Category Archives: Volume 20 Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Thomas Forstner, Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbayern 1918 bis 1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Thomas Forstner, Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbayern 1918 bis 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 603 pp., ISBN: 978-3-525-55040-3.

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

In his work, Priests in Times of Upheaval: Identity and Culture of Catholic Parish Clergy in Upper Bavaria 1918 to 1945, Thomas Forstner, a freelance historian in Berlin, offers an in-depth examination of the world of parish clergy in Germany during the Weimar Republic and later under National Socialism. Originally produced as a 2011 dissertation at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich under the direction of Dr. Walter Ziegler, professor emeritus for Bavarian regional history, this edition, according to Forstner, has been slightly revised and slightly shortened. Still, the present work inherently reveals its dissertation origins with extensive, but certainly informative citations, which, at times, act as parallel narratives to the text itself. The sources constituting these citations are also equally impressive. Quite significant among the sources are twenty interviews Forstner conducted with priests who had first-hand experience of the priestly world so-well documented in this work. Forstner incorporates selections from these interviews convincingly throughout his work. While all of the above points are naturally of great interest to the historical specialist and perhaps to modern-day clergy, the study’s thoroughgoing nature will more than likely make it daunting for most readers.

forstner-priesterFrom the outset, Forstner makes it clear that his book will depart from the following works: Thomas Breuer’s Verordneter Wandel? Der Widerstreit zwischen nationalsozialistischem Herrschaftsanspruch und traditionaler Lebenswelt im Erzbistum Bamberg (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1992); Thomas Fandel’s Konfession und Nationalsozialismus: Evangelische und katholische Pfarrer in der Pfalz 1930-1939 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1997); and Tobias Haaf’s Von volksverhetzenden Pfaffen und falschen Propheten: Klerus und Kirchenvolk im Bistum Würzburg in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus (Würzburg: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2005). All of these works, he argues, centered primarily on questions relating to resistance and politics without significant consideration of priestly culture and everyday life. Forstner places my own 2004 study, Resisting the Third Reich: The Catholic Clergy in Hitler’s Berlin (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press) in the same category, though he does acknowledge that my work included “some” discussion of priestly culture. By contrast to these studies, Forstner seeks to understand specifically the all-too often hermetic world of Munich’s clergy, especially their pastoral training, outlook, and practices, quite closely akin to Monika Nickel’s Habilitation, Die Passauer theologisch-praktische Monatsschrift: Ein Standesorgan des Bayerischen Klerus an der Wende vom 19. Zum 20. Jahrhundert (Passau: Dietmar Klinger, 2004), a study upon which Forstner lavishes great praise. Nickel’s work examined pastoral practice addressed in the Passau Monthly of Practical Theology.

In his introduction, Forstner spells out the three aims of his work: (1) to describe the formation of the Upper Bavarian clergy in the period between the two world wars; (2) to build upon the research of the late Erwin Gatz among others by further examining the cultural, social and attitudinal history of German Catholic clergy; and (3) to detail the ways in which clergy did and did not overcome the challenges of the tumultuous time in which they lived, especially taking into account the strategies they employed to negotiate the difficulties they faced. In my opinion, Forstner convincingly accomplishes his first two goals, though falls a bit short of his third ambition.

In his efforts to address the aims of his work, Forstner regularly employs the term Lebenswelt, though he purposely avoids the term “milieu” when discussing the nature of Munich Catholicism. According to him, a unique single Catholic milieu did not exist in the archdiocese, even though 89% of its population professed Roman Catholicism. Despite the lack of uniformity, Forstner finds the Catholic clergy of Munich and Freising quite unified in their world view. According to him, the Catholic clergy’s ideals revolved around the understanding of Habitus clericalis – the imposed norms for priestly conduct in private and public life. These priestly ideals embodied the practices of self-sanctification and self-denial. The challenges of the modern world interfered significantly as the clergy strove to live ascetically pure lives. This was especially true as the society, in which they lived, especially following the First World War, became more tumultuous. Increasingly, Catholic clergymen found they often lacked the training and abilities to deal with the harsh realities of modern-day German society. The archbishop and his clerical staff were of little assistance in addressing this situation.

Forstner begins his work by offering an overview of the archdiocese from 1918 to 1945. Throughout this period, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, imposing archbishop of Munich and Freising (1917-1952), set the tone for the archdiocese. Yet, at the same time, his clergy found him distant and aloof. As one priest frankly commented, “Following my priestly ordination, I never saw Faulhaber in my life again, never again. We had no access; he was a feudal Lord in his palace. Any baroness had access to Herr Cardinal, but curates not…. I only remember Faulhaber from his majestic behavior, as if he was a noble’s son, even though he was, I believe, a master baker’s son” (p. 51). Still, Cardinal Faulhaber was an entity from whom many of Munich’s 1.47 million Catholics (in 1933) took heed. Such regard among Catholics did not translate into weekly Mass attendance. In fact, the Munich archdiocese had one of the lowest records for Mass attendance in Germany. Similarly, Munich Catholics offered less support for political Catholicism than Catholics in other regions of Germany. In the 1924 state elections, for example, three out of four Catholics did not cast a vote for a Catholic party. As the rector of the Freising seminary lamented, “The men of our age no longer enjoy the protection and advantage of an ideologically closed culture and a uniform milieu” (pp. 43-44). Yet, within such a diverse culture, Forstner stresses that the clergy maintained their united anti-modern conservative outlook. Only a few priests, minor figures, Forstner argues, embraced a reform anti-Ultramontane strain of Catholicism present in Munich and its environs.

In the following chapter, Forstner examines the recruitment and training of Munich priests. Interestingly, he reports that more than half the priests of the Munich archdiocese came from the countryside, though he finds that this trend began to change after the First World War, especially since German society experienced an upheaval in general. The majority of the priestly candidates began their studies as young teenagers (ages 11-15), attending one of the minor seminaries in Freising, Scheyern, or Traunstein. The seminarians continued their studies at either the Freising Major Seminary or at the more liberally structured Georgianum in Munich – the latter included seminarians from other dioceses who attended classes at the University of Munich, taught by members of its Faculty of Theology. Forstner offers pages upon pages of detail as he richly documents seemingly every aspect of vocation recruitment and seminary life. The directors and rectors of the seminaries made every attempt to ensure that the young men entrusted to their care were kept as far from possible from outside worldly influences. Still, the realities of the times did creep into seminary life. For example, Nazi enthusiast, Father Albert Hartl, a prefect at the Freising Minor Seminary, had his students read and discuss the contents of the Völkischer Beobachter during morning study period. By late 1933, Hartl had further awakened everyone at the minor seminary to the realities of living under National Socialism when he denounced seminary director, Father Josef Roßberger, for speaking against the government. Actually, Forstner reveals that seminary life was never as insular as one might believe. In 1929, for example, 43 seminarians at the Freising Major Seminary supported the NSDAP candidates in local district elections, despite the rector’s assurances to his superiors that no seminarian was a member of the NSDAP.

It became impossible for seminarians to escape the grasp of National Socialism. In June 1935, the German government instituted a law that made six months of labor service (Reichsarbeitsdient) compulsory for all young men ages 16 to 25. According to Forstner, the seminarians, who were used to being away from family and friends for long periods of time, actually fared better than the majority of their peers. Anti-Church propaganda also had a reverse effect, by primarily strengthening the resolve of most of them. In 1939, the German government added another impediment to seminary training by making membership in the Jungvolk (ages 10 to 14) and the ordinary Hitlerjugend (ages 14-18) compulsory. By this time, however, priestly formation was already under significant stress in Upper Bavaria as the government requisitioned seminary buildings for military use, disbanded theological faculties, and altered or ended seminary programs of study.

