Category Archives: Volume 25 Number 1 (March 2019)

Letter from the Editors (March 2019)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Letter from the Editors (March 2019)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

I am pleased to introduce you to our latest collection of reviews and informative notes relating to the history of German and European religious history in late-modern history. As we launch the 25th volume of Contemporary Church History Quarterly, the journal remains an important forum for the dissemination of information and commentary on this important history. The issues and events our editors and guest contributors write about remain relevant in our current age of turmoil over identity, exclusion, and the role of religion in politics and society.

Members of the Canadian Royal 22e Regiment, in audience with Pope Pius XII, following the 1944 Liberation of Rome. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This March 2019 issue of CCHQ has taken longer to produce because of various academic conferences and other commitments of the editors. The delay does give us the opportunity, however, of recognizing the important announcement of March 2, by which Pope Francis declared that the Vatican Secret Archives pertaining to the pontificate of Pope Pius XII would open to researchers beginning on March 2, 2020. According to Francis, Pius XII guided the Roman Catholic Church “in one of the saddest and darkest moments of the twentieth century.” He added: “The Church is not afraid of history. On the contrary, she loves it, and desires to love it more and better, as God loves it.”

News agencies, editorialists, church leaders, scholars, and institutions around the world quickly responded to the Pope’s announcement. As United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Director Sara J. Bloomfield put it, “Since the end of World War II, scholars, Holocaust survivors, and others have asked important questions about the role of the Vatican and Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust…. It is long overdue for speculation to be replaced by rigorous scholarship, which is only possible once scholars have full access to all of these records.”

It will no doubt be some years before we learn whether or not access to a fuller archival record of Pius’ pontificate resolves the deeply divided views about his response (or non-response) to the Holocaust.

In the meantime, we have a variety of new book reviews, article notes, and other news for you. Leading off is Robert P. Ericksen’s review of Matthew Hockenos’s important new biography of one of the most important figures in the “German Church Struggle” and postwar German Protestantism, Pastor Martin Niemöller. Other reviews move forward and backward in time: Andrew Chandler assesses Roger Newell’s investigation of and reflection on the role of Protestants in Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche in the 1989 Revolution, while Kevin Spicer considers Jeffrey T. Zalar’s study of Roman Catholic lay reading habits in nineteenth-century Germany and Kyle Jantzen reviews Beth A. Griech-Polelle’s new introductory textbook on antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Other contributions touch on a variety of topics. Victoria J. Barnett considers two articles on twentieth-centuries challenges to the notion of “Christian civilization” in Europe, then tackles another on the role of nationalism in the thinking of Protestant theologians Paul Althaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Beth A. Griech-Polelle unpacks Thomas Brodie’s recent article on German Catholics in the Second World War. Alongside these article notes, we offer a translated excerpt from Manfred Gailus’s new book on the outspoken Reformed theologian Helmut Hesse, who died in Dachau in 1943 on account of his opposition to Jewish persecution. Finally, Rebecca Carter-Chand reports on the recent 49th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, held in early March at the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas.

We wish you the best as you read this latest issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly, and look forward to bringing you more articles, reviews, and notes in June.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

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

Reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

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

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

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

By Kevin P. Spicer, Stonehill College

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

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

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article Note: Challenges to “Christian Civilization” across Europe

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Article Note: Challenges to “Christian Civilization” across Europe

Paul Hanebrink, “European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?” Journal of Contemporary History 53, no. 3 (2017), 622-43.

Thomas Mittmann, “The Lasting Impact of the ‘Sociological Moment’ on the Churches’ Discourse of ‘Secularization’ in West Germany,” Journal of Religion in Europe 9 (2016), 157-776.

