and more.

Some of the material that Schuster presents has already been discussed by other scholars, yet he is able to reframe the material in such a creative and original way that his book is a must-read even for those familiar with the antecedent studies. The “Aryan Christianity ” that he examines is not simply an expression of an over-zealous German nationalism, nor the outgrowth of an inner-Protestant conflict, nor an effort to protect the church from Nazi hostility, but rather an outgrowth of new scholarly methods, including the methods of the History of Religions School and the “Erforschung der Judenfrage” that flourished during the Nazi era, as Dirk Rupnow has magnificently delineated in his important 2011 book, Judenforschung im Dritten Reich. Schuster examines members of the Institute and uncovers their shared roots as former students and researchers at the Universities of Leipzig and Tübingen whose academic orientation was rooted in History of Religions methods. Most important, Schuster reveals antisemitic structures of argumentation in their “scholarship.”

The History of Religions methods were thought by many theologians to provide a tool for overcoming divisions within Germany (e.g., Catholic-Protestant). This was not simply a field or division within a faculty, but scholarship with a social and political purpose. It was diverse, to be sure, but it was politicized and fit comfortably with the National Socialist regime.

Schuster notes that German nationalism from the outset was bound up with theological and biblical motifs, as numerous scholars have demonstrated. Indeed, the series of wars that led ultimately to German unification were conducted against Catholic countries–Austria-Hungary and France. Unification, moreover, brought renewed calls for unifying German Catholics and Protestants into a “Volkskirche” or “Nationalkirche” (46). Calls came from the beginning of the twentieth century, growing during World War One, to liberate the German Protestant church from foreign influences. Standing behind the call for a “Verdeutschung des Christentums” was an antisemitic worldview and a call to eliminate the OT from liturgy and sermons and understand Jesus to have been an Aryan, not a Jew (49). This was not only, Schuster writes, a rejection of Jewish influences within Christianity, but far more, a direct Bekämpfung (fight) against Judaism.

No distinction remained between religion and politics as the notorious Thuringian German Christian movement took shape under the leadership of the two Bavarian pastors who moved to the Werra Valley, Siegfried Leffler and Julius Leutheuser, both of whom served as Leiter of the local Nazi party Gau. Hitler was viewed as a continuation of Jesus and Luther, and the Nazi movement as a divine revelation that would resurrect Germany out of the Weimar Republic; Hitler was God’s tool, they believed. The Thuringian DC came to dominate through the late 1930s and its orientation was thoroughly racist. There should be a church for each Volk, and the church for the German Volk should finally overcome the division between Catholic and Protestant in one Nationalkirche.

The November 1938 pogrom left the remaining Jews marginalized and, as Hans Mommsen put it, under the jurisdiction of the Gestapo (70). Germany was to be rid of its Jews, and the formation of a dejudaization institute by theologians in 1939 was a logical culmination of the virulent idea of a Christian “Entjudung” that had circulated since the beginning of the twentieth century as well as a consequence of the Nazi policy of making Germany Judenrein.

Schuster emphasizes the Institute’s origins as an enthusiastic response to the 1938 November pogrom, demonstrating its “direkt Reaktion auf die antisemitischen Gewaltmassnahmen des NS-Staates” (74). Furthermore, the Institute was no marginal phenomenon with a brief lifespan, but “an integral component of the Protestant theological scholarly community” (83). Copies of its dejudaized New Testament and hymnal were sold widely throughout the Reich–500,000 copies of the hymnal were sold by early 1944 (86).

Throughout its conferences and numerous publications intended for both lay and clerical audiences, members of the Institute developed a racist hermeneutics. Heinz Eisenhuth (1903-83), professor of systematic theology at the University of Jena, argued that the Old Testament expressed a “foreign racial soul” (99) and that Jews, after baptism, nonetheless remain Jews (89). Such arguments were translated into policy by many of the regional churches. On December 17, 1941, the churches of Thuringia, Mecklenburg, Saxony, Nassau-Hessen, Anhalt, and Lübeck issued an official notice that “racially Jewish Christians” had no place in the church (91). Note the date: precisely on the eve of Nazi deportations of Jews from the Reich, just when the death camps were beginning their operations, Christians were told that baptized Jews were not Christians; moral duty toward them was not necessary.

Was this a theological effort to distance Christianity from Judaism, a revision of New Testament scholarship? The roots of the scholars who participated in Institute-sponsored conferences and publications were mostly within liberal Protestant historical-critical method, but it would be a mistake to understand their efforts as sincere but misguided scholarship. In an extremely important section of his book, Schuster presents conclusive evidence from letters as well as published materials that the ultimate goal of the Institute, as its own members understood it, was as an “integral component of the entire political development” of the Nazi regime and offer “respectability” to its antisemitic measures. (122). They saw themselves contributing to the war effort: just as Germany was fighting on the military battlefield, they were fighting on the spiritual battlefield, they would say.