In chapters three and four, Forstner centers upon parish ministry and the ideals of priesthood within active ministry. He offers an extensive portrayal of parish life, including a detailed examination of pastor-vicar work relationships, priestly social life, and remuneration. In particular, he illustrates how parish life revolved around the pastor who served not only as a pastoral care provider who dispensed the sacraments but also as an individual from whom everyone in a particular area sought advice. The latter role underwent a gradual but significant change as mayors more and more assumed this role. After 1933, this was even more the case when the National Socialist government removed priests from most honorary local positions.

In chapter five, Forstner discusses a topic rarely addressed in the existing literature on the German Catholic Church in this period: clerical deviancy and punishment. After explaining the various penalties that Church hierarchy had at its disposal to deal with recalcitrant priests, Forstner examines specific problems that befell individual priests and offers brief individual case studies. These issues included breaking celibacy, partaking in financial irregularities, and suffering severe psychological illness. In the latter discussion, the case of Father Richard H. stands out. Soon after his ordination, Father Richard manifested schizophrenic symptoms so his superiors placed him in Schönbrunn asylum, a Catholic sanitarium run by Franciscan sisters. His condition worsened and the asylum’s director, Monsignor Josef Steininger, approved his transfer to Eglfing-Haar, a state asylum in which the decentralized euthanasia program was still taking place – a fact of which Steininger was well aware. Soon after his transfer, the 35 year old Father Richard was reported as having died “officially” of fever and pneumonia, but, quite possibly, Forstner argues, a victim of the euthanasia program. Forstner speculates about Steininger’s choices and role in Father Richard’s death.

The sixth chapter deals with complicity in the crimes of National Socialism. Here Forstner examines brown priests, clergymen who openly supported National Socialism. Forstner acknowledges my book, Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism, (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008) and various articles on this subject, but believes that I did not differentiate sufficiently enough the varying degrees of “brownness” among such priests. Instead he turns to four categories of complicity suggested by University of Heidelberg historian Olaf Blaschke: “(1) Selective Contentedness, (2) Cooperation and Conformity, (3) Loyalty to Consent, and (4) Active Collaboration” (p. 425). Forstner argues that scholars should only label priests “brown” if their behavioral pattern falls within the third or fourth categories of complicity. Such priests consented to the core aims of National Socialism and, in turn, cooperated with National Socialism against the beliefs and practices of their own religious tradition. From this group, he singles out seventeen Munich archdiocesan priests, of which eleven were members of the NSDAP. Forstner offers compelling informative overviews of the careers of almost all these brown priests and concludes that these clergymen can primarily be placed in one of two groupings to explain their reasons for siding with National Socialism: extreme nationalism and opportunism. Forstner also argues that most of these individuals belonged to the generation that Detlev Peukert called the “Superfluous Generation” and Michael Wildt termed the “Uncompromising Generation” – those born between 1900 and 1910, too late to prove themselves during the First World War. While such characterization may help to explain the motivations for some brown priests, it does not cover the overwhelming majority of them. Still, Forstner does build upon and add to the existing literature as he discusses these problematic priests, even if his conclusions are not entirely new.

In chapter seven, Forstner offers a comparative examination of the role of priests in both world wars. In World War I, 6.5% (90 priests) of the diocesan clergy and almost all seminarians served in the military. Of the 301 seminarians who carried arms, 95 perished, a third of these falling in direct combat. Like most Germans, the priests of Munich shared in the nationalism and monarchism that so filled the air in 1914. Michael von Faulhaber, then serving as Deputy Field Provost (Stellvertretender Feldpropst) of the Bavarian army, was no different. His sermons used terms such as “soldiers of Christ” and described the war as “sacred” and “just.” By contrast, Forstner argues that Faulhaber’s public rhetoric during the Second World War was much more reserved. He does acknowledge though that any positive statements about the war, even if in support of the soldiers or seminarians in military service, still served indirectly to support the war effort and Hitler’s criminal regime. Munich’s clergy and seminarians showed much less enthusiasm for this war than the previous one. The church-state conflict clearly had affected diocesan seminary life by then. Despite exhibiting a zealous enthusiasm for the war, theologians were still drafted due to a secret provision in the 1933 Reich-Vatican Concordat. Before the war was over, 230 Munich priests, 270 seminarians and 182 pre-theology students from the minor seminary took part in military service. 10% of the priests and 30% of the seminarians fell in military service, the majority on the eastern front.

In his final chapter, Forstner focuses on the question of resistance among Munich’s clergy under National Socialism. While making great effort to differentiate his argument from other historians, his conclusions are not novel. Few priests, Forstner concludes, participated in open resistance against the National Socialist regime. Most considerations were subordinated and guided by the necessity to administer the sacraments and maintain pastoral care. He arrives at such conclusions without significant archival evidence. Rather, he relies primarily on his analysis of the materials collected by Ulrich von Hehl and his collaborators, published in the third edition of Priester unter Hitlers Terror (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1996). Overall, this chapter seems wanting, especially when compared to the depth of study and analysis presented in the other chapters of this work.

According to the portrait Forstner offers, Cardinal Faulhaber did not inspire resistance among his clergy. In a 1940 pastoral conference, Faulhaber told his priests: “Guarding the tongue in the pulpit is the strictest Canon of the time” (p. 532). Evidently, from the number of priests who came into conflict with the state primarily over issues relating to pastoral care, such words of advice were not easily followed. Other priests found Faulhaber of little assistance in their daily negotiation with the state. One clergyman commented: “The man [Faulhaber] left us completely alone as chaplains in the difficult conflict over the schools and in our preaching. We never received any help in the time of the Nazis, never! … The bishops were not for us.” Another priest added: “There was no help to be expected from the Church” (p. 538).

Overall, Forstner has produced a magisterial study on the culture of priesthood in Munich and Freising during some of its most trying times in the twentieth century. Certainly, it will become a standard work on this subject. Despite this important contribution and the information that it contains, the work does little to address the larger questions about the relationship of the Catholic Church with National Socialism and less to engage existing literature in these areas. In all of its 552 pages of text and footnotes, Forstner devotes but five pages (pp. 510-514) to a discussion of relations between clergy and Jews. Neither is any general picture offered on this topic. Those seeking to gain a broader portrait of the Catholic Church in such troubled times will have to look elsewhere. By contrast, those who wish to know specifically about clergy, seminary training, and parish life will find a rich resource in Forstner’s work.

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Review of Rainer Bucher, Hitler’s Theology: A Study in Political Religion

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Rainer Bucher, Hitler’s Theology: A Study in Political Religion (London: Continuum Books 2011), Xx+ 140 Pp., ISBN PB 978-1-4411-4179-8.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Rainer Bucher is Professor of Pastoral Theology at Graz University in Austria. As a young seminarian, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, he was curious about and later dismayed by the stance of his older colleagues in the priesthood towards the Nazi regime, and subsequently by their reluctance or even refusal to come to terms with their failure to protest or resist the crimes and cruelties of Hitler’s regime. Two chapters of this book deal with the responses of the Catholic Church and the measures that need to be taken to avoid any repetition of these omissions, which Bucher largely attributes to the fascination exercised by Hitler’s flamboyant and seductive personality and ideas.

Bucher-HitlerThe bulk of the book, which is written in a somewhat convoluted Germanic style, but competently translated into English by Rebecca Pohl, is based on a thorough examination of all of Hitler’s surviving speeches and writings. Bucher’s main contention is that Hitler’s worldview was far more than just an ideology adopted for tactical reasons in order to gain political support. Rather, in Bucher’s view, Hitler’s ideas constituted a theology, even though it was an intellectually crude and merciless construct, and based on an abominable racism. Bucher is well aware that speaking of Hitler’s theology is provocative because it seems to associate what Christians believe with one of the worst criminals of our era. So he is careful to ensure that he cannot be accused of trying to undertake any kind of vindication. His task is therefore one of explanation rather than condemnation, let alone approbation. In this he succeeds with consummate skill.

