Review of Matthias Grünzig, Für Deutschtum und Vaterland. Die Potsdamer Garnisonkirche im 20. Jahrhundert

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 2 (June 2018)

Review of Matthias Grünzig, Für Deutschtum und Vaterland. Die Potsdamer Garnisonkirche im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Metropol, 2017). Pp. 383. ISBN: 978-3-86331-296-1.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

Für Deutschtum und Vaterland is an unusual and unusually important book. Its author, Matthias Grünzig, is a journalist, but the meticulous and resourceful research makes the book a significant contribution to historical scholarship. Its topic is the past—specifically the history of the Garrison Church in Potsdam from the end of World War I to its final demolition in Walter Ulbricht’s German Democratic Republic—but it constitutes a major intervention into recent debates over plans to rebuild the Garrison Church. As an activist effort, the book cannot be judged a success: Grünzig’s introduction is dated “March 2017,” and construction at the site officially began at the end of October 2017. But as a work of scholarship—if the goal of “scholarship” is to inform, enlighten, surprise, and inspire critical reflection—it succeeds brilliantly. Anyone who cares about the history of Christianity, the German past, church-military relations, the architecture of Potsdam, or the politics of public memory should read this book.

Grünzig’s central question is about a building. What was the place of Potsdam’s Garrison Church in twentieth-century Germany? His answer is striking and sobering. Over a fifty-year period, the Garrison Church was the site of nationalist, National Socialist, military, and militaristic activity. Members of the congregation from Imperial Germany to the last days of Hitler’s regime loudly supported those causes, and the Protestant clergy, many of them military chaplains or veterans, promoted them from the pulpit. The church building was the site of memorials, rallies, processions, and ceremonies—to commemorate the Battle of Sedan, to mourn ten years since the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, to honor the anniversary of the death of Friedrich II, and to bless the banners of the Hitler Youth. It was both a symbol of an aggressive Fatherland and itself a force in creating and empowering that version of Germany.

Grünzig’s book is organized in three main sections: the Garrison Church in the Weimar Republic, the Garrison Church in the Nazi Era, and the Garrison Church after 1945. Between the first two parts, a pivotal segment explores “The Day of Potsdam,” March 21, 1933. Each section is illuminating—every reader, whether an expert on the German churches or a novice in the field, will learn something new—and each section also brings surprises.

Among the shocks in the discussion of the Weimar Republic is the extent to which the Garrison Church was a hotbed of support not only for the DNVP (German National People’s Party) but for the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party). Military chaplains, left over from World War I, stirred up trouble, and anti-democratic activists intimidated members of the congregation who did not share their views. In April 1932, even before Hitler became Chancellor, the church opened its doors, or at least its doorway, to a torchlight parade of SS, Stormtroopers, and Nazi Party members.

Anyone with even superficial knowledge of Hitler’s rise to power is familiar with the photograph of the Chancellor bowing over the hand of President Hindenburg in front of the Garrison Church. Grünzig’s presentation of the so-called Day of Potsdam shows much more. He reveals an astonishing amount of stage managing, not only by Goebbels, as one would expect, but by General Superintendent Otto Dibelius, who actively lobbied for the Garrison Church to play a key role in legitimating the new regime. No detail was too minor to merit lavish attention. The Garrison Church earned the dubious distinction of being the only Protestant church where Hitler himself spoke from the pulpit.

That inauspicious beginning set the tone for the Nazi period. After rearmament in 1935, Wehrmacht chaplains enjoyed a prominent place in the life of the church. Also notable was the appeal of the Garrison Church as a pilgrimage site both for Germans and for international visitors. Italian dignitaries were frequent visitors, and friendly luminaries also showed up from Hungary, Slovakia, and Japan, along with humbler travellers, including representatives of the League of German Girls from Romania. Grünzig provides a tantalizing list of concerts at the venue: works by Verdi, Bach, Brahms, Haydn, and others were performed there, as was Mozart’s Requiem in November 1944, all part of the ways Christianity and “culture” worked together at the church to legitimate Nazi rule and support Nazi German warfare. A Sunday service with a special performance by the Music Corps of Military District III was scheduled for April 15, 1945, but Royal Air Force bombs the evening before put an end to that.

Yet even in the form of ruins, and long after defeat and division of Germany, the Garrison Church remained a troublesome site. The final section of Grünzig’s book surveys the decades after the war, with an emphasis on the 1960s. He focuses in particular on one question: did East German leader Walter Ulbricht order the building torn down? Although widely accepted, this claim, Grünzig demonstrates, is false. He does not develop the implications of that finding, but it certainly weakens one of the arguments advanced or implied by some advocates of rebuilding: that restoring the prominent place of the historic Garrison Church, with its 90-meter steeple, to the Potsdam city-scape represents the triumph of re-Christianization after destruction of East German Communism.

The straightforward, unadorned style of Grünzig’s book is contrasted by the ostentatious website of the Wiederaufbau Garnison Kirche Potsdam (Reconstruction of the German Church in Potsdam). “We create space to remember history,” the Guiding Idea promises. Visitors can track progress of reconstruction on a webcam or make a donation to restore a building described as “national silverware.” The historian Manfred Gailus, one of the editors of this journal, has suggested calling the church something else. If it must be rebuilt, he wants it named after Friedrich Weißler. Beaten to death by a guard at Sachsenhausen in 1936, Weißler has become known as the “first martyr of the Confessing Church.” He was not killed because of his church politics, however, but because he was born Jewish. Grünzig does not address Gailus’s suggestion, nor does he directly engage the contemporary debate at all. Nevertheless, his patient, detailed, and relentless account speaks for itself: any efforts toward peace and reconciliation associated with the building, the site, or the name of the Potsdamer Garnisonkirche will carry the indelible stain of its history. Honoring Friedrich Weißler’s memory would not erase that stain but, like Grünzig’s book, it would be a meaningful acknowledgment.

Share

Review of Victoria J. Barnett, ed., “After Ten Years”: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Our Times

1 Reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 2 (June 2018)

Review of Victoria J. Barnett, ed., “After Ten Years”: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Our Times (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017). Pp. 48. ISBN: 9781506433387.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In this slim volume, Victoria J. Barnett, general editor (2004-2014) of the celebrated Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition (DBWE), has contextualized one of Bonhoeffer’s most famous writings and applied it to our tumultuous contemporary political environment. The book is comprised of two parts: Barnett’s introduction, entitled “Reading Bonhoeffer’s ‘After Ten Years’ in Our Times,” and the English translation of Bonhoeffer’s “After Ten Years: An Account at the Turn of the Year 1942-1943” produced by Martin and Barbara Rumscheidt for the DBWE Letters and Papers from Prison, published in 2009 (to which Barnett has introduced a few slight revisions).

In her introductory chapter, Barnett begins with three italicized paragraphs in which she locates her reading of Bonhoeffer’s “After Ten Years.” On the one hand, she notes, “one must be cautious about drawing simplistic historical analogies,” especially with respect to Hitler, Nazism, and the Holocaust. “Nationalism, antisemitism, ethnocentrism, and populism have played a role in different historical periods and national contexts” (1). The grievances and resentments associated with these political movements always emerge out of specific social and cultural contexts. What is left unwritten is that the United States—indeed, the wider Western world—is currently threatened by the resurgence of just these sorts of antagonisms. Barnett continues, noting how important it is that citizens and institutions respond to such threats. Toleration of or compromise with ideologies of hatred will undermine and even destroy Western liberal political cultures. She suggests that this is a very real danger, given the fragility of ethical veneers and social conventions. Living in a time when accepted values and political norms are upended creates crises for individuals, religious bodies, and institutions of civil society, all of which struggle to adapt to or resist to these challenges. Barnett explains that these are the themes Bonhoeffer was addressing in his famous essay. As she writes, “his observations about what happens to human decency and courage when a political culture disintegrates continue to resonate around the world today” (2). This “introduction to the introduction” is very important, because it connects Bonhoeffer’s reflections about Nazi Germany to the upheaval of contemporary politics in the Age of Trump, even as it recognizes that this connection must take place in thoughtful, nuanced ways.

The balance of the introductory chapter considers the historical context of “After Ten Years,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s own history, and the main ideas of his important essay. Here Barnett brings her considerable expertise to bear, writing efficiently about Bonhoeffer’s family influences, his early criticisms of the Nazi regime, his experiences in England and the United States, his return to Germany in 1939 and his connection to leading members of the German Resistance. She explains how Bonhoeffer wrote “After Ten Years” to his brother-in-law, Hans Dohnanyi, his close friend Eberhard Bethge, and his military associate in the Resistance, Major General Hans Oster, as a synthesis of themes he had been thinking and talking about for some time, during a period in which the Nazi conduct of war was growing increasingly destructive and prospects for an overthrow of Hitler were becoming increasingly bleak. “After Ten Years,” Barnett notes, “was not so much an assessment of where they stood in 1942 but of how they had gotten there” (5).

She then delves more deeply into Bonhoeffer’s responses to Nazism, beginning with his February 1933 essay “The Führer and the Individual in the Younger Generation” and his April 1933 essay “The Church and the Jewish Question.” Bonhoeffer was quickly critical of the Nazi regime, not least because of its persecution of Jews. Even as Bonhoeffer urged the church to stand with persecuted Jews, however, he maintained elements of the theological anti-Judaism of his day and age. And when it came to the question of what to do about the moral and political crisis created by Nazi rule, Bonhoeffer was actually quite cautious. He participated in the Confessing Church struggle against the nazification of the churches, but did not speak out against the regime—even after the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. This equivocation is captured in “After Ten Years.” As Barnett notes, “even Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans von Dohnanyi, and Eberhard Bethge—men of conscience who had seen through National Socialism from the beginning—could not completely extricate themselves from what was unfolding around them” (9). This is a key point that many general readers of Bonhoeffer miss: his insistence that he and his society were in various ways complicit with the Hitler regime under which they lived, not morally pure opponents completely set apart from National Socialism. The resistance that led to Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment and eventual execution emerged only after 1939.