Schuster is careful not only to examine the writings of Walter Grundmann, the academic director of the Institute, but also to detail the writings of several of its members and to evaluate the contribution each one made to the goals of the Institute. He uncovers important new information. For example, Grundmann planned an Institute-sponsored German translation of the Talmud Yerushalmi and engaged a young scholar, Rudolf Meyer, who had training in Hebrew, to work with him on that project–though it was never completed due to Meyer’s conscription into the Nazi military. Schuster notes that similar such Talmud projects had been undertaken by other antisemitic “pseudo-research” institutes supported by the Nazi regime and helpfully links the work of the Institute with the widespread “Judenforschung” of the Nazi era that Rupnow analyzes. Another young scholar, a student of Meyer’s, who was going to participate in the projected Talmud project was Siegfried Morenz, though Schuster notes that his involvement may have been motivated by an effort to promote his career than by antisemitic motivations. Schuster gives careful attention not only to the motivations of each scholar, but also to their postwar publications, noting continuation of Nazi-era arguments, purged of Nazi language (such as “Aryan”), that insist on an essentialized and negative “Judaism.” That they continued to argue for a dejudaized Christianity even after 1945 makes it clear that they were not simply responding to the politics of the moment, but sincerely believed in the theology they were presenting.

Schuster has done an excellent job placing the theological effort to dejudaize Christianity into larger contexts, including the Judenforschung that Rupnow outlines; German nationalism’s reliance on religion, as demonstrated by Hartmut Lehmann; and the History of Religions School, as discussed by Horst Jünginger. He is clear that the Institute was antisemitic and a direct response to Nazi antisemitic politics. Still, there are questions left regarding motivations. What did these theologians ultimately hope to accomplish? Certainly there was a desire to achieve recognition from the regime–to become “Bonzen” (big shots)–which did not happen, and yet they persisted despite the lack of recognition and even efforts by the regime against them (spying by the Gestapo, conscription into military service). Perhaps they were hoping for recognition from their colleagues, considering themselves theological pioneers paving new methods of historical analysis and textual exegesis. Yet their methods were ultimately neither new nor particularly sophisticated, but, rather, tendentious, built on speculation rather than evidence and driven by a pervasive, demagogic insistence on the degeneracy and danger of Judaism. In that respect, their work coalesced not only with what Hitler was doing at the moment, but with a longer tradition regarding Judaism within Christian scholarship that had not been challenged by any leading theologian. To have objected would have required support from some sort of authority, whether from Luther or from more recent theologians or from the New Testament itself. Yet no positive affirmations of Judaism could be mustered within the Christian theological tradition, and the Old Testament itself had been so terribly marginalized and even denigrated that its elimination brought a sense of religious relief.

One of the important accomplishments of Schuster’s contribution is his emphasis on the role of the Institute. This was not a marginal phenomenon. On the contrary, its influence was widespread, as he demonstrates by pointing to the enormous success of its publications, its large membership, the postwar careers of its members, but, most important, because its effort to dejudaize fit so easily into the wider framework of German antisemitism and Christian theological arguments against Judaism.

What motivated these scholars? Schuster agrees with what has already been argued by other scholars: they were motivated by career advancement, by antisemitism, by an opportunistic desire for publicizing their ideas, by anti-Communism, by loathing for the Weimar Republic, and by a Nazi regime that was both thrilling, at least in its early years, and practical, creating new academic opportunities by firing Jewish academics.

The postwar years brought new prospects and few hindrances to denazification. Jobs were lost, jobs were gained, politics of state and church were manipulated, and exculpatory self-justifications were written–most were successful. These theologians were no different from other scholars who lost or retained their university positions and academic stature–except that the theologians could appeal not only to state officials but to church officials as well. Thus, Grundmann lost his university professorship, but the church of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) employed him as professor at various seminaries, his numerous books were published and sold throughout German-speaking Europe, and he was regarded at the GDR’s most prominent theologian. Success was achieved by claiming “resistance” as a Christian against the Nazi regime, despite the fact that these theologians flourished thanks to that very regime.

The DC has been explained in a variety of ways. Its members presented themselves after 1945 as defenders of the church against Nazi anti-Christian efforts. They were at times exonerated for their pro-Nazi efforts by postwar state officials who described them as “naïve” theologians who did not understand politics. Church officials and theologians rarely recognized the antisemitism at the heart of their writings, accepting the self-defense of DC members that they were historians who were simply clarifying Christianity’s distinctiveness from Judaism, despite the fact that Grundmann, for instance, warned of the “syphilization” of Germany by the Jews, hardly a theological argument.