Bucher seeks to determine the characteristics of Hitler’s creed which brought him such strong and long-lasting support from the German elites, as well as from broad sections of the wider population. It is not enough, he argues, to claim that Hitler’s fascination was due to his charismatic personality or to his undoubted rhetorical skills. Nor is it enough to suggest that Hitler’s hold was based on his political successes, since it is clear that many of his followers remained dedicated to his ideas even after his defeat and death. Instead Bucher argues that it was Hitler’s use of theological concepts, drawn from Christian traditions, but interpreted in a racialist setting, which appealed to many Catholics, and indeed to other Germans.

Hitler’s theology was not orthodox in any dogmatic or academic sense. But it was expressed in a politically decisive fashion, and provided the legitimization of his political creed of racism. It also adopted an apocalyptic dimension. As such, it attracted the support of a few of Germany’s more “progressive” Catholic theologians, such as Karl Adam, Joseph Lortz, and Michael Schmaus, who were eagerly looking for some new approach to modern society and found the teachings of the Catholic hierarchy to be irrelevant to the problems and issues of post-war Germany. In a bastardized form, the same attraction for Hitler’s ideas was found among the more politicized sections of German Protestantism, especially in the ranks of the so-called “German Christians”.

In fact, one reason for this fascination was the symbolic power of Hitler’s frequent references to a higher transcendent reality. But it was also due, as Ian Kershaw pointed out, to the “quasi-messianic commitment to a set of beliefs which were undeniably simple, internally consistent and comprehensive”. The essential characteristic of such beliefs was Hitler’s sharply racist anti-universalism. His appeal to his fellow-countrymen rested on his unshakable belief in the superiority of the German Volksgemeinschaft. He saw his mission as safeguarding this community, and expelling all those of inferior character, especially the Jews.

Why did this project receive such wide support? In part, it was undoubtedly due to the disillusionment caused by the disasters of the First World War. It was also due to the irrelevancy of much of the Church’s preaching, especially in the Catholic ranks, where any accommodation with modernism had been strongly suppressed by the Vatican. But in part it was due to Hitler’s confident and unchallenged proclamation of his faith in Germany and by the cultic mediation of his ideas in mass rallies, and what Bucher calls “collective experiential orgies” with their striking and impressive staging.

What did Hitler himself believe? In Bucher’s view, Hitler’s world-view was deeply influenced by his Catholic upbringing. He not only admired the Catholic Church as a successful organization which lad lasted for centuries, but was a model for the inculcation of religious loyalty and devotion. The Catholic Church was to be followed by its adoption of infallibility in its theories, and rejection of dangerous rivals, such as the Jews. Whereas political ideologies were liable to engage in compromises, Hitler’s version of National Socialism was exclusive and transformative. It could therefore follow Christianity’s record of intolerance, and single-mindedly fulfill its destiny for the German Volksgemeinschaft.

Bucher rightly suggests that it was this heritage which led Hitler to reject the kind of völkisch religiosity proposed by some of his followers. He quickly realized that the obscurantism and fake religiosity of neo-paganism would never be able to attract the majority of Germans. The ideas of such men as Alfred Rosenberg or the cultic fantasies of the Ludendorffs were therefore rejected as incompatible with his racist politics and political objectives. As early as 1922 Hitler was denouncing the völkisch movement as “a hotbed of well-meaning fools”. He continued to pour scorn on such fantasies, even when supported by leaders of his own party such as Heinrich Himmler, on the grounds that these concepts had lost touch with the scientific basis of modernity.

Hitler’s world-view clearly and consistently included a supra-natural dimension. Almost all of his speeches made use of the concept of Providence, which, as Bucher rightly points out, was cleverly positioned between traditional Christian language and general religious vocabulary. From Mein Kampf onwards Hitler used the idea of Providence to legitimate the National Socialist project, and later on he applied it to his own career. After 1933, Hitler frequently claimed that “Heaven and Providence has blessed our efforts”. This vindication of the Nazi struggle, indeed, became a stereotype in Hitler’s speeches “allowing our plans to ripen fully and visibly blessing their fruits”. Thus Hitler was able to attribute the failure of the assassination attempt in July 1944 to the protection of Providence, whose “warning finger tells me that I must continue my work”. With the help of this notion, Hitler’s concrete political actions were inserted into a divine project, through which God was enacting his plans.

So too, in Hitler’s view, National Socialism served to maintain a decisive work in fulfilment of a divine will. Its duty was to carry out God’s intention to make the German race the dominant force in the world and thus secure forever its eternal destiny. “The man who carries out this path will in the end receive the blessings of Providence”. It was through the use of such ideas that Hitler was able to define himself not as a mere power politician but as the executor of a divine will. By such means, he gave his aggressive nationalist racist concepts a quasi-religious legitimization. And the tragedy was that many people in Germany accepted such a creed, seeing Hitler as a religious savior, a divine messenger, or a prophet. Such was the impact of Hitler’s theology.

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Review of Dean Stroud, ed., Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Dean Stroud, ed., Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2013), xii + 203p., ISBN 978-0-8028-6902-9.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

Defining “resistance” to the Nazi regime is notoriously difficult because of the vast array of individual and specific factors underlying the acts that could be deemed resistance. Factors such as race, nationality, religion, occupation, gender, and age, as well as time and place, complicate arriving at a comprehensive definition. Broad definitions of resistance that include all acts of defiance no matter how small are appropriate for certain groups in specific times and places but not for others. In Nechama Tec’s most recent book, Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror (Oxford, 2013) she chooses a very broad definition that tries to account for the wide variety of Jewish acts of defiance in Nazi occupied Poland. She defines resistance as, “a set of activities motivated by the desire to thwart, limit, undermine, or end the exercise of oppression over the oppressed.” This definition is broad enough to include armed and unarmed resistance, small acts of defiance and assassination plots, and, most importantly for her, resistance by Jews, who were simply trying to survive in the forests, camps, and ghettos in Eastern Europe. But broad definitions of resistance like this are problematic for those of us interested primarily in German resistance because a good deal of resistance by Germans was directed at specific Nazi policies. Tec’s broad definition of resistance works well for her consideration of Jewish resistance in Poland, where a morale-building activity in the Warsaw Ghetto counted as resistance, but it lacks the nuance necessary for making distinctions between acts of resistance, opposition, single-issue dissent, and non-conformity in Germany.

stroud-preachingDean Stroud’s Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich uses a broad definition of resistance along the lines of Tec’s definition. This is problematic, because his focus is preaching in the German Confessing Church. In his 48-page introduction to the historical context, Stroud does not engage the vast literature on resistance in Germany or offer his opinion on the competing definitions of resistance by scholars such as Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen, Peter Hoffmann, Detlev Peukert, and many others. But one can easily ascertain that he considers pastors in the Confessing Church to be a part of the Resistance, that he believes resistance among pastors was more wide spread than is acknowledged, and that he views Christianity as a radical alternative to Nazism. It is self-evident to Stroud that the thirteen sermons he includes in his book are “sermons of resistance.”

Of the thirteen sermons, twelve are by Protestants, and include such luminaries as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Martin Niemöller. Paul Schneider, who was murdered in Buchenwald, and Helmut Gollwitzer, who took over Niemöller’s parish after his arrest, each have two sermons. Julius von Jan’s famous sermon in the wake of Kristallnacht is included as is a 1944 sermon by the Confessing Church pastor, Wilhelm Busch. The final Protestant sermon is by Gerhard Ebeling, who studied under Bultmann and Brunner, and later Bonhoeffer at Finkenwalde. The sole Catholic contribution comes from Bishop von Galen and is his famous August 3, 1941 sermon against euthanasia. Stroud also includes as an appendix a sermon written for pastors in the Prussian church on the loyalty oath to Hitler, the authorship of which is unclear.

