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Review of Michael W. Brierley and Georgina A. Byrne, Life after Tragedy: Essays on Faith and the First World War evoked by Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Review of Michael W. Brierley and Georgina A. Byrne, Life after Tragedy: Essays on Faith and the First World War evoked by Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017). Pp. xxiv + 254. ISBN 978-1-5326-0226-9.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

The many centenary anniversaries of the First World War which have accumulated in Britain since 2014 have produced many significant contributions in many different forms. They have also given historians of religion an audience for their growing explorations of the diverse religious dimensions of the conflict. One of these dimensions has been the experiences of chaplains to the armed forces—a field which that fine historian, Michael Snape, has made his own. It is in this context that the striking figure of Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy emerges.

Studdert Kennedy, or ‘Woodbine Willie’, as he was affectionately known by soldiers, has long been the most well-known of the British wartime chaplains. He has attracted the attention of scholars of various kinds for his poetry (The Unutterable Beauty, published in 1927, remains much admired in some quarters), his trenchant criticisms of the status quo, his uncompromising socialism, his pungent scepticism of authority (one of his books was simply called Lies), and his determination that the ghastliness of war must surely and eventually yield a better world. But he was also the embodiment of courage and unselfconscious sacrifice (he won the Military Cross) and his early death, exhausted, at the age of 45, presented something of the quality of a martyrdom—not so much to the powers of the age but perhaps to the whole age in which he lived. Westminster Abbey notoriously turned down the idea of hosting his funeral. One suspects that Studdert Kennedy would have been delighted by the compliment.

This collection of anniversary essays is very much the work of two members of the clergy of the Church of England who have sought to claim for their cathedral something of a responsibility for public scholarship and critical reflection. This is admirable, and these days rare. Once I would have thought that an English cathedral could make a very good home to scholarship and that English priests at large might know how to value the reality of historical experience. I have long since lost that faith and find that even a book like this cannot quite revive it. Nonetheless, what we have here is solid fare and it expresses the commitments of ten priests, while the two laymen turn out to be lay canons of cathedrals. The effect is collegial: for the most part they share a common geography as well as denomination and one senses that they are happy to be found in company together.

Michael Snape inaugurates the volume with an efficient ‘reconsideration’ of British religion and the First World War, while Michael Brierley offers a brisk sketch of the life of Studdert Kennedy. John Inge presents a more personal and wide-ranging reflection on the war as it affected the sensibilities of ‘place’ and ‘home’, finding Studdert Kennedy at home only in the Christ of the Gospels and the worship of the Church. Peter Atkinson confronts Studdert Kennedy the poet and holds to account the imperious responses of later English literary critics, particularly I.A. Richards and Roy Fuller, before proceeding to a discussion of the poetry of Geoffrey Dearmer. Michael Brierley returns with a discussion of Studdert Kennedy and the ‘new vision’ of a suffering God—a vision which would resonate so profoundly, and be developed, in the later theology of the European twentieth century. Georgina Byrne examines different forms of preaching (‘Prophesy or Propaganda?’), locating Studdert Kennedy alongside the ‘intensely patriotic’ Bishop of London, Winnington Ingram (who has almost become a subject, or at least a controversy, in his own right) and the eloquent individualist and pacifist (of a kind), Maude Royden. A discursive Mark Dorsett places Studdert Kennedy in the company of the like-minded Edward Lee Hicks (a notable bishop of Lincoln and a leading Christian Socialist) and the influential thinker R.H. Tawney, while looking to further horizons. David Bryer provides a useful survey of the war and its impact on the development of humanitarianism while Alvyn Pettersen discusses images of glory in war memorials, examining those at Worcester itself and at Magdeburg Cathedral (by Ernst Barlach) before jumping, attractively but perhaps surprisingly, into a reflection on the life of the fourth-century monk, Antony of Egypt. By way of conclusion Mark Chapman is very much at home in a discussion of Anglican theology, not least in its stray connections with German theologians, during and immediately after the war. Finally, the two editors retrieve and reconfigure strands in a concluding reflection on ’integration, balance and fullness’. An Afterword by the bishop of the Evangelical Church in Central Germany, Ilse Junkermann, is only momentarily a response to the life of Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy and suggests a diocesan link at work. In no small measure is the integrity of the volume affirmed by a very good, robust bibliography.

In sum, there is enough here to satisfy the questions and perspectives of the conventionally-minded historian. Equally, theologians of society, war, literature ethics and aesthetics, will find much to intrigue them. Michael Brierley and Georgina Byrne have done particularly well to bring the whole feast before us and more than the figure of the marvellous Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy is honoured by it all.

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Review of Mark Edward Ruff, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Review of Mark Edward Ruff, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Pp. 408. ISBN 9781107190665.

Reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen

Mark Edward Ruff, Professor of History at Saint Louis University, has spent the past eleven years completing The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980. This includes four years working in Germany, supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the NEH, and the ACLS, as well as visits to a total of “two continents, six nations, and seventy-seven archives” (vii). The result is an important book that takes its place alongside John Connelly’s recent From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Connelly devotes more than half of his book to the period pre-1945; however, the importance of his book culminates in the 1960s, when, according to his argument, converts to Catholicism, several with German or German language roots, and especially Catholics of Jewish origin, inspired the remarkable transition in Catholic theology found in Vatican Two and Nostra Aetate.[1] Ruff’s book is more completely based in the postwar period. However, it also deals with the most salient issue addressed by postwar historians of Germany and of Catholicism: a measuring of the Catholic Church’s response to the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, and especially to the Shoah, the murder of six million Jews by a Christian nation within a Christian Europe. Connelly describes the incubation of ideas that led to a dramatic change in universal Catholic doctrine. Ruff describes the first thirty-five postwar years within Germany and the struggle over how to understand the history of Catholics, especially their place within and their relationship to the Nazi regime and its crimes.

Ruff begins with the assumption that both churches, Catholic and Protestant, share a compromised history within the Nazi state. He also acknowledges that both churches from 1945 to 1949 worked to polish their reputations: “Not wishing to further damage Germany’s reputation abroad …,” both Catholics and Protestants “elevated to orthodoxy the picture of the church triumphant, of clear-headed leaders valiantly resisting and the faithful unflinchingly following” (243). Not until the 1980s did historians of the Protestant Church seriously begin to redraw this rosy picture. However, Catholic behavior came under widespread attack already in the 1950s, “Doubts about the moral fitness of Catholic bishops, Cardinal Secretary of States and pontiffs of the Nazi era were cascaded before the public. They screamed from front-page headlines, the magazine covers of the most influential newsweeklies, the glossy pages of illustrated magazines and the best-seller lists in Germany and the United States.” Why did this happen? “This has been a guiding question for this book, since by almost all objective yardsticks, the German Protestant leadership left behind a more troubling record of collaboration than their Catholic counterparts” (244).[2]

Ruff clarifies early on his basic explanation of how the microscope quickly became focused on Catholics rather than Protestants in postwar Germany. First it has to do with demographics. Catholics had been an embattled minority in Germany since the aggressive Protestant, Otto von Bismarck, founded modern Germany. After 1945, millions of German Protestants were left behind in Poland and in the Soviet Union, but especially in the Russian Zone of Occupation that became East Germany. As a result, the percentage of Catholics rose from just over one-third in all of Germany prior to the war to 45 percent in postwar West Germany.

More importantly, Konrad Adenauer and his newly-created Christian Democratic Union—primarily a Catholic party, even though it invited Protestant participation—dominated the early years of West Germany, from the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949 until 1969. Ruff concludes (as “the central finding of this book”) that “controversies over the church’s relationship to National Socialism were frequently surrogates for a larger set of conflicts over how the church was to position itself in modern society—in politics, international relations, the media and the public sphere” (2). Because Catholics were powerful in the first two decades of the Federal Republic, questionable Catholic behavior under Hitler came under close inspection, an attractive target for any opponent of the Adenauer agenda. Protestants, by contrast, not exercising national power, were able to nurture their misleading claim that the Confessing Church had represented the Protestant stance in the Third Reich, and that it had been a church of resistance.

Ruff compresses the massive volume of postwar debates surrounding Catholic behavior in the Nazi era into seven chapters, each devoted to a specific controversy. Chapter 1 on the period 1945-1949 describes both Protestant and Catholic efforts to produce “postwar anthologies.” Each church strove in those years to prove their persecution under Nazism and their supposedly triumphant response. Ruff comments, “They knew—how could they not?—that the church had lost its decisive battles against the National Socialist juggernaut, its resistance notwithstanding” (13). Johannes Neuhäusler, author of the massive Cross and Swastika (1946), a story of Catholic suffering and resistance, personally resisted and suffered himself. He spent the last four years of the war in Dachau as a neighbor to Martin Niemoeller.[3] However, Ruff shows that Neuhäusler’s approach to writing history came “straight out of the playbook of a skilled intelligence operative. He presented evidence rife with omissions and manipulations …. In ambiguous documents that showed evidence of both support for the Nazi regime and opposition, he cut out passages professing support, leaving out the ellipses that would have indicated the cuts.” Later, a younger Catholic historian, Hans Müller, “discovered this cut-and-paste job … and publicly took the author to task” (34-35).

Chapter 2 describes a legal battle before the FRG’s Constitutional Court in 1956 that Ruff compares in significance to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 in the United States. Ironically, however, this German case involved trying to protect the separation of students along denominational lines. The SPD-led government of Lower Saxony had written a law maintaining the option of faith-based public schools, but insisting they be interfaith rather than denominational. Adenauer and the CDU filed a lawsuit, wanting to protect the right of Catholic parents to send their children to publicly-funded Catholic schools. Unfortunately, the CDU had to base its case on the Reichskonkordat of 1933, which had guaranteed such schools. This opened a can of worms. The Reichskonkordat represented Hitler’s first foreign policy success and also a widely questioned “accomplishment” of Eugenio Pacelli and the Vatican. Furthermore, a close 1950s-look at the Reichskonkordat and its origins required also a close look at the Enabling Act of March 1933 that made the Reichskonkordat possible. This Enabling Act, which gave Hitler dictatorial power, had only happened with the support of every vote within the Catholic Center Party faction. Critics of Adenauer’s position began to see a corrupt bargain in the Reichskonkordat’s provision of denominational schools and the Catholic votes that had given Hitler his Enabling Act. They also accused Catholics in West Germany of wanting to keep one foot in the authoritarian past, rather than accept the democratic concepts of religious liberty and an open society. In a fine example of Ruff’s ability to describe complex events, he builds this chapter upon six episodes within the schools conflict, from battles under the Weimar Republic, through the writing of the Basic Law of the FRG, to the networks built up by each side during the public relations battles of the 1950s, and finally to the decision of the Constitutional Court.

The Court ruling in May 1957, handed down by a nine-person court with five Catholic members, confirmed the Reichskonkordat’s legal standing. On the other hand, in a complicated balancing act, it also confirmed the right of Lower Saxony to order its own school affairs, since the Basic Law of the FRG had handed all control of education to the states. Ruff notes that this climactic event in the mid-1950s set the battle lines among church historians for years to come, especially the tendency to focus on Catholic rather than Protestant behavior in Nazi Germany. It also hardened political stances, with Catholics and their allies defending the past, including the authoritarian and (to outside eyes, at least) intolerant nature of Catholic hierarchy. On the other hand, critics hardened their stance in favor of a more extensive (and increasingly secular) view of civil society, civil rights, and religious liberty.

