Luther’s Evil Writings

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Luther’s Evil Writings

The reformer was not only anti-Jewish, but also antisemitic. So he was understood in the Nazi era, too.

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

 

The original article was published in German as “Luthers böse Schriften” in Der Tagesspiegel, 18 July 2017, and is available at http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/hass-auf-juden-luthers-boese-schriften/20071254.html. It is produced here in translation by permission of the author and newspaper.

Martin Luther’s late “Jewish writings” are no longer as unknown as they were for a long time—and the horror over the sharp anti-Jewish tone of the reformer is great everywhere. Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Chair of the EKD, has repeatedly confessed in interviews that he is ashamed of such texts by the principal founder of the Protestant churches in Germany.

Was Martin Luther an antisemite? And what would that mean for the Lutheran Churches as public-law institutions? For the many churches named after him? For a city which proudly bears the name “Lutherstadt Wittenberg”? For the many schools and streets that bear his name? Or was he perhaps not antisemitic, but “merely” an anti-Judaist motivated by Christian theology?

In the writing of church history, things have been seen this way for a long time. Certainly, most would concede that Luther’s “Jewish writings” are bad, but would add that his case is not one of genuine antisemitism, but “merely” one of theologically based (though also harsh) anti-Judaism. It is often added, however, that in his youth he wrote in a friendly manner, and that later he had grown old, was suffering from physical affliction and depression, and had long been disappointed by the stubborn unteachability of his Jewish contemporaries.

He was “only” anti-Jewish, reads the official view of the Church

Margot Käßmann, commissioned by the EKD as a Reformation and Luther ambassador for the 2017 commemorative year, is not always to be envied for her job, especially when it comes to the topic “Luther and the Jews.” As far as can be seen, the Luther ambassador (like Bedford-Strohm) maintains that Luther was “anti-Jewish” in his bad omissions about the Jews, and thus not antisemitic.

It’s easy to understand. After Hitler and the Holocaust, how today can anyone—no matter their undisputed achievements and merits—be advertised as an antisemite? At their Synod in Bremen (November 2015) the EKD approved a statement “Martin Luther and the Jews – A Necessary Reminder on the Occasion of the Reformation Anniversary.” The reformers, it says, stood in a tradition of anti-Jewish patterns of thought, whose roots reached back to the beginnings of the Church. With regard to Luther’s utterances, “hatred of Jews,” “resentments,” or “invective against Jews” is the language used—the word “antisemitism” is carefully avoided. Here, as elsewhere, the view is that antisemitism exists only in cases of racial antisemitism, which had only existed since the second half of the nineteenth century. So, it is said, we cannot talk about antisemitism when it comes to Luther.

Luther was taken up with the expulsion of the Jews

Thomas Kaufmann, the Göttingen church historian who stands beyond reproach as an expert in the Reformation period, came to the conclusion in his study Luthers Juden (2014) that Luther’s Jew hatred had included motifs that went beyond traditional Christian anti-Judaism. In addition to Luther’s central theological anti-Judaism, Kaufmann also attributes “premodern antisemitism” to the reformer. Luther ‘s recommendations to sixteenth-century authorities and church leaders, which he described as “severe mercy,” were notorious: destruction of synagogues, homes, and writings; confiscation of money and property; forced labor; prohibition of Jewish worship services; and, as the ultima ratio, the expulsion of Jewish communities from city and country. With relation to Luther’s evil writings, the church historian Kaufmann speaks of “a literary final solution of the Jewish question.”

It is well known that by 1933 a powerful antisemitism had spread among Protestant theologians. Did they get it from Martin Luther? Pastor Siegfried Nobiling, who held a position in the “Zum Guten Hirten” (“Good Shepherd”) parish (Berlin-Friedenau) since 1928, professed in a 1932 statement on National Socialism: “In conclusion, I can confess quite sincerely that National Socialism was for me destiny and experience.”

“The interests of the race,” he said, “are always valid only to the extent that they are useful to the nation as a whole. We see in Judaism the spiritual-biological poisoning of our race.”

Already in 1932, Nobiling joined the “Faith Movement of the German Christians” (DC). There he met numerous like-minded colleagues.