Barnett describes “After Ten Years” as “a series of seventeen aphorisms and meditations that build upon each other” (11). She explains the way Bonhoeffer drew on his writing in Ethics to explore the extent to which “National Socialism had subverted traditional moral and ethical standards” (11). Even as he called for more individual responsibility, he explained how civil courage had declined, how National Socialism had seduced Germans, and how a widespread collective “stupidity” had taken hold. In response, he encouraged a kind of inner liberation, worried about the growth of contempt in German society, believed in the guarantee of eventual divine justice, and advocated a kind of nobility that grew out of the traditions of the Christian humanist culture in which he had been raised. He closed with a call to restore trust and sympathy among the opponents of Nazism and the recognition of the impact of suffering, the search for a responsibility towards the future, and the admission of weakness and vulnerability—even the possibility of death.

Barnett is careful to note that Bonhoeffer was not writing out of a confidence in an approaching victory of goodness or out of his own heroism. Rather, he “was reflecting on what happens to good people, what happens to the soul, the human sense of morality and responsibility, when evil has become so embedded in a political culture that it is part of the very fabric of daily life, and it becomes impossible even for good people to remain untouched by it” (14-15). All of this, she explains, arose out of his Christian faith, “characterized by personal faith and prayer, a commitment to the community of the church, and a deep responsibility toward others” (15). In this way, Bonhoeffer’s “After Ten Years” speaks to fundamental issues:

the human capacity in all ages for decency, for courage, and for an engagement in political culture that affirms these values and honors human integrity. In whatever particular historical moment we find ourselves, we are summoned to determine what our place in history will be, to think and act beyond our self-interest for the sake of a common good: not just the common good of the moment, our particular political group, or even our society, but of our times—to act, as Bonhoeffer put it, on behalf of history itself and for the sake of future generations and the kind of society we would wish for them. (16)

Rereading “After Ten Years” itself, one is struck by the power of Bonhoeffer’s analysis of his compromised position—conclusions he reached after living for a decade under Hitler’s rule. He began by noting the difficulty of the situation in which he and his friends and colleagues found themselves—decent Christians and Germans living under Nazism: “Have there ever been people in history who in their time, like us, had so little ground under their feet, people to whom every possible alternative open to them at the time appeared equally unbearable, senseless, and contrary to life?” (18). Bonhoeffer was grappling with the moral and ethical upheaval of his society—unsure where it might lead but aware of its evil and of the inability of reason, principles, conscience, freedom, or virtue to serve as a basis from which to respond to it. “Only the one who is prepared to sacrifice all of these when, in faith and in relationship to God alone, he is called to obedient and responsible action. Such a person is the responsible one, whose life is to be nothing but a response to God’s question and call” (20).

Bonhoeffer went on to describe the lack of civil courage among Germans, particularly in light of the problem they now faced: that political success had been achieved by evil means. Here the question Bonhoeffer faced was how to react to these conditions out of a sense of responsibility to future generations who would inherit these conditions. In an especially powerful section, he noted how people could easily become collectively stupid under the influence—the pressure—of an upsurge of power:

It seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. … In conversation with [the stupid person], one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. (23)

It is not hard to see how Bonhoeffer became so gripped with the importance of achieving a kind of inner liberation—an independent sense of responsibility towards the world and the future. At this point, Bonhoeffer turned to address issues like the growing contempt for humanity, the uncertainty of immanent justice, and the certainty of an eventual setting right of things, as the abiding, God-given laws of human communal life “strike dead” those who try to establish some alternative, aberrant order of society (25).

The essay then shifts, as Bonhoeffer affirms his belief “that God can and will let good come out of everything, even the greatest evil” (25). But for that to happen, God would need good people ready to live in faith and trust in God. To that end, Bonhoeffer wrote about the importance of establishing trust between people, of pursuing a genuine spirit of nobility of character, of cultivating sympathy for the suffering of others, and of embracing suffering, should it come to them. There would be no certainty about the future. “To think and to act with an eye on the coming generation and to be ready to move on without fear and worry—that is the course that has, in practice, been forced upon us. To hold it courageously is not easy but necessary” (29). Genuine optimism means working for a better future until that becomes impossible. As he considered both the uncertainty of the future and the necessity of responsible action in the world, Bonhoeffer pondered the potential of death, noting of it that “deep down we seem to feel that we are his already and that each new day is a miracle” (29).

It was here that Bonhoeffer penned his most famous question: “Are we still of any use?” (30). Could he and others around him become the kind of simple, uncomplicated, honest people living out of the inner strength which would make resistance possible? Key to this, he believed, was their experience of becoming marginalized—cast out and oppressed. Looking beyond these conditions, Bonhoeffer concluded “After Ten Years” with a call to live “out of a higher satisfaction … grounded beyond what is below and above” and thus to “do justice to life in all its dimensions and in this way to affirm it” (31).

Together, this stand-alone publication of “After Ten Years” and Barnett’s thoughtful introduction make for a powerful reminder of Bonhoeffer’s ongoing relevance as a theological and political thinker. This volume will serve well as a companion text in many university and seminary courses, and as a reading to serve as the basis for discussion among Christians and others keen to understand how to live in our contemporary political and cultural environment.

Share

Review of Joachim Krause, Im Glauben an Gott und Hitler. Die “Deutschen Christen“ aus dem Wieratal und ihr Siegeszug ins Reich von 1928 bis 1945

1 Reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 2 (June 2018)

Review of Joachim Krause, Im Glauben an Gott und Hitler. Die “Deutschen Christen“ aus dem Wieratal und ihr Siegeszug ins Reich von 1928 bis 1945 (an annotated documentation / eine kommentierte Dokumentation) (Markkleeberg: Sax Verlag, 2018). Pp. 128. ISBN: 078-3-86729-212-2.

By Dirk Schuster, University of Potsdam

The retired chemist and theologian Joachim Krause just happened to come across the subject of the present book, as he writes at the outset. In referencing the well-known Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben) he noted that the origins of the German Christian Church Movement (Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen) and their institute lay in the eastern Thuringian Wieratal, where Krause (born 1946) grew up. Since he knew nothing about the German-Christian history of the churches in his home country, he began to thoroughly investigate the German Christian Church Movement—by far the most radical and influential German-Christian organization during the period of National Socialism.

As the second subtitle reveals (“an annotated documentation”), the book is a descriptive representation of the German Christian Church Movement with a regional focus on the origins of the movement in the Wieratal near the city Altenburg. In his presentation, the author outlines the development chronologically: first of all, he describes how the two young vicars, Siegfried Leffler and Julius Leutheuser, who were inspired by National Socialism, began scouring for a small circle of like-minded people from 1927 onwards. Within a few years, this small circle was to become one of the most influential inner-church movements that controlled several Protestant churches during the time of the “Third Reich”. The theological worldview of the church movement was a symbiosis of (Protestant) Christianity and National Socialism, since they saw the direct action of God in Adolf Hitler and his movement.

The main lines of development which Krause describes, especially with respect to the sources that are quoted again and again, are not new. The early phase of the church movement is known at least in its rough historical outline through the publications of Susanne Böhm and Oliver Arnhold. This is where the uniqueness of Joachim Krause’s book comes to the fore: it is based on local sources such as the archives of the various parishes in which the German Christians began to build their national church movement. Furthermore, he can draw on personal records of inhabitants of the Wieratal from the time of National Socialism. With the help of this extraordinary material, Krause is able to retell the missionary successes of the church movement amongst the inhabitants of the Wieratal in a lively manner within the opening chapters.

In the subsequent chapters on the period of the “Third Reich”, however, Krause makes a number of content-related errors: this begins with false dates (p. 63) and leads to claims that in 1937 the NSDAP had forbidden dual membership in the party and church (p.82). To the contrary, Walter Grundmann, the scientific director of the aforementioned institute and one of the ideological leaders of the German Christian Church Movement, serves as a classic example of membership both in the NSDAP and the church organization, which was easily possibly until the end of the war.  Likewise, the secret newsletter of Martin Bormann in 1941 was not a challenge of the Nazi Party to the churches or even Christianity, but rather the attempt to achieve a consistent separation of party and church, as Armin Nolzen has impressively demonstrated.[1]

In the last chapter, Krause effectively criticizes the myth-making of an alleged ecclesiastical resistance after 1945 and points out how, on the local level, former German Christians are still fondly remembered, even today. In the chapter on the church policy of National Socialism, Krause does not maintain such a critical attitude, since he only repeats older interpretations of church historiography. By adding more recent work on the history of the churches in the “Third Reich”, such misjudgments probably could have been avoided. However, if you would like to find out more about the early years of the German Christian Church Movement, I recommend this book, which surprises with very interesting sources at various points.

[1] Armin Nolzen, “Nationalsozialismus und Christentum. Konfessionsgeschichtliche Befunde zur NSDAP,” in Manfred Gailus, Armin Nolzen (eds.), Zerstrittene »Volksgemeinschaft«. Glaube, Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011) 151–179.

Share

Review of Come Before Winter: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and His Companions in the Dying Gasps of the Third Reich

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 2 (June 2018)

Review of Come Before Winter: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and His Companions in the Dying Gasps of the Third Reich, directed by Kevin Ekvall (Woodbury, MN: Stories That Glow Collectors, 2016).

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This film aims to tackle two stories in one: the life and thought of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer during his time in captivity leading up to his execution by the Hitler regime and the “fake news” black propaganda operation of the British journalist Sefton Delmer, assisted by Bonhoeffer family friend Otto John, Berlin-born actress Agness Bernelle, and later James Bond novelist Ian Fleming. It employs a combination of dramatic re-enactment, narration over still and moving images, and explanations from various experts, most notably sociologist Ekkehard Klausa from the Research Centre of Resistance History, ethicist Larry Rasmussen from Union Seminary, pastor John Matthews of the International Bonhoeffer Society, theologian and church official Ferdinand Schlingensiepen of the International Bonhoeffer Society, and Baptist minister and scholar Keith W. Clements, Past General Secretary of the Conference of European Churches, Geneva.

