Conference Report: 30th Biennial Meeting of the Conference on Faith and History

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Conference Report: 30th Biennial Meeting of the Conference on Faith and History, Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA, October 20-22, 2016

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Under the title of “Marching to Zion: Judaism, Evangelicals, and Anti-Semitism,” three scholars from the Conference on Faith and History examined the relationship between American Protestant Christians, Judaism, and Antisemitism during the tumultuous twentieth century.

Daniel Hummel, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, presented “Rethinking Covenant, Land, and Mission: Jewish-Evangelical Dialogue after Oslo.” In it he recounted the history of Jewish-evangelical dialogue in the United States, which was first officially begun in 1969 with a highly publicized meeting between Billy Graham and the American Jewish leaders at the headquarters of the American Jewish Committee in New York City. While interreligious dialogue and politics do not always go hand-in-hand, they are inextricable in the case of Jewish-evangelical dialogue. Since the late 1960s, it has expanded into one of the most active fronts of Jewish-Christian dialogue, while at the same time American evangelical support for Israel was politicized in the Christian Zionist movement. Hummel argued that Jewish-evangelical dialogue has supplied evangelicals over the past 45 years with new ways of thinking about theological concepts of covenant, land, and mission. Through a combination of changing evangelical theology, exposure to strands of modern Jewish theology, and the very act of interreligious dialogue, new conceptualizations of covenant, land, and mission have helped legitimate Christian Zionism. In political terms, the dialogue has rationalized the Christian Zionist focus on a blessing theology rooted in Genesis 12:3. This theology argues that the Jewish people remain in covenant with God. by which the Jewish people are irrevocably granted the Land of Israel (as demarcated in the Bible), while the mission of Christians is to bear witness to this arrangement by de-prioritizing evangelism and strengthening the covenant through support for the state of Israel.

Timothy D. Padgett, who just defended his PhD from Trinity International University, gave a paper entitled “Diverse Discourse on Zion: American Evangelical Public Discussions of Zionism and the State of Israel, 1937-1973.” In it, he traced the evolution of what he argued were diverse evangelical perspectives on Zionism and the State of Israel in evangelical periodicals. Some periodicals, like Arno C. Gaebelin’s dispensationalist Our Hope, were eschatologically minded but ambivalent about Zionism and (later) the Israeli government. In contrast, the editor and writers at Christian Herald (including the pseudonymous reporter Gabriel Courier) were strongly pro-Israel but wholly uninterested in eschatology. The Reformed magazine, Southern Presbyterian Journal, though often published weekly, had precious little to say about Zionism or Israel. Most stereotypically, perhaps, the Moody Monthly was both uniformly pro-Israeli and motivated by eschatological theology. Next, the dispensationalist Presbyterian magazine Eternity combined ardent support for and harsh criticism of Israel. Finally, Christianity Today and its editor Carl Henry were quite positive about the Jewish state, but gave little expression to any theology of the end times. Overall, American evangelicals were generally pro-Israeli, though this did not seem to correlate with their level of interest in eschatological theology.

Kyle Jantzen of Ambrose University rounded out the panel, with “German Racism, American Antisemitism, and Christian Duty: U.S. Protestant Responses to the Jewish Refugee Crisis of 1938.” In it, he assessed the rhetoric employed by liberal Protestant writers and editors in Advance (Congregational), Christendom (unaffiliated), and The Churchman (Episcopalian) in responding to National Socialism, US antisemitism, the German Church Struggle, and the Jewish refugee crisis of 1938. Without doubt, these members of the Protestant church press–many of them church leaders–understood it to be their Christian duty to respond to a profound sense of crisis. Democracy, civilization, Christianity, and all religion were under attack from the forces of war, totalitarianism, racism, and paganism. These writers and editors named the evils of war and totalitarianism, in particular the threat that Hitler and Nazi Germany posed to the civilized world. They also fought against antisemitism and tried to aid Jews, though not without reviving centuries-old anti-Jewish prejudices from time to time, and also not without reframing the persecution of Jews and the Jewish refugee crisis as the persecution of Christians and Jews and the Christian and Jewish refugee crisis. In the end, the plight of the Jews was not uppermost in their minds. Most important to these liberal Protestant spokesmen was the reaffirmation that Christianity was the only force that could ultimately save their civilization, preserve democracy, and protect the world from self-destruction.

Letter from the Editors (September 2016)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Letter from the Editors (September 2016)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Greetings friends,

French Church of Friedrichstadt,Berlin

As fall begins and students return to universities across Europe and North America, we are delighted to bring you a new issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly. Our September issue is highlighted by reviews of two books: Lauren Faulkner Rossi’s Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation and Christoph Picker et al.’s Protestanten ohne Protest: Die evangelische Kirche der Pfalz im Nationalsozialismus.

Along with these reviews, we have prepared a variety of interesting news and notes: a couple of conference reports, some article and book notes, a film announcement, and a call for papers for an upcoming conference on religion and ethno-nationalism. These diverse offerings attest to the ongoing vibrancy of the contemporary history of German and European religious history. We hope you enjoy them and wish you well in this autumn season.

On behalf of the entire editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Review of Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Review of Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation (Harvard University Press, 2015), Pp. 352, ISBN: 9780674598485.