For the theologian-generation of 1933, the Reformations of the sixteenth century and with them Luther’s image of the Jews lay far in the background. There were, first and foremost, other impulses directly and personally experienced, which were closer to them and which determined their attitudes toward Jews. Paramount for the anti-Jewish conditioning of this generation were, for example: the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, the Berlin court preacher Adolf Stoecker, the influential theology professor Reinhold Seeberg, then also the antisemitic and Christian “Association of German Student Fraternities” (VVDSt); and the unloved Weimar democracy, which was maligned as the “godless republic.”

In the Nazi era, there was a remarkable Luther revival

The sense of religious excitement of 1933, marked by the antisemitic “German Christians,” also included a remarkable Luther revival: the reformer as German national hero, as the prototype of the quintessential German man and fighter. Not infrequently, historical lines of tradition were drawn from Luther to Hitler—by Protestants themselves, and with pride. In the “Advent” parish (Prenzlauer Berg), “German Christian” member Haertel spoke on December 12, 1933, about “Luther and the Jews.” It must be the task of the “German Christians” to fully re-establish Luther’s clear position in the “Jewish question,” which Hitler had taught anew.

In the Spandau “Luther” parish, in parallel with the passing of the “Nuremberg Laws,” the parish church council decided in September 1935 to undertake the immediate free distribution of one thousand copies of “Luther and the Jews” as well as the procurement of display cases for Streicher’s Der Stürmer. In March 1937, Johannes Schleuning, a superintendent in Berlin East, referred in particular to Martin Luther and Adolf Stoecker as Christian champions against Judaism, in an article entitled “Judaism and Christianity.” He praised the most recent special issue of Der Stürmer on the “Jewish question” and emphasized that Christ had been an “Aryan,” a Nordic hero, as described by Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

In contrast to the “Nuremberg Laws,” which were widely endorsed in the “German Christian” press, silence prevailed throughout the Protestant milieu after the Kristallnacht pogroms of 1938. Explicit approval of the excesses was rare, but it did occur. On November 20, 1938, the “German Christian” theologian Immanuel Schairer wrote a commentary on the events, expressly referring to Luther’s “On the Jews and their Lies.” Immediately after the pogroms, the Thuringian Protestant bishop, Martin Sasse, printed extracts from Luther’s “Jewish writings” and sent them to Thuringian pastors. The intense Protestant antisemitism of the Hitler period fed on many sources—not only religious or theological—and mainly on those which were closer to the protagonists historically and biographically than Luther’s “Jewish writings.” Thus, on the one hand, these writings were not needed at all to generate the massive antisemitic confessions in the churches of the Hitler period. Since 1933, however, everywhere Luther’s “Jewish writings” were dug out and disseminated in the media, they reaffirmed the already-existing Protestant antisemitism and gave it additional legitimation.

Even before 1933, Luther’s “Judenschriften” had to be regarded as a serious derailment

Even before the year 1933, Luther’s “Jewish writings” had to be regarded as a serious derailment in the eyes of unbiased readers. After Hitler and the Holocaust, these writings stand in a changed historical context, which once again places the texts in a different light and makes Luther’s verbal derailments even more serious.

The current 2017 memorial year is the first Lutheran and Reformation commemoration ever to make the existence and explosiveness of the “Jewish writings” known to a broader public. This is to be welcomed as a historical clarification. For today’s Protestant churches, however, it is not easy to deal with this problematic heritage. In the long run, euphemistic assessments such as “anti-Judaism” or the discordant metaphor of the regrettable “shadows” of the great theologian will not suffice. One also wonders what the Protestant “learning history,” much invoked during the 2017 commemorative year, is supposed to mean, considering the churches’ performance (after 400 years of learning time) during the “Third Reich.”

Luther the confession-founder will not be taken away from anxious church contemporaries. The reformer is historically significant, and that will continue into the future. Still, the current image of Luther will have to keep changing. His status as a monumental figure will diminish, while the Luther-dilemma associated with his antisemitism will grow.