Chapter 3 takes us into the 1960s, with a dramatic February 1961 article by Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, “German Catholicism in 1933: A Critical Examination.” Ruff describes this as “a bolt of lightning,” given Böckenörde’s “array of devastating quotations from cardinals, bishops, theology professors and lay presidents” in support of the Nazi state (86). The young Böckenförde, a conscientious Catholic headed for an impressive career in constitutional law, inspired other members of the “1945 generation” to undertake a rigorous inquiry into the stance of those Catholic leaders. This also inspired opponents of Böckenförde’s critique to organize, including their creation of the Association for Contemporary History, a Catholic body attempting to emulate the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and soon led by the young and “pugilistic” Catholic historian, Konrad Repgen (116-19).

Two American scholars entered the fray at about this time, first the young sociologist, Gordon Zahn, a professor at Loyola University in Chicago. Zahn spent the academic year 1956-57 in Germany, supported by a Fulbright grant. This placed Zahn in Germany just as the quarrel over denominational schools reached the Constitutional Court and grabbed his attention. Also, as a long-time member of the Catholic peace movement, he chose to interview former Catholic peace advocates in Germany during the Nazi era. In September 1959 he delivered a paper on this topic at a meeting of the American Catholic Sociological Association. In the published version, “The Catholic Press and the National Cause,” he showed how newspapers and journals had preached a hyper-nationalism that, in his view, represented a “critical failure” in their message to German Catholics. Catholics in late-1950s Germany, from Johannes Neuhäusler to the German bishops, reacted angrily to this article, as did the Vatican and the German Foreign Office. These opponents successfully barred Zahn’s ability to publish in Catholic venues, though they failed in their attempt to get Loyola University to violate his tenure rights and release him. Ruff says, however, that they made his life at Loyola “perfectly miserable” until he moved to the University of Massachusetts Boston in 1966. Despite powerful efforts to block Zahn’s impact, he got his book, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars, into print in 1962, with a German translation in 1965 (143-46). He also inspired the next American thorn in the flesh of the German Catholic Church.

Guenter Lewy, born into a Jewish family in Breslau in 1923, fled Germany with his family, spent some time on a Palestinian kibbutz, and became part of the Jewish Brigade in the British Army. This gave him a chance to shout—in German—while his unit was taking their first German prisoners, “Surrender, the Jews are here!” (195) There is no record that he gave the same warning when he published The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany in 1964. However, the books by Zahn and Lewy in 1962 and 1964 were outside entrants into a field of criticism that raised alarms among defenders of the church in Germany. Among other things, church officials and archivists decided never again to give outsiders easy access to the sort of documents used by Zahn and Lewy, as Ruff highlights in his title to Chapter 6, “Guenter Lewy and the Battle for Sources.”

The most famous of all the early 1960s battles involved Rolf Hochhuth and his play, The Deputy, first performed in 1963. We all know this to be an early entry into the “Pius Wars,” with its condemnation of the pontiff’s alleged silence in the face of the Holocaust. Ruff gives a useful background on Hochhuth, the original production of the play, and the bitter conflicts that ensued. He concludes that “counter-strikes by the defenders of the beleaguered pontiff transformed a debate about the silence of the wartime pope into something more injurious to their cause. This was a debate about freedom of expression, civil liberties and tolerance, when in the early to mid-1960s societal attitudes on these subjects were fundamentally shifting” (156). In fact, Ruff says controversy about The Deputy “marked the fundamental turning point in the battles for the Catholic past. It represented the last gasp of the Catholic milieu, the final extraordinary mobilization of organizations, politicians and clerics. But this time it was unable to prevent a fundamental taboo from being not just infringed but shattered” (192).

Chapter 7 brings us into the 1970s and 1980s, with two powerful antagonists, Klaus Scholder and Konrad Repgen, squaring off against each other. They did so in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in their scholarly publications, and with assistance from their graduate students. Scholder, in Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, Band 1 (Frankfurt, 1977), did begin to see weaknesses in the Protestant response to the Nazi takeover in 1933. However, he also attempted to write about the Catholic Church, and, in his opening salvo, an article in the FAZ, he resuscitated what he had to admit was a speculative claim about linkage between Catholic Center Party votes for the Enabling Act and Hitler’s decision to negotiate a Reichskonkordat. This article, a sort of advertisement for his forthcoming book, “focused exclusively on the ignominious role played by Catholic politicians and ecclesiastical leaders in the catastrophe of 1933. Nowhere was the Protestant past from 1933 to be found in either headline or article” (226). Repgen, leader of the Association for Contemporary History of the Catholic Church, responded with vigor and tenacity, leading to a set of exchanges from 1977 to 1979. In those years Scholder, a professor of church history at Tübingen had several advantages. These included his strong political contacts to the FDP, his easy access to the press, and his role as a frequent commentator on television.

Even if Adenauer and the Catholic CDU dominated the first twenty years of the Federal Republic and even if Catholics represented 45 percent of the population, certain advantages fell not just to Scholder but to Protestants in general throughout the period from 1945 to 1980. This included the fact that Protestant behavior in Nazi Germany did not yet fall under close inspection, as did Catholic behavior. It included advantages such as that which Scholder enjoyed in his relationship to German media and the German establishment in his conflict with Repgen, despite Repgen’s ability to identify weak areas in Scholder’s arguments. It is also possible to gain from this very fine book by Mark Ruff the sense that first-generation defenders of the Catholic Church in Germany had to struggle not just with the past, but also with the future.

When Böckenförde or Hochhuth or even Klaus Scholder seemed to prevail in the court of public opinion, it had a great deal to do with the path toward our modern world and the way in which democratic ideals of religious liberty and an open society came to prevail. Mark Ruff’s well researched, well written, and cogently argued book adds significantly to our understanding of how early postwar views of churches in Nazi Germany developed. First for Catholics and eventually for Protestants, this topic moved past a struggle to defend church behaviors into an effort to understand and to learn from them. Mark Ruff makes a fine contribution in that undertaking.

[1] For my take on the remarkable nature of Nostra Aetate, see Robert P. Ericksen, “Jews and ‘God the Father’ after Auschwitz: American Responses to Nostra Aetate,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, 29/2 (2016), 323-36.

[2] In support of this claim, Ruff cites Manfred Gailus, “Keine gute Performance. Die deutsche Protestanten im ‘Dritten Reich,’” in Manfred Gailus and Armin Nolzen, eds., Zerstrittene “Volksgemeinschaft.” Glaube, Confession, und Religion im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2011), 96-121.

[3] Neuhäeusler also participated in the famous June 5, 1945 Naples interview in which Niemoeller admitted he had been ready to fight for Germany during the war. He, Neuhäeusler, and Josef Müller all agreed that Germany was not ready for democracy, adding to the very critical press response to this interview in the West.

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Review of Joachim Negel and Karl Pinggéra, eds., Urkatastrophe. Die Erfahrung des Krieges 1914-1918 im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Theologie

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Review of Joachim Negel and Karl Pinggéra, eds., Urkatastrophe. Die Erfahrung des Krieges 1914-1918 im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Theologie (Freiburg: Herder, 2016). Pp. 540. ISBN 9783451328510.

Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

The seventeen chapters in this volume are the published version of a lecture series in Marburg (2014/2015) on the impact of the First World War on Christian theology. Collectively, they are global and ecumenical in scope, though there is more emphasis on Europe than other parts of the world, more focus on Germany than other European societies, and more attention given to Protestant than Catholic, Orthodox, or other Christian traditions. They reflect—though in a limited way—broader trends in the historiography of the First World War, which has shifted from a focus on Western and Central Europe toward greater emphasis on international and global dimensions of the war and the experiences and agendas of Asian and African as well as European participants. On the other hand, none of the contributions selected for this volume gives any attention to women who were theologically-trained or pursued religious vocations. Therefore, its assessment of the impact of the war on religious thought remains partial and incomplete.

The book begins with two chapters offering broad surveys of early twentieth-century European culture and German war theology, respectively. Elmar Salmann’s “Der Geist der Avantgarde und der Große Krieg” covers familiar territory as it catalogs challenging and unsettling developments in modern psychology, philosophy, art, music, literature, and the natural sciences. For those contemporaries in despair over the complexity and contradictions of modern life, the Great War was a great simplifier and a welcome relief. Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele’s “Der ‘Deutsche Gott’” follows up with an overview of German war theology—also familiar terrain—but Schäufele generates new insights through his side-by-side analysis of Catholic and Protestant war theologies, his recognition of diverse perspectives among theologians of the same confession, and his cost-benefit analysis of contextual theology.  In addition to those theologians of both confessions who saw the war as justified self-defense, an occasion for moral and spiritual renewal, or an experience of the sacred, Schäufele draws our attention to Protestant theologians like Reinhold Seeberg and Ferdinand Kattenbusch who believed war was a means by which God tested the ‘Geschichtsfähigkeit’ of nations, a theme that comes up again in Justus Bernhard’s chapter on Emanuel Hirsch (“’Krieg, du bist von Gott’”). Though most German war theology promoted the “civil-religious ideology of German nationalism” (73), Schäufele does not accept Karl Barth’s demand for a radical separation of theology from religious experience. As an alternative, he points to the more nuanced and critical theological engagement with wartime realities that he finds in the works of Rudolf Otto, Karl Holl, Friedrich Niebergall, and Otto Baumgarten.

Nine of the chapters that follow offer narrower case studies of individuals representing significant trends in wartime or postwar religious thought. The majority were German Protestant theologians (Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Seeberg, Adolf Deissmann, Adolf von Harnack, Ernst Troeltsch, Emanuel Hirsch), though four German Catholic intellectuals (Erich Przywara, Hugo Ball, Carl Schmitt, Erik Peterson) and one Jewish-German philosopher (Franz Rosenzweig) are also represented.

Georg Pfleiderer’s “Kriegszeit und Gottesrreich” challenges some of the origin myths of Dialectical Theology through a close examination of Karl Barth’s “August Experience” (140). Despite Barth’s own claims of an absolute rupture between prewar and postwar theology, Pfleiderer argues that Barth’s intense exchanges with liberal theologians like Adolf von Harnack, Martin Rade, Wilhelm Herrmann, and Friedrich Naumann should be seen as a family quarrel that included moments of understanding and recognition as well as conflict and alienation. Christoph Markschies (“Revanchismus oder Reue?”) also challenges the notion that Barth and Dialectical Theology simply brushed aside an older generation whose systems of thought collapsed in the wake of the “seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century. He does so through an examination of the postwar works of Reinhold Seeberg, Adolf Deissmann, and Adolf von Harnack, assessing the extent to which they broke from their prewar foundations. Markschies finds very little change in Seeberg’s case, noting continuities between his Grundwahrheiten der christlichen Religion (1902), Grundriss der Dogmatik (1932), and the theology of the German Christian movement—though without fully exploring the final link in that chain. Deissmann remained consistent in the fundamentals of his theology but underwent a significant reorientation in terms of his appraisal of the war and his embrace of the ecumenical movement. Harnack stood somewhere in between, but Markschies argues that Marcion (1920) demonstrates a greater awareness of the distance between Christ and culture in Harnack’s postwar theology than is often recognized.