By Robert Ventresca, King’s University College at Western University

Rossi-Wehrmacht Lauren Faulkner Rossi has produced a measured and original contribution to the serious body of scholarship that has emerged over the past decade or so chronicling the varied responses and experiences of German Catholic priests under Nazism and in the Second World War. Actually, this book is about both ordained clergy and seminarians, an crucial distinction that merits a more precise articulation at the outset of this important study. We are talking here about a subject group that has received comparatively little attention from scholars to date: Catholic priests and seminarians who were conscripted into the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Significantly, only a fraction of them served officially as military chaplains; this is yet another important fact that is easily overlooked given the book’s understandable emphasis on chaplains and bishops. To be clear, the subject group under study was relatively small. Of the over 17,000,000 Wehrmacht soldiers who served in the war, 17,000 self-identified as priests or seminarians–roughly one-tenth of one percent. As Faulkner Rossi openly acknowledges, both the size of the subject group as well as the limited source base from which she draws do limit the book’s analytical scope. Most of the quantitative evidence presented here is based on the records of a single seminary in Bavaria. Further qualitative and narrative analysis is drawn heavily from the recollections of one man, Georg Werthmann, the Catholic Field Vicar-General and second-in-command to Reich Catholic Field Bishop Franz Justus Rarkowski. Accordingly, Faulkner Rossi wisely sets out forthrightly the delimitations of her analysis, inviting readers to appreciate instead the rich insights that can be gleaned through a thorough case study (2). It is indeed helpful to have at the outset a clear explanation that this is not a social history of the subject group.

These delimitations are purposeful and instructive and underscore the utility of the case study approach. That priests and seminarians should comprise such a small fraction of the Wehrmacht is not at all surprising. So the question of numbers is largely irrelevant. What matters from the standpoint of historical understanding is that these priests and seminarians were conscripted in the first place and, most important of all, that they chose to serve in such overwhelming numbers; it is remarkable and telling indeed that of those conscripted, just one–Franz Reinisch, an Austrian Pallottine priest–chose the path of conscientious objection, a choice for which he was executed. Adding to the unique perspective of the subject group are two further qualifying factors. For one, as mentioned, very few of them served as military chaplains. This meant, in short, that they were not primarily, or officially at least, responsible for the pastoral care of German Catholic soldiers, even though most of them seem to have rationalized their military service precisely in this vocational sense. Second, by virtue of the secret supplement to the 1933 Reichskonkordat between the Hitler government and the Holy See, priests and seminarians conscripted into the army were to be inducted into the medical unit or to concern themselves with the “pastoral care for the troops,” under the jurisdiction of the military bishops. This meant, in practice, that most of the men in the subject group did not take up arms in the literal sense. Instead, they provided medical service, working as assistants in field hospitals, as stretcher-bearers and so on. Serving as neither chaplains nor armed soldiers, then, these priests and seminarians were something of an anomalous group.

Precisely because they were something of an anomaly, these so-called “Wehrmacht priests” make for a fascinating case study. Why did they agree to serve? Why did only one refuse? What were their experiences like on the front lines of Hitler’s war of annihilation? How did their Catholic worldview and pastoral training influence their responses to what they witnessed and their relationship with their fellow soldiers? How did the Wehrmacht priests come to terms with their participation in the war, and how did they rationalize their role in the light of their faith and their national loyalties? Faulkner Rossi does an admirable job of focussing the reader’s attention on these animating questions. Most important, she provides compelling answers that tell us much about the challenges German Catholics confronted in the face of an “ever-shifting, fluid negotiation of national and religious identity under the Nazi regime” (5). Because it was ever-shifting and fluid, that process of negotiation was ongoing. Invariably, it pushed these Wehrmacht priests onto a kind of ethical gray zone, trying to do go some good–or so they believed–while cooperating with the Hitler state in a war that many of them believed to be unjust. And yet they justified their service nonetheless, ostensibly in the name of serving God and country.

Since she wants to understand her subjects as men of their time, Faulkner Rossi offers a nuanced assessment of how these priests and seminarians reasoned and acted within the confines of their worldview. The book is perhaps most incisive and most effective at re-creating the “mental horizons”–to borrow from John Connelly–of this distinctive group of devout German Catholics who heeded the call for military service (3). It was a worldview framed by the reigning Catholic moral theology of the day, by the particular contours of their clerical training, and by their personal experiences as young German Catholics whose formative years were defined by the turbulent collapse of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazism and the inexorable radicalization and racialization of German society under the auspices of Gleichschaltung (16). Theirs was a German Catholic cultural and moral universe that nurtured a strong and resilient autonomous youth movement and associational life, but also learned to accommodate if not make peace entirely with the Hitler regime. This limited degree of autonomy, which lessened over time, nonetheless did create some space for German Catholics to distance themselves from certain Nazi policies and practices without feeling compelled to engage in active or even passive forms of resistance to the regime before or during the war.

Faulkner Rossi very deftly dissects these mental horizons, revealing the complex intersection and interaction of religious faith, cultural identity and national loyalty. She reasons that two themes were formative in the motivation and rationalization of conscripted priests and seminarians: the twin emotional and intellectual demands of faith and national identity (3). Faulkner Rossi concludes that most of these conscripted priests and seminarians did not go to war because they supported Nazism (154). To the contrary, she says, they “consistently divorced” their participation in the war and even the army itself–leaders and soldiers–from Nazism (154). We are told simply that most of them went to war for “a variety of reasons” (154). Two reasons appear to have been paramount: a sense of duty to care spiritually for German Catholic soldiers, and a sense of patriotic duty to defend their country. As Faulkner Rossi concludes, for the Wehrmacht priests and seminarians, “religion and nationalism worked in tandem as motivation” (154).