The author is Professor of Modern History at the Centre for Antisemitism Research at the Technical University of Berlin.

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

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

By Dirk Schuster, University of Potsdam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

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

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Conference Report: Religion and Ethno-Nationalism in the Era of the Two World Wars

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Conference Report: Religion and Ethno-Nationalism in the Era of the Two World Wars, University of Toronto, May 21-23, 2017

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

This symposium assembled an extraordinary group of twenty scholars from twelve different countries to discuss the roles of religious individuals, institutions, and networks in the conflicts and upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. Co-sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and the University of Toronto’s Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair in Holocaust Studies, the three-day event was organized by Victoria Barnett (USHMM), Doris Bergen (University of Toronto), Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College), and Rebecca Carter-Chand (University of Toronto and Clark University). The wide range of cases and issues discussed made the symposium highly stimulating (although that same quality makes it difficult to summarize). Most fundamentally the symposium showed the value of taking a global perspective, not only to compare but to connect developments in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas; and it demonstrated the power of in-person interactions. Having time to talk, in lengthy sessions, over meals, and outdoors, proved very fruitful and will, we hope, lead to a publication and future initiatives.

The symposium built on a 2015 summer research workshop on “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945,” held in Washington, DC and initiated by Barnett and Spicer. Now the goal was to expand the conversation by bringing in more people and looking beyond Europe. A call for papers yielded three times more abstracts than we could accept—an indication of the topic’s significance—and a team of experts in History, Religion, Islamic Studies, and Jewish Studies helped choose among them. Four facilitators—Devi Mays (University of Michigan), Paul Hanebrink (Rutgers University), Milena Methodieva (University of Toronto), and Christhard Hoffmann (University of Bergen)—worked with us to organize the fifteen participants into panels and identify themes. All papers were pre-circulated.

After an opening party on Sunday, we had a full day of sessions on Monday, May 22. The first panel was organized around the theme of “Transnational Religion and Diaspora Communities.” Francesco Pongiluppi (University of Rome), Burçin Çakir (Glasgow Caledonian University), John Eicher (German Historical Institute, Washington DC), and Stefan Vogt (Goethe University) presented their research on, respectively, Fascist Italians’ cultural activities in interwar Turkey; debates about the Armenian genocide in Turkey one hundred years later; Mennonites in South America and their relationships to Nazism; and the tensions and connections between Jewish religion and German nationalist discourse in Martin Buber’s thought. Devi Mays identified several issues to think across these disparate topics. She noted the centrality of different locations in articulating nationalism, including transnational sites. Homeland, she observed, has to be articulated, too. Of the many questions that arose in this discussion, two stand out because they recurred throughout the symposium: What is the role of religion in narratives of the nation under attack? How do visions of religious ethics as a unifying force subvert or reinforce the exclusive claims of nation and land?

The second panel explored “Religious Leadership and the Role of Clergy.” Paul Hanebrink structured the session around four questions: 1) How are enemies and threats defined? 2) How do we understand theology? Religious language can be mobilized but it also has a weight of its own. 3) How do churches’ internal debates interact with outside forces? 4) What, if anything, is distinctive about European Christianity? Francesca Silano (University of Toronto), Jonathan Huener (University of Vermont), Eliot Nidam Orvieto (Yad Vashem), and Brandon Bloch (Harvard University) shared highlights of their research on, respectively, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Tikhon and his condemnation of pogroms in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution; Vatican responses to Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church in the Warthegau; The Religious of Our Lady of Sion, a Catholic order in France that reported assaults on Jews; and Protestant theologies of law and human rights in occupied Germany. In addition to big thematic issues, the discussion revealed some intriguing details, including Anna Shternshis’s observation that Soviet anti-religious propaganda depicted Tikhon as a Jew.

The third panel, facilitated by Milena Methodieva, was titled “Mobilization of Religion for National and Political Projects.” It featured the work of Roy Marom (University of Haifa), Peter Staudenmaier (Marquette University), Kateryna Budz (Kyiv, Ukraine), and Irina Ognyanova (Institute of Balkan Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences). Their research took us from Palestine in the 1930s to the Rome-Berlin Axis, and explored Ukrainian Greek Catholics and the Holocaust, and the Roman Catholic Church and Ustasha in Croatia. Methodieva raised issues about the role of religion in projects of national mobilization. She also noted how much can be learned from examining the so-called fringe or considering inconsistencies and tensions, for example, between an individual’s ideology and conduct.