Joachim Negel’s study of Erich Przywara (“Nichts ist wirklicher als Gott”) and Barbara Nichtweiß’ analysis of Erik Peterson (“’Der Himmel des Garnisonspfarrers’”) demonstrate that Catholic theologians who lived through the First World War also emphasized the gulf between heaven and earth and between God and humanity. Przywara ultimately concluded that “God, who from beyond this world and its history, entered and vanished into history (kenosis), can only be encountered through its contradictions and catastrophes” (226). Similarly, Peterson’s postwar fable “Der Himmel des Garnisonspfarrers” (1919) was a scathing indictment of pastors and theologians who, by substituting militarism for the teachings of Jesus, conflated heaven and earth, or divine and human agendas. At the end of the story, the “Son of God” (actually Satan in disguise) proclaims, “Look, now everyone is in heaven, everyone in hell!” (400).

If there is any comic (or tragi-comic) relief in this book, it is in Bernd Wacker’s account of the complicated relationship between Hugo Ball and Carl Schmitt (“’Die Revolution tagt in Versailles’”). Along with his role in the Dada movement, Ball’s editorship of the anti-war journal Freie Zeitung and his critique of German militarism and authoritarianism in Zur Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz (1919) were anathema to conservative nationalists like Schmitt, who would eventually be known as the “crown jurist of the Third Reich” (304). However, Schmitt was pleasantly surprised by Ball’s Byzantinisches Christentum (1923), which he took as an indication of Ball’s religious and political conversion (he was only half right). Around the same time, Ball wrote a series of relatively positive essays on Schmitt’s political theology for the journal Hochland, but Schmitt began to fear for his own reputation when he learned that Ball planned to release a slightly-revised version of Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz under the new title Die Folgen der Reformation. Ball’s own illusions were shattered when an associate of Schmitt’s who reviewed the book accused him of having spent the war in exile working alongside of other “paid traitors” (341). The relationship ended with each convinced that his own ideas about Germany, the war, and democracy were rooted in Catholic traditions.

Although over half of the chapters focus on individual German intellectuals, several explore international dimensions of the war’s impact on Christian theology. Jörg Ernesti’s “Der Vatikan im Ersten Weltkrieg” argues that Benedict XV’s “peace note” was a watershed in the history of the papacy. In the face of almost complete political marginalization, and widely ignored or disparaged by Catholics on both sides, Benedict XV tried to use his moral authority to bend world affairs in the direction of peace and reconciliation, signaling a greater humanitarian agenda and openness to the world on the part of the Vatican. Karl Pinggéra’s chapter on Orthodox theology (“Alte und Neue Wege”) also sees the war as a watershed, through its destructive impact on Christian theology within the Ottoman and Russian Empires. Churches, seminaries, ancient manuscripts, unique forms of religious education, and a majority of the theologians themselves were annihilated in the context of war, genocide, revolution, and civil war in these regions. Liberal reform movements influenced by German Protestant theology and steps toward greater lay leadership were cut off abruptly within the Armenian and Russian Orthodox Churches. Though Orthodox theology continued among émigré theologians in cities like Paris, they tended to define themselves in opposition to “the West,” by which they meant not only the Catholic and Protestant traditions but also centuries of pre-war Orthodox theology they believed had been corrupted by Western influences.

Hannelore Müller’s chapter on the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches (“Jenseits von Konfession und Nation”) focuses on the small subset of European and North American Christians who promoted international understanding and the protection of religious and national minorities in the new postwar world order. Yet even here there was ambiguity, as members of the World Alliance occasionally used issues like the rights of religious minorities to advance their own national and religious interests and to bring “civilization through law” to “backward” peoples in the “orient” and other parts of the world (451).

The only chapter to fully engage theological developments outside of Europe and North America is Frieder Ludwig’s “Das also ist Christentum?”, which addresses the impact of the European war on churches and missions in Africa and Asia. Even here, the author gives substantial attention to European perspectives before considering Asians and Africans as subjects in their own right. The second half of the chapter offers cross-regional comparisons of anti-colonial resistance led by prophets representing or embodying indigenous gods but influenced by Christian millenarianism (in Uganda and Kenya) as well as Christian resistance leaders like John Chilembwe (Nyasaland) and Garrick Braide (Nigeria). In addition to those who rebelled, there were African Christians who continued to work with European missionaries even as they criticized European political and religious leadership and demanded greater equality. Following a brief nod to Asian elites and theologians (Rabindrath Tagore in India and Liang Qichao and Yu Rizhang in China), Ludwig concludes that the global nature of the war challenged European claims regarding peace, community and Christianity and made contradictions between missionary work and colonial policies more apparent than ever. As a result, it called into question not only the Christian character of Europe, but also the European character of Christianity (511-512).

Two other chapters offer reflections on the fate of the Christian churches in light of the catastrophic failures of the early twentieth century. Thomas Ruster (“Krieg gegen die Glaubensbrüder”) poses the question: “Can one still believe a single word from the churches, given their endorsement and affirmation of this war?” (102). After all, “the whole community of the faithful went astray … from the bishops down to the last believing lay persons—and especially the theologians” (105). According to Ruster, the only way forward is to identify the theological errors that led to the churches’ capitulation a century ago, and to develop a more sophisticated theological understanding of ‘principalities and powers’ in the present, in order to avoid aligning the church with systems that bring death rather than life. Roman Siebenrock (“’Gewalt ist kein Name Gottes!’”) revisits the same problems in the final chapter, arguing that when Christians of different countries pray to the same God for victory in war, they not only destroy the unity of the church, but the Christian proclamation as well. Siebenroth wants “Gewalt ist kein Name Gottes” to be an article of faith against which all affairs of the church are measured. If God’s all-powerful nature means not an infinite extension of power in human terms, but something qualitatively different (Incarnation, kenosis), then the church must also renounce power, privilege, and triumphalism.

Such prescriptions are appropriate for churches and believers who have placed themselves in the service of destructive institutions and ideologies. On the other hand, they also assume that white, male, European Christianity stood for (and still stands for?) the whole church. How might a theology of “principalities and powers” or concepts like Incarnation and kenosis be understood within a global and more inclusive framework, with our gaze directed toward individuals like Sister Margit Slachta, Pastor John Chilembwe and Dorothy Day as well as Reinhold Seeberg and Emanuel Hirsch?

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Review of Lee B. Spitzer, Baptists, Jews, and the Holocaust: The Hand of Sincere Friendship

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Review of Lee B. Spitzer, Baptists, Jews, and the Holocaust: The Hand of Sincere Friendship (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2017). Pg. xiv + 482. ISBN: 9780817017828.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Lee B. Spitzer, General Secretary of American Baptist Churches, USA, has written a comprehensive study of the relationship between Baptists, Jews, and the Holocaust. Long curious about Baptist attitudes and responses during that time on account of his own secular Jewish background and his relatives’ reluctance to discuss their Holocaust experiences, Spitzer traces Northern, Southern, and African American Baptist engagement with both US and European Jews, the latter under threat of annihilation by Hitler’s Nazi regime. The book’s subtitle comes from a 1935 London speech by Dr. J.H. Rushbrooke, President of the Baptist World Alliance, in which he reaffirmed a declaration against racial persecution issued by the 1934 Baptist World Congress in Berlin. Quoting the declaration’s condemnation of “the placing of a stamp of inferiority upon an entire race” and “every form of oppression or unfair discrimination towards the Jew” as “a violation of God the Heavenly Father,” Rushbrooke lamented the suffering of European Jews. “To my Jewish brothers and sisters under such conditions I extend the hand of sincere friendship,” he avowed (3).

Despite the initial impression that the author’s ecclesiastical position and the book’s subtitle might suggest, Baptists, Jews, and the Holocaust is no simple glorification of Baptist-Jewish history. Rather, it is a thoroughly researched analysis of diverse Baptist responses to the plight of Jews during the Nazi era. Spitzer’s sources include a wide array of archival material: annual convention or conference books of Northern, Southern, Swedish, Regular, African American, and Seventh Day Baptists; minutes and correspondence from the Baptist World Alliance; papers from various Baptist boards, societies, and personnel; and several dozen national and regional Baptist periodicals. This is complemented by three main Jewish sources—The Jewish Chronicle, The American Hebrew, and The American Jewish Yearbook—and a solid collection of relevant secondary sources. Surveying the existing accounts of scholars like William E. Nawyn, E. Earl Joiner, and Robert W. Ross, Spitzer finds only brief, negative assessments of the two large, national, and white Baptist conventions. Omitted are the African American and the regional, state, and local facets of the history.

Convinced of the need for a fresh assessment, the author begins by considering historic Baptist commitments to both democracy and religious toleration, then turning to Baptist-Jewish encounters during times of Jewish immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here we find fears of immigrant criminality from “this European sewer” but also compassion for “God’s own people” (22, 24). This background is useful, because it contextualizes the unruly mixture of Baptist concerns and responses to Jews later, in the 1930s and 1940s.

For example, Northern Baptists provided relief at Ellis Island, funded city missions to convert Jews, and developed “the Christian Americanization movement organized by the Women’s Baptist Home Mission Society” (34). In the 1920s, they also passed resolutions against war and condemned the Turkish genocide against Armenian Christians. As the Committee on Interracial Relationships put it in 1928:

In racial prejudices and false nationalism are to be found the sources of such curses of the human race as wars, oppressions, and the exploitations by the stronger races of the weaker. … Only in the teachings of Jesus Christ, and in the common Fatherhood of God and the Universal Brotherhood of man which he reveals, is there a remedy for race antagonisms. (48)

Statements like these simultaneously asserted racial difference—even hierarchy—affirmed a Baptist commitment to the primacy of Christianity, and expressed a desire to live in peace and harmony with other peoples.

As for Southern Baptists, already in the nineteenth century they “recognized the role of the Jews as the Old Testament people of God, acknowledged a missionary call toward them, demonstrated ambivalence toward the restoration of Israel as a nation, and imagined a responsibility for mission work among Arabs as well” (55). Like their northern counterparts, Southern Baptists expressed fear that the immigration of “Roman Catholics, Jews and heathen,” who were “enemies of the evangelical faith,” would flood American cities and threaten both American and Christian institutions (59). More surprisingly, Southern Baptists called for an international conference in 1919 to alleviate Jewish suffering and emphasized a core Baptist commitment to religious liberty (60-61).

With respect to the Nazi era, Spitzer asks three questions that form the basis of his study: “was the Baptist offer of friendship to Jews really sincere? Did Baptists throughout the United States reach out to Nazi victims through individual and corporate expressions of caring and compassion? Were Baptists in the United States truly concerned, or were they apathetic in the face of the persecution and attempted extermination of the Jewish people?” (5). He formulates his answers in sections covering Baptist periodicals and then Northern, Southern, and African American Baptists, each in their turn, before turning to the Baptist World Alliance towards the end of the book.