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

In the late 1930s the European landscape was roiled by the events in Nazi Germany, the Spanish Civil War, the unfolding terror in the Soviet Union, and the continued repercussions of the political and territorial shift that had followed the end of the First World War. European and North American church leaders were alarmed by the implications of these developments for the institutional church and for clergy, members of religious orders, theological faculties, and laypeople. The sheer scope of what was happening seemed to portend something more ominous: a transnational “Kulturkampf,” a seismic shift that threatened the foundations of what church leaders viewed as “Christian civilization.” Although in the early twentieth century Catholic and Protestant church leaders viewed the rise of Communism as the foremost “secular” threat, by the 1930s the threat seemed more complex and diffuse.

In his 2006 book In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890-1944, Hanebrink skillfully explored dynamics in Hungary. This article is an equally expert treatment of (primarily) Protestant responses to multiple crises that included the imprisonment and murders of Catholic clergy and members of religious orders in Spain, the growing pressures on the churches in Nazi Germany, and the debates within the international Protestant ecumenical movement as it sought to address the complexities of the German Church Struggle. Hanebrink offers three very different case studies from 1937 of battles against (and perceptions of) secularism and totalitarianism: in Nazi Germany, in an alliance between Catholics and Protestants in Hungary, and at the July 1937 Oxford ecumenical conference in England.

He begins with helpful background. The nineteenth-century “culture wars” had been framed largely in the context of church-state issues. During the 1920s the Russian revolution and its anti-church measures, as well as the emergence of left-wing political parties critical of the churches, led Protestants and Catholics to focus on Bolshevism and “secularism” as the new enemy. In the process the antisemitism already embedded in western culture was drawn into these new critiques: for their role in the processes of emancipation and assimilation Jews were accused of promoting a wider “secularism”, and they were also linked to Bolshevism.

By the 1930s such attitudes led many German Protestants to support National Socialism because of its anti-Bolshevism, and they were an impetus for Christians elsewhere in Europe to align themselves with the fascist movement. In contrast to this, Protestants involved in European ecumenism viewed fascism and National Socialism as new forms of “secularism” that contradicted and undermined the “Christian” values of individual freedom, conscience and human rights. These understandings, in turn, would shape the early post-1945 framing of these issues in the Cold War, in which the threat of “godless Communism” became the primary example of the dangers of “secularism.”

Hanebrink’s transnational approach is very useful for such analysis. As he notes, most studies of Protestantism during this period of European history draw on individual national case studies but don’t look comparatively across Europe. Hanebrink’s first case study examines the 1937 attempt in Hungary between Protestants and Catholics to form an anti-Communist alliance, building on a shared language and self-understanding of Christian culture, belief, and nationality. There was even an attempt by a Jewish author to encourage a broader religious alliance against totalitarianism and “godlessness.” This went nowhere; throughout Europe, the evils of Bolshevism were usually linked to a perceived “Jewish materialism and secularism.” The Hungarian case, however, offers a revealing look at a coalition that altered Christian understandings there of the “religious-secular conflict.”

The intersection of anti-Communism and antisemitism was pervasive in the German Evangelical Church as well. An additional complication was the German Kirchenkampf, the internal battles within German Protestantism that began in 1933 over the attempted nazification of that church and the theological extremism of the Deutsche Christen. The Confessing Church emerged in opposition to these attempts, particularly over the efforts to introduce a church “Aryan law” that would affect the inclusion, baptism, and ordination of “non-Aryan Christians” in the church. As Hanebrink notes, “the widespread conflation of anti-Bolshevism and antisemitism” added an additional level of complexity to these internal church debates. Many in the Confessing Church shared the anti-Bolshevism and the antisemitism of their compatriots and leaders, and over time these sentiments undermined the initially strong support for Christians of Jewish descent. This was also a factor in tempering the Confessing Church’s public criticism of the Nazi state. Nonetheless, while anti-Communism (and, I would argue, German nationalism) was a unifying factor throughout the church, the theological divisions and the church-state issues that emerged in the Kirchenkampf remained significant and are worth further analysis in any study of discourse about “secularism” in this instance.