The thirteen sermons vary widely in their topics and in their degree of condemnation of the Nazi regime. In my mind what they have in common is not that they are all “resistance sermons” but rather sermons that in diverse ways seek to provide Christian guidance at a time of confusion and crisis brought about by Nazi rule and the rise of the German Christians. Paul Schneider’s January 1934 sermon rages against the German Christian heresy, Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and “leading figures of the new Germany” who embraced racial thinking in the church. He reminds his parishioners of the error of placing “blood and race alongside the will of God revealed alone in the words of the Scripture.” But he also mentions aspects of the new regime that he finds appealing, i.e., “the will for political unity, for national honor, for a social community [Volksgemeinschaft].” Stroud comments in a footnote that Schneider “seems to be looking for areas of cooperation between church and state, as one would expect of a good Lutheran pastor nourished by the ‘two kingdoms’ teaching of Protestantism.” This type of observation, which is extremely rare in Stroud’s book, is of central importance to understanding the weaknesses of the Christian resistance to National Socialism. Stroud would have better served his readers had he chosen to use his considerable knowledge about Christianity, preaching, and the German language to analyze the sermons in greater detail with particular focus on how many of the leading figures of the Confessing Church forcefully opposed Nazi intrusions into the affairs of the church while at the same time found areas of agreement with National Socialism.

Despite Stroud’s background as a Presbyterian minister and German literature professor, he does not provide more than snippets of his own interpretation of the sermons. His 2-3 page introductions to each sermon are mostly concerned with providing historical and biographic background information. His rather long introduction to the book has over twenty subsections on well known topics such as Hitler’s notion of “positive Christianity,” the German Christian movement, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the Barmen Declaration. He relies heavily on Klaus Scholder and John Conway to provide the historical context to the Church Struggle and Michael Burleigh for general background to the Nazi period. The most interesting and original sections of the introduction are when Stroud abandons the secondary sources and provides his own analysis or commentary. For example, his analysis of the essay, “Was ist positives Christentum?” by pastor Wilhelm Rott and his commentary on an essay that appeared in Barth’s series Theologische Existenz heute by theology student Max Lackmann introduce readers to two men who engaged in the Church Struggle, who have received very little attention thus far. Stroud also provides at the end of his introduction some useful tips on how to read the thirteen sermons with an eye to how Christian vocabulary could serve as subversive language.

If there is one underlying thesis to the book it is “Christianity’s total incompatibility with Nazi doctrine.” And herein lies the biggest problem. For Stroud Christianity and Nazism are fundamentally and irreconcilably opposed. He does not address the role that Christian anti-Semitism and nationalism played in Christian complicity, including by the Confessing Church, in Nazi rule and the Holocaust. He writes, “Although the Nazi program included a counterfeit ‘positive Christianity’ and although Hitler peppered speeches with references to God, neither he nor Nazism had a single thing in common with traditional Christianity.” The pastors and theologians in the Confessing Church are portrayed as the representatives of traditional Christianity in complete opposition to the Nazis and German Christians. Although Stroud does mention Niemöller’s early anti-Judaism, he concludes without equivocation that after 1934 Niemöller was an opponent of Nazism. Besides this brief mention of Niemöller’s anti-Semitism, Stroud does not give any serious consideration to the ways that Nazi rule might appeal to a faithful Christian.

The Confessing Church as a whole was never opposed to Nazism as a whole. The authors of the thirteen sermons were unique in their courage and the Nazis viewed them as such a threat that they banned, exiled, jailed, or murdered several of them. Publishing beautiful translations of their sermons honors them and provides a wonderful resource of scholars and students. But if there is one thing that the scholarship on the Confessing Church over the past two decades has uncovered it is that the Confessing Church and its leaders had a complicated relationship to National Socialism that involved different levels of consent and dissent at various times during the 12 years of Nazi rule.

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Review of Arne Hassing, Church Resistance to Nazism in Norway, 1940-1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Arne Hassing, Church Resistance to Nazism in Norway, 1940-1945 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2014), Xx + 384 Pp. ISBN 978-0-295-99308-9.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Arne Hassing’s achievement is to write the first comprehensive account in English of the Church Struggle in Norway, concentrating on the period following the invasion and occupation of the country by German troops in April 1940. Although news about conditions in Norway, and particularly about its churches, was printed in England during the war as a means of war-time propaganda, Hassing’s more complete study based on the official archives and several decades of secondary sources will undoubtedly become the authoritative account. As such, it is a valuable addition to scholarly learning. As he correctly remarks, church historians of this period have neglected the struggles of smaller nations such as Norway or Holland, and have concentrated on Germany where the complications and complexities of the churches’ relationships to the Nazi state have been intensively studied. But Hassing’s illuminative account of the conditions in Norway has much to offer, particularly in terms of the solidarity of church members against the imposition of an alien ideology and their resistance to any unwanted divergence from the national traditions. Although the main outlines of this resistance, and particularly the special role of the chief bishop, Eivind Berggrav of Oslo, have been known earlier, this book’s detailed analysis will undoubtedly be a major resource for future treatments of European church-state relations during the early twentieth century.

hassing-churchHe begins with an account of the Norwegian reception of the German Church Struggle in the pre-1940 period, since he rightly notes that both nations had Lutheranism as their official Protestant state religion and as their traditional focus of loyalty. The challenge of Nazi ideology and its attempt to corrupt Luther’s teachings was therefore immediately recognized. Hassing pays tribute to the skilful manner in which Bishop Berggrav differentiated the Norwegian understanding of Luther from that held by many theologians in Germany. He also notes the skill with which the Norwegian church leaders were able to forge an alliance amongst themselves and resolve long-held theological antagonisms, in order to oppose the invaders and their supporters in Norway.

At the same time, he does accept the fact that this Church Struggle in Norway never reached the kind of intensity as for example in Poland. This was due not so much to the firm adherence by Norwegians to Christian doctrine but more to the reluctance of the German governor, Josef Terboven, to engage in an open and costly Church Struggle. Still, Christian resistance of a more passive kind could be seen in the refusal to join the ranks of the pro-Nazi clergy, who followed the line adopted by the chief pro-Nazi Norwegian, Vidkun Quisling. The overwhelming proportion of the Norwegian church members, clergy as well as laity, refused to participate in services which the few pro-Nazi clergy tried to organize. Hassing makes good use of the available statistics to show the bankruptcy of this attempt to create a Nazified Norwegian church.

On the other hand, he also evaluates the somewhat unheroic stand of the Church of Norway in the matter of the persecuted Jews, and points to the lack of any timely mobilization of protest on humanitarian grounds. Even though the number of victims was small, the belated recognition of this issue by Norwegian church leaders has to be acknowledged.

Hassing’s book concludes with a valuable epilogue, pointing out that the defeat of Nazi Germany and the restoration of the pre-war church polity in Norway did not lead to any revival or intensification of church life. In the end, the church struggle reinforced the conservative and pietistic character of the Church of Norway but was insufficient to deflect the social developments led by the socialist and largely secular governments of the post-war period.

My only criticism of this work would be that more should be said about the role of the laity. Hassing’s concentration on the small number of anti-Nazi bishops and clergy, who constituted the essence of church resistance, does not tell us enough about how this lead was followed by the people in the pew, whose attitudes are surely recorded in parish records or personal memoirs. The title of the work would suggest a much broader participation by Christians, but we are not given the evidence, even in retrospect.

Hassing’s excellent command of the large number of secondary sources and his systematic exploitation of the archival records, especially those dealing with the German side of the Norwegians’ church affairs, is commendable in every respect. His esteem for his original homeland shines through, but at the same time, his study gives us a balanced and not uncritical account of the turbulent events of seventy years ago in a country too little recognized as one in which the popular barriers to Nazi ideas were effectively raised and maintained.