Importantly, this mutually reinforcing motivation produced what Faulkner Rossi evocatively describes as a “dangerous myopia,” wherein the presumed salvation of the souls of German Catholic soldiers counted above anything and everything else. In other words, an understandable pastoral impulse to care for the spiritual and emotional health of German Catholic soldiers fighting a war of annihilation proved a more powerful claim for this select group of priests and seminarians than resisting inhumane and unjust behaviour in war (155). This, according to Faulkner Rossi, is what made the Wehrmacht priests so genuinely different from other conscripts, that is, this avowedly “vocational aspect of their military service” (240). These men believed fervently that serving dutifully in the Wehrmacht meant serving God and country, not Hitler per se; they told themselves during and after the war that there was a “greater good” to be served in offering pastoral care for Catholic soldiers and mitigating the suffering of all German soldiers through other forms of compassionate service. They were determined, in Faulkner Rossi’s words, “to do some good or to make a difference for the soldiers” (154).

The logic of the “greater good” thereby provided the Wehrmacht priests with a confirmatory moral justification for serving. In short, these priests and seminarians brought to the war zone a unique blend of “training, faith, and feeling” that distinguished them from laymen soldiers and also sustained them in their military service; Faulkner Rossi labels this as a kind of “spiritual opportunism” (154). In the end, this vocational sense of military service helped the Wehrmacht priests to “rationalize their complicity with a racist, murderous regime” (155). True, these men saw their spiritual sustenance of laymen soldiers as pastorally and morally vital, and proper to their vocation and training. But this trapped them in what Faulkner Rossi rightly describes as a “flawed rationalization” (155). They told themselves that they were working for God and country and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of that conviction, however myopic or flawed we may judge the rationalization. In the words of one former priest-soldier, identified only as Wilhelm W.

I served the Church. A side effect of this was, in effect, to render a service to the state, but I had to hazard the consequences. I believe fundamentally in helping soldiers, in serving them, in preserving the Church and to that final end serving the glory of God… The other part of it included a cooperation that one simply couldn’t repudiate (250).

Evidently, the impulse to “do some good” and to seek the “greater good” through a vocational sense of military service did not extend to speaking or acting on behalf of the innocent victims of Hitler’s wars. Paradoxically, the deeper the religious and pastoral commitment to the spiritual welfare of soldiers, the more myopic–perhaps even blinded–the Wehrmacht priests grew vis-à-vis the most vulnerable–those, as Faulkner Rossi puts it, “most in need of defense, namely Europe’s Jews” (156).

An important caveat is in order here. Much of what we know about how Wehrmacht priests rationalized their decision to serve in a war that was, as Faulkner Rossi notes, “criminal” and “antithetical” to their Catholic values, comes from written testimony some 140 priest-veterans provided many decades after the war ended. Allowing for the usual hazards of private and public memory of traumatic episodes, the reader is struck, as Faulkner Rossi was, by the obvious difficulty these priests and seminarians had in coming to terms with their service. It is impossible to ignore the fact that few of these men engaged in a serious, self-critical examination of conscience about what they saw and did or did not do on behalf of the victims during their military service.

Troublingly, most of the men claimed never to have witnessed first hand or even to have known about the atrocities until after the war, a claim that strains the limits of credulity. Consider the recollection of one Josef P., who served as a medical orderly and chaplain. He recalled being assigned to a small Polish city “full of Jews, all of whom wore the Jewish star.” But, he insisted, at that point the “systematic extermination had not yet begun…. I never witnessed atrocities against Jews or civilian populations. I only heard about it after the war.” Josef recalled hearing stories about SS troops killing Jewish children in disturbingly horrific ways. “But these were stories,” he said. “I never witnessed it. I didn’t know if it was true” (242). Still other men insisted on distinguishing and distancing the Wehrmacht from the Nazis. In the words of Kunibert P., “our Wehrmacht, or at the division I was in, was anything but Nazi…. [W]e served an unethical regime, that was clear to everyone, the Nazis were criminals…. I’ve already said, I was gladly a soldier, but we were never Nazis” (247). Of course, this exculpatory claim–we were never Nazis–was invoked widely and persistently in the years after the war by various segments of society, by powerful institutions like the military and the Church both in Germany and well beyond. In fact, Faulkner Rossi sees in the individual failure by the Wehrmacht priests to consider the consequences of their complicity with a murderous regime a corollary failure of the two institutions in which these men served–the German military and the Catholic Church (253).

To her great credit, Faulkner Rossi handles the interview responses with an appropriately critical sensitivity, thereby avoiding facile historical or moral judgements. Consequently, she is able to write persuasively about the dilemma that most of the Wehrmacht priests and seminarians faced: a binary choice between their sense of duty to offer pastoral care and sustenance to soldiers on the one hand and the inescapable realization of their complicity with a murderous regime on the other. The dilemma was captured aptly by one chaplain who said years after the war, “Naturally, one wondered repeatedly if this was a just war…. [O]n the one hand, as a Christian, one couldn’t endorse the regime, couldn’t support it. But on the other hand, we did this indirectly, by emboldening the soldiers. Doubt often came over me: should I continue doing this or not? And if I thought about the soldiers themselves, I could do nothing but continue” (251).

Such a statement conveys powerfully the sense of the inescapability of the binary choice the Wehrmacht priest and seminarians said that they faced. The irrevocable commitment to provide pastoral care for the conscience of the Catholic soldier meant that Wehrmacht priests understood and accepted that their service entailed some degree of complicity with a criminal regime. Yet, their “consciousness of the dire need for pastoral care” was the tipping point so to speak, the decisive factor in their decision to serve. Faulkner Rossi reasons that this sense of pastoral duty “outweighed any impulse to take a principled stand against a regime that did not tolerate dissent. When a priest can literally see before him a phalanx of Catholics asking for spiritual guidance in the midst of the annihilation, the idea of abandoning his training and ignoring that plea for guidance was morally irresponsible” (251).