Much of this became evident in the events surrounding Hanebrink’s third case study: the July 1937 conference in Oxford, England, of the ecumenical (Protestant) Universal Christian Council for Life and Work, which focused largely on the events in Nazi Germany. The Oxford meeting convened only a few months after the public reading from German Catholic pulpits of the March 1937 papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge and the Gestapo’s widespread confiscation of that encyclical in response. Delegates at Oxford were well aware of these developments, although there were, of course, no Catholic delegates present. (While there were unofficial communications during that era between Protestant ecumenists and some Catholic leaders, only after the Second Vatican Council was there official Catholic representation at Protestant ecumenical meetings).

For the German Evangelical Church, it was an equally volatile moment in the ongoing internal battles between the official church leadership and the Confessing Church. Shortly before the Oxford conference, Pastor Martin Niemoeller had been arrested. Niemoeller (described by US ecumenist Henry Leiper in 1933 as the new “Martin Luther”) had become the international symbol of the church opposition to Hitler. Moreover, in advance of Oxford, the Confessing Church had insisted that it be invited as the sole representative of the German Church. The ecumenical position since the beginning of the Kirchenkampf had been to maintain ties to all factions in the German Evangelical Church, and this was the moment when the Confessing Church—already itself deeply divided and alarmed by the escalation of state pressure—angrily abandoned its efforts to represent the German churches ecumenically (the pre-Oxford argument about this led Dietrich Bonhoeffer to resign as youth secretary of the ecumenical World Alliance). Ironically, shortly before the Oxford meeting, the German government blocked representatives of the official GEC church from attending the meeting, and so only individual German delegates were present.

Ecumenical leaders at the Oxford conference addressed the persecution of Jews in Germany very differently than did their colleagues who came from in a non-ecumenical context. The persecution of the Jews was understood (and condemned) as a terrible symptom of secularism, and ecumenical solidarity with the Jews as victims was combined with an outspoken critique of totalitarianism. To some degree this perspective had been shaped by the viewpoints of North American delegates and their activism on issues of race and prejudice in the United States, but I would add that even during the 1920s the ecumenical movement interpreted Communism, fascism, and the nationalism emerging in Germany as manifestations of a dangerous kind of “secularism” and was using the language of human rights that became more explicitly framed at Oxford. In 1937, the ecumenical language about nationalism, totalitarianism, and the treatment of the persecution of the Jews was entirely consistent with that of previous ecumenical gatherings beginning with the fall 1933 meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, and it was notably different from how these issues were addressed in other European contexts.

Hanebrink’s important article illustrates why the diversity within European Protestantism—historically, nationally, culturally, and institutionally—makes it far more difficult than in the Catholic case to draw a coherent picture of the Protestant reactions to the turbulent historical events of the twentieth century, both before and after 1945. In framing the very different understandings of and responses to the threat of secularism, totalitarianism, and Communism, he shows that “there was more than one Protestant culture war.”

In an article focused on the post-1945 dynamics in West Germany, Thomas Mittmann picks up where Hanebrink leaves off, and many of his observations are helpful continuities of the discussion begun in Hanebrink’s article. Tracing developments in both Catholic and Protestant churches, Mittmann delineates three phases of “secularization discourse” in postwar Germany. The first, from 1945 to the late 1950s, emerged in the immediate aftermath of Nazism and its collapse. Seeking to regain their standing in the aftermath of Nazism, Christians in Germany longed for a religious revival; as the Cold War intensified this discourse became naturally aligned with anti-Communism. The second phase, beginning in the 1960s, brought a “theologization” of “secularization”: a theological discourse that increasingly embraced secularization as part of a new political awareness about the churches’ role in the modern world (along with a more explicit rejection of the churches’ failures under National Socialism). The third phase occurred in what Mittmann terms the “sociological moment” of the 1970s-1980s. Theological language was downplayed as the churches adapted to an increasingly secularized society, and the very significance of the “religious” vs. the “secular” was redefined. Although Mittmann doesn’t discuss the changes on the German church landscape after 1989, one could extend this third phase, I think, into the post-unification era and the dramatic shift in religious demographics and church membership.