Come Before Winter begins by acknowledging the memoirs and writings of Sefton Delmer, Otto John, Sigismund Payne Best, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer as sources. It then asserts that “one of the tragedies of World War II was the refusal of President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill to acknowledge the existence of a German resistance,” introducing the failed ­assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. From there viewers are introduced to Sefton Delmer, the British journalist (born and raised in Berlin) who operated several so-called black propaganda operations, broadcasting disinformation into Nazi Germany. The operation covered by the film was the German short-wave broadcast “Atlantic,” which used a powerful transmitter to broadcast jazz, invented personal announcements, and fake news throughout Germany and also to U-boats in the Atlantic during the later war years. Delmer’s goal was to demoralize German troops and to turn the German public against the Nazis. At several points in the film, broadcasts written by Delmer and Fleming (with information from Otto John) and read by Bernelle are re-enacted, in order to depict Delmer’s determined effort to use propaganda to defeat Germany. These scenes also serve as a vehicle for Otto John, a member of the July 20 assassination plot who had escaped to England, to explain the various efforts of the German Resistance to assassinate Adolf Hitler, along with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s principled participation in the Resistance and his consequent arrest and detention in Tegel prison.

This section of the film contains interesting statements from several of the Bonhoeffer experts about the quest to kill Hitler. Schlingensiepen argues that Bonhoeffer’s extended conversation with German jurist, intelligence officer, and anti-Nazi Helmuth James von Moltke in April 1942 on the island of Rügen revolved around the theologian’s ethical justification for killing Hitler (23:40). When the head of state orders the death of thousands day by day, the only way to stop him is to kill him. Bonhoeffer believed that God left members of the Resistance free to do that, just as God left his son Jesus free to heal the sick on the Sabbath (24:44). Clements notes the difficulty of describing Bonhoeffer as either pacifist or assassin, given the complexity of his situation. Bonhoeffer deeply respected pacifism and knew the costs of war, but was it possible to preserve one’s innocence by doing nothing? (24:10).  Rather than dogmatic militarism or pacifism, Bonhoeffer argued people must face their duty to God, and that they determine that duty based on the question of what the consequences will be for other people. This was also the basis for his counsel to other members of the Resistance (25:23). Ethicist Reggie Williams of McCormick Theological Seminary adds that Bonhoeffer acted out of faith, asking what Christ calls us to do in the crisis (25:43), while religion scholar Lori Brandt Hale of Augsburg College notes that Bonhoeffer’s choice to enter the Resistance wasn’t really a choice; he knew that it was necessary and that so few others understood (26:02).

As the dramatized scenes in the film continue, Sefton Delmer and his black propaganda unit continue their work, Otto John laments the destruction of Berlin, and Bonhoeffer sits in Tegel prison. The film details his transfer to the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse SS headquarters, then on to Buchenwald and the Schönberg schoolhouse in rural Bavaria, until his eventual final imprisonment in Flossenburg concentration camp. Along the way, we’re introduced to an eclectic mix of fellow inmates who encountered Bonhoeffer, including the British intelligence officer Sigismund Payne Best, the German mother Fey von Hassell, the Russian atheist Vassily Korokin, and the German cabaret singer Isa Vermehren. Bonhoeffer’s final sermon, preached to these prisoners before his summons to Flossenburg, included a scripture passage from Isaiah 53 on the suffering servant and a text from 1 Peter 1 on the Christian’s living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This and the singing of “A Mighty Fortress” are dramatized, along with Bonhoeffer’s famous parting words to Payne Best: “This is the end, but for me the beginning of life” (54:15).

Here Ferdinand Schlingensiepen provides a bold theological interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s execution: “Terrible as this story is, it was not without God’s commands. And Bonhoeffer knew that himself. He says, ‘Hitler cannot kill me. The hour of my death will be prescribed by the living God himself.’ And he almost escaped in Schönberg, with the others. But God allowed him to become a martyr, which made him a much more important figure for future times” (54:35).

Keith Clements explains that Bonhoeffer’s court-martial was a sham, a hasty process not meeting proper judicial standards. As the film dramatizes Bonhoeffer’s final moments, including his shaming by an SS officer and his hanging, the film shows only his feet, while cross-cutting to a typewriter tapping out the death section of Bonhoeffer’s “Stages of Freedom” poem. Clements then reflects thoughtfully on Bonhoeffer’s execution: “When the tyrant executes the martyr, the tyrant’s power ends, because he can’t do any more than that. But the power of the martyr begins, because his witness goes on forever. … [These resisters] were the people who won the battle of faith and courage and conviction and human dignity. And it’s to them that we now look today” (59:40).

The film ends with a dramatization of the memorial service for Bonhoeffer and Bishop George Bell’s sermon, including the section in which Bell makes meaning of the German theologian’s martyrdom: “He represents both the resistance of the believing soul, in the name of God, to the assault of evil, and also the moral and political revolt of the human conscience against injustice and cruelty” (1:04:10).

While the film seems to question the results of Delmer’s black propaganda (including the execution of German civilians who listened to the broadcasts and the creation of the myth of the good German soldier), it sums up Bonhoeffer by noting that, “In death, as in life, Bonhoeffer has remained on the edge of controversy. Nonetheless, his writings and life have gradually been embraced by millions and many scholars have marveled at the breadth of his theological and philosophical appeal” (1:06:36). Short descriptions of the fate of other main characters are also provided at the close of the film.

On the whole, the film does well where it dramatizes the events of Bonhoeffer’s final years using his own words or those of other key figures who knew him. The contributions of Schlingensiepen and Clements are also informative and thought-provoking. Less coherent is the story of Sefton Delmer’s black propaganda unit, which oscillates between humour and pathos. The film interprets it both as vitally important to Allied victory and as a misguided effort.

Whether these two stories—that of Delmer’s black propaganda unit and of the final stages of Bonhoeffer’s life—actually belong in the same film is probably up for debate. The person of Otto John is the link between the two, but he plays only a minor part in the film. While Come Before Winter captures something of the power of Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom, in terms of an introduction to the German Resistance, I would still recommend Hava Kohav Beller’s fine documentary The Restless Conscience: Resistance to Hitler in Nazi Germany (docurama films, 1991), and for an introduction to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the significance of his life, thought, and death, I would turn to the Martin Doblmeier documentary Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Pacifist, Nazi Resister (First Run Features, 2003).

 

 

Share

Conference Report: Mennonites and the Holocaust, Bethel College, Kansas, March 16-17, 2018

1 Reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 2 (June 2018)

Conference Report: Mennonites and the Holocaust, Bethel College, Kansas, March 16-17, 2018

By Doris Bergen, University of Toronto

Scholars, students, community and church leaders, and members of the general public gathered in mid-March 2018 at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, for two intense days of presentations and discussions on the subject of “Mennonites and the Holocaust.” Conference organizers Mark Jantzen, John Thiesen, and John Sharp put together a stimulating program featuring speakers from the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Ukraine. Around 200 people registered, and more attended the keynote address and the film showing, which were open to the public, so that the conversation continued beyond the formal sessions, over meals, during coffee breaks, and subsequently online. As the conference demonstrated, it is worth the time, effort, and expense to bring people physically together when the issues involved are so important and the stakes so high.

Joel H. Nofziger, Ben Goossen, Aileen Friesen, and Jason Kauffman prepared thoughtful summaries of all the sessions for the “Anabaptist Historians” blog. You can find those, along with additional commentary by Lisa Schirch, at https://anabaptisthistorians.org/tag/mennonites-and-the-holocaust-conference/page/1/.

This report focuses on three insights from the conference: one historical, another methodological, and the third programmatic.

History

Mennonites were directly involved in the destruction of Jews as witnesses, beneficiaries, and perpetrators. Already from John Thiesen’s opening remarks it was clear that the conference would unsettle the myth of Mennonite innocence. Thiesen’s research on the reception of National Socialism among Mennonites in Paraguay dates back to the 1980s; the title of his book, Mennonite and Nazi?, articulated a key question twenty years ago. Still, even for those familiar with the research of the late Gerhard Rempel (“Mennonites and the Holocaust: From Collaboration to Perpetration,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 84 [Oct 2010]: 507-49) and recent work by Ben Goossen, the conference produced shock after shock.

In her contribution to a panel titled “Mennonite-Jewish Connections,” Aileen Friesen described a massacre of Jews in Zaporizhia in southern Ukraine in 1942, just miles from the church where Mennonites from the Khortytsia colony gathered to celebrate Easter. Among the local police who did the killing were two Mennonite brothers. Using the recently opened KGB Archive in Kiev, Dmytro Myeshkov provided chilling accounts of Mennonite collaborators. For example, Ivan Klassen, a physician in the service of the SS, examined disabled patients in a hospital in the Mennonite Molotschna settlement. A killing squad followed up by shooting more than 100 children, women, and men whom Klassen had deemed unable to work. Erika Weidemann’s paper analyzed the experiences of two Khortytsia Mennonite women. One of them, an informant for the SS killing squad Einsatzgruppe C, used her language skills to rat out potentially subversive forced laborers.

Weidemann, Myeshkov, Friesen, and Victor Klet all noted the disastrous impact of the Soviet experience on Mennonite communities in Ukraine. But those victimized by Stalin were not the only Mennonites who joined the Nazi cause. Colin Neufeldt’s paper, on “Jewish-Mennonite Relations” in the Masovian Voivodeship, shifted attention to German-occupied Poland. At least twenty Mennonites, including Neufeldt’s grandparents, left their village of Deutsch Wymyschle to take over properties from which Jews had been expelled in nearby Gąbin. Papers by Arnold Neufeldt-Fast and Pieter Post identified Mennonite theologians in Germany and the Netherlands who embraced and propagated National Socialist ideology; Joachim Wieler added a poignant personal note, reading a letter by his father, a Wehrmacht officer, who in 1941 exulted from France, “The Lord is visibly on our side.”

Methodology

In her keynote address, “Neighbors, Killers, Enablers, Witnesses: The Many Roles of Mennonites in the Holocaust,” Doris Bergen called for more scholarship, and from as many angles and disciplines as possible. The conference illustrated how fruitful multiple approaches can be but also revealed many unexplored perspectives.

Jim Lichti’s presentation, “An Illusion of Freedom: Denominationalism, German Mennonites, and Nazi Germany,” compared Mennonites with other “free” churches, notably Quakers and Seventh Day Adventists. Like Imanuel Baumann and Astrid von Schlachta in their papers, Lichti was careful to point out the range of Mennonite positions, public and private, on everything from the Hebrew Bible to antisemitism and Nazi racial policies. At the same time, he observed that the lack of centralized structures made it almost impossible to develop a coherent Mennonite voice of opposition. Alle Hoekema’s discussion of Dutch Mennonites recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous among the Nations” confirmed this point. The forty individuals identified are, as Hoekema put it, not insignificant, but they are few. Nor do their accounts highlight Mennonite identity or beliefs as key factors. Instead they emphasize their networks and commitment to humanity as what motivated them to help Jews.