 

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Review of Robert Beaken, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Robert Beaken, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), ISBN 978-1789763552, Pp. xix + 300.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

In his biographer’s view, the reputation of Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1928 to 1942, has suffered unfairly in the seventy years since his death. He was attacked for being “proud, pompous and prelatical” and is often remembered only for the critical public speech he made during King Edward VIII’s abdication crisis in 1936. This seemed to lack any sign of Christian charity towards the monarch he had earlier sworn to serve loyally. But Robert Beaken presents a more favourable picture, based on a full examination of Lang’s papers in the Lambeth Palace library. He portrays a church leader faced with complex and difficult situations, both ecclesiastical and national, whose temperament was elitist but not cavalier, and who held together the divergent segments of the Church of England with considerable adroitness. That said, Lang lacked both the theological scholarship and the charismatic personality of his successor, William Temple. And in the changed atmosphere of the post-1945 world, he appeared to be a devotee of the past and the top-heavy establishment of the Church of England. In Beaken’s view, however, Lang deserves the credit for holding the Church together during the Second World War without reproach, maintaining the morale of the public and helping the Church to adjust to a variety of thorny political situations.

beaken-langLang was born in Scotland, the son of a distinguished Presbyterian minister. When he came to study in Oxford, he switched allegiance to a moderate high Anglicanism and opted to be ordained in the Church of England. His gifts were obvious and he quickly gained preferment. In fact, in 1890, at the age of 36, he became a suffragan or assistant bishop, and at the age of 44 was selected to be Archbishop of York, the second highest appointment in the English hierarchy. He spent twenty years there, before being moved to Canterbury in 1928. In Beaken’s view, it was hardly his fault that he was appointed to York too early and to Canterbury too late in life. He was a loner and a workaholic, and a bachelor who had difficulty in relating to others even of his own class and complexion. As a result, he never established any personal associations and had no following to uphold his legacy. This biography will, however, serve to record his achievements and gives a sympathetic analysis of Lang’s actions during the difficult and traumatic years of the 1930s.

Beaken admits that Lang was ambitious and a snob, and even speculates whether his keen desire to attain high office may have stemmed from a need to justify his conversion to and ordination in Anglicanism. His greatest gift was to be an administrator, getting on with the daily grind of an archbishop. This made for an uneventful career, broken twice by major crises, one ecclesiastical and one political.

The first of these arose in the 1920s over plans to issue a new Book of Common Prayer for the Church of England, to update the 1662 liturgies, which had survived largely unchanged since Cranmer’s days four centuries earlier. After the shock of the Great War, such reforms were held to be necessary for revitalizing church life. The reformers, especially in the Anglo-Catholic wing of the church, sought a liturgy more inclusive of their desires for more colourful and prayerful services. But evangelicals viewed such ideas as an attack on the Reformation heritage of their church, and as a dangerous precedent for “creeping Romanism”. By law all such changes had to be approved by Parliament. But when the new Prayer Book was presented in 1927, it was twice defeated in the House of Commons, due to the mobilization of those MPs who were fearful of any innovations, especially if derived from Roman Catholic practices. Following this setback, the then Archbishop Davidson resigned, and Lang was left to pick up the pieces and to try and heal the obvious disagreements about churchmanship.The two major issues were: first, who held the lawful authority to alter the Book of Common Prayer and its rituals; and second, what changes, if any, were desirable or acceptable to the majority of the Church of England? Beaken regards Lang’s actions as insufficient and tepid. Certainly he appointed a high-level commission, but it took seven years to produce a report, and then recommended keeping the status quo. On the second point, there was no agreement, so confusion reigned. Different parishes, even adjacent ones, could and did provide wholly different liturgies, and the situation still remains unresolved. It was not, in Beaken’s view, Lang’s finest hour.

On the matter of King Edward VIII’s abdication, the second of Lang’s crises, Beaken claims that Lang played a much more decisive part. He acquits him on the charge of organizing a “plot”, along with Prime Minister Baldwin, to force the king to abdicate. But he does suggest that quite early on Lang recognized Edward’s unwillingness to maintain the role of a dedicated Christian monarch upholding traditional values, as had his father before him or his niece after him. Lang saw the monarchy in sacramental rather than merely political terms. But Beaken is critical of the speech made shortly after the abdication which scolded the former king for not upholding the ideals of the Church on Christian marriage, and for associating with those “whose standards and ways of life are alien to all the best instincts of his people”. At the time Lang was attacked for being smugly sanctimonious—and not only by the king’s supporters. At the time, too, most people in Britain blamed the king’s mistress, Mrs. Simpson, the twice divorced American, for causing the catastrophe. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now share Lang’s view of Edward’s unsuitability, and can be thankful that his successor was quickly able to restore the aura of the monarch, as could be seen in the splendid ceremonies of the 1937 coronation, over which Lang presided.

Lang’s leadership of the church and nation as the war clouds regathered over Europe earns Beaken’s praise. He had learnt the lessons of the earlier war, and avoided any claims of divine guidance or approval of Britain’s war efforts. Most of his time was spent in keeping the administration and pastoral witness of the Church of England going. It was not glamourous, but rather a humdrum necessity. Lang did, however, lead in denouncing the Nazi victimization of the Jews, and guided the country during national days of prayer. Even though he was outspoken in opposing the Nazi regime, he also warned against any spirit of vindictiveness or hatred towards the enemy. He joined his colleague Bishop Bell in condemning the blanket bombing of German cities and gave his support to the pacifists’ desire for conscientious exemption from military service. He also gave leadership to discussions for future post-war plans, but soon the added strains of war-time, including the bombing of Lambeth Palace, led him to recognize that he should retire. A younger man would, in any case, be needed to take up the burden of post-war reconstruction. So, in March 1942 he resigned and was replaced by William Temple.

In summary, Beaken believes that Lang left the Church of England in better shape after his fourteen years in office. At the same time, he notes a certain sadness about Lang’s character. “He sat at the top of an ecclesiastical pyramid, the focus of all sorts of unrealistic hopes and expectations, trying to hold together and to guide his Church, and coping with an unenviable workload. … As Archbishop of Canterbury, Lang simply kept going, doing his best for long hours, day by day, filled with an almost Calvinistic sense of duty and obligation” (238-239). He had inherited a ramshackle church government, and struggled under a heavy burden of office without adequate support. Still, his vision for a Christian England was upheld and in many ways is still in place.

 

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Article Note: New Contributions on Nazism and Christianity

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Article Note: New Contributions on Nazism and Christianity

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Samuel Koehne, “Nazism and Religion: The Problem of ‘Positive Christianity,’” Australian Journal of Politics and History 60 No. 1 (2014): 28-42.

Samuel Koehne, “Nazi Germany as a Christian State: The ‘Protestant Experience’ of 1933 in Württemberg,” Central European History 46 No. 1 (March 2013): 97-123.

In this past year, Samuel Koehne has published two new articles, both of which are interesting contributions to the ongoing debate over the relationship between Nazism and Christianity. One looks at the question from the perspective of the National Socialist movement, probing the party’s use of the term “Positive Christianity”. The other examines the relationship from the perspective of conservative Christians in Württemberg, analyzing their early responses to Nazi rule.