So we are left to conclude that a moral choice lay behind the decision to serve and to do so dutifully even in the midst of the annihilation of entire communities across Eastern Europe. We know, of course, that this choice–these thousands of choices–had consequences, however unintended and unforeseen. Moreover, it remains unclear whether the choice to serve was guided primarily by religious and pastoral commitments, as we are told repeatedly in the postwar testimonials, or whether service truly was inspired and sustained by nationalism. For her part, Faulkner Rossi concludes that nationalism, not Catholicism, was the “essential ingredient” in the military service of Wehrmacht priests and seminarians. “These men,” we are told, “were deeply German” (241). If that was the case–and there is plenty of evidence presented here to substantiate the point–then the reader is left to wonder: were these Wehrmacht priests and seminarians really all that different from laymen soldiers or from Protestant chaplains and priests for that matter? More to the point, did their avowed vocational sense of military service distinguish them from laymen soldiers, or was it simply the confirmatory rationalization for serving above all to defend country–a shared goal with Nazism that clearly facilitated and eased accommodation and complicity or at the very least stifled dissent or resistance for most.

The role that these priests played in providing spiritual guidance and perhaps even forms of formal or informal absolution to soldiers waging a war of annihilation is a troubling yet deeply consequential question that warrants further research and analysis. It is deeply consequential because it cuts to the heart of the choices soldiers (and civilians) made in the midst of the Nazi war of annihilation: the choice to follow orders or to refuse; the choice to look away when confronted with brutality and violence or to protest, to dissent, to resist; the choice to refuse to be conscripted or to serve dutifully, thereby playing a part, however small or indirect, as a cog in the wheel of the machinery of destruction. It may be true that most of the Wehrmacht priests were never avowed Nazis but, as Faulkner Rossi reminds us, other people–including some priests–made other choices and paid the ultimate sacrifice for them. That is the moral of the story of conscientious objectors like Franz Reinisch, a story that is told altogether too briefly and too hurriedly at the end of this otherwise very informative book. Thanks to Lauren Faulkner Rossi, we now have a much deeper understanding of why and how priests served in Hitler’s war of annihilation. The perplexing and troubling question persists, though: why were there so few priests like Father Reinisch?

Review of Christoph Picker, Gabriele Stueber, Klaus Buemlein, and Frank-Matthias Hofmann, eds., Protestanten ohne Protest: Die evangelische Kirche der Pfalz im Nationalsozialismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Review of Christoph Picker, Gabriele Stueber, Klaus Buemlein, and Frank-Matthias Hofmann, eds., Protestanten ohne Protest: Die evangelische Kirche der Pfalz im Nationalsozialismus, 2 Vols. (Speyer and Leipzig: Verlagshaus Speyer and Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2016), Pp. 911, ISBN: 9783374044122.

By Manfred Gailus, Technical University of Berlin; translated by John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Picker-Protestanten The Protestant Union Church of the Palatinate is one of the smaller regional churches in Germany, with its headquarters in Speyer on the west bank of the Middle Rhine. The church authorities, after lengthy delays, have now published this voluminous collection of essays by more than 60 contributors, which describes the fate of the church during the years of Nazi rule. It constitutes one of the best regional studies of the Protestant church for this period, although, as the chief editor Christoph Picker acknowledges in his introduction, the results are highly sobering. In this region of Germany which was diverse in its denominational loyalties, Protestantism and National Socialism went hand in hand. Many leading Nazi functionaries saw themselves as “good Protestants,” and the collaboration between the church leadership under the “German Christian” Bishop Ludwig Diehl and the Nazi Party’s regional hierarchy was at first close and on very good terms. Above all, the desire among churchmen for stability led them to endorse the Nazi project for “national unity” (Volksgemeinschaft) in the interests of harmony. So no real Church Struggle took place in the Palatinate Church, and it is estimated that 50 percent of the pastors belonged to the German Christian faction in 1933. The limited opposition from those who supported the Confessing Church when it was organized in 1934 was successfully integrated with the dominant German Christians. More than 20 percent of the pastors took out membership in the Nazi Party.
Four large chapters in Volume 1 spell out the details:

Chapter one describes the historical developments of this Church from the political and religious situation during the Weimar Republic up to the difficult and contentious coming-to-terms with its “brown” past during the immediate post-war years up to 1949. Chapter two (“Institutions, organizations, and groups”) includes the relationships with the national Reich Church under Bishop Ludwig Mueller as well as with the Nazi state. Details are also provided about the traditional church parties, the German Christian Movement and the local Confessing Church in the Palatinate. Chapter three covers the growth of antisemitism and the church’s reactions to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, as well as the results of the Nazi plans for ethnic cleansing through its euthanasia program in church institutions, and also the more general Nazi persecution measures against Protestants. Chapter four details internal church developments. This section describes such things as the character of church services, church art and architecture, youth work, the church press, the continuing and formative hostility towards the Catholics of this very mixed region, and finally the role of church women and especially of the pastors’ wives, who held prominent position in the parishes. All this is described in great detail in the 638 pages of the first volume. At the same time, a large number of impressive photographs are included, which are of considerable historical value.

The second and less extensive volume covers the activities of the major church protagonists, who were mainly pastors, with short biographical sketches. Given the multiplicity of these articles, it is naturally impossible to examine individual items. Particularly notable, however, is Walter Rummel’s contribution on the performance of the church during the Second World War, which describes the extensive and willing participation of church members in Hitler’s campaigns. For example, the Dean of Speyer, Karl Wien, gave a rousing sermon on Heroes’ Remembrance Day in 1940, which, in flaming tones, exalted the list of German heroes from those who had fallen during the First World War to the “freedom fighters” in the postwar period up to the fighters in the SA and those who were actually now fighting in the ranks of the German army. After the German victory over France in June 1940, Bishop Diehl ordered all parishes to hold services of Thanksgiving. As long as these victories continued, there was a regular personality cult around Hitler, even in church pronouncements.