Several speakers noted that common narratives about Mennonite suffering and survival can serve to conceal negative assumptions about Jews and Judaism. Hans Werner analyzed how Mennonites frame their memories to produce “usable” versions of the past, for example, by writing only about the Soviet years or balancing sadness about the Holocaust with joy at Nazi German “liberation” of Christianity. Viewing the 1935 movie, Friesennot (“Frisians in peril”) showed how Mennonites, real and imagined, were mobilized for Nazi purposes. That theme of mobilization also came across in Ben Goossen’s paper on scholarship about Mennonites in the Third Reich. Mark Jantzen, who introduced the film and prepared the subtitles, pointed out that it does not explicitly refer to “Mennonites” or “Jews.” Nonetheless, antisemitic canards about Jews-Bolsheviks as the lascivious, blasphemous, brutal foe of pure and noble “Aryan”-Christian-German-Mennonites are embedded in the story.

The cultural components of the conference encouraged reflection on issues that tend to be neglected or repressed. Connie Braun’s poetry and prose invited listeners to contemplate “the missing pieces of our narratives”: Mennonite prejudices and the suffering and losses experienced by others. Helen Stoltzfus’s reading from “Heart of the World,” a play she co-wrote with Albert Greenberg in 1999, raised the topic of intermarriage as a way to explore what divides and connects Mennonites and Jews, and indeed all people. Stoltzfus’s performance of four different characters showed the value of multiple perspectives and reinforced an earlier moment in the conference. During the Q&A, an audience member had identified herself as Jewish, possibly the only Jew present she said, and challenged the rest of the room to consider how the light-hearted tone taken by some speakers sounded and felt to her.

Looking Ahead

Although the conference was academic and focused on the geographically and chronologically delineated subject of Mennonites and the Holocaust, it raised even broader questions with far-reaching implications. Some of these were spelled out explicitly, others remained below the surface of the formal proceedings or spilled over into discussions off-site. David Barnouw’s paper about Jacob Luitjens, “From War Criminal in the Netherlands to Mennonite Abroad and Back, to Prison in the Netherlands,” suggested the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), a widely respected relief organization, actively helped a Nazi conceal his past and use his Mennonite ties to gain refuge. Does this history pose a challenge to the MCC’s ongoing efforts in Israel/Palestine? Some people present at the conference want an examination of these issues in advance of the upcoming 100-year anniversary of the MCC. Some also echo Arnold Neufeldt-Fast’s call for a Mennonite “post-Holocaust theology.” Already in the works is another conference, to be held in 2020 at the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Indiana, on “Reading the Bible after the Holocaust.”

In his paper, “Selective Memory: Danziger Mennonite Reflections on the Nazi Era,” Steven Schroeder called for “truth-telling” about Mennonite involvement in the Holocaust and also about the ways that Mennonites participated in and continue to benefit from colonial systems. Schroeder, who teaches in western Canada, noted that his institution, University of the Fraser Valley, is located on unceded Indigenous Territory. Several members of the audience signaled an interest in future engagement with this aspect of the Mennonite past and present. As Bergen mentioned in her keynote, thinking critically about history does not imply that I would do better. But it might open possibilities to listen, understand, and care.

Share

Article Note: Janice A. Thompson, “Renewing the Church as a Community of Hope: The German Catholic Church Confronts the Shoah”

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 2 (June 2018)

Article Note: Janice A. Thompson, “Renewing the Church as a Community of Hope: The German Catholic Church Confronts the Shoah,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 51, no. 3 (2016): 337-365.

By Rebecca Carter-Chand, Clark University

Janice Thompson’s timely article from 2016 focuses on the West German Catholic document “Our Hope: A Confession of Faith for This Time,” promulgated by the Joint Synod of the Dioceses in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1975. It was the first official document from the Catholic Church in Germany to address the Holocaust and is, in Thompson’s assessment, “one of the forgotten treasures of the post-Vatican II Church.” Drafted by theologian Johann Baptist Metz and accepted by a majority of the synod (made up of bishops, priests, religious, and lay people), it offered a radical recentering of Catholic theology in the wake of the Holocaust. In it, Metz argued that real hope is possible only by facing the painful reality of death and suffering in the world. One of the interesting ways that Thompson contextualizes this document is by contrasting Metz’s theology with that of his close contemporary Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI).

In our culture’s current attention on apologies, official statements of guilt, and reckoning of past wrongs, “Our Hope” offers an illustrative example of an earlier statement that demonstrated a collective deep reckoning with the past in light of contemporary concerns. As an open admirer of the document, Thompson discusses several ways in which “Our Hope” makes radical theological arguments, but admits that the language is perhaps too subtle for readers who may not have the theological background to recognize the implications. Her attention on “Our Hope” is prescriptive as well as descriptive—she makes a strong plea to reawaken the renewal process that was initiated by Metz and the synod in the mid-1970s. After several decades of retreat from change, the Catholic Church seems to be embracing renewal once again under the leadership of Pope Francis. Thompson’s contextualization and detailed analysis of the document’s theological claims can contribute to a larger discussion of apologies and the Christian church’s process of coming to terms with the past.

Share

Letter from the Editors (March 2018)

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Letter from the Editors (March 2018)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

With spring drawing slowly nearer, the editors are pleased to publish a new issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly. This issue contains an eclectic mix of book reviews, article notes, and conference reports assessing new research in German and European religious history.

St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, Berlin, where Bernhard Lichtenberg was provost. Lichtenberg aided Catholics of Jewish descent during the Nazi era, and spoke out against the persecution of the Jews after the Kristallnacht Pogrom.
Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=659751

Lauren Faulkner Rossi reviews Martin Röw’s substantial study of Catholic military chaplains, while Manfred Gailus examines Thomas Martin Schneider’s book on the Confessing Church’s Barmen Declaration and its longer-term impact. Dirk Schuster assesses Elizabeth Lorenz’s book on the German Christian attempt to create a nazified translation of the Bible and Andrew Chandler reviews an interesting edited volume on the British military chaplain Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy.

Beth A. Griech-Polelle and Kyle Jantzen report on journal articles and book chapters about the Vatican’s efforts to combat communism in the 1930s and 1940s, about church politics in Thuringia during the Third Reich, and about Protestants, Catholics, and Christmas in Nazi Germany. (The authors of these works include CCHQ editors Heath Spencer, Christopher Probst, and Kevin Spicer.)

Finally, Griech-Polelle and Matthew Hockenos supply conference reports from the Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education at Pacific Lutheran University and from the German Studies Association, informing us about papers which consider the role of Catholicism in the Holocaust and interactions between international Protestants during the Nazi period.

We hope you continue to find Contemporary Church History Quarterly a useful addition to your reading about the history of religion in Germany and Europe.

On behalf of the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Share

Review of Martin Röw, Militärseelsorge unter dem Hakenkreuz: die katholische Feldpastoral, 1939-1945

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Review of Martin Röw, Militärseelsorge unter dem Hakenkreuz: die katholische Feldpastoral, 1939-1945 (Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2014).

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Martin Röw’s Militärseelsorge unter dem Hakenkreuz is among the newest contributions in a sudden flurry of work on chaplaincy and pastoral care during the Nazi period. Published in 2014, Röw’s text is the first rigorous, intensive analysis of the Catholic military chaplaincy during the Third Reich. At more than 450 pages, it is also the most detailed, even exhaustive. As such, Röw has provided the definitive book on this subject that is essential reading for anyone with an interest in religion in the military, pastoral care, and the world of German Catholic chaplains during the Second World War.

Röw’s intentions are to deliver a comprehensive structural and experiential history of Catholic military pastoral care in Germany, with a particular emphasis on providing a systematic study of chaplaincy (12). He has oriented himself solidly in the available historiography on the subject in both German and English and his archival research is impressively broad, gathering material from four archdiocesan archives (including Salzburg), eight diocesan archives (including one in Austria and one in the Netherlands), and several other state and private collections in Germany. His main source for primary documentation is the Archive of the Catholic Military Bishop, in Berlin, notably the Georg Werthmann collection. Until relatively recently, this rich compilation of chaplaincy-related material, produced by the man who served as second-in-command of the Catholic chaplaincy during the Second World War, was strikingly understudied; in the past four years, three books have appeared whose authors have extensively mined its records.[1] Röw articulates a concern with several facets of the chaplaincy’s existence, including the chaplains’ relations to military authorities, their understanding of the regime’s politics and ideology, the daily life of chaplains and their interactions with civilian populations, and their witness to war crimes. He is especially attuned to the challenges of accessing and interpreting mentality, and is determined “to drill into the mental dispositions” of chaplains wherever possible in order “to illuminate [their] self-conception and their mindset” (13). To some extent, he acknowledges the bias in and limitations of his main source, as Werthmann was the “nerve centre” of the chaplaincy (39), and his numerous judgments should not automatically be taken as balanced or neutral.

Beyond the introduction, Röw dedicates a short chapter to constructing the Catholic milieu of Germany. In passing, he recognizes the minority position that German Catholics held in a newly united German empire after 1871, but he focuses more on the impact of the First World War and the Weimar era on German Catholics, the ascent of Nazism and the relationship between the regime and the Church, and the meaning of the war’s outbreak for the German Catholic community in 1939. Much of this work is summation of earlier, mostly German historiography; because this is the backdrop to Röw’s main focus, he introduces nothing revelatory or original about the larger context of German Catholicism. The bulk of his work, nearly four hundred pages, is devoted to the Catholic chaplaincy during the war.

Röw divides his analysis of the chaplaincy into six main sections, the first two of which sketch the contours of the chaplaincy and the roles that chaplains expected themselves to fill as well as those that military officers asked them to take on. The first section considers the structures and individuals of the chaplaincy under Nazism, including general and specific chaplaincy statistics. There were “about 760” priests who served as chaplains over the course of the war, with 410 serving simultaneously at its peak, in the summer of 1942 (84). In a different section, Röw delves briefly into a quantitative social analysis of chaplains, offering statistics about regional background and generational variation; the leadership of the chaplaincy; the recruitment process and training; and the Nazi regime’s persistent, often explicit hostility towards the chaplaincy, culminating in the infamous 1942 order not to fill any vacant chaplain positions (120). The second section focuses on the context of the chaplaincy within the Wehrmacht, proclaimed at the time as “the pillar of the regime” (127). Röw depicts the military’s conceptions of pastoral care; the different kinds of relationships between chaplains and their officers, both positive and negative; the introduction of the much-detested National Socialist Leadership Officers (NSFOs) at the end of 1943; and Catholic chaplains’ interactions with their Protestant counterparts, both cooperative and competitive.