These themes anticipated Tuesday’s session on “Religion and Violence.” Ranjana Mukhopadhyaya (University of Delhi), Ionut Biliuta (Gheorghe Sincai Institute for Social Sciences and the Humanities, Romanian Academy), and Jason Tingler (Clark University) all addressed the period of the Second World War, but with a focus on Buddhism and ethno-nationalism of Japan, the Romanian Orthodox Exarchate from southern Ukraine, and genocidal violence in Chelm. Christhard Hoffmann offered six tips for making comparisons: 1) In each case we are dealing not with religion per se but religion in a social context; 2) Look at the history of ethno-religious conflict in a region; 3) Pay attention to expectations for the future; 4) Consider different forms of violence; 5) What were the roles of religious people and leaders? 6) How did ethno-religious groups react when they became targets of violence?

The value of taking a global perspective was especially evident from the intense interest in Mukhopadhyaya’s paper, the symposium’s only examination of religion in a non-western context. Yet her work had many points of contact with the other papers. The importance of prophecies was one and proselytization, also central to Biliuta’s analysis, was another. Certainly Mukhopadhyaya’s insight that any religion can become implicated in violence resonated across all the sessions.

The roundtable of facilitators provided another opportunity to make connections. Kevin Spicer led off by noting that a central question in the 2015 workshop—Christian antisemitism or Christian anti-Judaism?—had not featured in any of the presentations here. Mays raised the issue of absence: what does it mean when religion is not discussed? that it is not there or is so pervasive it goes unarticulated? She highlighted two areas that got short shrift in our deliberations: gender and lay people. Hanebrink drew attention to the question as to exactly how religious concepts are harnessed and what determines whether that project succeeds or not. He wondered about the divide between private and public religious discourses and commented that the symposium as a whole did not have much to say about Jews. For her part, Methodieva emphasized the multiple forms of each religion examined and the role of individuals, including particular personalities, in driving developments. Hoffmann returned to the thorny question of the boundaries of religion: what is religion and what is non religion? He also pointed to the importance of narratives of victimization and decline in situations of violence.

The group discussion that followed raised more big questions. Spicer asked about comparative approaches: When are comparisons helpful and when are they counterproductive and even irresponsible? Marom pointed out that we had failed to question the assumptions built into the symposium title. Hanebrink observed that the term “ethno-nationalism” is a product of the 1990s, and Mukhopadhyaya explained that ethno-nationalism can complicate a bigger nationalist project, as in India where it works against civic nationalism. Bloch urged us to think about religious language as shaping how people understand the world. Silano remarked on the importance of material support: where do the funds come from and who controls the finances? Vogt warned against essentializing religion, and Budz emphasized how religious identity substitutes for ethnic identity when there is no national state. Susannah Heschel pointed to the importance of the imperialist context and referred to John Kucich’s book, Imperial Masochism (2009), to draw attention to imperialists’ insistence on their own abjection: “Look how we suffer.” Tingler encouraged expanding the scope not only geographically but chronologically, for instance, to explore religious roots of nationalism in the Middle Ages. Carter-Chand highlighted the significance of conversion and the diversity of what being “Christian” meant, even within Central and Eastern Europe, and Biliuta added the dimension of competition between religions and religious groups.

The final component was a public program featuring Susannah Heschel and Victoria Barnett and moderated by Doris Bergen. Titled “Religion, Ethno-Nationalism, and Violence: Probing the Intersections,” it was an opportunity to hear from two people who have shaped the field. Barnett and Heschel responded to three questions: 1) How do you understand the relationship between religion, ethno-nationalism, and violence? 2) How do you respond to the Holocaust and the violence of our own times without despairing? 3) How has your thinking changed in the decades since you began your work?