Roland Paul describes the church reactions to the Nazi pogroms against the Jews of November 1938, noting the widespread silence in church circles. Shortly afterwards, in his annual report, Pastor Georg Becker of Iggelheim wrote that, with these pogroms, the Nazis were actually carrying out Luther’s intentions and inheritance. “Those cities and sites where the Jews have blasphemed God and Jesus Christ will shortly disappear from the Reich of our dear leader Adolf Hitler” (357). Pastor Johannes Baehr in Mutterstadt was the exception. In November 1938, while teaching his class of schoolchildren, many of whom had witnessed the burning-down of the local synagogue, Pastor Baehr declared that such actions were not to be justified. On the very same day he was taken into “protective custody” and only released two days later after the intervention of Bishop Diehl.

This is a significant publication, providing a self-critical account of the church’s activities and attitudes. Of course, its appearance is very late. Only after several generations have passed by can we expect such a sobering and self-critical analysis of these twelve horrifying years of Nazi rule, which were also twelve fatal years for German Protestantism. So far not all regional Protestant churches have found the courage to undertake such a thorough and self-critical examination. So this example by a relatively small church shows what can be done on its own initiative. We can hope that these two volumes will find many readers, especially since 2017 is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Not only do these volumes provide us with examples of dangerous perversions to be avoided, but also remind us of the long and illustrious history which German Protestantism has enjoyed for the last 500 years.

Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “Were the National Socialists a Völkisch Party? Paganism, Christianity, and the Nazi Christmas”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “Were the National Socialists a Völkisch Party? Paganism, Christianity, and the Nazi Christmas,” Central European History 47, no. 4 (2014): 760-790.

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

As Kyle Jantzen noted in our most recent issue, Samuel Koehne has published over the last several years a series of articles that offer significant insights on National Socialist views of religion. This study is no exception. Koehne offers nuanced conclusions based on meticulous research. The article is especially valuable for the light it sheds on the interaction between “the völkisch world of thought,” (764) which he dubs the “strange worldview out of which Nazism emerged,” (767) and Nazi views on religion as illuminated by their celebrations of Christmas in the early years of the Weimar Republic.

Koehne’s main argument is threefold: that “the Nazis were clearly a part of the völkisch movement, that they reflected the movement’s diverse religious trends, and that there is an urgent need for historians to reconnect the Nazi Party to the milieu from which it emerged” (762-763). While major histories of the Third Reich have examined the role played by antisemitism, eugenics, and Social Darwinism in the broader völkisch subculture in which the Nazis operated, he avers, “there is a need for a deeper analysis of the intellectual roots of National Socialism with respect to its religious beliefs—and to how those beliefs connected with earlier völkisch religious trends” (763). Koehne’s emphasis on the syncretistic interaction between Nazi ideology, the völkisch milieu of the early twentieth century, and Christianity is both welcome and thoroughly elucidated here.

Koehne’s conclusions are also threefold. First, he concludes that there was no “cohesive meaning” to “positive Christianity,” a much discussed phrase used in Point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Program. Instead, the fact that this “positive Christian” party both promoted and reported its own Christmas celebrations as “the Germanic pagan festival of winter solstice” demonstrates both that leading Nazis (including Hitler) were not concerned about appearing as traditional Christians and that a wide array of religious views existed within the party (787). Second, he contends that “the early Nazi Party was immersed in the völkisch movement, including its pagan trends and traditions” (787). Koehne demonstrates that the party both promoted and was influenced to a significant degree by the ideas of people like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Theodor Fritsch, and Arthur Dinter. Third, Koehne concludes both that there is no “inherent dichotomy” within the Nazi Party between its pagans and its Aryan Christians and that—because of the context and meaning poured into the terms by their Nazi adherents—references to Jesus Christ, Christianity, and the Bible do not necessarily exclude paganism (788). The picture that emerges here is one of a wide diversity of beliefs and indeed a great deal of syncretism between Christianity, Germanic paganism, and völkisch ideology.

Koehne’s study of a rather narrow topic—early Nazi views of the celebration of Christmas—offers tantalizing answers to much bigger questions, including the one posed in the article’s title. The study is extremely meticulous. The author’s nuanced conclusions are worthy of careful consideration and will no doubt propel others to plow further ground in this relatively fallow area of scholarly research.

Article Note: Todd Weir, “The Christian Front against Godlessness: Anti-Secularism and the Demise of the Weimar Republic, 1928-1933”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Article Note: Todd Weir, “The Christian Front against Godlessness: Anti-Secularism and the Demise of the Weimar Republic, 1928-1933,” Past and Present 229 (Nov. 2015): 201-238.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

Though historians have long been attentive to the role of organized religion in the demise of the Weimar Republic, Todd Weir argues that they have failed to recognize the full significance of anti-secularism in the political developments that brought Hitler to power. In contrast, Weir sees a close relationship between campaigns against godlessness and the Nazi Party’s electoral breakthrough with conservative Protestant voters beginning in 1930.