The final four sections are dedicated to the war’s impact on the chaplains and contain some of the richest material from the Werthmann collection to be introduced in one book. The third section confronts the duties of a chaplain, highlighting the divine service as “the centerpiece of pastoral care” at all times (173); Catholic chaplains’ reactions to the mandated, and controversial, nondenominational services (interkonfessionelle Gottesdienste); the significance of chaplains’ presence at the frontlines; equipment and available literature; care for the wounded, the fallen, and the imprisoned; and “deviant chaplains,” those who Werthmann labelled “weak brothers” (232).

The fourth section is Röw’s most sustained drive into the issue of mentality, considering how chaplains crafted meaning out of the war for themselves and the soldiers with whom they served, including nationalist and anti-Bolshevik impulses; displays of ambivalence, distance, and powerlessness, as well as affinity with the regime’s wartime goals; and the significant influence of a highly-developed sense of duty.

The fifth section, on communication and interactions between chaplains and their various environments, includes Röw’s scrutiny of the impact of the chaplains (and religion) on the fighting troops; their roles as guides, mentors, and helpers for soldiers in the thick of battle; the community of chaplains, however nebulous, that existed throughout the war; and their relationships with other identifiable groups, including seminarians and priests serving in the Wehrmacht (the so-called Priestersoldaten), foreign chaplains and priests, and indigenous populations.

The sixth section sees Röw endeavour to capture the kind of “everyday life in war” (“ein Alltag im Krieg”) that chaplains attempted to make for themselves, while admitting the challenges and controversy in introducing that word into the context of a war of annihilation (380-381). Thus Röw examines the typical official activities of a chaplain within his regiment or division; the peaks and ebbs of war as determined by active battle and proximity to the front; the experiences on different fronts, with a lengthy excursion into life on the Eastern Front; and their witnessing of atrocity (Röw uses the term Verbrechen for this section). This includes chaplains’ reactions to the maltreatment and murder both of Soviet POWs as well as of Jews. The almost-scant attention paid to this topic—fifteen pages—as well as Röw’s dependence on secondary sources and postwar published memoirs to flesh out the half-dozen or so eyewitness accounts that he has uncovered underscore the paucity of recorded testimony from the chaplains themselves. While many undoubtedly witnessed something, chaplains simply did not write about such things.

For scholars who have studied the Catholic chaplaincy in the Wehrmacht, Röw’s analysis does not necessarily bring anything ground-breaking to the subject of chaplains and pastoral care during the Second World War, or the hostility of the Nazi regime towards the Catholic Church in general and priests in the Wehrmacht in particular, or to the nature of the war and how devout Catholic clergy tried to makes sense of it. The identification of Bolshevism as an enemy provided a convenient overlap between Catholic and Nazi ideologies (260-270). Chaplains were dependent on good relations with the military authorities to be able to work effectively. Röw argues that “outspoken opponents of pastoral care, such as Nazi supporter General Schörner, commander of the 6th Mountain Troop Division, appear to be an exception” (145). Written or explicit criticisms of the regime or the Führer were—not surprisingly—non-existent, given the lethal reaction they would have provoked (291, 298).

The significance of Röw’s work is not its originality; it is that his study is the first methodical, systematic treatment of the chaplaincy, from the top of its hierarchy—the relatively feeble field bishop, Rarkowski, isolated from the other bishops and supported by the Nazis, alongside his field vicar-general Werthmann, judicious, active, energetic, willing to take risks (103)—to the chaplains standing next to soldiers on the field of battle. For this reason alone, the text is indispensable.

Röw’s objective is to produce a study of Catholic pastoral care during the war “in its various spheres and facets, but always viewing pastoral care as a whole” (442), and in this he has succeeded, though he has had to sacrifice depth in order to achieve breadth. The character of individual chaplains is underemphasized in favour of the institution in which they served, so that one is hard-pressed to keep track of the names (which are not always given in the footnotes). Despite the brief foray into the social and regional background of some chaplains, there is only a passing understanding of how old, or conversely how young, the chaplains tended to be, how long they had been priests when they were recruited, how their familial and regional histories moulded their pastoral behaviour in the military, or how many came from Austria or other annexed territories of the Reich. (Curiously, one of the most striking omissions in Röw’s list of archival resources is the archdiocesan archive of Munich and Freising, one of the largest archives of its kind in Germany). Werthmann is very present throughout, but remains as slippery and enigmatic as ever. Röw admits, “Whether [Werthmann’s] motto actually was, ‘good German and above all Catholic, but not and in no way National Socialist,’ as Heinrich Missalla alleges, cannot be said with certainty.” (103) Although the collection that bears his name is at last receiving the scholarly attention it has long deserved, we still await a definitive biography of its creator. One might have wished for a clearer sense, too, of change over time within the wartime chaplaincy, particularly given the turning-point of 1942, when no new chaplains were recruited.

Röw is undoubtedly correct when he claims that his work challenges the older interpretation of chaplains as unpolitical, and their military service as merely “care (Fürsorge) for men mired in the misery of war” (445). It is difficult to disagree with his conclusions about the motivation of so many chaplains, composed of an amalgam of “Catholic idealism, fueled by a specifically Catholic inferiority complex with deep historical roots, and a patriotism that convinced them that they were in no way second to non-Catholic Germans” (446). Röw is unflinching in his final assessment of the effect that chaplains had on the kind of war fought on the Eastern Front, articulating what those of us long familiar with these sources have known: their very presence encouraged soldiers to justify their behaviour as legitimate, even necessary, in an existential battle against an enemy—Bolshevism—that sought to annihilate German and Catholic culture. In this manner, priests in chaplain uniform “became, however involuntary, instruments of normalization of the war of annihilation” (448). And Röw has sifted his sources thoroughly to provide demonstrable proof of this. Although the regime worked doggedly to nullify the influence that a relatively small number of chaplains (760, says Röw, in an army in which some 18 million men served) had on the troops, the chaplains ultimately rendered a vital service in sustaining the Wehrmacht’s fighting fervor, especially on the Eastern Front.

Yet the number here might give one pause: how could so few chaplains possibly have motivated millions of men over a span of several years? They could not possibly be everywhere at once, and Werthmann, Röw’s primary resource, acknowledges that some divisions went months, or more, without access to a chaplain.[2] Does this not suggest that the chaplains inflated their own importance, precisely to justify their presence at the front, both at the time and after 1945? Undoubtedly the Priestersoldaten—more than 17,000 Catholic priests, members of religious orders (Ordensleute), and seminarians who were conscripted but did not serve in the chaplaincy—helped to fill in some gaps, though these individuals fell outside the chaplaincy and Röw accords them only a few pages.

What will really answer this question is testimony from the soldiers themselves about the impact of religion and the men who represented it: chaplains, as well as priests and other religious outside the chaplaincy wearing military uniforms. This is, admittedly, beyond Röw’s focus. His milieu is the chaplaincy, and while he begins to address the issue of reception, he does so in somewhat cursory fashion, referring to what responses to pastoral care military authorities told chaplains to expect from soldiers (326-329), and then to the perspectives of chaplains themselves (329-336). Röw does not claim to have answered all outstanding questions about the Catholic chaplaincy with this work. Indeed, he lists several areas for further research in the final pages, including theological themes in wartime sermons and other writing, comparative studies of chaplaincies in different militaries during the war, and the much-desired critical evaluation of Werthmann. But it might be time to shift focus in order to address more fully the questions that this research engenders. Perhaps we should begin to look less narrowly at the men who brought religious care to the troops, and instead scrutinize more attentively what the troops themselves did with that religious care. Röw has provided an exceptional overview of the former in the German context, and it should be considered essential reading for any scholar asking questions about religious care in the German military during the Second World War.

 

 

[1] Chronologically, Röw’s book was the first published, predating my own work by only several months. Röw was aware of my doctoral dissertation and cites this briefly in his introduction, though I was not aware of his work until it was published. While we both worked in the same archive in Berlin at roughly the same time, we never met each other. He did not have access to my book on the subject, Wehrmacht Priests (2015), prior to publishing his work. The third book is Dagmar Pöpping’s Kriegspfarrer an der Ostfront, a comparative study of the Protestant and Catholic chaplaincies, which appeared in 2017.

[2] This dearth was made even worse by the 1942 prohibition to fill vacant chaplain positions, as Röw details. See 120-122.

Share

Review of Thomas Martin Schneider, Wem gehört Barmen? Das Gründungsdokument der Bekennenden Kirche und seine Wirkungen

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Review of Thomas Martin Schneider, Wem gehört Barmen? Das Gründungsdokument der Bekennenden Kirche und seine Wirkungen (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2017). Pp.241. ISBN: 9783374050345.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

This review was originally published in zeitzeichen. Evangelische Kommentare zu Religion und Gesellschaft, February, 2018. https://www.zeitzeichen.net/rezensionen/thomas-martin-schneider-wem-gehoert-barmen/. It is reprinted in translation with the permission of the publisher.

The Barmen Theological Declaration (BTD), adopted on May 31, 1934, at the First Reich Confessing Synod in Wuppertal-Barmen, is widely regarded as the Magna Carta of the church opposition in the Third Reich. It is certainly rightly considered the most demanding statement of the Confessing Church (BK) in its defense against the advance of pro-Nazi German Christians (DC). The purpose of the DC was to transform the Protestant churches into a Reich church shaped by völkisch antisemitic theology and governed from Berlin according to the “Führer principle.” Much has been written about the theological content of the six Barmen theses in the postwar era, culminating in the 50th anniversary of the declaration in 1984. For anyone looking for quick information about this Protestant document of the century, about its historical context, about its theological meaning and its church-political significance, and about its enormously broad reception history since 1945, this popular overview can certainly be recommended. The reception of the Barmen Declaration is presented in particular detail, and its astounding variety makes it clear that various political orientations and church circles from the left to conservative evangelical groups felt that they could invoke the tradition and intention of the declaration in their current concerns. Almost all parties and groups declared sometime after 1945 that the good “spirit of Barmen” actually belonged to them and would be further developed in their work. An extensive documentary section (p.155-219) documents the diverse uses of the declaration by everyone from Marxist GDR theologians to West German Left-Protestants to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Evangelicals. It is noteworthy from today’s point of view that the Lutheran churches which were abstinent and critical of the Barmen Declaration during the time of the Church Struggle—they sensed too much Reformed spirit in the statement which was largely formulated by Karl Barth—have since 2012 (after a long period of reflection, beginning with the newly-founded North Church) begun to refer explicitly to the theological and church-political traditions of Barmen.