As Spitzer examines reports and editorials on the plight of the European Jews, he expands on Robert W. Ross’ research on the Protestant church press by scrutinizing a wide variety of Baptist publications, most importantly Missions and The Watchman-Examiner. The latter reported extensively on Nazi antisemitic campaigns, Jewish emigration, attacks on eastern European Jews, deportations, camps, and the scale of the killing in the Holocaust. Also important were the editors’ interest in Zionism and Jewish migration to Palestine (in light of biblical eschatology) and numerous condemnations of Nazism and antisemitism (139). Complementing this examination of the Baptist church press was a chapter on The American Hebrew, which covered the 1934 Baptist World Congress, considered Christian-Jewish relations, and praised Baptist and other Protestant expressions of sympathy, only growing more critical after 1943, when it censured both Christian antisemitism and Baptist suggestions that Jews convert (135).

Having concluded that Baptists were well-informed about Jewish suffering, Spitzer moves into the heart of his study, seeking to determine whether Baptists responded to the Holocaust and, if so, how. He finds that Northern Baptists, who were used to addressing domestic and international social and political issues, repeatedly issued national statements condemning Nazism and sympathizing with persecuted Jews. In 1939, for instance, the Committee on Race Relations denounced American antisemitism, while the Resolutions Committee affirmed that “God hath made of one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and that we are His offspring” (152). The committee then condemned prejudice against African Americans, Asian Americans, and Jews. Various regional and state assemblies did likewise, though none of these sentiments were translated into personal, practical aid.

In contrast, the Southern Baptist Convention made much less of Jewish persecution, in part because some of the key leaders, like President M.E. Dodd and missionary leader Everett Gill, were antisemitic or racist, but also because “Southern Baptist complicity in Jim Crow culture opened them up to charges of hypocrisy” (439). Indeed, its Social Service Commission described the race problem quite unsympathetically in 1940:

Whenever two races live along side each other or come into necessary contact with each other there is, as always in the history of the world, a race problem. Sometimes it is the Aryan and the Jew; sometimes it is the Arab and the Jew; sometimes it is the White man and the Negro, but always wherever two races have to deal with each other you have a race problem…. (276)

Spitzer explains how Southern Baptists criticized the Nazi regime primarily for its attempt to overthrow “all the things for which men have fought, bled and died for” since the time Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount, namely the “idea of the worth and dignity of the individual, which is the basis of democracy” (277). Still, Southern Baptists did support the racism resolution at the 1934 Baptist World Congress, as well as its reiteration in 1939. At the state level, apart from Missouri, Southern Baptist Conventions did not express sympathy for persecuted Jews until after the Kristallnacht Pogrom of November 1938. Then, however, six state conventions were outspoken in their denunciations of Nazism and their support for Jews, and two others expressed some sympathy (303-324). Overall, though, the author concludes that Southern Baptists were more concerned to convert Jews than to work for justice for them (343).

One of the strengths of Baptists, Jews, and the Holocaust is the attention Spitzer gives to African American Baptists, who, he writes, “experienced a competitive friendship with the Jewish community” (440). African American Baptists identified with Jews for two reasons. They saw them as fellow victims of prejudice and marginalization within American society, and they identified strongly with the biblical account of Israel’s exodus from slavery in Egypt. Still, there were perhaps stronger reasons for rivalry: Jewish immigrants were far more likely to prosper economically than African Americans; Jews were often landlords where African Americans were tenants, as in Harlem; and international sympathy for the persecuted Jews of Europe stood in marked contrast to the absence of compassion for the plight of African Americans. As Nannie Helen Burroughs of the Women’s Auxiliary put it:

… we confess that our sympathy is mixed with sadness, fear and suspicion. We wonder if when the Czech and the Pole and the Jew, of all nations, eventually achieve freedom from fear, they will join the rest of the white world in appropriating and reserving for themselves this freedom for which black men, too, have fought, bled and died? Freedom for all men, everywhere, is the only thing worth fighting for (363-364).

Internationally, Spitzer argues, the responses of the Baptist World Alliance to the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews were an amalgam of all of these diverse Baptist perspectives. “While passing resolutions that voiced Baptist opposition to Nazism, the persecution of Jews, and anti-Semitism, the BWA never developed a strategy for assisting Jewish victims of Nazism or resettling Jewish exiles in the aftermath of the Holocaust” (441).

In the end, Spitzer’s analysis uncovers the good, the bad, and the ugly about Baptist responses to the Holocaust. Writing for his coreligionists, he concludes that “the hand of sincere friendship” was not really offered by Baptists towards Jews. He makes the appropriate judgment that “Baptists felt solidarity with Jews because of their status as a persecuted minority and not because they were involved in caring relationships with Jewish neighbors. … Baptist recognition of Jewish victimhood did not compel comprehensive, concerted, or practical action on their behalf, which friends might expect from friends” (455). We can only hope, with the author, that his thorough analysis of this history bears fruit in contemporary Baptist and wider Christian responses to antisemitism in the twenty-first century.

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Review of Kevin P. Spicer and Martina Cucchiara, eds. and trans., The Evil that Surrounds Us: The WWII Memoir of Erna Becker-Kohen

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 4 (December 2017)

Review of Kevin P. Spicer and Martina Cucchiara, eds. and trans., The Evil that Surrounds Us: The WWII Memoir of Erna Becker-Kohen (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017). Pp. 161. ISBN: 9780253029577.

By Beth Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

The story of Erna Becker-Kohen provides a welcome and much-needed contribution to the scholarly literature on survivors of the Holocaust. Becker-Kohen’s memoir, written as a diary, allows historians to explore the experiences of someone who was labelled by the Nazi regime as “privileged,” demonstrating how persecution, discrimination, and threats of death impacted such persons, wiping away any sense of privilege whatsoever. Spicer and Cucchiara have added to our understanding of what life could be like for a neglected category of people: Catholics of Jewish heritage. Erna’s simple and straightforward style of writing conveys a sense of immediacy, with no knowledge of what the future may have in store for Erna, her Catholic Aryan husband, Gustav Becker, and their small child, Silvan. Readers may take the journey with Erna, hoping that all three family members will outlast the Nazi horrors.

Erna’s first entry at Christmas 1937 begins with an announcement: she and her Catholic husband, Gustav, are expecting their first child in March. By this time, Hitler had been in power in Germany for four years. Erna and Gustav had married in 1931 while Erna was still Jewish and Gustav Catholic. As Spicer and Cucchiara note, the newlyweds could have had no idea then that their religious heritages would come to matter so very much to the outside world. In the early phases of Hitler’s chancellorship, Gustav continued working in an engineering company. His status as a pure Aryan accorded Erna a measure of protection. However, as the years of the Third Reich continued, Gustav and Erna would come to see that the so-called “privileged” status of their union was really no protection against an increasingly hostile German society. What adds yet another layer to this fascinating story is that Erna had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1936. She longed for community in the face of such social isolation and persecution and she took increasing solace in her Catholic faith.

Throughout the memoir, Erna records the challenges she confronted. She and Silvan are separated time and again from Gustav—first due to neighbors and their discriminatory remarks, then due to aerial bombardments in Berlin, which lead Erna and Silvan to make their way to potential safety in the Tyrol. From the beginning of these separations, Erna recognizes that she and Silvan are in grave danger and that she must seek out help in order to survive on the run. Her careful observations show us how her baptism as a Catholic did not necessarily translate into assistance from Catholic Aryans. From an October 1941 entry, “For a while I was a member of the church choir in our little parish. Singing has always given me much joy, but now I had to give it up because a few singers did not like the idea of a Jew participating. I always remained modestly, even shyly, in the background. Still, I am not wanted” (46). Despite being told by a priest that she was “like a leper” and would have to stay away from other people, Erna continued to note in her writings whenever she found what she referred to as “the true spirit of Christianity.” In an entry labelled late February 1942, Erna encounters a woman who had tried to befriend her. “Frau Herberg came to see me to inquire why I have not come to see her… She consciously stands by me and insists that I continue to come and visit her. This once again gives me courage and the certainty that Christianity lived makes people strong and good” (48).

But Erna’s faith in people living the message of Christianity would be tried many times over. In March 1943 the Gestapo paid Erna a visit at the family’s apartment. She was arrested and taken to a collection point for Jews in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse. After her release, her fears for her family increased, particularly her fear of being separated from her son and what might become of him if she were taken away to a camp. She and Silvan had to flee their home in Berlin on June 15, 1943, with only one hour to pack as the Nazis were restricting purchases of train tickets. A kind priest, Father Erwin, advised Erna to take Silvan by train before the restrictions went into effect. Thanks to Father Erwin, Erna and Silvan were able to find refuge in a remote corner of Tyrol in August 1943. Once in the Tyrolean village, Erna finds Catholics willing to help her but she also quickly notes that the mayor of the village is a fanatical Nazi. Erna understands that, as nice as the local Catholic villagers are, if the mayor finds out she is of Jewish ancestry, they will not be able to help or protect her.

In addition to Erna’s recollections of her encounters with both helpful as well as awful people, she provides information about the fate of her extended Jewish family. Erna’s mother, who felt deeply betrayed when Erna converted, went to live in Belgium with her son. While she died of natural causes, the fate of many of Erna’s relatives, including her brother, reveal stories of persecution, arrest, imprisonment, and death. Erna’s sister and brother-in-law emigrated to Chile and so they survived the war. Central to Erna’s story is the fate of her loyal husband, Gustav.

Throughout the memoir, Gustav appears as brave and loyal to his wife and son. In the early years, Gustav takes on traditional “women’s work” by stopping after work to do the grocery shopping- primarily because he is an Aryan and is therefore entitled to more food than Erna is as a Jew. He attempts to find safe places with nuns in convents for Erna, and sends her whatever he can while she and Silvan are moving from place to place for safety. As the Nazis came closer and closer to defeat in the war, they attempted to drive apart those individuals who remained steadfast to their “non-Aryan” partners, refusing to divorce them. To that end, Gustav was ordered to report to a work camp to force him to separate from Erna, thus removing her designation of “protected status.” Gustav refused and after performing hard labor he contracted skeletal tuberculosis. He survived the war, but was confined to a plaster body cast for years, and ultimately died from the harsh conditions under which he suffered because of his dedication to his marriage. Although Gustav and Erna were reunited before his death, Gustav never again experienced joy in life. He died in 1952.

As Erna struggled in the post-war world, her memoirs note how she felt homeless and sickened by the people who had once tormented her and rejected her. Now that the war was over, she saw the hypocrites rushing to befriend her to prove that they had not turned away from her when she most desperately needed their assistance. Some of Erna’s faith in Christianity and more broadly in humanity was restored to her through her interactions with Father Paul, who “has proved to me repeatedly that there is no contradiction between Judaism and Christianity” (125). Erna seems to have found some true inner peace when she penned:

But why do I nonetheless record this memory? First to impress upon mankind that something like this must never happen again. We, too, want to be recognized as human beings, and if you can look upon Jews without any racial conceit, then you have solved half of the Jewish problem. Second, to confirm that I encountered those forces that unyieldingly fought for human rights and dignity only where the Christian teaching—“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28)—was not mere words but was consciously lived (126).