In “Nazism and Religion: The Problem of ‘Positive Christianity’”, Koehne challenges Richard Steigmann-Gall’s interpretation of “Positive Christianity”—the term used in Point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform. Koehne rejects Steigmann-Gall’s view, as presented in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, that “Positive Christianity” was a kind of Nazi Christianity which was supra-confessional (uncoupled from any Protestant or Catholic dogmatism), antisemitic (rooted in the German racial community), and socially ethical. Noting that Steigmann-Gall never considered the pre-history of the term, Koehne argues convincingly that from the nineteenth-century on, “Positive Christianity” emerged in juxtaposition to liberal, rationalistic Christianity. Right into the Weimar era, the term was widely used to mean conservative, orthodox, doctrinal (i.e. dogmatic) Christianity. It had appeared in Meyers Konversationslexikon, then in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart as well as in Brockhaus, and was featured in church election campaign coverage in the Weimar period—even in the Völkischer Beobachter. Though Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller tried to redefine “Positive Christianity” on behalf of the German Christian Movement, Koehne points out (following the lead of James Zabel) that there were other meanings floating around, including “orthodoxy, neo-paganism, heroic faith, anti-intellectualism and moderation” (32). Indeed, this “lack of definition” may have been an important reason the term was adopted by Hitler for the NSDAP Platform.

Koehne finds a great deal of diversity in the use of “Positive Christianity” among National Socialists. Some meant it in its older sense of “not liberal,” while others linked it to cultic or neo-pagan movements. In Mein Kampf, Hitler himself emphasized the role of traditional dogma in turning religious or political belief into faith, and in generating both certainty and intolerance, which Hitler felt to be important for any movement, including his own. In short, it was as “doctrinal faith” that the Führer understood “Positive Christianity” (39). Nonetheless, it is precisely here that Koehne identifies:

the paradox of Hitler’s dogma. In his most public statement it is clear that Hitler defined Christianity as a religious system precisely in terms of dogmatic faith. It is equally clear that those leading Nazis who declared themselves to be Christian adhered not to a dogmatic form like that of the Catholic or Protestant orthodox position, but to a radical and “Aryanised” form of faith (40).

In his conclusion, Koehne argues convincingly that the Nazis were trying to have it “both ways”, a tension revealed in Gottfried Feder’s official commentary on the Nazi Party Platform. In it, Feder asserted that National Socialists supported: 1) “Complete freedom of conscience”, 2) “Special protection of the Christian creeds”, and 3) “Suppression and obstruction of doctrines which are contrary to the German moral sense and whose content is of a character destructive to the state and Volk” (40-41). Clearly, these were not mutually compatible.

Though Koehne has effectively demonstrated that “Positive Christianity” was not a coherent “religious system” (à la Steigmann-Gall), his findings don’t exactly clarify the relationship between Nazism and Christianity. Near the end of his article, Koehne argues that “Hitler’s own definition [of “Positive Christianity”] meant that the Nazis were decidedly “un-Christian” (40). That may be, but as Steigmann-Gall has demonstrated, many leading Nazis self-identified as Christians. By both affirming traditional doctrinal Christianity and reinterpreting it in light of National Socialist racial ideology, Hitler and his Nazi colleagues created a great deal of confusion, both then and now. As a result, whether Point 24 and its affirmation of “Positive Christianity” was merely a smokescreen for Nazi anti-Christianity or whether it represented a willingness to accept the Christian churches as subordinate partners in the remaking of Germany is still open to debate. Koehne rightly calls for more research into how ordinary Christians understood the “Positive Christianity” of Nazism, in order to better define the relationship between Nazism and Christianity.

In “Nazi Germany as a Christian State: The ‘Protestant Experience’ of 1933 in Württemberg” (the earlier of the two articles, in terms of publication dates), Koehne engages in just the kind of research he calls for. This article is a response to Manfred Gailus’ call for new micro-histories of Christianity in Nazi Germany, and especially of the upsurge in Christian nationalism during the Nazi seizure of power—what Gailus, studying Berlin, calls the “Protestant Experience” of 1933 (97). Koehne attempts to discover whether a similar phenomenon occurred in Württemberg, and he does so by analyzing parish newsletters and pastoral correspondence, particularly from conservative (Pietist) Protestants in the Pastors’ Prayer Group (Pfarrergebetsbund) headquartered in Korntal. His goals are to discover how they viewed the Nazi regime in 1933 and how they responded to Nazi antisemitism.

As in the article on “Positive Christianity”, Koehne begins with a historical review—this time, of the relationship between politics and religion during the pivotal years of German Unification (1870) and of the outbreak of the First World War (1914). What he finds is that the conservative Protestants like the Korntal Pietists tended to view political events in religious terms, so that, “as Hartmut Lehmann has noted, events such as the foundation of the German Reich, World War I, and the rise of the Nazis could be read as indicating divine will” (100). Germany was, according to this perspective, a Christian nation.

In light of this, conservative Protestants came to see the Weimar era as a time of spiritual crises and godlessness, the product of the collapse of the Christian state that was Imperial Germany. As his 1933 speeches make clear, Hitler leveraged this fear. He called for a fight against communism and a duty to reestablish national unity and revive the German spirit. He declared his support for the Catholic and Protestant churches, proclaiming that they would play a key role in the moral and national renewal of Germany. He even announced that National Socialists “would create a state in which there could be a really profound revival of religious life” (103).

The Korntal Pietists Koehne studied responded favourably to Hitler’s overtures. Koehne quotes Regional Bishop Wurm, in the Korntal Parish Newsletter, drawing a parallel between the German Wehrmacht and the Christian Church, both of which stood above the conflict of the parties, served the entire nation, and fought “for good against evil and for the well-being of the whole Volk” (105). Similarly, the Korntal Parish Newsletter editors welcomed Hitler’s ascension to power, giving thanks for a Führer as a leader not seen since Bismarck, and one who was saving Germany from Marxist terror. As they put it, “Hitler and his regime have proclaimed the Christian State” (106). For Koehne, this was a revival of the spirit of 1914, a combined national and religious revival in the wake of powerful political events. Here he reviews the excitement of conservative Württemberg Protestants from that time, who saw the outbreak of war as a “spiritual springtime” complete with large upswings in church attendance. He quotes Gailus’ argument that both 1914 and 1933 were seen as “God’s hour” and interpreted “as a reunion with God of a people who had strayed from the true faith, a change of direction toward re-Christianization” (107).

If conservative Württemberg Protestants were pleased with the national-spiritual revival of early 1933, they grew increasingly concerned throughout the course of 1933 over the increasing politicization of the German churches. Whether it was the attempt by Premier Wilhelm Frick to place the Mecklenburg church under state control, the appointment of August Jäger as commissar over the Old Prussian Union Church, or Hitler’s support for the German Christian Movement, the Korntal Pietists understood that the state was interfering regularly in the life of the churches. There was, quite simply, a significant inconsistency between Hitler’s assurances that the inner religious life of the churches would be protected and his advocacy of the German Christians, the group who sought to “bring the Protestant Church in line with National Socialism—taking extreme positions on religious questions in doing so” (109). If, as the Korntal Pietists believed, the churches were to act as “the conscience of the Volk,” then the essential question was not about the national revival, but about the spiritual one: Would the Volk “listen to the voice of the Word of God proclaimed by the church, which does not simply awaken the slumbering good in our Volk but also judges the evil” (111)?

In addition to his findings concerning the attitudes of conservative Protestants towards the new Nazi state, Koehne also probes his sources for evidence concerning Christian attitudes towards antisemitism. He finds almost no mention of antisemitic events like the April 1 boycott of Jewish shops, and beyond that, little opposition to the persecution of Jews or other victims of Nazism. Rather, the emphasis among Korntal Pietists was invariably on the role of the Nazi state in working toward national renewal, leaving the spiritual renewal to the churches. They believed Hitler’s state was creating the conditions for spiritual renewal in four ways: 1) by fighting immorality, 2) by promoting a Christian concept of community, 3) by publicly supporting the Christian churches, and 4) by sparking general enthusiasm in German society, a “spring storm” of sentiment (112). Writers in the Korntal Parish Newsletter called on the German Protestant Church to use this enthusiasm to create a national mission (Volksmission) and hoped Christians would enter into and take on leadership roles in the National Socialist movement. In reality, as Koehne notes, the proselytization went the other way, as Nazi values reshaped the Christian churches. He also describes how conservative Protestants viewed the neo-pagan German Faith Movement as a growing threat.