In this account by the Koblenz-Landau church historian, one can not ignore the remarkably sympathetic treatment (for example, pp. 62 f., 72 ff.) of the Lutheran churches which adapted to the Nazi regime and which were skeptical or even hostile to the Barmen project from the outset. From today’s point of view, a critical church-historical assessment would seem more appropriate. Also, an up-to-date church history should leave behind terms from the time of the Church Struggle such as “intact” and “destroyed” churches. For the three large Lutheran regional churches (especially that of Hanover), with their far-reaching adjustment to the regime, the label “intact” should really be dispensed with. And for divided regional churches, such as the great Old Prussian Union Church, it would be more appropriate to speak of “self-destruction.” Although the author deals comparatively with the “Altona Confession” (1932), he deals too briefly or not at all with the 1936 memorandum of the 2nd Provisional Church Leadership (of the Confessing Church) to Hitler or the memoranda by Margarete Meusel (1935) and Elisabeth Schmitz (1935/36) on behalf of Protestant “non-Aryans” and persecuted Jews. A comparative chapter involving these and other important manifestations of the period of the Church Struggle would be well placed here.

Nevertheless, on the whole, these restrictive remarks do not substantially reduce the great usefulness of this compact introduction to the most important Protestant church document of twentieth-century German history.

 

Share

Review of Elisabeth Lorenz, Ein Jesusbild im Horizont des Nationalsozialismus

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Review of Elisabeth Lorenz, Ein Jesusbild im Horizont des Nationalsozialismus. Studien zum Neuen Testament des “Instituts zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben” (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017). Pp. 539. ISBN: 978-3-16-154569-6.

By Dirk Schuster, University of Potsdam

This book by Elisabeth Lorenz is based on her dissertation, which was submitted in 2015 at the University of Regensburg. The focus of the book is the “dejewified” New Testament, The Message of God (Die Botschaft Gottes), which was published in 1941 by the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, also known as the Eisenach Institute. Several monographs have been published in the last ten years about this institute, founded by the German Christians in 1939. However, the “dejewification” of the New Testament has only been the subject of shorter published articles, making the relevance of this work obvious.

Lorenz’s goal is to compare New Testament passages from The Message of God with the Luther Bible, the standard translation, and the original Greek text. For this purpose, Lorenz has chosen three central terms by means of which she tries to analyze the new interpretation in The Message of God. Chapter 2 deals with the Messiah concept and the relationship between Jesus and Judaism. Chapter 3 places the concept of sacrifice at the heart of the comparison. Chapter 4 deals with the portrayal of Jesus in the New Testament traditions in comparison with Jesus’ presentation in The Message of God. The focus on concepts rather than merely on individual passages is very welcome, since, for example, in dealing with the Messiah concept, the entire Christology of The Message of God and thus of the German Christians can be derived, as Lorenz rightly states (83).

The contrasting juxtaposition of the single text passages in the form of tables makes it easier for the reader to understand the different wording in The Message of God, the standard translation, as well as the Luther translation quickly and clearly. Based on such juxtapositions, Lorenz is able to demonstrate that, for example, in relation to the Messiah concept in The Message of God, there has been a significant interference with the other translations. The aim was to put Jesus in opposition to the Jewish Messiah conceptions (93). Ultimately, all these revisions were aimed at highlighting Jesus’ opposition to Judaism, as the editors of The Message of God understood Jesus not as a Jew but rather as a fighter against Judaism.

It is here that the weak point of the book emerges: Lorenz does not pay attention to significant publications on the German Christians and the Eisenach Institute and, as a result, produces several misinterpretations. For instance, she understands the intention of publishing the “dejewified” New Testament as a passive, defensive reaction against the background of anti-Semitic Nazi ideology (492). Lorenz even goes so far as to suggest that the editors of The Message of God had no awareness of the consequences of their work (492). Unfortunately, Lorenz repeatedly refers to the theologian Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr for information on the Institute’s work. In research on the Eisenach Institute, however, Niebuhr receives very little attention because he does not argue historically but exclusively apologetically. If the author had referred to central works such as those by Susannah Heschel (only two older papers by Heschel are referenced), Manfred Gailus (who is not named at all), or other researchers, such erroneous conclusions could have been avoided. The members of the Eisenach Institute were always aware of the consequences of their anti-Semitic works. The intention behind books such as The Message of God was an active disengagement of Jesus from its Jewish context, in order to provide a basis for the anti-Semitic goals of the German Christians and their institutes that existed from the beginning.

Future research on the Eisenach Institute needs to pay attention to Lorenz’s book, since it has bridged a gap that previous research had not closed yet. The detailed comparison of selected New Testament terms between The Message of God and classical Bible translations has succeeded and deserves a high degree of recognition. Unfortunately, this cannot be said for the historical classification and the intention of the Eisenach Institute and its “dejewified Bible,” because Lorenz has not followed the relevant research on the German Christians and the Institute. This is a pity. As a result, Lorenz issues judgments in some passages of her very good book that are simply no longer tenable due to the current state of research.

 

Share

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

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

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

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

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

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

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

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

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

Share

Book Note: “Religion” in Lisa Pine, ed., Life and Times in Nazi Germany

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Book Note: “Religion” in Lisa Pine, ed., Life and Times in Nazi Germany (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Pp. xv + 307. ISBN: 9781474217927 (Paperback).

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Lisa Pine’s Life and Times in Nazi Germany brings together an interesting set of contributions on “the history of everyday life” in the Third Reich. With three sections—“Food and Health,” “Lifestyle,” and “Religion”—she aims to assess “the extent to which a regime with totalitarian aims and ambitions succeeded in permeating different areas of social and cultural life in Germany” (15/357; all references are to the pdf electronic edition). Pine provides a thorough historiographical overview of the social history of Nazi Germany, then turns things over to her contributors. The section on “Religion” is the chief concern of this note, and is comprised of three chapters on Protestantism, Catholicism, and Christmas.

In his chapter “Protestantism in Nazi Germany: A View from the Margins,” Christopher Probst draws on church sources (newsletters, conference papers, ecclesiastical correspondence, and published works) to consider how Protestants responded to the Nazi regime and living in Nazi Germany produced profound religious divisions among Protestants. Probst begins with the issue of antisemitism, noting that “many, perhaps most, German Protestant ministers and theologians had decidedly deprecating views of Jews and Judaism,” and that most were “deeply nationalistic” (244/357). He goes on to ask three main questions: “What tack did Protestant pastors and theologians take towards the Nazi regime? How did the pressures and strictures of living in the Nazi state help to fracture the Protestant church into competing factions with distinct views on myriad issues? How did Protestant clergy and theologians confront the so-called ‘Jewish Question’?” (244/357)

Probst argues that most Protestants supported the Nazi state, whether eagerly or with mixed emotions, and that well before 1933, Protestantism was permeated with antisemitism and anti-Judaism. He develops these ideas through an overview of German Protestantism in the Third Reich and then a comparison of the views of two opposing Protestants towards Jews: Theodor Pauls, a historian and professor of religious studies who celebrated Luther’s antipathy towards Jews (adding a layer of Nazi racial antisemitism to the views of the reformer) and who worked to de-Judaize Christianity; and Heidelberg pastor Hermann Maas, a member of the Confessing Church and an ardent defender of “non-Aryan Christians” and Jews against anti-Judaism and Nazi persecution. Along the way, he draws on the work of Alon Confino (A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide) to establish the ubiquity of antisemitic sentiment among Germans, including Protestants, as the context within which clergy and theologians lived and worked. Overall, Probst focuses on explicating the range of Protestant opinions on Jews and Judaism, but says little about Protestant responses to Nazism or the pressures which split Protestantism into the competing factions of the Confessing Church and German Christian Movement, generating the church-political struggles that dominated Protestant life in the Third Reich.

Kevin P. Spicer’s chapter, “Catholic Life under Hitler,” traces the difficult choices faced by German Catholics over four phases of their relationship with National Socialism: “(1) 1930-1933, when German bishops publicly opposed National Socialism; (2) 1933-1934, when the German bishops jointly reversed their stance towards National Socialism, while holding on to the delusion that they could work with the state; (3) 1934-1939, when the state directly attacked the Church’s value system and worked to remove it from the life of the Volksgemeinschaft (‘national community’); (4) 1939-1945, when the state, while threatening to blot out the Church as a matter of policy, engaged in an annihilative war that simultaneously carried out the murder of thousands of physically handicapped and mentally ill people, as well as the deportation and murder of millions of European Jews” (273/357).

With memories of the nineteenth-century Kulturkampf in mind, Catholics worried about the danger of marginalizing themselves from the political mainstream through a rejection of Nazism. And besides, both Hitler’s promise that the churches would be foundational to his rule and the emerging economic recovery made the Nazi regime popular. The Centre Party’s support for the March 1933 Enabling Act and the July 1933 Concordat between the German state and the Vatican only seemed to confirm the belief that Hitler and his government might well form an effective partnership with the Catholic Church.  After all, both Catholics and Nazis rejected the cultural modernity of the Weimar era, promoted traditional gender roles and forms of family life, opposed Bolshevism, and expressed antipathy towards Jews. Though Catholic religious antisemitism differed from Nazi racial antisemitism, in practice these were mutually reinforcing, as clergy rarely differentiated clearly between the two.