The German churches’ process of navigating these discourses was theological as well as political, and Mittmann does a fine job of describing the role of Catholic and Protestant theologians like Dorothee Soelle and Karl Rahner in framing the discourse of their respective eras (even, in the case of someone like Soelle, bridging several eras). Particularly in the early postwar period, “secularization” was a “transformational term…that bundled church-political concerns and aspirations.” It also drew the lines of internal church debates between those who viewed secularization negatively in terms of church decline and those who saw it as a necessary opening for the church in the modern world.

By the 1960s, secularization was viewed more positively. Particularly in the Protestant churches, there was already a body of theological work by figures such as Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who had framed such processes as positive and necessary renewals of the church—in Bonhoeffer’s case, in his embrace of a “this-worldly Christianity.” In this second phase, Catholic and Protestant theologians called upon the church to renew itself and address the world in affirmation. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council Catholic theologians like Johann Baptist Metz encouraged a similar movement, describing “worldliness” as part of the “inner-historical power” of Christ.

This embrace of a new position in the modern world occurred in conjunction with a new self-identification of church as social and political actor. German Catholic and Protestant churches and their agencies became more openly involved in political causes like the environmental and peace movements. There were also liturgical and church policy reforms. All this fed into the “sociological moment” in which church leaders and laypeople alike arrived at a very different understanding of what the church represented, what it meant to be Christian, and what it meant to have faith in the modern world.

Mittmann offers a fascinating examination of the rise during the 1970s of Islam in Germany and the challenges this development posed, particularly for the Protestant church. Suddenly a trend that the churches had viewed positively was viewed by the Muslim minority as an exclusionary method of establishing boundaries against the immigrant population. Having acclimated religion and its institutions to a modern society, German churches were now confronted by the phenomenon of a “religiosity” that did not want to integrate. Christian “secularity” was understood as supportive of the structures of modern liberal democracy; Muslims were expected to conform and revise the public expression of their religious life accordingly. Since the 1980s, Mittmann observes, the pendulum has begun to swing the other way (a development evident in the United States as well). There is now talk of a “post-secular” society and there are new theological exchanges between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Germany.

It is interesting to read both these articles from our vantage point in 2019. With the resurgence of conservative evangelical Christianity on the larger stage of world Christianity today—affecting not just churches in North American and Europe, but in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—“secularization” is once again viewed negatively by large sectors of the Christian world, with profound implication not just for understandings of Christian doctrine but with respect to church engagement in political issues. There are similar fault lines in Judaism and Islam. These articles by Hanebrink and Mittmann are important reminders that in any era terms like “secularization,” “religion” and even “Christianity” are fluid and subjective, driven by different cultural and political presuppositions and used for different ends.

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

 

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Article Note: Thomas Brodie, “Between ‘National Community’ and ‘Milieu’: German Catholics at War, 1939-1945”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Article Note: Thomas Brodie, “Between ‘National Community’ and ‘Milieu’: German Catholics at War, 1939-1945,” Contemporary European History 26 no. 3 (August 2017): 421-440.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

Thomas Brodie’s examination of German Catholics in the Rhineland and Westphalia from 1939-1945 offers a challenge to arguments presented by both the “Volksgemeinschaft” (“National Community”) paradigm and the analysis which argues for a Catholic subculture sealed off from the dominant Protestant majority. Brodie’s analysis reveals that neither the explanation that Catholics were living in a hermetically sealed “milieu”, separated from the Third Reich and its supporters, nor the presentation of a homogenous “National Community” with all Catholics going along with Nazi propaganda are accurate portrayals capturing the everyday lived experiences of Rhenish-Westphalian Catholics. Instead, Brodie presents readers with a much more nuanced and complex examination of Catholic loyalties, mentalities, and influences acting upon them. He argues that Catholics’ membership in the Volksgemeinschaft as well as their participation in the Catholic milieu subculture of the region contributed to a wide range of opinions, effectively curbing church-state conflict during the war years.