Koehne finds that, in contrast to the Korntal Parish Newsletter, the correspondence among members of the Pastors’ Prayer Group was more circumspect, a mixture of joy and concern. Yes, Hitler was a God-given saviour, but the German Christian Movement, the totalitarian claims of the state, and the growing prevalence of the “racial question” in the Church was disconcerting. Indeed, one member of the group wondered whether the “‘Aryan question’ … was possibly a satanic devise to prevent ‘a genuine awakening’” (115). In terms of antisemitism, Koehne found allusions to the persecution of Jews, but didn’t seem to uncover much material on the “Jewish Question.” In fact, he wonders whether antisemitic measures had any real impact on these pastors or their congregations and concludes that their “willingness to overlook antisemitic policy” or other “less pleasing” actions of the state (here he is quoting one of the pastors) “meant that they were actively passive, having made a choice to remain passive, to abide” (118).

Overall, the members of the Pastors’ Prayer Group exhibited a mixture of political joy but religious concern. While they saw Hitler as a “God-given Führer” for the nation, they lamented the absence of a “spiritual leader” for German Protestants (119). They worried about the extensive politicization of religion and the growth of a media culture which created a sensory overload and left no room for spiritual reflection. In terms of racial politics, their narrow focus on the national rebirth meant that they found National Socialist antisemitism tolerable. Again, they were “actively passive,” viewing their interests as limited to the ecclesiastical realm and deciding that the positive aspects of National Socialism overwhelmed the negative ones.

In his conclusion, Koehne quotes the Korntal Parish Newsletter’s description of the experience of 1933 like a national-spiritual wave, a return to the high point of 1914 after the low ebb of the Weimar era. Once again, Koehne has demonstrated the complexity of relations between Nazism and Christianity, particularly at the outset of the Third Reich. His conservative Protestants from Württemberg clearly welcomed the new Nazi state and saw themselves as participants in a spiritual revival that ran alongside Hitler’s national revival, as had been the case in earlier moments of national importance, such as 1870 or 1914. Their sense of partnership with the new regime enabled them to ignore the regime’s antisemitism, though the growing politicization of religious life concerned them. Still, in 1933, they expressed “belief in a national revival under the Nazis” and “belief that Nazi Germany was a state in support of religion” (120).

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Letter from the Editors: June 2014

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Letter from the Editors: June 2014

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Dear Friends,

Freising Cathedral, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Freisinger_Dom_aussen_01.jpg.

Freising Cathedral, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Freisinger_Dom_aussen_01.jpg.

Once again I have the privilege of introducing a new issue of reviews and notes on contemporary church history in Germany and Europe. This issue features two themes: Bavarian Catholicism under the leadership of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber and Nazism as political religion.

The former is treated in an extensive report about a fascinating project to publish a critical edition of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber’s massive diary. This report is courtesy of Dr. Hubert Wolf, one of the project leaders. Complementing the report on the Faulhaber diary is a review by Kevin P. Spicer examining Thomas Forstner’s Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs, an analysis of the identity and culture of Catholic parish clergy in Upper Bavaria from the end of the First World War to the end of the Second World War.

The second theme of political religion is taken up first of all by John S. Conway in his review of the interesting new book by Rainer Bucher, provocatively entitled Hitler’s Theology: A Study in Political Religion. Then, Kyle Jantzen assesses two recent articles by Samual Koehne, who examines the relationship between Nazism and Christianity from both the perspective of the Nazi ideologues and their concept of “Positive Christianity” and from the perspective of conservative Protestants in Württemberg.

Three other reviews round out our issue: Matthew D. Hockenos on an edited volume of “Resistance sermons” and John S. Conway on two wider European matters: church resistance in Norway and the British Archbishop Cosmo Lang.

We hope, as always, that you enjoy the various reviews and other notes on contemporary church history. Feel free to add your comments at the end of the articles. We always welcome feedback and debate on the books and other material we take up in Contemporary Church History Quarterly.

Best wishes in this season of Pentecost.

On behalf of all the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

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15,000 days in the Life of a Bishop: Long-Term Project Prepares an On-Line Edition of the Diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

15,000 days in the Life of a Bishop: Long-Term Project Prepares an On-Line Edition of the Diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich

By Hubert Wolf, University of Münster [1]

Ever since 2012, a corpus of sources has become accessible in the Archdiocesan Archive of Munich and Freising, which historians have long awaited: the diaries of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber (1869-1952), which were predominantly written in a shorthand called “Gabelsberger.” Johannes Waxenberger (1915-2010), the last secretary of the archbishop of Munich and Freising, had taken the diaries – against the archbishop”s testamentary will – and kept them in a cardboard box under his bed for decades. That the cardinal had kept a diary was known to researchers. Waxenberger, however, refused to release the records and only transcribed singular pages of the diaries for the purpose of a few academic studies. It was only in 1999 that he concluded an agreement with Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, archbishop of Munich until 2008, according to which the diaries were to be restored to the Archiepiscopal See of Munich after his death, which occurred on June 25, 2010.

This longtime-hidden treasure will now be edited by researchers and made accessible online for anyone to view. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved a long-term project for a duration of twelve years, for which the historian Prof Dr. Andreas Wirsching, head of the Institute of Contemporary History (IFZ), and I are responsible. Concise but elaborate annotations will furnish information on the individuals and the most important issues recorded in the diaries. The edition is not only intended for use by historians and theologians, but also by scholars from the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies. Sources edited online are also suitable for the use in university teaching, which the “Critical Online Edition of the Nuncial Reports of Eugenio Pacelli (1917-1929)” in Münster has already proven. The new project will profit from this in many ways. The first texts that Faulhaber wrote during the eventful period from 1917 to 1919, which are of utmost importance for his biography, will be available online by late 2014 at www.faulhaber-edition.de.

A close look behind the scenes of official correspondences

Michael Faulhaber was bishop of Speyer from 1911 to 1917 and archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1917 until his death in 1952. He was of humble birth, being the son of a baker and farmer from the Lower Franconian village of Heidenfeld near Schweinfurt. In 1913, however, he was ennobled and created a cardinal in 1921. Faulhaber was an excellent theologian, an articulate pioneer of political Catholicism, and a champion of Catholic interests. His influence reached far beyond Germany”s borders and those of the Catholic Church. Faulhaber had marvelous connections with the Bavarian people and with the elites of Church, politics, nobility and the media at home and abroad. He was a close friend of Pope Pius XII, but also negotiated with Adolf Hitler, Theodore Roosevelt and Konrad Adenauer. The numerous interlocutors that Faulhaber received day by day came from all social classes. It is especially through his published sermons that he reached a mass audience. Already in his lifetime, church members admired him, but he remained highly controversial, especially due to his stance during the period of National Socialism.

The fact that a representative of the Church wrote down his experiences and thoughts in a detailed diary for over four decades is a stroke of luck for historians. Since the Catholic Church is a “global player” and Faulhaber had excellent foreign contacts, there are various possibilities to approach the issues mentioned in the diaries on an internationally comparative level.

The diaries represent a corpus of sources that is unique in terms of quality and quantity. They have been fully preserved for the period from 1911 to 1952. The diaries consist of 32 volumes in notebook format comprising more than 4,000 pages that primarily contain succinct entries on the individuals Faulhaber met as well as brief summaries of their conversations. In total, Faulhaber recorded about 52,000 visits. These diaries are often referred to as a “visitors’ diary,” in order to distinguish them from other, less comprehensive diaries that Faulhaber kept. He, however, used it also to record information he considered important with regard to his views on key political, social or religious events. Whenever he considered such issues to a greater depth or had particularly important conversations, he added ample supplementary sheets, of which approximately 1,000 have been recorded so far. The average length of a supplementary sheet ranges from one to four pages in octavo. The edition will thus offer a detailed view of approximately 15,000 days of Faulhaber”s life.