Their reflections were personal, profound, and often funny. Barnett described her childhood in West Virginia and her formative experience with liberation theology at Union Theological Seminary and the Puebla Conference in the late 1970s. She also invoked Jonathan Fox’s study of the “salience of religious issues in ethnic conflicts” to underscore that religion is not always or solely a factor, but it becomes powerful when “things fall apart.” Heschel challenged us to be more concrete and precise, and she set an example by defining “religion”: a communal system of propositional attitudes related to the superhuman. She poked fun at what she called the “ghostbusters” approach to comparative genocide studies—“Find the ten factors and you win!”—and asked what happens to religion in a democracy. Does it lose its enthusiastic quality? Both she and Barnett observed that pluralism is not enough. Do we come together as liberals of different faiths or within each faith? Both speakers, and the two of them together, made a powerful impression. David Clark, a PhD student at Wycliffe College who is writing his dissertation on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, called the event his “bibliography on stage.”

The full program of the symposium may be found at https://www.ushmm.org/research/scholarly-presentations/symposia/religion-and-ethno-nationalism-in-the-era-of-the-world-wars.

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Workshop Report: Mennonites and the Holocaust

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Workshop Report: Mennonites and the Holocaust–and Gerhard Rempel’s Unfinished Book, Dove and Swastika: Russian Mennonites under Nazi Occupation, University of Toronto, June 12, 2017

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

On June 12, 2017, the University of Toronto hosted an intense and unusual event that brought together a small group of historians to discuss issues around the role of Mennonites in the Holocaust. The specific focus was on the manuscript written by Gerhard Rempel and under revision for publication at the time of his death in 2014. In a series of closed sessions in the morning and afternoon, Mark Jantzen (Bethel College, Kansas), Rebecca Carter-Chand (Clark University), Diana Dumitru (New Europe College, Bucharest), Aileen Friesen (University of Waterloo), Robert Nelson (University of Windsor), and Robert Teigrob (Ryerson University) presented their reflections on selected chapters. Doris Bergen (University of Toronto) chaired the conversation, and Richard Ratzlaff (University of Toronto Press, now McGill-Queen’s University Press) observed and contributed questions and insights.

Many important issues were raised, and what follows are only a few examples. Jantzen observed that Mennonites in the nineteenth century proved remarkably adaptable. He also emphasized that refusal to serve in the military was not central to Soviet Mennonite identity. Nelson noted that Rempel’s uncritical approach to his sources led to some problematic juxtapositions and assumptions about postwar Mennonite history. Friesen drew attention to translators, a job that opened the way to collaboration for many Mennonites, and police, the main role in which Mennonites would have participated in killing of Jews. Carter-Chand found that how Mennonites acted was quite typical of other small Christian groups (Quakers, Mormons). She wondered whether the Reich Germans treated Mennonites differently from other Volksdeutschen. Teigrob noted that the ways Mennonites in North America talk about things sometimes gets echoed in the scholarship (including in Rempel’s work.) Dumitru pointed out that in the manuscript the desire to defend the Mennonite community comes across as stronger than the desire to talk about the Holocaust. Mennonites seem to need a narrative to shield them from the Soviet past and ways they participated in that system as well as from the Nazi past. Jantzen mentioned that the Reich German Mennonites and their involvement in Nazism could use more study, and Ratzlaff mentioned Stutthof, where at least judging from the names on the records, Mennonites were deeply involved.

In the late afternoon, the room was opened to the public for a panel discussion. Bergen posed questions to each of the invited guests, who spoke from their areas of expertise to the topic. Jantzen and Friesen addressed why the issue of “Mennonites and the Holocaust” is currently “in the air” (Jantzen is hosting a major conference under that title at Bethel College in Kansas in March 2018). Dumitru situated the subject in the context of studies of collaboration, and Nelson linked it to transatlantic histories of colonialism. Teigrob looked at transnational and comparative commemorations of the war, and Carter-Chand reflected on Mennonites as one of many small, Christian minority groups active in Central and Eastern Europe.