Schuster is clear about the different motivations of the seven theologians whose careers and writings he examines in detail–career opportunism and antisemitism were prime among them. Yet he is also clear about his most important claim: that the effort to create an Aryan Christianity was not simply a product of Nazi politics, but an outgrowth of Protestant theology. Not only was it not simply a Nazi product; the ideas he traces during the Nazi era continued after 1945. Schuster’s study leads to the question of why these (mostly) Protestant (mostly Lutheran) theologians, primarily in Germany, but also in Scandinavian countries, were so committed to antisemitic theology. For Schuster, the answer is twofold. Protestantism had long denied a continuity from Old to New Testament, preferring to see the Old Testament as a “foreign text” and Judaism as overcome and negated through Christianity’s supersessionism (286). Moreover, he argues, what the Nazi era accomplished was to make possible the ultimate “proof” of an Aryan Christianity by granting DC theologians professorships and by promoting the work of the Institute. I would add additional motivations, including the sense within the church at the turn of the century that racial theory was new and sophisticated, so that racializing theology was seen as a method for modernizing Christianity. Racial theory was also a way to preserve the uniqueness of Jesus from claims by Jewish historians that his teachings were no different from those of other rabbis of his day. Inflammatory antisemitism was a way to arouse the pews to emotional engagement, in contrast to fine points of exegesis or doctrine. Given the mood in Germany during the first decades of the twentieth century, antisemitism provided a scapegoat, a mood of excitement, and an explanation for problems.

Very little theological opposition to the Institute was published during the war years–some negative book reviews–and once former Confessing Church members took control of the Thuringian church after the war, efforts to keep it going were not successful, despite disingenuous claims that its dejudaization program was a purely scholarly effort. However, the continuation of its arguments into acceptable language was not difficult, as Schuster demonstrates, and Institute members published major works of scholarship in the postwar decades, as he notes. The reception of those works deserves further attention, as does the involvement of some Institute members in Dead Sea Scroll scholarship. Nor should their dejudaization efforts be understood solely as a product of DC scholarship; plenty of their opponents in the Confessing Church articulated highly negative claims about Judaism, though not with an intention of dejudaizing Christianity or removing the Old Testament from the Christian Bible.

That leads to the postwar question awaiting future scholarship: why were such Christian antisemitic ideas promoted after 1945 in both the anti-fascist German Democratic Republic and the democratic Federal Republic of Germany? Why does the negation of the Old Testament continue, exemplified by the recent call by Notger Slenczka, professor of theology at the Humboldt University, to remove the Old Testament from the Christian Bible. Schuster concludes with caution, noting that what passed for theological scholarship in the 1930s would not be acceptable scholarship today, and also warning of the danger of attributing an inherent, indelible “character” to any religion. The mixture of politics and theology, and a political regime that fosters inhumane theological claims is the heart of the danger, one that requires careful monitoring. The wish to remove Judaism from Christianity was not limited to the Third Reich, and Schuster has written a thoughtful and insightful analysis probing the danger of what happened when that wish was fulfilled.

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Review of Horst Junginger, The Scientification of the “Jewish Question” in Nazi Germany

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

Review of Horst Junginger, The Scientification of the “Jewish Question” in Nazi Germany (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2017), 456pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-34107-4.

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, University College

Horst Junginger’s ambitious and weighty history of an exceptionally ugly aspect of Christian scholarship during the Third Reich begins with a dedication to a Jewish woman from Karlsruhe named Sophie Ettlinger. Ettlinger “accidentally” made her way into Junginger’s meticulous work of scholarship “because she possessed a typewriter with Hebrew letters that was of service to National Socialist ‘Jew research.’” The heartrending and galling narrative about Sophie’s fate (and that of her typewriter), to which we will return shortly, illuminates not only Judenforschung during the Third Reich, but also Nazi theft of Jewish property and, ultimately, the murder of six million European Jews.

A few key conceptions and realities are at the forefront of Junginger’s study, which is a translation of a revised version of the author’s Habilitation thesis. First, the author seeks to demonstrate that Nazi-era “Jew research,” which purported to pose scholarly answers to the “Jewish Question” but in fact aimed at supporting anti-Jewish policies – was carried out at German universities in a manner that mutually reinforced religious and racial antisemitism. Thus, the book focuses on the religious aspect of modern antisemitism – even while recognizing with great care that “religious stereotypes coalesce with a racial explanation of the world” (ix). Second, the University of Tübingen’s centuries-long role as “an intellectual stronghold against Judaism” (x) culminating in its essential function as a locus of Nazi Judenforschung, is emphasized. Finally, theoretical and practical antisemitism converged during the Holocaust, as typified here by Junginger’s examination of the biographies of roughly a dozen war criminals who, the author demonstrates, were responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand European Jews during the Shoah.