Spicer demonstrates how easily clerical attempts to protect the Church from state attacks could lead to accusations of political subversion against Catholic clergy. Indeed, “one-third of Germany’s diocesan priests came into conflict with the Gestapo or other police agencies” (272/357). Few of these would have understood themselves as opponents of the regime. They were merely attempting to fulfill their liturgical, educational, and associational roles. On the side of the laity, over half attended services faithfully and almost all who married within the faith did so in Catholic churches (274/357). By the middle 1930s, however, tensions were rising as Nazis and Catholics sparred over access to Germany’s youth. Hermann Goering forbad all non-spiritual youth activity (including the popular hiking and camping trips taken by church youth groups), in violation of the Concordat. Over time, simultaneous membership in Catholic and Nazi youth groups was forbidden and eventually Catholic youth groups themselves were disbanded, while the Hitler Youth was made mandatory (281/357). Many priests and Catholic religious instructors faced Gestapo investigation or incarceration for their continuing engagement in youth work. Similar battles were fought over the continuing existence of Catholic schools in the Third Reich.

Spicer explains how Pope Pius XI and Vatican officials wrote well over 350 pages of correspondence to the German government over various church-state conflicts, following those private complaints with the papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (‘With Burning Concern’) in 1937.  The German state responded with an increase in the judicial persecution of Catholic clergy by means of the so-called “morality trials,” to which the bishops responded with pastoral letters critical of state attacks on the Church. While the number of Catholics exiting the Church increased somewhat in the later 1930s, all in all, the Church was able to maintain the loyalty of most Catholics and maintain its church taxation system.

Finally, during the war, Spicer argues that Catholics were “disturbingly silent” in response to the Kristallnacht Pogrom, with the exception of Monsignor Bernhard Lichtenberg. More notable was Münster Bishop Clemens von Galen’s public protest against the Nazi euthanasia campaign, which “became the central topic of conversation among the Catholics of Münster and far beyond” (287-288/357). In the end, though, Spicer maintains that Catholic resistance was normally limited to blocking state interference with traditional church practices. Similarly, Catholic lay people—perhaps especially in the countryside—were able to accommodate the everyday practice of their faith to their patriotism and loyalty towards the Hitler regime.

Finally, Joe Perry’s chapter, “Christmas as Nazi Holiday: Colonising the Christmas Mood,” demonstrates how “Nazi functionaries cast Christmas as a celebration of the German Volk that had deep roots in the solstice worship of pre-Christian Germanic tribes.” Decorations, family celebrations, carol singing, Christmas markets, and Christmas trees “were stripped of their Christian content and were reworked to insert Nazi ideology into popular festivity” (31/357). Perry draws on the history of emotions to assess the extent to which Hitler and his movement successfully co-opted the traditional Christian holiday and the “‘Christmas mood’, which turned on moving feelings of Gemütlichkeit (comfort, cosiness), Innerlichkeit (inner warmth, soulfulness), family love and deeply felt spirituality” (301/357). As Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels put it in 1935, Christmas was “the most German of all holidays. It is a Christian celebration,” but “also in the truest sense of the words a National Socialist holiday. Because, when we consider the great ideals of community that bind together the entire German Volk, the commandment ‘love thy neighbour’ has gained a new and surprising significance for us all” (303/357).

Perry traces the nazification of Christmas through three stages: (1) attempts to reshape the holiday along völkisch lines in the 1920s, (2) the campaign to popularize the Volksweihnachten (‘People’s Christmas’) between 1933 and 1939, and (3) the promotion of a Kriegsweihnachten (‘War Christmas’) during the Second World War. Often, December 21—winter solstice—was emphasized over December 25 as the time to celebrate, and public celebrations outshone family holidays.

An important part of this Nazi colonization of Christmas was the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NS-Volkswohlfahrt) charity initiative carried out by the Winter Relief Agency (Winterhilfswerk). Heavy advertising and aggressive collection campaigns focused on promoting charity because, as Goebbels stated, “we must possess a healthy Volk so that we can assert ourselves in the world” (313/357). The Hitler Youth played a large role in the collection of Winter Relief, giving out badges to those who had donated and shaming those who hadn’t. As “the human face of an inhuman regime” (Herbert Vorländer), the Winter Relief generated large sums of money which went to holiday gift packages and Christmas trees to those in need (314/357).

Similarly, other Nazi organizations such as the Hitler Youth, National Socialist Women’s League, and German Labour Front, along with the German Army, also sponsored significant Christmas celebrations. All of these events were designed to celebrate and strengthen the Volksgemeinschaft, or racial community. Perry also mentions the role of the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement in fostering this nazified version of Christmas. German Christians attempted to strip the story of Jesus’ nativity of its “Jewish-Christian accretions.” Indeed, German Christian pastor Wilhelm Bauer’s Celebrations for German Christians (1935) described the rising of a “morning star” on December 25, but left out any mention of Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph, or even Jesus, and renamed Jerusalem “the heavenly abode” (307/357). Nazi party presses produced a wide array of similar publications with instructions for celebrating Christmas, many of them directed to women, boys, and girls. The Ministry of Propaganda also produced many Christmas-themed radio programs and newsreels, while the National Socialist Teachers’ League produced curriculum material emphasizing the “blood and soil” aspects of the holiday, including the winter solstice, Nordic rituals, and female fertility (312/357).

Other Nazi writers worked to reshape even family celebrations of Christmas, by emphasizing primordial Germanic Christmas customs and rewriting Christmas carols along völkisch-racial lines. Here too, German Christians played significant roles. They replaced the lyrics “Rejoice, Rejoice, O Christianity” with “Rejoice, rejoice to be the German Type,” and added the lines, “Christmas! Blood and soil awake! Volk, from God’s light and power; your honour and heroism come” to another Christmas song (318/357).

During the war, Christmas took on new meaning, linked to suffering and sacrifice. “Light oaths” to the sun, mother love, Hitler, the Fatherland, and the German army mixed with “Bringing Home the Fire,” a ceremony where lit candles would be taken from the public, Nazi celebrations into the family home. More ominously, “Heroes’ Remembrance” ceremonies were designed to comfort grieving families at Christmastime (323/357).

Though the nazification of Christmas had its limits—the dechristianization of the holiday was particularly unpopular, and “National Socialist attempts to colonise Christmas and the Christmas mood turned the holiday into a site of cultural-political conflict” (326/357)—Perry effectively demonstrates how it was one means among many through which National Socialists worked to reconstruct social solidarity and national identity along racial lines.

 

Share

Article Note: Heath A. Spencer, “From Liberal Theology to Völkisch Christianity?: Heinrich Weinel, the Volkskirchenbund, and the Church Struggle in Thuringia”

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Article Note: Heath A. Spencer, “From Liberal Theology to Völkisch Christianity?: Heinrich Weinel, the Volkskirchenbund, and the Church Struggle in Thuringia,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 30, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 328-350.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In this interesting article, Heath A. Spencer explains how Heinrich Weinel, professor of New Testament and systematic theology at Jena University from 1904 until his death in 1936, could combine “theological liberalism, progressive politics, and humanitarian ideals” (328) with support for the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement in Thuringia. As Spencer notes, in many respects, Weinel was something of a conundrum. He defended “Protestant freedom” against conservative theology, but supported the idea of a Protestant Volkskirche (people’s church). He strove for peace and disapproved of the “national religion” of the First World War era, yet volunteered for military service and promoted “total mobilization” towards the end of the war. During the Weimar period, he was one of the minority of Protestant clergy who supported the new republic, but as the völkisch movement grew stronger through the later 1920s, he called on his fellow religious liberals to work with those on the right (328-329).

Spencer argues that Weinel’s story helps us understand how not only ideology but also “situational factors” drew German Protestants towards völkisch Christianity. Further, it reveals the motives, decision-making processes, and hopes of Protestants (especially in 1933), while illustrating the importance of local and regional factors in the history of the German churches under Hitler (330).

Weinel believed in German exceptionalism and Germany’s cultural mission in the world, and in the importance of Christianity to both. Indeed, it was his fear of losing the völkisch movement to organized religion—just as the educated elites and the industrial working classes had been lost—that drove him to want “to combine Christianity and the völkisch movement together in the right way” (335).

As Spencer explains Weinel’s journey through the war, the Weimar era, and the early years of the Third Reich, what emerges so clearly is Weinel’s tolerance for and desire to understand and even work with those of differing religious and political inclinations. Though he criticized aspects of Nazism, he approved of Hitler’s “national renewal.” Similarly, though he disapproved of the German Christians’ antisemitism and elevation of German-ness over the Gospel, he chose to set aside his long participation in the Thuringian Volkskirchenbund and to support the German Christians in the 1933 Protestant church election. His rationale was that the German Christians were a dynamic force that was winning the hearts of the masses and that they were the party that could establish a centralized Protestant Reich Church, a cause Weinel championed but knew that religious liberals could not accomplish (339).

In the final section of the article, Spencer explains how Weinel’s support for the German Christians entangled him in the antisemitic politics of Nazi Germany. Though Weinel had positive things to say about historic Judaism and though he criticized the antisemitism of the völkisch movement, he also favoured ethnic segregation, celebrated the nation as a creation of God, and failed to speak in defense of Jews and Jewish Christians who were suffering under Nazi political rule and German Christian ecclesiastical rule. Ultimately, though Spencer argues that Weinel’s support for the German Christian Movement was largely a tactical decision born of “frustration and desperation,” he also concludes that “Weinel’s story is a depressing reminder that intelligent, devout, compassionate people can make disastrous political and moral choices” (344).

Share

Article Note: Giuliana Chamedes, “The Vatican, Nazi-Fascism, and the Making of Transnational Anti-Communism in the 1930s”

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Article Note: Giuliana Chamedes, “The Vatican, Nazi-Fascism, and the Making of Transnational Anti-Communism in the 1930s,” Journal of Contemporary History 51, no. 2 (April 2016): 261-290.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

Giuliana Chamedes’ article addresses the intersection of Soviet, Vatican, and German policies through an examination of the Vatican’s Secretariat on Atheism and its transnational campaign to fight the spread of international Communism. In the early 1930s, the Vatican launched the Secretariat on Atheism as a branch of its foreign policy apparatus. The Secretariat led the anti-communist campaign by publishing monthly journals, creating traveling exhibitions, and sponsoring radio programs, writing contests, and even film propaganda. Although the Secretariat was deeply engaged in the fight against the spread of communism, Chamedes argues that the Secretariat’s success was due in part to its willingness to work with pre-existing networks of anti-communists, including the Nazis, Fascists, and others in Europe and in the Americas.