The capacity audience included undergraduate and graduate students, professors, and members of the local community, among them some who identified themselves in the question and answer period as Mennonites, Jews, Ukrainians, Germans, or people with no direct connection but a strong interest in the topics at hand.  At least one Holocaust survivor was present as were authors and editors of significant works in the field, notably Anne Konrad (Red Quarter Moon: A Search For Family in the Shadow of Stalin, 2012); and Harvey Dyck (editor and translator with Sarah Dyck of Path of Thorns: Soviet Mennonite Life under Communist and Nazi Rule, by Jacob A, Neufeld, 2014).

The event was sponsored by the University of Toronto Joint Initiative in German and European Studies/DAAD; Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair of Holocaust Studies, and an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. For more information on the conference in March 2018, click here.

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Letter from the Editors (June 2017)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Letter from the Editors (June 2017)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

While the editors of Contemporary Church History Quarterly are pleased to release our newest issue, we are also deeply saddened to announce the passing of our founding editor, John S. Conway, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of British Columbia. As most readers will know, CCHQ began as John’s monthly e-mail newsletter, which ran from 1995, when he entered mandatory retirement, until 2009. Like clockwork, John would send his newsletter of book reviews and other notes relating (for the most part) to the history of the German churches in the Third Reich to over 500 recipients from universities and religious communities around the globe. When he was about to turn 80 years old, he engaged various members of the current editorial team in a discussion about the future of his newsletter–a discussion which resulted in the founding of this journal. John was gracious in allowing us to transform his monthly e-mail newsletter into an online quarterly, and remained our most active contributor up until the last six months of his life.

I had the privilege of visiting John and his wife Ann one last time in mid-June. As we talked about work, family, and faith, John was at his most energetic when chiding me and my fellow editors for the times when we failed to release the new issue of CCHQ at the beginning of the month. As ever, John combined generous support and high scholarly expectations, something many of us benefitted from and greatly admired. Indeed, until now, John has been the driving force behind CCHQ. The editors will have more to say about John Conway’s scholarly legacy in future issues. For now, we will mourn his loss, give thanks for his life and work, and pray for his family.

On behalf of my fellow editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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1933 as a Protestant Experience and the “Day of Potsdam”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

1933 as a Protestant Experience and the “Day of Potsdam”

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

Lecture at the joint meeting of the Martin Niemöller Foundation and the Initiative “Christians Need No Garrison Church,” Potsdam, March 18, 2017.

Vortrag auf der Gemeinsamen Tagung der Martin-Niemöller Stiftung und der Initiative “Christen brauchen keine Garnisonkirche” am 18. März 2017 in Potsdam.

German original available at https://www.christen-brauchen-keine-garnisonkirche.de/files/opensauce/scss/gailus_potsdam%20m%C3%A4rz%202017.pdf.

Dear ladies and gentlemen, the “Day of Potsdam,” which will see its 84th anniversary in three days, was no singular derailment of the churches in the fatal year of 1933. Everywhere, Hitler’s Weltanschauung was present in the churches of 1933. But the unique feature of the ecclesiastical and also highly politically symbolic ceremony of March 21, 1933, in the Potsdam Garrison Church was this: it was the only church in which Hitler himself gave a speech during the twelve-year Nazi regime. The new Catholic Reich Chancellor was often praised in the Protestant churches of 1933: very often, brown uniforms and Nazi symbols such as the swastika were seen in churches and parish halls; and not only church songs were sung, but also frequently the “Horst Wessel Song.” On occasion, at the altar, alongside the crucified Christ was also a portrait of Hitler, whom the members of the German Christian Movement venerated in the churches as a saviour of the Germans sent by God. But that Hitler himself would make a speech in the church—as far as we know, that only happened once in the “Third Reich,” and that on the memorable day in the Potsdam Garrison Church, which now, after its destruction in Hitler’s war, is supposed to be rebuilt. Continue reading →

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Review Article: Confessing Church Biographies

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review Article: Confessing Church Biographies

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

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

By Matthew Hockenos, Skidmore College

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review Article: The Quest for the Historical Schweitzers

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review Article: The Quest for the Historical Schweitzers

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

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

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

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

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

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

By Sarah Thieme, University of Münster

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

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

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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

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

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

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

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