One of the main issues for Catholics living in the Rhineland-Westphalia region was the question of loyalty. Could Catholics be loyal to the Hitler State while simultaneously thinking of themselves as “good Catholics”? For many Nazi Party members, who were also practicing Catholics, the answer was a clear and emphatic “yes.” Brodie’s article explores the compatibility of religious identity with Nazi ideology for Catholics who were negotiating the complexities of living in a dictatorship that demanded undivided loyalty. For those Catholics who were perhaps not ardent Nazi Party members, Brodie finds that younger Catholic clergy were interested in combining their Catholicism with the Volksgemeinschaft in order to place their Church firmly into the “National Community.” Older clergy tended to maintain a stricter sense of church hierarchy and more traditional neo-Scholastic teachings. For many lay people, navigating a course between the practice of their Catholic faith and their participation in the Third Reich reveals the growing tensions in German society as the war years intensified.

What Brodie’s research offers is a much more complex, nuanced understanding of issues related to the concept of the Volksgemeinschaft, particularly as his research aims to address confessional identities whereas most works on the “National Community” ignore the role of religious beliefs. His work examines the minor conflicts which arose between local government and Church officials in the region. He tracks the decline of support for the Nazi regime among Catholic lay people as the war turned against Germany yet Brodie also highlights areas of ideological overlap between Catholics and National Socialists. Here he is able to demonstrate effectively how Catholics could incorporate traditional nationalistic language with Catholic devotion, thereby bringing their faith and support for the war effort into greater alignment. Brodie argues that Catholic laity, in particular, often criticized religious leaders if they were seen as being too harsh or too critical of the regime during its difficult years.

Brodie concludes with an examination of popular Catholic attitudes towards the Jews and their persecution. In this, he sees the co-mingling of both Catholic teachings about divine punishment as well as Nazi regime propaganda arguing that Germany’s fate was linked to the destruction of the Jews. Finally, what emerges is a much more complex understanding of Catholic reactions to church-state conflict underscoring the intermixing of both Catholic religious subculture and Nazi Volksgemeinschaft influences.

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Book Note: Against the Mainstream of the Hitler Era: The Wuppertal Reformed Theologian Helmut Hesse (1916-1943)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Book Note: Against the Mainstream of the Hitler Era: The Wuppertal Reformed Theologian Helmut Hesse (1916-1943)

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

The following is an excerpt from Manfred Gailus’ book Gegen den Mainstream der Hitlerzeit: Der Wuppertaler Theologe Helmut Hesse (1916–1943) (Bremen/Wuppertal: de Noantri, 2018), published on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the death of the Reformed Theologian Helmut Hesse, November 24, 2018.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, or Sophie Scholl enjoy today an at least moderately interested following. But who knows the young Elberfeld theologian Helmut Hesse, who was arrested 75 years ago for his courageous preaching for persecuted Jews and imprisoned Confessing Christians and who died on November 24, 1943, at the age of 27, in the Dachau concentration camp? In 1980, in a vivid appreciation of Hesse’s fate, Günther van Norden bemoaned the fact that Hesse’s name had been forgotten and his courageous struggle was almost unknown in his community.

Hesse was born in Bremen in 1916 and grew up in Elberfeld (today Wuppertal) as the youngest son of the renowned Reformed theologian Hermann Albert Hesse. Like his three brothers, he studied theology from 1935 on and actively participated in the conflicts of the church struggle during his student years. He was significantly influenced by Karl Barth, with whom he studied two semesters (1937-38) in Basel. In March 1938, he undertook a visiting mission to Austria and Hungary on behalf of the Confessing Church (BK), along with his close friend Ruth Wendland, a Berlin pastor’s daughter and theology student. The two travelers were eyewitnesses to the “Anschluss” of Austria to Hitler’s German Reich. Hesse vividly described the experiences in a travel journal. The overall impression of the two young theologians must have been depressing—partly, as Hesse states, the Austrian Protestant congregations knew little of the German church struggle, and partly, the opportunistic backing of the German Christian church governments and the Nazi regime dominated.