The creation of the Secretariat was part of the Vatican’s determination to re-assert Rome as the center of global Catholic life while simultaneously underscoring the Catholic Church’s ongoing prominence in international affairs. It was also part of an effort to protect the Church against threats that seemed to challenge the very existence of the Church. By revealing more information about the under-studied Secretariat on Atheism, Chamedes’ article expands on the history of transnational anti-communism. In addition, Chamedes’ research helps us to understand how Catholic Church leaders got involved with Fascists and Nazis in the Vatican’s quest to gain control over the multitude of anti-communist organizations.

Chamedes notes that Vatican-Soviet relations were carried on diplomatically throughout the 1920s and that a change in the relationship came about in the early 1930s. For Chamedes, the Vatican’s “crusade of prayer” played only a small role in the changing dynamics of Vatican-Soviet relations. Rather, she cites the years 1932-1933 as the moment when mild protests against Soviet policy were replaced with a transnational campaign, aiming to vilify communism “as the greatest existing threat to the survival of Catholicism and the Catholic Church” (266). She connects this sea change to several factors, including the outbreaks of anticlerical violence in Spain and Mexico and the emergence of a new cadre of Vatican insiders such as Eugenio Pacelli, who functioned as the Secretary of State at the Vatican. By 1931, Pacelli was obsessed with the rise of the Spanish Republic and its attempts to separate Church and State. He was convinced that the Spanish Republic was part of a communist plot to destroy Catholic Spain. He took a similar approach when examining events in Mexico. By early 1932, Pacelli revealed in a circular letter sent to Vatican officials in 39 countries that a new campaign was going to be launched from Rome to fight against the existential threat of communism against Catholicism and the Church.

1932 was also the year in which the Vatican developed the anti-communist encyclical, Divinum Mandatum. Pacelli was once again involved in this project as well and the encyclical argued that the international Catholic Church could weaken international communism. The encyclical, however, was never published and the reasons remain somewhat unclear. This did not stop Pacelli. In January 1933, a group of officials at the Vatican agreed to form the Secretariat on Atheism. The organization would be run by the Jesuits, who would keep in continual contact with the Secretary of State, and Rome would serve as the organization’s home base. Its purpose would be to launch an international counter-revolution in an attempt to defeat the aims of the Soviet Union. The new organization began by coordinating itself with anti-communist activists in Europe, the Americas, and in countries in Asia and Africa.

The Secretariat argued that it was uniquely qualified to lead the charge against communists, asserting that “the Vatican was the only ‘dynamic and truly global organization’ that stood ‘above all nations and nationalities’, and was capable of competing with international communism…” (271). Unlike Fascist and Nazi propaganda, the Secretariat did focus on communism as being essentially atheistic and godless, therefore avoiding the anti-Semitic tropes employed by men such as Hitler. Despite the struggle between the Secretariat and Nazi-Fascist forces for leadership in the charge against communism, Chamedes argues that cooperation between the competitors actually increased when one examines the case studies of traveling exhibitions and a writing competition.

With the urging and support of Pope Pius XI, the Secretariat on Atheism was charged with overseeing an international writing competition (although the role of the Secretariat was to be kept secret). The judges for the competition were known for their fascist and proto-fascist sympathies. Over 500 novels were submitted, and a Russian émigré to Vienna, Alja Rachmanova, won first place. Her novel represented the triumph of Christianity over an immoral and extremely violent Bolshevism. While Rachmanova’s novel did not employ Nazi-Fascist motifs, the second-place novel, written by Erik Maria Ritter von Kühnelt-Leddihn, told the story of a Jesuit and two other men who traveled around Europe beating up communists. Further book prizes were awarded in ways which underscored the growing interconnectedness between the Secretariat and radical right-wing political movements. For instance, when writing to the judges of the competition, Pius XI noted that book awards should go to authors who stressed themes that were anti-democratic, authoritarian, and rooted in religious political thinking (275). The Pope also warned that the novels should not stress extreme nationalism as that would threaten the role of the Catholic Church as an international organization capable of leading the fight against communism.

By the spring of 1936, as the Spanish Civil War was close to erupting, the Secretariat released a traveling exhibit meant to re-affirm that the Vatican was the leader in the fight against Communism. The thrust of the exhibit stressed that the Soviet Union and its nefarious influence could only be defeated with the collaboration of state powers with the Vatican. Using many types of modern staging techniques, visitors would encounter the growing threat of international communism. The final room in the exhibit, however, showed the Secretariat’s brochures, posters, and related material, leaving visitors with a feeling of hope that the Catholic Church was capable of defeating communism. The exhibition traveled to many different European cities and was followed up by two other exhibitions in 1938 and in 1939. In the case of these exhibitions, the Vatican did not shy away from working with Nazi and Fascist governments, as their anti-communist agenda was a shared one. This common cause also led to agreements with the Gestapo that allowed previously banned publications to be brought into Nazi Germany, showing the work of the Secretariat in its battle with the Soviet Union.

In March 1937 the Vatican released three encyclicals, one of which addressed the growing Soviet threat. Divini Redemptoris revealed the influence of the Secretariat on Atheism in its emphasis that the power and resources of the Catholic Church would be the only effective means of maintaining world peace. This encyclical was followed by Firmissimam Constantiam, which argued that violent action was needed in response to threats against Catholicism in Mexico. Using the theory of just war, the encyclical allowed and even encouraged the use of force in the fight against communism. The final encyclical of 1937, Mit brennender Sorge, addressed the rise of racist ideology. Though it avoided naming Nazi Germany specifically, it nonetheless clarified some of the Church’s position regarding Nazism.

Until the outbreak of the Second World War, many European nations and the United States of America courted the Vatican to support the fight against the spread of communism. However, once the war began in 1939, the Secretariat on Atheism was shut down. Chamedes suggests that because of Vatican cooperation with Nazi-Fascist forces during the interwar years, the Secretariat was never reopened. Chamedes concludes: “In order to weaken the Soviet Union and the global appeal of communism, the Vatican agreed to a tactical cooperation with Nazi-Fascist forces in a number of on-the-ground campaigns. The Vatican often took the initiative in doing so, even as it increasingly distanced itself in doctrinal terms from the Fascist and Nazi project” (289-290).

Share

Article Note: Todd H. Weir, “A European Culture War in the Twentieth Century? Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Bolshevism between Moscow, Berlin, and the Vatican 1922-1933”

Leave a reply

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Article Note: Todd H. Weir, “A European Culture War in the Twentieth Century? Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Bolshevism between Moscow, Berlin, and the Vatican 1922-1933,” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 2 (June 2015): 280-306.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

Todd H. Weir’s article is a transnational account of the anti-Catholicism gripping Europe in the interwar years. Between 1927-1939, thousands of Catholic clerics and lay people suffered persecution, torture, and murder in places such as Mexico, Spain, and Russia.  Weir addresses an interesting aspect of the ‘culture wars’ by examining the role that religion plays in relation to political ideologies in an age of extremes. The focus is on Germany as the site of a contested ideological and religious struggle between the Vatican and the Soviet Union. The work is divided into two phases of the relationship, covering the 1920s through 1930 as a time when Germany played the role of diplomatic mediator between the Soviet Union and the Vatican via the German Communist Party and the Catholic Center Party. Beginning in 1930, however, Germany became the chief battle arena for an ever-increasing transnational propaganda war between Catholics and communists.

In the first phase, Weir offers explanations as to why both the Vatican and the Soviet Union were open to negotiations. For Vatican officials, the communist takeover meant that there was a need to ensure access to the sacraments for the more than two million Catholics in Russia. It also offered an opportunity for the Church to seek converts from Orthodox Christianity to Catholicism. For Soviet officials, the need to secure diplomatic recognition from powerful entities and to avoid offending countries with substantial Catholic populations were reasons enough to enter into diplomatic talks. Throughout these discussions, Germany emerged as the chief negotiator, particularly since Germany and the Soviet Union had reached a diplomatic agreement in the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922.

During the 1920s, influenced by the Rapallo Treaty, the German Foreign Office refused to do more than mention religious persecution within the Soviet Union. To increase the pressure on the Soviets, Vatican Officials, including Eugenio Pacelli, began using their connections to German Catholic newspapers such as Germania to insert demands for an end to religious persecution. In response, the Bolsheviks issued an April 1929 decree making it possible for the state to persecute religious associations even more. The April decree also placed greater burdens on congregations to maintain the upkeep and taxes on their churches. The persecution and targeting of church leaders also proved to be an effective way of destroying village solidarity and ridding the areas of local elites. The Soviet clamp-down on Catholic priests induced German Catholics, including Friedrich Muckermann, to place still more articles attacking the Soviet authorities for attempting to rid their country of religion.

By 1929, Pope Pius XI had given up hope that diplomacy would win the day. Now, the Vatican would launch a “crusade of prayer” (which opened publicly on March 19, 1930) attacking the persecution of Catholic priests inside the Soviet Union, but the crusade also sought to counter the growing promotion of anticlericalism—especially in Germany. The German Freethinkers, under the influence of Soviet examples, urged Germans to leave the churches through public demonstrations, agitprop theater, and graphic propaganda. Both sides now squared off: the Soviets proclaimed that the Pope was the ringleader of Western powers seeking the destruction of the Soviet Union while the Vatican argued that communists were seeking to spread atheism and anti-clericalism throughout Europe. In Germany, Catholic priests followed the pope’s lead in the “crusade of prayer” and organized marches and demonstrations in which thousands protested the spread of anticlericalism. Priests in Germany were trained to combat atheism largely through the People’s Association for Catholic Germany. Through lectures, demonstrations, conference meetings and brochures, priests were instructed to take positive steps in the fight against the spread of atheism and godlessness. These efforts were transnational when some German priests went as a delegation to Mexico to address uprisings against the Cristero movement.

Weir tracks the divisions among German Social Democrats, German Communists, and Catholic Center Party members, revealing the strains of anticlericalism, fears about secularization, and the rising tide of groups such as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party with its promise to end secularism in Germany. The author concludes his article by suggesting that the study of political ideas “should investigate Christian apology as a crucible in which a number of religious-social discourses and theological-political strategies were forged. Although most succumbed to the more powerful political ideologies and are now largely forgotten, these Christian strategies and discourses represent signature elements of the political culture of the period” (305).

Share