The book is presented in nine chapters. Chapters one and two set out the intellectual framework for the rest of the work, demonstrating how problematic were Nazi efforts to define Jews by means of their race or religion. The fact that baptismal records were a key means of identifying whether one was an “Aryan” or not speaks both to the crucial role played by the churches in this certification (and thus, by extension, the persecution, expropriation of belongings and property, ghettoization, and murder that followed for “non-Aryans”) and to the confusion brought about by the Nazi classification system. Junginger notes astutely, “National Socialist laws and their accompanying political commentaries could concentrate on blood and genealogical succession as much as they liked; apart from religion the state had absolutely no other means to ascertain the race of its citizens” (7).

Chapter three traces the history of the University of Tübingen’s long and tortuous history as a place of exclusion for and condemnation of Jews and Judaism. A key consideration here is how such ideas survived into the post-Enlightenment and post-emancipation eras. Junginger finds the answer, in part, in the work of the social historian Jacob Katz, who argued that, even in a far less religious epoch, Christianity was still a defining aspect of the European outlook. The pre-modern image of “the Jews” metamorphized “into a seemingly rational one” (68). Yet, even in the modern era, lingering and “antiquated” Christian prejudices still contributed to a multifaceted post-emancipation antisemitic milieu.

In chapter four, Junginger demonstrates that the University of Tübingen’s institutional bias against Jews and Judaism did not reverse during the era of the Weimar Republic, which he calls “the zenith of Jewish emancipation.” Quite to the contrary, and despite the fact that the Weimar constitution guaranteed full civil rights and access to civil service employment for all, regardless of religious affiliation, the university consciously undermined such a policy so thoroughly that, when the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service came into effect in April 1933, the university had the lowest quota of dismissals of any German university. While other reasons for this include the national malaise in the wake of the First World War, Junginger places greater emphasis on Tübingen’s centuries-long “all-encompassing nationalist Protestant consensus,” which included antisemitism (111).

Chapter five deals largely with the case of Gerhard Kittel, who became Chair of New Testament Studies at Tübingen in 1926. Thanks to the work of scholars like Max Weinreich, Robert P. Ericksen, Alan Steinweis, and Anders Gerdmar, Kittel is now a well-known and notorious case of Protestant scholarship in service of the Nazi regime, including its anti-Jewish policy. Still, Junginger’s deep dive into both primary and secondary sources offers the reader some new or lesser known aspects of Kittel.  One is the revealing and harrowing account of a Jewish scholar named Charles Horowitz (1890–1969). In March 1928, Gerhard Kittel applied to the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Association of German Science) for funding of a planned collection of rabbinic texts. In his application, Kittel stressed how vital the participation of young Jewish scholars would be. The project was approved and funded handsomely (122).

As one of the Jewish scholars hired for the project, Horowitz began working in the winter semester of 1930–1931. While working at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (College for the Study of Judaism) in Berlin, Horowitz collaborated during the early 1930s on the Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament), which was edited by Kittel. He apparently received no remuneration for this work. Horowitz also translated the Talmud treatise Jeruschalmi and proofread the Talmud references in Adolf Schlatter’s commentaries during this period. For his work overseeing a small working group for rabbinic texts in the summer of 1930, work which continued until March 1933, he received the paltry monthly stipend of 25 Reichsmark (124).

In April 1933, just two months after Hitler came to power, Kittel notified the rector’s office that Horowitz’s salary would be discontinued immediately, adding in June that Horowitz’s work as a tutorial assistant was to be taken over by Karl Georg Kuhn (1906–76) after Horowitz’s “retirement.” Just a few days before Horowitz was summarily dismissed, Kuhn had held the official boycott speech for the Nazi Party on Tübingen’s market square. Even before the National Socialists came to power, Horowitz had been the target of antisemitic hostility in Tübingen. He often found menacing letters and antisemitic notes on his desk and all of his documents were stolen from his study (125).

Horowitz’s misery would only increase, of course, with the onset of Nazi rule. Not long after his dismissal from work at Tübingen, he and his family fled to Amsterdam and then, in 1937, to Dijon, France. After the German invasion and occupation of France, in 1941, the Horowitz family fled across the demarcation line to Valence. Despite taking every precaution, including moving from place to place, in August 1942 Charles’s wife Lea was arrested and deported after a denunciation. While Charles and his children barely survived the war and the Shoah, Lea was murdered in Auschwitz (125-126).

Chapters six through eight cover the efforts of Kittel and like-minded others to transform existing confessional studies about Judaism into purportedly scholarly antisemitic studies; the extent to which such efforts were effective; the conversion of such theoretical studies into concrete action directed against Jews (that is, ghettoization, theft, violence, and murder); and the “ultimate consequences” of the antisemitism theorized at Tübingen but promulgated and executed throughout Europe during the Holocaust – that is, the aforementioned hundreds of thousands of murders carried out and/or ordered by war criminals influenced by their studies at Tübingen.