By giving the English-speaking world access to Erna Becker-Kohen’s memoir, Spicer and Cucchiara have provided us all with insight into what it was like to be a Catholic of Jewish descent in a time when most people could only see a “Jew” in front of them. Like the diary of Victor Klemperer, Erna’s account allows us to experience her world—with all of its ugliness as well as all of its extreme acts of kindness. The editors have also provided a substantial amount of background material in both their introduction and their footnotes so that readers will be able to place Erna’s memoir into the larger context of Nazi laws and the persecution of Catholics of Jewish heritage. This is a valuable addition to the scholarly literature, deepening our understanding of an understudied group of persecuted people.

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Review of Harry Oelke, Wolfgang Kraus, et. al., eds., Martin Luthers “Judenschriften”. Die Rezeption im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Review of Harry Oelke, Wolfgang Kraus, et. al., eds., Martin Luthers “Judenschriften”. Die Rezeption im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 338 Pp. ISBN: 978-3-525-55789-1.

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

On October 31, 1517, the irascible yet erudite German monk Martin Luther is said to have posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, touching off a massive theological and political controversy that has come to be known as the Protestant Reformation. Outside of this, his most famous exploit, Luther also (in conflict with the norm of clerical celibacy) married Katharina von Bora and translated the New Testament into German. Yet, it is his deeply antagonistic relationship with Jews and Judaism, as evidenced in his writings about them—the so-called “Judenschriften”—that, on the eve of the 500th anniversary of the events at Wittenberg, provoked the academic conference upon which the present volume is based.

The volume is a product of the conference “The Reception of Luther’s ‘Judenschriften’ in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” which was held at Erlangen University in October 2014. The contributors, who number more than a dozen, represent fields that include Protestant church history, Protestant systematic theology, religion, Jewish studies, and Catholic theology. As the book’s title suggests, the collection of essays covers a broad chronological range; the thematic terrain is wide as well. This breadth is one of the volume’s greatest strengths. The essays addressing nineteenth-century reception of Luther’s Judenschriften are especially welcome, as are Christian Wiese’s insightful treatment of Jewish and antisemitic Luther lectures in the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic and Volker Leppin’s analysis of Luther’s Judenschriften in the light of the editions prior to 1933. Yet, there are some problematic elements as well, including some of the conclusions reached about Protestant reception of the Judenschriften during the Third Reich. These will be addressed (together with the volume’s strengths) after a summary of the contents.

A thoughtful introduction by Harry Oelke sets out three elements addressed in the work: 1.) the volume’s “hermeneutical balance” between the original historical context of the Judenschriften and the history of their reception and impact in the era of the modern German state, 2.) the intention of the work, which is driven in part by the need to address historical lacunae on the reception history of the Judenschriften, and 3.) its conceptual structure. This structure consists of six parts. The first part, comprising two essays, provides a material overview of two fundamental areas of Luther research: the reformer’s life (Anselm Schubert) and his work (Volker Leppin). The second section deals with the reception of the Judenschriften in the era from the Restoration (or, the Vormärz) to the end of the Kaiserreich. Martin Friedrich addresses the theme of “Luther and the Jews” in Prussia until 1869, while Hanns Christof Brennecke deals with the reception of the Judenschriften in the era of the Erweckungsbewegung and Bavarian Confessionalism. Christian Wiese examines the interplay between Jewish interpretations of Luther and antisemitic reception of the Judenschriften in the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic.

In the third section of the volume, the thorny issue of Protestant reception of Luther’s Judenschriften during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich is addressed. Gury Schneider-Ludorff’s essay analyzes the theme “Luther and the Jews” in its theological perspective in the era between the two World Wars. Essays on reception of the Judenschriften in the Confessing Church (Siegfried Hermle) and in the German Christian movement (Oliver Arnhold) follow. The fourth section of the book examines German Protestant discourse on the Judenschriften in the era following the Second World War. The reception of the Judenschriften in the field of church history is examined by Harry Oelke, while Reiner Anselm analyzes the theme in ethics and systematic theology. A third essay by Stephen G. Burnett addresses the reception of the Judenschriften in the Anglo-American context; Burnett reminds us that these writings did not become an issue in this context until the second half of the twentieth century.

In the penultimate section of the book, the lens is widened to include Catholic and international ecumenical contexts. Lucia Scherzberg examines Catholic perceptions of “Luther and the Jews” while Wolfgang Kraus analyzes the theme as it has been addressed in official church pronouncements since the Second World War. The final section of the book features two thought-provoking summary analyses of the conference proceedings and the volume (Berndt Hamm and Johannes Heil).

Several essays stand out for their contributions to the history of the impact of Luther’s Judenschriften in modern German history. Volker Leppin’s essay is especially valuable. It demonstrates, through fastidious attention to detail, that the Judenschriften appeared as part of collected editions of the reformer’s broader work and in individual editions alike from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. Notably, Leppin corrects the faulty notion forwarded by some twentieth-century German church historians that Luther’s Judenschriften somehow were not readily available to German Protestants during Weimar and the Third Reich. Leppin’s conclusion is clear and emphatic: “What effect Luther’s Jewish writings actually had on the adaptation of antisemitic racism in ecclesiastical circles cannot be decided on the basis of the editorial position. But this much is clear: the texts were available at any time—even on the eve of the Third Reich” (37). He provides a trove of evidence to this effect, including a list of dozens of primary sources that demonstrate the point. Thus, the Judenschriften were most certainly read by many German Protestants from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Christian Wiese’s incisive essay on Jewish and antisemitic Luther lectures during the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic demonstrates that Jewish scholars working in the early twentieth century—Hermann Cohen and Leo Baeck are placed at the center of Wiese’s analysis—offered, yes, a historical critique of those aspects of Luther’s theology that were hostile to Jews and Judaism, but also a picture of the reformer as a “symbolic embodiment of a tradition of tolerance and emancipation” (110) (i.e., an embodiment of those elements of the Enlightenment tradition that were not only laudable but vital to Jewish life in the public square). Jewish intellectuals, who “were looking for positive links to the central figure of the Reformation so central to the German-Protestant cultural consciousness,” thus forwarded an image of Luther that would enable them to integrate more fully into German culture and society (119-120). Tragically, this portrait of the reformer “was almost completely ignored by contemporary Protestantism and remained therefore tragically ineffective” (110).

Berndt Hamm’s summarizing analysis of the volume’s content is both thoughtful and, in places, problematic. Hamm highlights and expounds upon eight salient points raised in the conference and the volume. While taken together, they are all relevant and meaningful; a few, in particular, are worth examining closely. The first point reads, “Luther’s Judenschriften are evidently both present and not present in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” As the volume’s essays demonstrate, there certainly are periods during which, and pockets of German society in which, the Judenschriften are less present than one might expect, including in the work of some Jewish intellectuals during the nineteenth century. Yet, they are more present in the Confessing Church during the Third Reich than either Hamm or Siegfried Hermle would have us believe. While the virulence of the application of Luther’s recommendations to, for example, burn down Jewish synagogues and confiscate sacred Jewish writings is certainly more pronounced and vulgar in the writings of the radical German Christian wing of the Protestant church, the generally more urbane application of Luther’s anti-Jewish recommendations is more than “hardly” present (315) in the writings of Confessing Church figures. There is also little recognition here of the fluid Protestant “middle” or “neutrals,” who represented roughly a third of the German Protestant clergy during the Third Reich.

Hamm’s third point is especially valuable. He notes that, until fairly recently, scholarly research on the Protestant Reformation and Luther has not emphasized enough the “theological connections between the aggressive exasperation in Luther’s late Judenschriften and the apocalyptic-anti-satanic fundamental character of his theology since 1520 …”, which included, for example, his view of the pope as the antichrist (317-318). The Dutch Reformed church historian Heiko A. Oberman was the first to make this important observation, which was a crucial step toward Protestant Reformation and Luther scholars more directly recognizing and confronting the antisemitism in Luther’s works.

The fifth point contains both cogent analysis and a very curious conclusion. Here, Hamm confronts the prickly problem of the terminology that should be employed when discussing hostility and hatred toward Jews and Judaism. In other words, should scholars use the term “anti-Judaism” or “antisemitism”—or, perhaps, both? Or, a different term altogether? Kyle Jantzen reflected on this problem in a previous issue of CCHQ. The present author also discussed it (Probst, Demonizing the Jews). Hamm rightly notes that the term “antisemitism” is, in a sense, absurd, because, in its application it always refers not to hatred toward Semites more broadly, but to Jews. In the late nineteenth century, when the term was coined by Wilhelm Marr, antisemites connected language and culture to race, resulting in a term that, ironically, sounded “respectable” to these less vulgar (but still no less hateful) proponents of anti-Jewish animus.

In modern scholarship, “the term ‘antisemitism’ has now been established in such a way that it defines a judenfeindlich attitude [an attitude of hostility toward Jews] which socially excluded and legally disadvantaged members of the Jewish religion or their descendants, or at least intended such exclusion” (319). Because Luther (and others) often used theological or religious arguments to denigrate Jews and Judaism, many scholars, including many church historians, have argued that Luther was “only” engaging in anti-Judaic thought, not antisemitic agitation. Hamm acknowledges this problem. Yet, curiously, he suggests as a solution—one that he rues as “unrealistic”—that scholars “renounce the linguistically misleading concept of antisemitism and replace it in general with the concept of anti-Judaism” (320). The problem of terminology is indeed very real. But, as the term “antisemitism” was originally meant to signify hatred of Jews on the basis of their race while “anti-Judaism” has predominantly been used to connect anti-Jewish hatred to religion, it is likely that neither term will satisfy those examining the issue in a scholarly fashion. It is also true that understanding the precise motivations for anti-Jewish hatred—while valuable to scholars and laypersons alike—is cold comfort to the historical victims of such hatred.

While discussing his seventh point, Hamm opines that Luther’s Judenschriften “did not produce this new racial-biological antisemitism” and that the Nazi regime carried out the mass murder of millions of Europe’s Jews “without any argumentative support from the authority of Luther.” In short, so Hamm, “For the masterminds of the crimes, Luther’s writings on the Jews were only a completely marginal aspect.” This logic is problematic on more than one level. First, here as elsewhere, Hamm reduces Nazi antisemitism to its “racial-biological” variety. For two decades, Burleigh and Wippermann’s thesis about the Nazi “racial state” has largely held as the most accurate characterization of what the Nazis created in Germany. Yet, Alon Confino argued convincingly in A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide that the Nazis imagined a world in which the very memory of Jewish existence, including their culture and religion, would be eradicated. This is why Nazis burned Hebrew Bibles and synagogues in November 1938. If Confino is correct, then the starkest aspects of Luther’s antisemitism, including, but not limited to, the burning down of synagogues and the confiscation of the sacred writings of Judaism provided for many German Protestants a vision of the world that had affinities with the one envisioned by the Nazi regime. This is something more than merely the “disturbing parallelism” suggested by Hamm (321).