In February 1940, Hesse completed his first theological examination before the board of examiners of the Rhenish Council of Brethren (BK). Subsequently, Hesse vehemently rejected the “legalization agreement” concluded by the Council of the Rhenish Confessing Church with the consistory in Dusseldorf in June 1941, which provided for future examinations of BK parish candidates by the consistory. He saw in it a deviation from the spirit of the confessional synods of Barmen and Dahlem (1934). Tragically, the gap between Hesse and the Rhenish BK leadership widened during these years (1941-43) to the breaking point. In the spring of 1943, there was a singular event in the Elberfeld Reformed parish: a council not authorized by the leadership of the BK examined the young pastoral candidate and, in the church service that followed, Helmut Hesse was ordained by his father Hermann Albert Hesse as a “servant of the Word in the Reformed Church, according to God’s Word.”

Helmut Hesse served for a short time as a preacher in the Reformed parish of Elberfeld. On May 23 and June 6, 1943, together with his father, he led the services for that circle in the parish which remained faithful to the two Hesses, in spite of all the quarrels. In the invocation on May 23, the persecuted Jews were remembered. In his sermon on the resurrection of Lazarus (John 10:39-11:57), the young Hesse spoke critically about church politics, including the compromising behavior of the BK. During the intercessory prayer, the names of imprisoned Christians such as Martin Niemöller, Heinrich Grüber and Katharina Staritz were read out. One week later, large parts of Wuppertal-Barmen were reduced to rubble and ruin during night bombing raids. The service on June 6 was dedicated to this catastrophe. Father Hermann Albert Hesse saw the ruined Wuppertal “under the mighty judgment of God.” As in previous sermons, Helmut Hesse addressed the “Jewish question” and talked about it in a way that probably happened nowhere else during a worship service in the “Third Reich”: “As Christians, we can no longer bear that the Church in Germany is silent about the persecution of the Jews. What drives us is the simple commandment to love one’s neighbour. The Jewish question is a gospel question and not a political question. The church has to resist every antisemitism in the community. In contrast to the state, the church must testify to the salvific significance of Israel and put up resistance against any attempt to annihilate Judaism. In Germany today, every non-Aryan, whether Jew or Christian, is one fallen among the murderers.” In his unusually courageous words, Hesse leaned on formulations from the so-called “Letter from Munich Laity,” written by pastor Hermann Diem of Stuttgart. The report of the Gestapo, which recorded this sermon, concluded that the approximately 150 visitors on this evening were visibly impressed by the preacher’s remarks.

Two days later, the Gestapo arrested father and son Hesse. As the basis for detention, they named “anti-state attitudes” and repeated public prayer for the Jews. After extensive interrogations, the Gestapo summed up the charges against Helmut Hesse as follows: in intercessory prayers, he had read out the names of the imprisoned pastors, which was forbidden; he spoke in prayer against the authorities, that is, the current government; he also prayed for the Jews; finally, on June 6, he made public statements on the Jewish problem in a manner derogatory to the state. His comments on the “Jewish question” are offenses against §2 of the Treachery Act (Heimtückegesetz).

After months of imprisonment in Wuppertal, father and son Hesse were transferred in November 1943 to the Dachau concentration camp. By this point, Helmut Hesse was severely weakened from long-term detention and the withdrawal of essential medicine. He died on November 24, 1943, in a hospital barrack in the Dachau concentration camp.

There were not many Protestants who, as contemporaries in the “Third Reich”, on the recognizable road to disaster, protested and joined the Christian resistance. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one of them; the “non-Aryan” lawyer Friedrich Weißler, who was murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in February 1937, is one of them; the Breslau city vicar Katharina Staritz, with her commitment to the Christians of Jewish origin, and the Berlin historian Elisabeth Schmitz, with her early memorandum of 1935/36 against the persecution of the Jews, are included; and finally, the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl in Munich. This list also includes the Elberfeld protesting Protestant Helmut Hesse. Anyone who surveys Protestants in Germany today and asks about Helmut Hesse will generally hear the answer: we do not know! The time is ripe for today’s Protestants to include the life and work of Helmut Hesse in their memory and in their commemorative culture. In Wuppertal, where, in memory of the Barmen Theological Declaration, a monument was erected in a prominent place in the city in honour of the First Confessing Church Synod, one day a monument remembering the young Reformed preacher Helmut Hesse, who died in the Dachau concentration camp at the age of 27, will have to stand next to it.