Among other things, we learn in these three chapters how Kittel was called upon in 1942 to give an expert opinion in the show trial of Herschel Grynszpan, the desperate, stateless Polish Jewish teenager who fatally shot German Legation secretary Ernst vom Rath in November 1938, an event that was used as the pretext for the Reich pogrom that began on November 9 (261ff.) and that Kittel provided both written materials and ancient Jewish caricatures for the notorious antisemitic propaganda exhibition called “Der ewige Jude,” which ran initially in the German Museum in Munich from November 1937 to January 1938 (230-231).

Though these three chapters offer a dire array of examples of words and deeds offered up by the purveyors of antisemitic Judenforschung during the war and the Holocaust, perhaps no example ties the threads of the study together quite like that of the aforementioned Sophie Ettlinger. In keeping with the increasingly common Nazi practice of theft of Jewish goods and property (made legal ex post facto) Sophie’s brand-new, very valuable portable typewriter – which contained Hebrew letters – was stolen and offered by the Reich Ministry of Education for sale to the University of Tübingen in September 1941. Though the rector at Tübingen replied favorably a few weeks later, noting that both the “research unit on the history of Judaism” and its Protestant faculty of theology would find the typewriter very useful, he received disappointing news, as it had been sold instead to the Frankfurt-based Institute for Research on the Jewish Question, whose head was Wilhelm Grau. Junginger notes the irony that an official Nazi organ for antisemitic research would thus take possession of the stolen (and re-sold) typewriter rather than “Judenforscher” Karl Georg Kuhn or another member of the faculty of Protestant theology at Tübingen.

Together with several family members, Sophie Ettlinger had been deported in October 1940 to the Gurs internment camp. Between August 5 and September 1, 1942, four deportation trains left Gurs for the extermination camps in the East, with a stop at the transit camp at Drancy along the way. Sophie was present with the more than 2,000 Jews from this group that went to Auschwitz, where Sophie was murdered (258-259).

The concluding chapter recapitulates the main emphases of the work but also reminds readers that most of the war criminals discussed in chapter eight—all of whom had significant ties to the University of Tübingen and/or its Jewish research unit and had blood on their hands by way of direct participation in the murder of European Jews—either received light jail sentences or had their sentences later reduced, enabling them to live the rest of their days in freedom and comfort.

Junginger’s work illuminates how the University of Tübingen, especially those members of its Protestant faculty of theology involved in research on the “Jewish Question,” made key contributions not merely to a broadly antisemitic atmosphere in Württemberg but to the murder of hundreds of thousands of European Jews during the Holocaust. While historians and scholars of religion will find it particularly useful, patient lay readers, too, will benefit from its sophisticated but clear argument about the nexus between antisemitic words and deeds in Nazi Germany.

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Review of Konstantin Hermann, Gerhard Lindemann (Hg.), Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz. Biografien von Theologen der Evangelisch-lutherischen Landeskirche Sachsens im Nationalsozialismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

Review of Konstantin Hermann, Gerhard Lindemann (Hg.), Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz. Biografien von Theologen der Evangelisch-lutherischen Landeskirche Sachsens im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), pp. 328, ISBN: 978-3-8471-0726-2

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

This review was originally published in theologie.geschichte, Bd. 13 (2018) and is reprinted with the kind permission of the publisher. The original version can be found here.

The volume is a collection of chapters on the roles of individual clergymen during the Nazi regime in the Protestant church of Saxony. It is a fairly specialized study for those concerned with regional church history in what in Germany is called Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte. This branch of church history focuses on the twentieth century, with a particular interest in the impact of the Third Reich (though the field has over time widened in scope and perspective). The aim of this volume is to introduce the biographical-professional pathways, political choices, and theological justifications of men working in the church of Saxony in the 1930s and 1940s. The research is based on the evaluation of new archival materials, and all the case studies follow a consistent framework. They show the spectrum of positions these men took during the Nazi regime and the Kirchenkampf (church struggle), from the moment Hitler took power and the Nazification of German society to the outbreak of World War II and its end in 1945. They also situate each of the clergymen in their family histories and theological training before 1933, followed up briefly by notes on their personal and professional lives after 1945, including the de-Nazification process and accommodations with the new East German socialist government.

Commendably, the editors cover the various levels of complicity and resistance in their selection of biographical reconstructions. They do so systematically by dividing the volume into four parts. The first and longest part introduces the biographies of clergymen who embraced Nazi ideology and identified with the Deutsche Christen – the “German Christians,” a group within the Protestant parishes that saw no contradiction between Hitler and Luther, between Nazi ideology and church teachings (Knabe; Münnich; Coch; Fügner; Bohland; Axt). The second part covers four men belonging to the so-called “Mitte,” the center, who tried to walk a middle path between radicalized and Nazi-supporting clergy and those who opposed the Nazi takeover of church and society (Herz; Bruhns; Loesche; Gerber). The third and shortest part introduces two biographies of men of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), who prioritized faith in Christ over nationalist and völkisch ideologies and (partially) resisted the Nazi regime (von Kirchbach; Delekat). The last part documents the biographies of churchmen who were persecuted by the Nazis for political and racial reasons, including Protestant ministers who were classified as Jews (or mix-blooded) by the 1935 Nuremberg Laws (Stempel; Kaiser; Gottlieb; Starke; Grosse).