According to what is known about him so far, Faulhaber was a great and reliable observer, who mostly wrote soberly, but sometimes used very frank words to phrase his opinions. His records were not only influenced by his own observations and experiences, but also by messages received orally and by letter and by reports from newspapers and radio transmissions. He then enhanced such communication with his own interpretations. The entries are usually brief, being written down shortly after the depicted event had taken place. The notes apparently served him as a sort of reminder, not being intended for publication, which is why Faulhaber had the possibility to write down confidential and maybe even incriminating contents of his conversations.

The source is therefore to be considered a highly authentic relic that was transmitted unintentionally. The private records allow for an exciting view of a church dignitary”s emotional world and behind the scenes of official correspondences and official statements. They complement the corpora of sources already accessible, so that new perspectives and motives for his actions may be discovered, which could so far scarcely be delineated. The diaries represent a key to open up his comprehensive papers and to analyze them from particular perspectives. Ahead of schedule, Cardinal Friedrich Wetter made the larger part of Faulhaber”s papers in the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising available to research in 2002 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death. It is easily accessible, but has only been analyzed rudimentarily. There is no comparable corpus for other important German church representatives.

The supplementary sheets are scattered among Faulhaber’s papers, but many of them emerged recently in the records turned over by Waxenberger. So far, only a few supplementary sheets have been edited by Ludwig Volk (Akten Kardinal Michael von Faulhabers 1917-1945, 2 vol., Mainz 1975/1978). These documents are frequently quoted by researchers and give proof of this source’s potential for historical research. Ludwig Volk saw only a brief selection of the many items Waxenberger withheld from Faulhaber’s papers. It may thus be assumed that those supplementary sheets that are politically charged are only casino online now soon to be made accessible to researchers and the general public.

Gabelsberger Centre of Excellence is to make accessible further archival holdings

The historical analysis of the diaries and supplementary sheets is complicated by the fact that it was only the dates and names of his interlocutors that he wrote down in longhand, as well as geographical, political and ecclesiastical or religious terms, though often in abbreviated form. For the rest he used Gabelsberger, which was the most widespread short hand in Germany before the introduction of the German Unified Shorthand (Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift) in 1924. Today, only few experts know how to decipher Gabelsberger. The long-term project therefore also comprises stenographic training, which pursues the aim of establishing a centre of excellence for shorthand in Munich. This training was financially supported by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, which in general sponsored the preliminary work of the long-term project. With the help of those newly trained experts on the cultural technique of reading Gabelsberger further comprehensive archival holdings will be made accessible to researchers. A survey has revealed that German archives hold ample collections of the nineteenth and twentieth century written in Gabelsberger.

Online edition offers numerous advantages

The online edition aspires to offer a flexible, multidimensional technique of editing, which permits the contemporary display of two textual versions of each diary entry in arbitrary combination: first, the scanned facsimile; second, the precise transcription; and third, an extensive reading version that contains references to supplementary sheets, spelled-out abbreviations, other possible readings and indications of the respective stages. Annotations will appear as pop-ups. The database-based online edition offers numerous advantages compared to a printed volume:

(1) Accessibility: the project supports the principle of Open Access. The diaries and the supplementary sheets will be accessible all over the world, for free and comparably fast and easy.

(2) Efficiency: an online edition is considerably more low-priced and resource-efficient, especially given the amplitude of sources.

(3) Flexibility and velocity: the texts and the pertaining annotations are to be uploaded in sections – and thereby accessible more quickly. Moreover, particularly interesting parts of various years can be transcribed and made accessible online together with the respective supplementary sheets, even before the other documents of that particular year are transcribed and all supplementary sheets have been retrieved. Belated additions and modifications are not a problem, for instance in case further relevant documents are found among Faulhaber”s comprehensive papers.

(4) Transparency and meticulousness: an online edition offers the opportunity to mark cases of doubt as well as various readings more thoroughly than a traditional print edition. This is a huge advantage considering the complexity of the material”s content and the difficulties that are to be expected when deciphering Gabelsberger. The multidimensional technique of editing allows for excellent attention to detail as well as for legibility.

(5) Linking possibilities: the documents in the database can be linked with each other, but also with external corpora of sources, such as image or audio files.

(6) User-friendliness: among the most important advantages of the online edition are the comprehensive search options, the possibility to copy the texts easily and the multi-linking with the entries in the biographical as well as in the keyword databases. Moreover, online editions are comparably easy to analyze from a statistic point of view, which may raise new questions, e.g. as far as writing processes and the development of terminologies are concerned.

(7) Interactivity: online editions make it easier for users to forward advice and recommendations to the project team. There is going to be a contact form on the website of the Faulhaber-edition.

The online edition is based on software called “DENQ” (Digital edition of contemporary sources), which was developed by Dr. Jörg Hörnschemeyer from the German Historical Institute (DHI) in Rome in cooperation with the DHI London. The IFZ assumes the hosting of the database and of the website as well as of the project”s internal server platform, which contains a protected area. Long-term storage is secured within the frame of the Institute”s close cooperation with the Bavarian State Library.

State of research and possible questions

The biographical literature on Faulhaber”s fellow bishops is not very broad yet. Nonetheless, it offers a basis to compare what is representative and what is specific of Faulhaber”s biography. Neither a biography based on source material nor partial biographies of Munich”s spiritual leader have been published so far. A history of the archdiocese of Munich and Freising in the first half of the twentieth century is missing as well.

What is more, the edition is going to be illuminating on many fundamental questions of Germany’s and Europe’s history. In his notes, Faulhaber reported on the German Empire, the First World War, the Bavarian Soviet Republic and the Weimar Republic, the Nazi dictatorship and the occupation period as well as on the beginnings of the Federal Republic of Germany. This period saw several surges of secularization and re-confessionalization as well as fundamental theological developments. Many questions that Faulhaber was confronted with are still current today, and essential for the self-understanding of the Catholic Church.

Faulhaber”s diaries and the pertaining supplementary sheets are of particular interest as far as several fundamental issues are concerned, which are in various ways interlinked: the relationship of religion and politics, especially that of the Catholic Church and the “Third Reich,” the relationships with other religions and confessions, and the Church”s structures and networks. Moreover, it is concerned with questions of cultural, religious, and theological history and deals with issues such as emotions and piety.

The interdisciplinary team of the long-term project began its work on October 31, 2013 and cooperates closely with Dr Peter Pfister, director of the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising. Members are Dr. Erich Ruff, an expert on Gabelsberger, Dr. Philipp Gahn, a Catholic theologian, Dr. Peer Oliver Volkmann, a historian, Matthias Bornschlegel, a computer scientist, and Carina Knorz and Franziska Nicolay, graduate students, who will critically examine the diaries in their dissertations.

Links related to the project:

Hubert Wolf: http://www.uni-muenster.de/FB2/personen/mnkg/seminar/wolf.html

Andreas Wirsching: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/andreas-wirsching/

Edition der Nuntiaturberichte Eugenio Pacellis: http://www.pacelli-edition.de/

Jörg Hörnschemeyer: http://dhi-roma.it/team.html

Peter Pfister: http://www.erzbistum-muenchen.de/Page005788.aspx

Erich Ruff: http://www.erichruff.gmxhome.de/

Philipp Gahn: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/philipp-gahn/

Peer Oliver Volkmann: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/peer-oliver-volkmann/

Matthias Bornschlegel: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/matthias-bornschlegel/

Carina Knorz: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/carina-knorz/

Franziska Nicolay: http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/das-institut/mitarbeiterinnen/ea/mitarbeiter/franziska-nicolay/

 

[1] I would like to thank Elisabeth-Marie Richter for translating the present article and Holger Arning for his contributions to the concept of the text.

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