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Article Note: David Robinson and Ryan Tafilowski, “Conflict and Concession: Nationality in the Pastorate for Althaus and Bonhoeffer”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Article Note: David Robinson and Ryan Tafilowski, “Conflict and Concession: Nationality in the Pastorate for Althaus and Bonhoeffer,” Scottish Journal of Theology 70, no. 2 (May 2017): 127-46.

By Victoria J. Barnett, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum*

Paul Althaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer are generally understood to be at opposite ends of the theological and political spectrum during the Nazi era. Althaus interpreted Lutheran theology to support a volkisch understanding of church, leading him to welcome the rise of the Nazi state. Bonhoeffer’s early opposition to such interpretations was the beginning of the path that ended with his resistance and execution by the Nazis.

There were some interesting parallels between the two during the late 1920s, however, and that is the focus of this article. At a historical moment when Germans were searching for a new kind of national community, both Althaus and Bonhoeffer wrote works about the nature of the church as community: Althaus’ Communio Sanctorum: Die Gemeinde im lutherischen Kirchengedanken (1929) and Bonhoeffer’s dissertation Sanctorum Communio: Eine dogmatische Untersuchung zur Soziologie der Kirche, which was published in 1930. Bonhoeffer was preparing his dissertation for publication just as the Althaus book came out, so he could not have read it, and in any case, the two drew different conclusions about the community of the church in a way that presaged their subsequent divisions during the Kirchenkampf. For Althaus, the church had to be an expression of the national community and its traditions. In contrast, Bonhoeffer understood the community of the church theologically and Christologically, as the place where the risen Christ was proclaimed in the world, an understanding that was inherently transnational.

Both also served pastorates in the late 1920s in expatriate German settings (Althaus in Poland; Bonhoeffer in Spain). The authors contend that their respective experiences in these expatriate settings led each man to a deepened sense of national German identity and the development of a “competitive philosophy of history that would come to form a fundamental element of National Socialist ideology.” There are some problems here, the main one being the attempt to draw extensive comparative conclusions despite the relative paucity of evidence about this aspect in Bonhoeffer’s thought. While the development of Paul Althaus’ nationalist theology is well-documented, the primary evidence in the case of Bonhoeffer consists of one 1929 lecture, “Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic,” delivered when Bonhoeffer was serving the parish in Barcelona.

That lecture is indeed nationalistic, speaking of the inevitability of conflict between different peoples, describing ethics “as a matter of blood and a matter of history,” and declaring that there is a “German ethic.” I would add there were other signs during the 1920s that Bonhoeffer was drawn for a time toward nationalism, joining a conservative nationalist (and antisemitic) fraternity and briefly participating in military exercises in the Schwarze Reichswehr. One lecture does not constitute an “expatriate theology” of nationality, however, and there are enough critical texts by Bonhoeffer during that same period to suggest caution. As the authors acknowledge, by the early 1930s Bonhoeffer was espousing pacifism, giving anti-war lectures in the United States, and criticizing the increasingly nationalist theological tone among German theologians, including their misinterpretation of Luther’s concept of “orders of creation” to justify ethno-nationalist policies. Notably, in 1931 Bonhoeffer directly challenged Althaus when the latter attacked the ecumenical movement.

