Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 4 (December 2019)

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

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 4 (December 2019)

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

By Christina Matzen, University of Toronto

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 4 (December 2019)

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

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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