Did the Nazis base their murderous plans for the Jews of Europe on Luther? No. But, did the Nazis need the support of Protestants, who represented roughly sixty percent of the German population, not only to gain and retain power, but also to lend, together with other vaunted cultural institutions, a certain moral legitimacy to their repression of Jews and other persecuted groups? Actually, in important ways, they did (Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany). It is also important to recognize, as Leppin’s essay demonstrates, that Luther’s Judenschriften were readily available in numerous editions to German Protestants during the Third Reich. Further, a significant number of German Protestant pastors, theologians, and Luther scholars—including, for example, Erich Vogelsang, Wolf Meyer-Erlach, Georg Buchwald, and Walter Holsten—interacted in significant ways with the Judenschriften in their published work (Probst, Demonizing the Jews). Luther’s writings about Jews and Judaism were certainly not the driving force behind Nazism and the Holocaust. But, they were no small part of the German Protestant cultural milieu.

The strengths of the present volume include its chronological and thematic depth and its inclusion of scholars working outside the boundaries of German Protestantism, namely, scholars working in Catholic theology and Jewish studies. Given its weaknesses, it will no doubt engender debate among lay readers, but perhaps especially among Luther, Reformation, and Holocaust historians.

 

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Review of Stiftung Topographie des Terrors and Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, eds., “Überall Luthers Worte …” – Martin Luther im Nationalsozialismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Review of Stiftung Topographie des Terrors and Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, eds., “Überall Luthers Worte …” – Martin Luther im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, 2017). 271 Pp., ISBN 978-3-941772-33-5.

By Dirk Schuster, University of Potsdam

“Luther’s words are everywhere …” – this quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer from 1937 correctly reflects the public perception of the Reformation Jubilee in Germany today. It is therefore hardly surprising that the Berlin Topography of Terror Documentation Center chose the words of Bonhoeffer as the title holder for an exhibition on Martin Luther in National Socialism, to be seen in Berlin from April 28 to November 5, 2017. The exhibition catalog illustrates impressively that there was a broad reception of Luther at the time of the Third Reich. The catalog is divided into three periods: the years 1933 to 1934, the period from 1935 to 1938, and the years of the Second World War. In addition, it offers seven essays by well-known scholars, which concisely and intelligibly summarize the current state of the research and, based mostly on the authors’ own work, the respective subject areas. At this point, the main criterion of the catalog can already be formulated. The documentation, including the introductory texts, is written in German and English, in contrast to the essays. These are only written in German with an English abstract. For an internationally renowned documentation center like the Topography of Terror, such an approach is somewhat incomprehensible. The German and English description of the presented objects emphasizes the intention to address an international audience against the backdrop of the Reformation Jubilee. Why this was not implemented with regards to the essays remains an open question and might irritate non-German speakers.

The first part of the catalog impressively illustrates the instrumentalization of Luther as the “German faith hero” in the first two years of the Third Reich by using photographs and covers of contemporary publications. Several Protestant representatives drew an additional historical and theological continuity line from Luther to Hitler. Publications and celebrations such as the 450th anniversary of the reformer in 1933and the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Bible translation in 1934 illustrate the reference to Luther at this time. Likewise, many new church buildings were named after the reformer, the most well-known example being the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin-Mariendorf, consecrated in 1935. On the theological level, in the early years of the Nazi regime, Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms was the center of church-political debates concerning the relationship between the church and the state. But this was increasingly changing in the mid-1930s. As a result of the exclusion of the Jews forced by the National Socialists, Luther’s antisemitic “Jewish writings” were increasingly placed at the center of the reformer’s reception. These writings often served as justification for the persecution of the Jews from a theological point of view. It is somewhat surprising that the section on the state-church relationship is mainly related to the view of the National Socialists, Bonhoeffer, Niemöller, and other representatives of the Confessing Church. The German Christians with their theological line of continuity of Jesus-Luther-Hitler are hardly mentioned in this section.

Chapter 2 illustrates the legitimacy of the antisemitism of the National Socialists by the German Christians, using the example of the pamphlet by the Thuringian regional bishop, Martin Sasse. In his preface, Sasse referred to the connection between Luther’s birthday on November 10 and the November pogroms in Germany of 1938, in order to present Luther as the greatest antisemite of his time, who had always warned against the Jews (p.118 f.).

Chapter 3 deals with references to Luther in the Second World War. The first section shows documents and pictures, including clergymen who stylized Luther as the heroic leader in their war sermons, even though there was no comparable war enthusiasm among church representatives as there had been in 1914. A separate sub-chapter is about the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, which was founded by Protestant regional churches on May 6, 1939, and which Susannah Heschel addressed in her highly-respected book, The Aryan Jesus. [1] The documents and books presented in the catalog clearly illustrate how this institute was intended to create a “German” Christianity and thus to complete Luther’s “unfinished” reformation, as Walter Grundmann, the director of the institute, pointed out in his opening lecture in 1939.[2]

The seven essays at the end of the catalog summarize the current state of research on Protestantism in Germany from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich in compressed form. Hartmut Lehmann shows that Luther was already formed into a German hero in the Kaiserreich. Together with “völkisch” patterns of thought, the idea arose that the German people were meant to have a special destiny in the world. Heinrich Assel, on the other hand, addressed the inner-theological discourses on the Lutheran heritage at the beginning of the 1930s, which were often characterized by the acceptance of an authoritarian leadership state. Beate Rossié, Stefanie Endlich, and Monica Geyler-von Bernus describe the different Lutheran images in the Third Reich, whereby the German Christians, in the sense of the Nation-Socialist point of view, linked Luther with combat. Cornelia Brinkmann on hymnal reforms and Manfred Gailus on the reception of Luther’s Jewish writings show once again that not only the German Christians used Luther. Representatives of the so-called intact regional churches, as well as representatives of the Confessing Church, also developed antisemitic reform ideas these areas. Olaf Blaschke still devotes himself to the “well-intentioned antisemitism” in Catholicism at the background of National Socialism, and Peter Steinbach treats the churches’ dealings with their own guilt and responsibility after 1945.

The catalog, which reproduces the printed parts but not the contents of the listening stations in the exhibition, is a very good example of the present-day public discussion about the church in National Socialism. Scholars who are familiar with the subject won’t find anything new, but this is not the aim of such an exhibition. The exhibits, and above all, the documents, photographs, and books, show how Luther was instrumentalized more than 400 years after his Reformation. If you cannot visit the exhibition, which can be seen until November 5, 2017, in Berlin, this very good exhibition catalog can be recommended.

[1] Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

[2] Walter Grundmann, Die Entjudung des religiösen Lebens als Aufgabe Deutscher Theologie und Kirche (Weimar 1939).

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Review of Benjamin W. Goossen, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Review of Benjamin W. Goossen, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 266 + xiv Pp., ISBN: 978-0-691-17428-0.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

From the outside, the Christian tradition of Anabaptism, of which Mennonites are the largest branch, is often known simply for its German ethnicity and its pacifist theology. In Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era, Benjamin W. Goossen employs post-structuralist history to carefully and thoroughly dismantle these notions. “If Mennonite theologians could both justify and oppose pacifism, if Mennonite nationalists could both embrace and reject Germanness, it makes little sense to think of either category as coherent, limited, or unchanging” (4). Rejecting traditional definitions of religion and nationality, Goossen depicts Mennonites as a socially constructed and historically situated collectivity forged through processes of contestation, their identities continually (re)negotiated in response to the course of modern German history. Needless to say, his differentiated portrayal of Mennonites unsettles several cherished myths: that Mennonites were thoroughly German (their Dutch roots notwithstanding), that Mennonites were marked by pacifism, or that Mennonites were apolitical. It also asks hard questions, such as whether Mennonitism was or is based on heredity or belief? The result is a thought-provoking examination of Mennonite identity centred on Mennonites’ fluid relationship with Germany from the time of nineteenth-century nationalism and political unification to the present.

Chosen Nation argues that “Mennonitism should not be understood as a single group—or even as an amalgamation of many smaller groups.” Rather, the book seeks to uncover “what the idea of Mennonitism has meant for various observers” and “how and why interpretations have developed over time” (7). Goossen’s transnational history argues that Mennonites appropriated German nationalism when it was in their interest to do so and suppressed or abandoned it when it became problematic. Into the 1800s, Mennonites had commonly understood themselves to be a global confessional community. As the century wore on, however, they began to portray themselves as “archetypical Germans” (13). As Emil Händiges, the long-time chairman of the progressive Union of Mennonite Congregations in the German Empire (established in 1886), put it, “Do not almost all Mennonites … wherever they may live—in Russia, in Switzerland, in Alsace-Lorraine, Galicia, Pomerania, in the United States and Canada, in Mexico and Paraguay, yes even in Asiatic Siberia and Turkestan—speak the same German mother tongue? Are not the Mennonites, wherever they go, also the pioneers of German language, customs, and culture?” (13). Whether the Mennonites in these far-flung locales—or even in conservative congregations in the new German Empire—understood themselves as the promoters of German culture was another matter entirely.

For Goossen, the free-for-all of Mennonite identity-building (“collectivism”) was “constrained by the situations in which they found themselves” (16). Over the course of seven rich chapters, he guides us along the twisted road of Mennonite identity formation. Initially, around the time of the formation of the German Empire in 1871, Mennonite activists like Hinrich van der Smissen (despite his Dutch name!) developed “a common narrative based on German nationality” (19). They drew together Mennonites from three non-German regions—north German Mennonites with roots in the Netherlands, South German Mennonites with connections to coreligionists in Switzerland and Eastern France, and Prussian Mennonites living in former Polish and Lithuanian territory—who had been loosely connected by migration, commerce, marriage, and a long memory of religious persecution (fostered by the influential Martyr’s Mirror). This nascent German identity was fostered by print publications, by participation in political and military activity, and by improved communications—not least through congregational address books linking churches throughout the unified German territory (31). During these early years of Imperial Germany, there were three important developments: German replaced Dutch as the language of Mennonitism; the notion of a Mennonite diaspora was invented (further entrenching the notion of Germany as the movement’s homeland); and Mennonites became closely associated with agriculture and traditionalism (never mind the urban modernity of many of their intellectual leaders).

One key point of conflict, and the reason many Mennonites resisted this narrative of Germanness, was the notion that pacifistic Mennonites should enter military service in Imperial Germany. Whether in fighting or in noncombatant roles, military service was a means to improve Mennonite standing in the new Germany and attaining full civil liberties for their congregations. Many Mennonites rejected this political transaction, however, and emigrated. (Russian Mennonites faced a similar quandary after the passage of a draft law in 1874, and about 18,000, or one-third, emigrated to North America.)