The volume’s internal structure – from Nazi sympathizer to active resistance – guides the reader well through the many choices these clergymen made and the degree to which they used their clerical authority to position themselves vis-à-vis a dictatorial regime. What, in hindsight, looks like an unambiguous verdict – after all, how would any Christian minister be able to support a racist, murderous, and genocidal regime? – turns into a more complicated maze of decision making, career ambitions, and ideological convictions when examining how biographical motivations intersect with political developments. Given the longstanding German tradition of fusing Lutheran theology with national aspirations, many believed that Hitler would revitalize the Protestant churches and strengthen the German nation against common foes: secularization, Bolshevism, and those responsible for the Versailles Peace Treaty. Such expectations enticed clergy to join the Nazi Party and the Deutsche Christen (DC). Some held on to both memberships, others left the DC but not the NSDAP; some moved from the DC to the Confessing Church over time, others joined the German army as military chaplains. Yet others never affiliated with any of these groups because they identified with religious-socialist circles or the political party of the Social Democrats. It is worth delving into the continuities and discontinuities we see played out in these individual biographies.

As a reviewer, it is tempting to introduce some of the characters by name and to follow their life stories within the church environment of Saxony. However, for readers unfamiliar with the particulars of Saxony’s regional church administration and struggle, the amassed archival details of each chapter would quickly overwhelm. Experts in church history will have, no doubt, an easier time in grasping the significance of certain names and nuances, and they will welcome this volume as an addition to the literature on the German church struggle. Yet, not only specialists should read Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz, a point I will return to at the end.

A few areas of concern need to be mentioned for they weaken the otherwise meticulous research presented in this volume.

More help could have been provided to the reader to make sense of the many historical details mentioned in the chapters. At times, the biographical material is just a long list of data; this is especially true for the men’s family histories and their university studies and early career pathways preceding 1933. Though the contributors claim that this information is important to understand their subjects’ later choices, this is not always evident. More explicit interpretative models would have been useful. The criticism that Philippe Lejeune once voiced against autobiographical prose can apply here to some degree. Autobiographers, Lejeune lamented, sometimes write as if they fill out a “questionnaire sent by a punctilious administration.”[1] The copiousness of biographical data does not automatically contain explanatory power.

More help could have also been provided for weighing the significance of particular choices and attitudes. How should we assess, for example, someone’s genuine Heimatliebe (love of one’s home-nation) when it goes hand-in-hand with anti-Jewish resentments (as in the case of Oskar Bruhns with his Baltic-German roots and völkisch identification)? How should we distinguish between an ambitious career move and membership in the NSDAP? Some chapters offer clear assessments, but generally the volume errs on the side of caution.

A few of the contributors are too close to their subjects, with the result that they lose critical distance and present them with undue loyalty. Generational affinity might be one reason for this shortcoming (the contributors’ birth years range from 1929 to 1988). This is especially the case for contributors born before 1945. Their own linguistic style (Sprachduktus) occasionally resembles those of their subjects – and those styles carry embedded value references. This is true, for example, for the issue of gender and gender relations. Wives and children of the churchmen are mostly introduced as an aside, such as in the case of the death of von Kirchbach’s wife after his return from World War I, which is commented with the laconic entry: “He left in good care his children, eight and six years old. For him now, the decision to study theology was firm” (208).[2] Another example is the cavalier way of commenting on behaviors questionable by today’s standards, such as the beating of students for educational purposes: “In extremely rare cases it is told that emotional stress apparently led him to slap [his students]” (313).[3]

There is also little discourse analysis of the theologians’ autobiographical writings that were consulted for this study. This lack is particularly glaring with respect to self-exculpations during the de-Nazification process (Selbstreinigung) after 1945. Ego-documents often require a reading between the lines, listening not only to what is said but also to how it is said and what is not being said, and to paying attention for the less obvious elements of emotionality, narrative patterns, and omissions.

Related to these issues is the absence of the Holocaust in the presented biographical reconstructions. Anti-Jewish tirades and antisemitic stereotyping as well as the Arierparagraph and the case of pastors of Jewish origins find mentioning in the chapters, but the Holocaust itself is largely absent. It might very well be that the archival materials do not contain any such references, but this silence in the documentation should have been addressed and problematized.