To make his case, Weir employs M. Rainer Lepsius’ conceptual model of four “mutually hostile” social-cultural milieux (socialist, Catholic, liberal Protestant, and conservative Protestant) among which Germans had been divided since the late nineteenth century (207). The socialist milieu, represented by the Communist and Social Democratic parties in the Weimar era, was decidedly secular in comparison with the others, and its members were prominent in the German Freethought Association as well as the periodic church-leaving campaigns. From 1929 onward, the communists’ displays of anti-clericalism grew increasingly provocative as they tried to draw ardent secularists away from their more moderate social democratic rivals. Catholic and Protestant clergy and lay organizations—most often aligned with the Center Party and the German National People’s Party, respectively—responded to these threats with energetic campaigns against godlessness. Their domestic mobilization dovetailed with widespread concern over the persecution of Christians in Mexico and the USSR, leading many Christians in Germany to conclude that their “defensive campaigns against German secularists” were part of a larger “global battle with unbelief” (202).

A side effect of this escalating cultural conflict was that it further undermined the position of Heinrich Brüning of the Center Party, who was Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932. Although Brüning suppressed communist freethought associations and banned a high-profile Jugendweihe (secular confirmation ceremony) that communists had planned for 2000 youth in Berlin, he was derided by conservative Catholics and Protestants for tolerating socialist freethinkers and the Center/Social Democratic coalition that governed the state of Prussia. Disappointment with the Center Party’s ‘tepid’ responses to secularism gave the National Socialists an opening to present their party as a more aggressive and effective champion in the struggle against godlessness. Their strategy seems to have been most effective among Protestants on the far right.

Weir’s article demonstrates a positive correlation—though not necessarily a causal relationship—between heightened concerns over godlessness and conservative Protestant support for the Nazis. Expressions of outrage over anti-clericalism and governments that appeared to tolerate it were certainly part of the toxic mix that undermined the Weimar Republic. However, Weir’s neglect of the liberal Protestant milieu and its role is puzzling. Members of this subculture also opposed godlessness, though many of them considered the ‘Catholicizing tendencies’ of conservative Protestants to be an equally grave threat to German culture. Consideration of this milieu would not necessarily negate Weir’s central argument, but it would provide a more nuanced representation of Christian responses to organized secularism at the end of the Weimar era.

Article Note: Thomas Brodie, “The German Catholic Diaspora in the Second World War”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Article Note: Thomas Brodie, “The German Catholic Diaspora in the Second World War,” German History 33, no. 1 (March 2015): 80-99.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Thomas Brodie of Jesus College, Oxford, has drawn from his doctoral research on German Catholics on the home front during the Second World War to publish this interesting article about the vagaries of religious practice among Rhenish Catholics displaced by Allied bombing. He follows Catholic evacuees from the Rhineland and Westphalia to places like Thuringia, Saxony, and southern Württemberg, where they often struggled to make new homes and develop healthy spiritual practices.

The article begins with a strong historiographical section, placing the author’s research in the context of recent scholarship on the air war, evacuations, the home front, and German religious history. While many accounts have suggested that the experience of the Second World War was conducive to an upswing in religious activity and clerical influence, Brodie disagrees, arguing that scholars have taken “insufficient account of the manifold strains the conflict imposed on the Churches’ pastoral structures during this very period” (82). To the contrary, he suggests that, “It was indeed precisely from 1943 onwards, as Allied bombing of northern and western Germany intensified, that civilian evacuations increasingly disrupted established religious geographies and networks of clerical ministry in these regions” (82). In short, he suggests that the western German Catholic milieu didn’t survive displacement.

Brodie asks a series of useful questions: Were clergy able to minister to their displaced parishioners, or were evacuees essentially removed from their influence? Did evacuation to Protestant or remote Catholic regions weaken the faith of Catholics from the Catholic strongholds of the Rhineland and Westphalia? Do the experiences of Catholic evacuees tell us anything about the wider level of religious engagement in German wartime society? And how did the Catholic clergy and laity understand their experiences as evacuees? His overarching argument is that population movements were significantly disruptive to confessional life: “German society may not have been disintegrating by 1943/1944, but the measures required to maintain the national war effort were proving increasingly corrosive of traditional ‘milieu’ boundaries” (83).

In the sections that follow, Brodie draws on the reports of Rhenish clergy working with evacuees to illustrate a series of problems created by the mass evacuation of western German Catholics. For instance, often Rhenish priests simply lacked important materials for their ministry, like Bibles, catechisms, or prayer books. Moreover, they frequently wanted for the necessary means of transportation to reach widely scattered evacuees. Large parishes and poor public transportation meant that they were frequently cycling 10 to 20 km to minister to families or provide religious instruction. Then, even if they could reach their charges, clergy needed a place to meet with them. In Thuringia, for example, the Protestant church government refused to allow Catholics to use their church buildings at any time during the war. On top of that, the Gestapo often prohibited Catholics from holding religious services in schools or homes. Even when evacuees ended up in Catholic regions, however, religious practices were often so different that the Rhinelanders struggled to join in.

Compounding these problems were others. Often, clergy had no way of knowing how many Rhenish Catholics had been evacuated, where they had settled, or if they had returned home. In one case relating to the Cologne Archdiocese, out of about 250,000 evacuees, only 16,500 had registered for religious supervision in the diaspora (86).

Brodie also notes the acute shortage of Catholic clergy. In late 1943, 9 percent of German parishes lacked a priest, and the vast majority of theology students and trainee priests–at least in the Cologne area–were being called up for military duty. (This research mirrors the reality in many Protestant regions, where many clergy cared for two and three parishes during the war and administrators struggled to fill gaps.)

In Protestant regions, Catholic priests often faced confessional hostility from Protestant lay people or police. Both they and their parishioners felt this, and Rhenish clergy developed a self-understanding of working in exile. They often complained about the secularism of Protestant regions like Thuringia, and viewed their labour as a participation in the wider effort to stem the tide of godlessness in Europe. Drawing on their neo-Scholastic theology, these clergy interpreted the spiritual apathy they observed to the Reformation’s “depowering of the sacraments and the sacrifice of the cross.” The result was, as one priest put it, “the whole faith increasingly collapses” (92). In Austrian Catholic regions to which evacuees had been sent, this declining religious vitality was attributed to “enlightened Josephinism” and its modernizing effect. Everywhere, however, priests also pointed to the morally corrosive effect of the war itself, including the prevalence of adultery and marital breakup.