The 1886 German Mennonite Union was slow to develop. At first, only 17 of 71 congregations joined, and most of them were progressive urban congregations in northwest Germany (71). Claiming to speak for all Mennonites, progressives portrayed conservatives who shunned the Union (and, with it, participation in modern Germany) as both nationally and religiously indifferent, and invoked fears of mixed marriages and Mennonite population decline to coerce reluctant conservatives from the South and Northeast to join the Union. In this, they achieved a measure of success. By 1914, 70 percent of Mennonites were members of the Union, and rural Mennonites even outnumbered their urban coreligionists (94).

The culmination of this Mennonite entrance into the national life of Germany came during the First World War. For Mennonites in Germany, war offered them the fullest opportunity to participate in national life, by fighting and dying for the Fatherland. Of the roughly 2,000 German Mennonites who entered military service, only one-third chose noncombatant roles. Abroad, Mennonites had little interest in supporting German war aims, but failed to convince their neighbours. Their Germanness and their refusal to fight against Germany (not out of love for Germany, but because most were pacifists) made them persecuted outsiders in Russia, the United States, and Canada. In Russia, about 6,000 Mennonite men did enter the non-combatant forestry service, while another 6,000 served in the medical corps. Many rejected any German identity, claiming that “not a drop of German blood flows in our veins” (103)!

The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 mobilized Mennonites in Europe and North America to try to rescue about 100,000 of their coreligionists from the violence of the Russian civil war (97). After 1918, Russian Mennonites subject to anti-German reprisals and marauding brigands formed self-defence militias. Suffering under persecution and famine, many sought to emigrate. To do so, they adopted the language of national self-determination and of race to present themselves both as oppressed minorities and as white agriculturalists worthy of resettlement in North and South America. Goossen describes this as the embracing of “a Zionist-like form of religious nationalism” (16). “Between 1923 and 1926, 20,000 settlers—one-fifth of all Mennonites in the Bolshevik empire—relocated to Canada” (115). About 4,000 more established a “Mennonite state” in the Chaco, in Paraguay, primarily because it afforded them cultural isolation and refuge from persecution (119). Though there was still much debate about whether Mennonites constituted a “cohesive trans-state identity,” the experience of the First World War and its aftermath “consolidated the idea of a global Mennonite community” (120).

After Hitler and his National Socialists came to power and led Germany into a racialized conquest of Eastern Europe, discourses of Mennonitism shifted once more, as pro-Nazi Mennonites formulated the notion of “a four-hundred-year-old ‘racial church’—an Aryan version of the Jewish ‘antirace’—entitled to a share of the Führer’s spoils” (16). Indeed, German scientists had begun racial research in Mennonite communities already in the Weimar era, with the consent and often support of Mennonite leaders. In the Third Reich, Mennonites proved to be “more Aryan than the average German,” according to Nazi researchers, in large part because of their cultural resistance to intermarriage. They were, in a sense, racial nationalists before the fact, and not a few tried to work their way towards the Führer by campaigning for a centralized, united, hierarchical Mennonite Union in the image of National Socialism. While many Mennonites were critical of the pro-Nazi “German Christian Movement” for attacking the Old Testament and some questioned whether one could be both a Christian and a National Socialist, most were content to enter into inner emigration, focusing on the purely spiritual activities of church services and abandoning education and youth work to the Nazis (125-126). Most Mennonite officials swore oaths, and most Mennonite men abandoned non-resistance, which they viewed as a dangerous relic of the past. Mennonites adopted racial discourse, encouraged Nazi racial research which depicted them as pure Aryans (“anti-Jews”) and even adopted aspects of antisemitism, complaining about the Judeo-Bolshevik persecution of Russian Mennonites in the Soviet Union (140). Goossen notes the ways in which Mennonite intellectuals produced their own Aryanism, striving to prove their Germanness by contrasting themselves to Russians and Jews. Hundreds of articles were written to make this point in the middle 1930s (143).

Goossen argues Mennonites were implicated in the Holocaust, in part by fashioning narratives of Aryanism that justified antisemitic laws and “implicated the confession in policies of internment, expropriation, and genocide’ (123). SS Chief Heinrich Himmler met extensively with Mennonite leader Benjamin Unruh, and established an SS Special Command R to comb the Ukrainian countryside for Mennonites to resettle in Wartheland, even as SS Einsatzgruppen were combing the Ukrainian countryside for Jews to round up and kill. As ethnic Germans, Mennonites were rewarded with social services and material goods, such as the clothes, shoes, and homes of murdered Jews. As Goossen puts it, “welfare and mass murder were two sides of the same coin” (149). In the Nazi vision for Lebensraum in Eastern Europe, pure-blood Mennonites were the ideal German settlers who could colonize (for them, resettle) Ukraine. SS leaders singled out Mennonite settlements like Chortitza and Molotschna as model German towns. Alfred Rosenberg described his visit to the former as “the most moving moment of the entire trip” he made through occupied Ukraine in 1942 (152). For these Mennonites, the war served to spark a religious and political revival, in which they gained status and power in the occupied territory. They complied with and at times participated in the Holocaust, occasionally as killers but more often as the inheritors of land expropriated from Jews among whom they lived (164).

As the war turned against Germany, Mennonites in the East were evacuated en masse. From fall 1943 to spring 1944, 200,000 German colonists (including 35,000 Mennonites) made their way on foot, horseback, wagon, and train westward into occupied Poland, swelling the German population in Wartheland. Here, too, Mennonites participated in the racial categorization underway, as the Nazis sought to identify ideal German settlers (169). Ultimately, though, as the Nazi empire collapsed, 45,000 Mennonites ended up fleeing from Ukrainian, Polish, and East Prussian territory into Germany.

After 1945, as Allied officials began sorting out the tangle of displaced persons and refugees, Mennonites faced a dilemma. If they identified as Ukrainians or Russians, they risked deportation to the USSR. If they identified as Germans, they risked the charge of collaboration and made themselves ineligible for aid. At first, some tried to identify themselves as Dutch, and a few made it to the Netherlands. Others began to claim Mennonitism as an alternative to German or Russian ethnic identity, not because of an awakening of religious nationalism but as a “temporary response to historical contingencies” (175). Though the International Refugee Organization was skeptical, about 15,000 Mennonites were nonetheless allowed to immigrate to Canada in the 1950s, mostly because they were white, Christian, anti-communist, agrarian settlers (179, 181).

In recent decades, Mennonite identity has remained fluid and contested. Mission work and the establishment of new Mennonite churches in the non-Western world has prompted questions about the relationship between Germanness and Mennonitism. Ironically, while the Mennonite migration from the collapsing Soviet Union to the newly unified Germany was predicated on Mennonite claims to German citizenship, questions remain about their Germanness.

In the end, Benjamin W. Goossen’s Chosen Nation demonstrates that, over the past two centuries, Mennonite ethnic and religious identity has been anything but stable and self-evident over the past two centuries; rather, it has been constructed, controversial, and changeable.

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Review Article: Confessing Church Biographies

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review Article: Confessing Church Biographies

Review of Michael Heymel, Martin Niemöller: Vom Marineoffizier zum Friedenskämpfer (Darmstadt: Lambert Schneider, 2017), 321 pages, ISBN: 9783650401960.

Christiane Tietz, Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, trans. Victoria Barnett (Minneapolis: Augsburg fortress, 2016), 141 pages, ISBN: 9781506408446

By Matthew Hockenos, Skidmore College

These two biographies by Christiane Tietz and Michael Heymel offer introductions to the life and thought of the two most celebrated leaders of the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) and Martin Niemöller (1892-1984). Trained as theologians, Tietz and Heymel add to our knowlege of Bonhoeffer and Niemöller’s intellectual development and theological orientation, although neither significantly alters our current understanding of their place in the history of the church struggle or (in the case of Niemöller) postwar German history. Tietz does a better job of avoiding hagiography but both authors give short shrift to anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in their subject’s life and thought.

Whereas a new biography of Martin Niemöller is long overdue, one might ask: do we need another on Bonhoeffer? Continue reading →

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Review Article: Swiss Protestant Ecumenists and the German Churches under Hitler

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review Article: Swiss Protestant Ecumenists and the German Churches under Hitler

Review of Marianne Jehle-Wildberger, Adolf Keller: Ecumenist, World Citizen, Philanthropist (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013), 302 pages, ISBN: 1620321076.

Review of Heinrich Rusterholz, “… als ob unseres Nachbars Haus nicht in Flammen stünde” : Paul Vogt, Karl Barth und das Schweizerische Evangelische Hilfswerk für die Bekennende Kirche in Deutschland 1937-1947 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zurich, 2015), 720 pages, ISBN: 978-3290177126.

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum[*]

During the first half of the twentieth century, Switzerland occupied a unique place among European nations, due partly to its neutrality in both world wars and partly to its federalist system that gave autonomy to its German, French, and Italian-speaking cantons. In the wake of the First World War, Switzerland became a haven of internationalism. The League of Nations, International Labor Organization, International Committee of the Red Cross, International Peace Bureau, The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the World Jewish Congress all had their headquarters in Geneva. During the 1930s the Protestant ecumenical movement, comprised initially of two movements, Life and Work and Faith and Order, established centralized offices in Geneva. In the years that followed, all roads for international Protestant leaders passed through Geneva. North American ecumenical and denominational leaders regularly travelled there to meet with European ecumenical colleagues as well as with international refugee workers and diplomats.

A number of Swiss-born church officials and ecumenists played prominent roles during this period, but they have been largely overlooked in the historiography. In their day, however, figures like Adolf Keller and Paul Vogt were internationally known, influential figures in the Protestant world. Both of the books reviewed here underscore the significance of their work and the circles in which they moved.

Marianne Jehle-Wildberger’s biography of the Swiss Reformed pastor Adolf Keller traces the life and times of an ecumenical pioneer. Born in 1872, Adolf Keller served churches in Geneva and Zurich as well as the Protestant congregation in Cairo. During the 1920s he became active in the ecumenical movement and was elected second associate general secretary of the Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work at its founding meeting in 1925. In 1922 he founded Inter-Church Aid, an ecumenical relief agency that focused on rebuilding and assisting Protestant communities across Europe in the wake of the First World War. His work was concentrated on the plight of Protestant and Orthodox minorities in Eastern Europe, and the chapter on the interwar situation of these communities in Poland, the Baltic states, Austria, and elsewhere is fascinating. The after-effects of the war included widespread poverty, resurgent nationalisms, shifting church boundaries, and growing political and social instability that posed a vital threat to some of the Protestant minority churches. Keller ambitiously viewed his task as raising international Protestant awareness and “promoting Protestant unification,” and he became a driving force in organizing the different denominational agencies that emerged to assist their partner churches in Europe. He also became a remarkably good fundraiser, raising 1.7 million Swiss francs from U.S. and European churches for his work by 1924.

Keller’s leadership during the 1920s brought him into wider discussions about the role and purpose of the international ecumenical movement. He was well-known in the United States, serving as a European liaison for the Federal Council of Churches, giving regular lecture tours, and publishing regular op-eds and commentaries in U.S. denominational magazines.