The authors also note the “troubling ambivalence” of both thinkers with regard to the 1933 debates about how the church should respond to the “Jewish question.” They provide a comparative analysis of Althaus’ 1933 Erlangen Gutachten in support of a church Aryan paragraph and Bonhoeffer’s 1933 essays “The Church and the Jewish Question” and “Theses on the Aryan paragraph in the Church,” which opposed the Aryan paragraph. While Althaus and Bonhoeffer arrived at opposing conclusions about the acceptability of the Aryan paragraph, both treated the “Jewish question” as a problem that the state and church would have to address, and Bonhoeffer’s anti-Jewish paragraph in “The Church and the Jewish Question” is particularly problematic. Clearly their respective understandings of the church’s relationship to state and nation shaped how both Althaus and Bonhoeffer addressed the 1933 debates, and just as clearly at this stage, Bonhoeffer was still working through his theological approach to these issues.

Despite what to my mind are some over-generalized conclusions, this article is worth reading. As the authors correctly note, Bonhoeffer scholars have tended to dismiss the nationalism of the Barcelona lecture as well as the problematic aspects of Bonhoeffer’s 1933 “Church and the Jewish Question” and his “Theses on the Aryan paragraph in the Church.” These difficult texts, however, pose challenges that need to be addressed historically and theologically, and for that reason it is useful to compare and contrast Bonhoeffer with figures like Althaus. Since in recent years there has been a revived interest in understanding Bonhoeffer’s approach to Lutheran theology, this article opens up some important areas for further examination by scholars, particularly with regard to where and why Bonhoeffer disagreed with the pre-eminent Lutheran scholar of his day.

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

 

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Conference Report: 49th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Conference Report: 49th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches

Rebecca Carter-Chand, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The 49th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches took place March 2-4, 2019. Hosted by the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, this year’s conference theme was “Conflicting Realities of the Holocaust.” Although the conference has evolved over the years to include topics and themes far beyond “the Churches,” it has retained its commitment to interfaith dialogue and reconciliation. This year several papers dealt with issues of religion and related topics, such as rescue, humanitarian aid, and antisemitism.

Mark Roseman’s keynote address examined the Bund (Gemeinschaft für ein sozialistisches Leben), a small German life-reform group that was committed to self-improvement through communal life and education. The fascinating talk was based on his forthcoming book, Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany, and offered a new theoretical model for conceptualizing small acts of assistance, solidarity, and resistance in the context of networks and small groups. During the Nazi years the Bund offered solidarity and assistance to persecuted Jews. Yet Roseman questioned any easy labels, probing the members’ intent, and emphasizing that their lived experience was characterized more by fear of total war rather than of Nazi authorities.

Five scholars whose names will be familiar to readers of the CCHQ offered a nuanced and erudite panel on Christians, Jews, and Judaism. Chaired by Beth Griech-Polelle, the panel addressed different cases of Protestants and Catholics in the 1930s and 40s understood their relationship with Jews and Judaism. Christopher Probst offered a much-needed critical examination of Protestant theologian Adolf Schlatter. Suzanne Brown-Fleming analyzed a collection of correspondence from ‘non-Aryan’ Catholics to the Vatican in the second half of 1938, highlighting these Catholics’ feelings of abandonment and desperation. Kyle Jantzen showcased new research he has done in collaboration with one of his students on the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a dispensationalist evangelical denomination in Canada and the United States. Matthew Hockenos’ paper explored Martin Niemöller and the ‘Jewish Question’ after 1945, emphasizing the change in Niemöller’s thinking over time.

Other papers of interest to this journal included Eileen Groth Lyon’s contextualization of memoirs of priests who had been in Dachau, Kelly Palmer’s investigation of the American Friends Service Committee’s work in France, and Rebecca Carter-Chand’s comparison of the Salvation Army’s assistance to Jews in several western European countries.

This conference, more than some others, offers a platform for scholars at all career stages – this openness has the potential to be its strength going forward. Graduate students presented and senior scholars, such as Martin Rumscheidt, Henry Knight, and David Patterson, offered personal reflections based on their long and distinguished careers in the field. But generational shifts are underway and the future trajectory of the conference is not entirely clear. As the conference organizers look toward next year’s 50th anniversary, they are faced with challenges and opportunities in encouraging the future of Holocaust research.

 

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