In the final section of his article, Brodie suggests that the weakness of Catholic evacuees’ religious practice in wartime and their observations about Protestant secularism in places like Thuringia and Saxony suggests that the narrative of a general upsurge in German religious activity on the Second World War home front may be mistaken. In fact, Brodie suggested confessional identity took a beating, with Catholics slipping into Protestant services or (more often) just going shopping or sightseeing on Sunday. In parts of Saxony, for instance, the movie theatre seems to have outdrawn the church (95). Ultimately, if many Rhenish Catholics struggled to attend church at home, how much less likely were they in the situation of displacement?

In his conclusion, Brodie reiterates his primary argument that wartime was not conducive to increasing clerical influence or religious engagement. Rather, “the experiences of the Catholic diaspora as a whole indicate that although German society was not completely atomized during 1943 and 1944, certain traditional customs and networks were fraying under the pressures of war” (98).

Book Note: Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Book Note: Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 (London: Penguin Books, 2015), Pp. 593, ISBN: 9780713990898.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Kershaw-Hell Despite its theologically-sounding title, this latest work by Ian Kershaw, who is one of Britain’s most distinguished contemporary historians, is a masterly synoptic history of Europe, designed for the general reader. In this work, Kershaw expands on his previous interest in Nazi Germany to cover what he calls Europe’s “era of self-destruction,” which places Nazi Germany in its wider context of a continent-wide series of disasters in the first half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless he also includes a short but valuable section on “Christian Churches, Challenge and Continuity”, placing emphasis on the political and social developments affecting the Christian churches within the wider European setting.

Kershaw begins this section by describing how, on the outbreak of the 1914 war, both sides indulged in claims of divine approval for their nationalistic goals. These mutually contradictory and incompatible assertions did little to enhance the morale of the combatants, and in the long run discredited both their advocates and the Christian gospel of peace and brotherly love. In the aftermath, paradoxically, the churches in Britain and France led the movement against militarism and were in favour of reconciliation through such agencies as the League of Nations. But in defeated Germany, the clergy were leaders in maintaining that they should have been victorious, that their nation had been stabbed in the back by disloyal elements, particularly Jews, and that they were being humiliated by the vindictive and oppressive Treaty of Versailles. Such reactionary attitudes did much to prepare the ground for Hitler’s rise to power.

As Kershaw argues, in 1933 one wing of German Protestantism sought to bring the church up to date by jumping on the Nazi bandwagon. But this evoked a backlash from the more conservative wing known as the Confessing Church, which opposed any state interference in church affairs. However, many of these pastors had sympathy with Nazism’s political and military aims. For their part, the German Catholics invoked the aid of the Vatican in 1933, seeking a treaty or Concordat to secure their position in the new Third Reich. But, as Kershaw points out, this Concordat from the beginning was a dead letter, due to the Nazis’ dynamic ideological and nationalistic plans and the anticlerical attitudes of the party leadership. In practice, in both churches, despite attempts to oppose Nazi encroachments, there was general compliance with other spheres of government policy, including the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

The author goes on to explain that similar attitudes prevailed in other countries, such as the Nazi satellite state of Slovakia, where the president happened to be a Catholic priest. Criticisms from the pope were ignored, so that a leading Vatican official could comment in 1942: “Everyone knows that the Holy See cannot bring Hitler to heel. But who will understand that we cannot even control a priest?” In other parts of Europe, the fate of the Jews was largely greeted by churchmen with indifference. Arguments have continued ever since whether more forceful condemnations of Nazi atrocities by the churches would have saved lives, or have led to making the situation in Germany and the occupied territories even worse. In Kershaw’s view the silence of Pope Pius XII on this issue irredeemably harmed his reputation. After the Nazi regime was overthrown, little was done to regret the churches’ support for totalitarian rule or to extend sympathy to its victims. In 1945 only a few voices, such as that of Pastor Niemõller, were found to support a declaration of guilt, while too many churchmen had to come to terms with their previous support of Nazi goals.

In Kershaw’s opinion, apart from the regions that fell under Soviet domination in 1945, the wartime experiences of the churches in Europe did little to impair their standing. Soon afterwards they took energetic steps to reorganize and revitalize themselves. Significant changes would only come about in the 1960s. In his conclusion, Kershaw reverts to his theological interests by asking both about the churches’ responses to the disastrous atrocities of this half-century and about a God who could allow such evils to prevail. In his view such vital questions would only grow, not diminish, as the Second World War receded further into history.

Conference Report: “Not Without the Old Testament”: The Importance of the Hebrew Bible for Christianity and Judaism, French Church of Friedrichstadt, Berlin, 8-10 December 2015

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Conference Report: “Not Without the Old Testament”: The Importance of the Hebrew Bible for Christianity and Judaism, French Church of Friedrichstadt, Berlin, 8-10 December 2015

By Gerhard Naber, Nordhorn, and Oliver Arnhold, University of Bielefeld and University of Paderborn; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Note: Normally Contemporary Church History Quarterly publishes historical rather than theological material. However, given the relevance of any German theological debate concerning the validity of the Old Testament to the antisemitic history of the German Christian Movement in the Nazi period, it seemed useful to publish this report from a noteworthy conference. The following account demonstrates that the conference “Not Without the Old Testament” grappled not only with contemporary theological problems, but also with the shadow of this history. Translator’s additions appear in square brackets.