17 of the 18 churchmen introduced in this volume were born between 1877 and 1895, 12 of them between 1882 and1890 (with one outlier who was born in 1906[4]). Little is done with the opportunity to study these men as members of the same generational cohort, the 1890ers (born between 1870 and 1890).[5] This political-generational cohort shared identifications and worldviews that united them beyond their individual biographies. These men lived through a number of political dreams and upheavals, from the Wilhelmine era to the end of the Kaiserreich, from colonial ambitions to the end of imperial dreams after World War I. It was a time characterized by social tensions between workers, industrial capitalism, and the middle class. These themes (especially World War I and the attempts at re-binding the working class to the church) appear frequently in the chapters, but they are not woven into a more cohesive instrument of interpretation.

Finally, what works well for this volume – namely the ordering of the biographies according to the conventions of contemporary church history (Deutsche Christen – the Center – Confessing Church – persecuted theologians) – is also a limitation. This framing follows a progression from most complicit with the Nazi regime to least complicit. This makes sense. Yet, its reliance on a well-worn traditional framework, which categorizes individual choices along the organizational venues of the Kirchenkampf, strains the possibilities of assessing culpability and complicity differently. What if we were to apply to the biographies of Protestant clergy and theologians more fine-tuned categories of culpability, such as perpetrator, accomplice, opportunist, enabler, bystander, beneficiary, victim? What if we read the archival material through an analysis of power and male agency? What if we foregrounded in these biographies the question of male subjectivity in the gray zone of moral and political choices and opportunities? An analysis of levels of culpability might compel us to reconfigure the historical and ethical assessment of these men’s choices, and this might be particularly relevant for the men of the Mitte (center).

A volume like Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz cannot accomplish all these tasks or satisfy these desiderata; the concerns raised above merely indicate how detailed historical research can be expanded and enriched. The two volume editors write in their brief and solid introduction that “the political agenda of the NSDAP found wide and positive resonance in [German] Protestantism.” Among the reasons for Christians supporting the Nazi party, they list the following: rejection of the “Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, the strengthening of the state, measures to increase employment, [securing] of national borders [Volkstumsgrenzen],…legal discrimination of Jews,…fears of Bolshevism and also discontent with a pluralistic society” (10).  If we were to replace some of the historical references in this passage with contemporary political agendas, a number of countries would come to mind where politicians currently stoke fears and hate – with the support and vote of large numbers of Christians. Replace the Versailles Treaty with the Paris Agreement of Climate Change, Volkstumsgrenzen with national border security, legal discrimination of Jews with legal discrimination of immigrants, or Bolshevism with Islam, and we find ourselves in the midst of Trump’s America and Orbán’s Hungary. As illiberal democracies spread, are Christians today any better prepared to resist than the Protestant theologians in the church of Saxony in the 1930s? This is why the book, Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz can and needs to be read by people beyond a circle of specialists.

Dr. Björn Krondorfer, Professor of Religious Studies and  Director of the Martin-Springer Institute, Northern Arizona University, USA

Notes:
[1] Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography. Edited by Paul John Eakin (Minneapolis 1989, p. 235).
[2] In the original: “Nach Dresden zurückgekehrt, fand er sie nicht mehr unter den Lebenden. Seine Kinder, acht und sechs Jahre alt, konnte er in guter Obhut lassen. Für ihn stand nun der Entschluss zum Theologiestudium fest.”
[3] In the original: “In äußerst seltenen Fällen wird berichtet, dass ihm offensichtlich als Affekthandlung die Hand ausgerutscht sei.”
[4] The outlier is Horst Ficker, a parish minister of the Confessing Church. Born in 1906, he belongs to the generational cohort of the 1933ers (see note 5). Indeed, his biography – which is juxtaposed to Bohland, a parish minister affiliated with the DC – reads quite differently from the other biographies presented in this volume.
[5] Björn Krondorfer, “Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust in Autobiographien protestantischer Theologen. ” In Mit Blick auf die Täter: Fragen an die deutsche Theologie nach 1945. Edited by Krondorfer, Katharina von Kellenbach, and Norbert Reck (Gütersloh 2006, pp.. 23-170).

 

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Review of Wolfgang Thielmann, ed., Alternative für Christen? Die AfD und ihr gespaltenes Verhältnis zur Religion

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

Review of Wolfgang Thielmann, ed., Alternative für Christen? Die AfD und ihr gespaltenes Verhältnis zur Religion (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2017). Pp. 192. ISBN: 978-3-7615-6439-4.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

This book is a collection of short chapters by Protestant clergy, lay leaders, journalists and public intellectuals on the fraught relationship between Christianity and Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing populist party that has gained significant momentum in state and national elections since its founding in 2013. The editor and most contributors argue that the AfD and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible, though they also recognize that church members are attracted to the party and its program to roughly the same extent as the broader population. For this reason, they recommend dialogue with AfD supporters and sympathizers, though always with the goal of limiting its impact in church and society.