After 1933 his prominence gave him an important place in the ecumenical conversations about the Nazi threat. Like other ecumenists, Keller viewed National Socialism and its emphasis on blood, race, and Volk as the antithesis of the ecumenical spirit, and he called for an ecumenical dialectical theology that could make the case against nationalism. He articulated this theology in the 1933 L. P. Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary, published as Religion and Revolution: Problems of Contemporary Christianity on the European Scene. Despite the widespread concern among European and North American ecumenists about the Nazi regime and the situation in the German churches, there was considerable disagreement among ecumenists about how to respond, particularly during the 1930s. Some of their concerns were strategic. Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, who worked from Geneva on refugee issues after being expelled from Nazi Germany in July 1933, feared that outside criticism would increase the pressures on the German church opposition. Other complicating factors for Swiss church leaders in particular were the different confessions, alliances, and related theological debates between Swiss Lutheran and Reformed churches and their German counterparts.

Keller sought to develop a theological response that could speak to the Confessing Church as well as to the “neutral” leadership in the German Evangelical Church, and he also undertook diplomatic trips to mediate between the different German factions and ecumenical sectors (the Federal Council of Churches sent him to Berlin in 1934 to speak to the German church leadership, for example). His theological efforts were overshadowed by those of Karl Barth (with whom he largely agreed) and his diplomatic efforts grew increasingly challenging, given the growing divisions in the ecumenical movement about whether to maintain ties to all the factions in the German church struggle. An additional complication was that the German Evangelical Church was represented in the ecumenical refugee agencies by Bishop Theodor Heckel, who was critical of the Confessing Church. Keller—who remained head of Inter-Church Aid until 1945 and also led the Swiss Church Aid Committee for Protestant Refugees—had to deal regularly with German concerns from all sides.

Keller ended up playing a precarious balancing act at a time when the complex demands on the ecumenical movement provoked competing visions and agendas. There was also a generational shift underway: in 1939, Keller was sixty-seven years old and had been overshadowed in Geneva circles by the thirty-nine-year-old Dutch ecumenist Willem Visser ‘t Hooft. Keller’s ties to U.S. ecumenical leaders, particularly Henry Smith Leiper, were stronger than his ties to European ecumenical officials with whom he had disagreements, and in 1940 Keller went to New York to give a series of talks and workshops on the situation in Europe. He decided to extend his stay (after the war he settled in the U.S. with his family) and in his absence, the ecumenical relief agencies were restructured and the sixty-nine-year-old Keller was moved to the sidelines.

Jehle-Wildberger’s book is a fine study of one of the most remarkable figures in ecumenical history, and it also traces the issues and debates that accompanied the expansion of ecumenism, the emergence of different agencies and different international partnerships, and above all the challenges faced by ecumenical leaders in the first half of the twentieth century.

Heinrich Rusterholz’s book on the work of the Swiss Protestant Relief Agency (Hilfswerk) for the Confessing Church covers some of the same territory (and naturally includes additional documentation on Keller’s work), but focuses on the Swiss Reformed circles and their responses to the German Church Struggle and the persecution of the Jews. Paul Vogt, the leader of many of these initiatives, is another under-examined figure in the history. Born in 1900, he began his career in 1929, focusing in his ministry on unemployment and other working class issues. He founded a social ministry center, “Sonneblick,” that became a refugee haven in the mid-1930s. From 1936-43 he was a pastor in a suburb of Zurich. He also began to work closely with Karl Barth, and the two founded the Hilfswerk in 1937 in solidarity with the German Confessing Church; one of their first actions was to organize statements of support for imprisoned Martin Niemoeller. The organization also began to offer seminars in Switzerland for lay and clergy from the Confessing Church.

The Hilfswerk membership eventually included about seven hundred Swiss Reformed congregations and their leaders, and by the late 1930s the organization’s work was focused heavily on advocating for and helping refugees. Before the war, most of these refugees came from the Confessing Church and were baptized Christians of Jewish descent. These activities sparked a series of theological position statements about events in Nazi Germany and about the Jewish-Christian relationship. Some of these statements were generated by the Germans who reached Switzerland; others came from working groups of Swiss theologians, including Barth and Wilhelm Vischer. One such statement was the October 1938 statement, “Salvation comes from the Jews,” addressed to Swiss Reformed pastors and condemning antisemitism.

These theological statements resembled other church statements of that era—that is, they condemned what they described as Nazi racial antisemitism but did not challenge Christian theological teachings against Jews. Yet the Hilfswerk activities opened the way to a broader engagement that eventually included theological discussions about the Jewish-Christian relationship with the Swiss Jewish community. The most striking aspect of Rusterholz’s book is his extended account and documentation about the cooperation and discussion between the Swiss Jewish community and the Protestant Swiss circles—particularly significant because this kind of ongoing communication between Christians and Jews was otherwise rare during that era.

This communication emerged in the early period of the war, when the Swiss Jewish community reached out to Vogt to gain Reformed church support for Jewish refugees. After documented confirmation of the genocide of European Jews reached various officials in Switzerland in the summer of 1942, leaders of the Swiss Jewish Federation (Schweizer Israelitische Gemeindebund) contacted Reformed Church leaders and a series of meetings began between Paul Vogt, Gertrud Kurz, and Rabbi Zvi Taubes of Zurich. The outcome was a November 1942 message that Kurz and Vogt sent to leaders of Swiss Reformed churches that read in part “The Jews of Europe, particularly those in Poland, face a massacre…we confess the guilt of a Confessing Church that it has remained silent for too long about certain realities….” (333). Regular meetings between the two communities began and Swiss Reformed leaders issued various statements, including some that began to address the underlying theological issues of Christian teachings about Judaism.

In 1944 George Mandel, a Hungarian businessman who had reached Switzerland and been hired as a consular secretary at the El Salvador Consulate, received an eyewitness account from two Jews who had managed to escape Auschwitz about the circumstances in Auschwitz, including the extent of the genocide. With the approval of the Consul General, Mandel issued documents identifying European Jews as citizens of El Salvador, notarized them, and sent several thousand of these through consular channels throughout Europe. He also gave a copy of the report, the Auschwitz Protocol, to Paul Vogt. Vogt, Karl Barth, Adolf Freudenberg and others used the Auschwitz Protocol to raise awareness across Europe about what was happening to the Jews. The document was circulated to Christian clergy around Europe and in the U.S., with a cover letter from the Hilfswerk, signed by Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Paul Vogt, and Willem Visser ‘t Hooft.

Rusterholz traces these relationships and the theological developments into the early postwar era, when the Hilfswerk turned its attention to the ongoing crisis of refugees and displaced persons. His book shows the full complexity of that period and the figures involved, and the appendix includes helpful biographies and documentation. Both this work and Marianne Jehle-Wildberger’s biography of Adolf Keller are welcome and significant additions to the literature on the churches during the early twentieth century.

[*] The views as expressed are the author’s alone and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Review Article: The Quest for the Historical Schweitzers

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review Article: The Quest for the Historical Schweitzers

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

James Carleton Paget and Michael J. Thate (eds.), Albert Schweitzer in Thought and Action: A Life in Parts (Syracuse University Press, 2016).

Patti M. Marxsen, Helene Schweitzer: A Life of Her Own (Syracuse University Press, 2015).

Albert Schweitzer is, perhaps, the most truly, and even magnificently, awkward of figures. He was a product of the nineteenth century and in unique ways embodied many of its intellectual and moral achievements and possibilities. Yet he left that age behind and sought to claim a new one, even when he struggled to understand what the twentieth century had brought. Schweitzer was an internationalist who evidently remained entirely confident of the superiority of the culture that had produced him even as he repudiated it. He was a thinker of enduring value, but he founded no school and his very range deprived him of a secure place in conventional academic categories. He was a figure of history but today historians, by and large, overlook him Continue reading →

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Review of Richard Weikart, Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Belief that Drove the Third Reich

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review of Richard Weikart, Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Belief that Drove the Third Reich (Washington, D.C: Regnery History, 2016), 386 pages, ISBN: 978-1-62157-500-9.

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

Biographers and historians alike have devoted countless pages to an examination of Adolf Hitler’s worldview. Just this past year, Lars Lüdicke contributed to this discourse with the publication of Hitlers Weltanschauung: Von “Mein Kampf” bis zum “Nero Befehl” (Ferdinand Schöningh, 2016). Though historians have devoted much energy to discussing Hitler’s antisemitism and militarism, few spent much time analyzing Hitler’s conception of God and religion. In recent years, several authors have endeavored to fill this void, including Continue reading →

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Review of Hans von Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”: Briefe aus Militärgefängnis und Gestapohaft 1943-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review of Hans von Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”: Briefe aus Militärgefängnis und Gestapohaft 1943-1945 (Munich: Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 2015), 351 pages, ISBN 9783421047113.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Hans von Dohnanyi was one of the most prominent men in the group of high-ranking German military officers and leading civilians who conspired in the course of the Second World War to overthrow Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. The failure of the attempted assassination plot in July 1944 led to Hitler’s orders to the Gestapo to round up and execute all those suspected of being involved, including Dohnanyi, his brother-in-law Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and two other brothers-in-law who were all put to death in April 1945.

Dohnanyi had been trained as a constitutional lawyer and had held significant posts in the Ministry of Justice. But he had early on become dismayed at the illegal activities and political violence of the Nazi extremists and had in fact drawn up a dossier which documented these misdeeds in full detail. Continue reading →

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Review of John Carter Wood, ed., Christianity and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Europe. Conflict, Community, and the Social Order

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review of John Carter Wood, ed., Christianity and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Europe. Conflict, Community, and the Social Order (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 211 pages, ISBN 9783525101490.

By Sarah Thieme, University of Münster

John Carter Wood has edited a volume which considers religion and its impact on politics, more precisely, the relationship between Christianity and “national identity” and the discourses about this interaction in the “long” twentieth century in Europe. In his introductory essay, the editor stresses the volumes’ focus on the intertwining between national and Christian identities. Rather than having an adversarial relationship, churches and nations often engaged in various partnerships in the twentieth century, Wood argues. Beginning with the changed conditions which shaped their relationship, he claims that the biggest challenges for Christianity were the growing state power—in particular, totalitarianism—and secularisation, which he describes as subjective secularisation. Theses common themes connect the following essays.

The inclusion of Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox perspectives is commendable, as it highlights not only conflicts about national identity within one confession, but also points to conflicts between various denominations and allows comparisons. Continue reading →

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Review of Rolf-Ulrich Kunze, “Möge Gott unserer Kirche helfen!” Theologiepolitik, Kirchenkampf und Auseinandersetzung mit dem NS-Regime: Die Evangelische Landeskirche Badens 1933-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review of Rolf-Ulrich Kunze, “Möge Gott unserer Kirche helfen!” Theologiepolitik, Kirchenkampf und Auseinandersetzung mit dem NS-Regime: Die Evangelische Landeskirche Badens 1933-1945 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2015).

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This book on the Protestant regional church in Baden during the time of the Third Reich is the product of a research project from the early 2000s which focused on the theological milieu and mentality of the pastors and church leaders. The goal was not to write a social history of the “church struggle” in Baden, but to use the rich archival resources on Baden’s pastors to understand their experience and self-understanding, including an exploration of the ways in which political and church-political ideas were codified theologically (17). Continue reading →

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