Among the incompatibilities cited by the authors are the AfD’s denigration of vulnerable groups (especially migrants and Muslims), its insistence on a homogeneous German Leitkultur, its political strategy (deliberate provocations and insults, distortions and “alternative facts,” manufacturing or intensifying anxieties), and its invocation of Christianity as an element of national identity rather than a universal faith and system of values. Nevertheless, they recognize that individual Christians have played a key role as founders and leaders of the party (including Frauke Petry, Bernd Lucke, and Konrad Adam on the Protestant side and Jörg Meuthen on the Catholic side). The group “Christen in der AfD” is another indicator that the party has made inroads among Christians, though very few pastors and priests have endorsed the AfD and many have been outspoken in their opposition.

The contributors’ calls for dialogue take different forms. Pastor Ulrich Kasparick of Hetzdorf (Uckerland) stresses the need for outreach to rural parishioners who rely on the internet and social media for much of their information about the wider world. Pastors and church councils must use those same channels to counter AfD positions and explain where they transgress Christian norms. Pastor Sven Petry (formerly married to Frauke Petry) argues that church leaders should listen to the concerns of Germany’s Wutbürger (enraged citizens) even as they challenge the misconceptions and scapegoating promoted by the AfD. Christina Aus der Au defends the decision to invite Anette Schultner (leader of the group “Christen in der AfD”) to participate in a panel discussion at the Protestant Kirchentag in Berlin and Wittenberg in 2017. Aus der Au, who served as president of the Kirchentag that year, appeals to the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for whom the highest priority was not looking heroic, but the survival of the coming generation. It would be better, she argues, for Christians “to get their hands dirty than to wash them in innocence” (83).

Of course, dialogue does not mean moral relativism, nor does it mean that an opponent’s views will go unchallenged. Superintendent Ilka Federschmidt (Wuppertal) welcomes a clear “no” to the AfD on the part of the churches, but like Kasparick she sees a need for ongoing dialogue and active engagement with church members who lean toward the AfD and its agenda. Law professor Jacob Joussen, an elder at the Bonhoeffer-Gemeinde in Düsseldorf, weighs the options available to lay leaders if a member of a church council declares allegiance to the AfD (as Hartmut Beucker did in Wuppertal in 2017). Joussen could find no legal justification for excluding or removing an elder based on party affiliation but argued that non-AfD parish leaders had an obligation to wage a vigorous and public campaign against the ideas of their wayward colleague if such a case were to arise.

The book also makes room for two prominent AfD voices via Hartmut Beucker’s essay “Warum ich für die AfD kandidiere” and a partial transcript from the 2017 Kirchentag, in which Anette Schultner squared off against Bishop Markus Dröge (Berlin-Brandenburg-Schlesische Oberlausitz) and journalist Liane Bednarz. Both Beucker and Schultner are fairly predictable in their opposition to “uncontrolled” migration, “Islamization,” abortion, and gender mainstreaming as well as their promotion of tighter restrictions on immigration, defense of the “Jewish-Christian foundations” of German culture, and “traditional” families. Equally noteworthy is their invocation of the fifth thesis of the Barmen Declaration to argue that the churches should steer clear of politics (i.e., criticism of the AfD), along with their strategy of representing themselves and their party as the true victims of intolerance, hatred and hysteria. When asked to comment on those who feared the AfD because its proposals threatened to restrict their rights, Schultner avoided answering directly and instead accused those who were frustrated over the existence of the AfD of being “undemocratic” (187).

Among the limitations of the book are its lack of historical depth and its minimal engagement with a growing body of research on populism, far-right political parties, and their points of connection with religious communities and identities. Also regrettable is the lack of Catholic contributors and the tendency of several of the Protestant authors to congratulate themselves for wading into the morass of dialogue, unlike their principled but risk-averse coreligionists who had refused to give AfD members access to the podium at the 2016 Katholikentag in Leipzig. A third issue, though admittedly unavoidable in such a work, is that some of the information it relays is quickly outdated. For example, Anette Schultner abandoned the AfD in October 2017, only a few months after defending it at the Kirchentag, because in her view extremists had taken over the party. In May 2018, AfD representative Volker Münz was allowed to speak at the 101st Katholikentag in Münster.

Despite these drawbacks, the book is a fascinating source for contemporary church historians in that it shows German Protestants (in the larger regional churches as well as the smaller free churches) reflecting on and responding to right-wing populism in real time. Though the players and the circumstances are different in many respects, one cannot help but contrast the nearly unanimous opposition of church leaders to the AfD with the collaboration or complicity of church leaders during the Nazi era. Equally important are the ways in which that earlier history serves as a reference point for contemporary antagonists as they frame the debate and define their positions within it.

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