Conference organizers: Protestant Academy of Berlin; Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies; Moses Mendelssohn Foundation; Protestant Church of Berlin, Brandenburg, and Silesian Upper Lusatia; Church and Judaism Institute (Humboldt University).

Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time (2015), by Joshua Koffman

On the invitation to this conference and also on the huge display wall at the front side of the French Church of Friedrichstadt, we see two young women with crowns (princesses, perhaps?). They are similarly clothed, level with one another, and facing each other—each of them occupied with a scripture: the left one with a scroll, and the right one with a book marked with a cross—clearly a Torah and a Bible. What is special, however, is that neither looks (only) at her own scripture, but—in this moment—is interested in the scripture of the other.

The picture fascinates and confounds.

Such a composition is well known from medieval imagery. On almost all gothic churches we can find Ecclesia and Synagoga, an image of anti-Jewish theology with the message: Israel has been rejected; the Church has triumphed. But here, both figures are on the same level, made equal. They read their writings, but are also interested in the things that concern the other. This image of dialogue between Israel and the Church, created by Joshua Koffman, is entitled “Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time” (2015).

This representation symbolizes better than any other the protocol for the conference “Not Without the Old Testament.”

The background for this conference was the current, so-called “Slenczka Debate.” In 2013, the Berlin systematic theologian Dr. Notger Slenczka published a treatise in which he expressed concern that it might be time—in the intellectual tradition of Schleiermacher, Harnack, and Bultmann—to decanonize the Old Testament, i.e. perhaps to downgrade it to the status of the Apocrypha and in any case not to grant it the same status as the New Testament for Christian theology and for the Church.

This was certainly impetus enough to fundamentally reexamine the importance of the Old Testament for Christians and the Tanakh [Hebrew Bible] for Jews.

After greetings from Dr. Eva Harasta of the Protestant Academy and Dr. Julius H. Schoeps of the Moses Mendelssohn Center, the first session revolved around the question “Text and Politics.” Dr. Rolf Schieder spoke first on the theme of “The Political Responsibility of Christian Theology towards the Old Testament.” He criticized the fever of the debate, the style of the confrontation. It was important that technical questions be kept at the center. Slenczka’s thesis should therefore be taken seriously, insofar as he sees his position within the realm of Jewish-Christian dialogue. Christians should not worm their way into the covenant with Israel; they should respect the Old Testament as a record of Jewish faith. Finally, the speaker proposed a “dogmatic disarmament”—not to understand the canon as normative, but as a collection of texts for use in worship, teaching, and personal devotion. In this sense, the Old Testament is certainly part of the Christian canon.

Dr. Oliver Arnhold, Department Head for Protestant Religious Instruction in Detmold and Visiting Lecturer at the Universities of Paderborn and Bielefeld, examined aspects of the “Ecclesiastical and Theological Treatment of the Old Testament among the German Christians (DC).” Arnhold made it clear that the DC were no unified block, and provided various examples of gradations in the question of the status of the Old Testament. On the one hand, Friedrich Wienecke advocated for the maintenance of the Old Testament, while, on the other hand, Reinhold Krause called for a radical separation from the Old Testament and parts of the New Testament at the “Sport Palace Rally” [in Berlin in November 1933].

Arnhold gave a detailed outline of Walter Grundmann’s position in the “28 Theses of the DC”: The Old Testament is not of the same value as the New Testament; rather, it should serve as an example of the failure of the Jewish way (Thesis 12). The abandonment of the Jews by God resulted in the curse of God on this people—up to the present day (Thesis 13). And for his part, Siegfried Leffler, co-founder of the Thuringian Church Movement of the German Christians, wanted to replace the Old Testament with stories from German history.

A key institution for this movement was the “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life” (“Dejudaizing Institute”), founded [by Grundmann] in 1939 in Eisenach. By 1941, Grundmann had managed to win about 180 associates for the scholarly work of the Institute, including 24 university professors from 14 Protestant theological faculties, along with ecclesiastical dignitaries and emerging scholars. These served voluntarily in working groups, research projects and publishing activities. A total of 46 research projects and workshops aimed to erase Jewish elements from theology and Church, among other things. In place of the Old Testament, personnel in the Grundmann Institute proposed the legends of German heroes and saints as the model and ideal for religious life.

“The Combination of Politics and Theology in the Controversy concerning the Old Testament: A Jewish-Civil Society Perspective”—this was the topic of the evening lecture by the Jewish Education scholar Dr. Micha Brumlik, who went into great detail about the life and thought of the theologian Emanuel Hirsch. Hirsch understood “Volk” as the concrete place, where the message of God is encountered. Thus he became a member of the German Christian Movement out of conviction, and the National Socialist Party too. In 1933 he proclaimed “a YES to the German year!” and praised Hitler “as an instrument of the Lord of all.” The Old Testament served for him as a demonstration of a false, inadequate understanding of God that should crumble. Brumlik pointed out that the line of tradition in which Slenczka stands includes not only Schleiermacher and Harnack, but also theologians like Hirsch, who fawned over National Socialism.

The second day of the conference—Wednesday, December 9, 2015—was devoted to the theme of “Text and Hermeneutic.” It was opened by Dr. Andreas Schüle, Professor of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis at the University of Leipzig, under the title “Bible Minus Old Testament: A Blind Alley.” At the outset he demonstrated that uncertainty arises if faith becomes “questionable” and people insist upon resources of certainty. The Bible is one such resource, but that idea is hard to understand outside of a worship service and outside of church. Along with Niklas Luhmann, Schüle describes the Bible as a “communications medium,” that with its diverse histories, ideas, images, and motifs can be understood in diverse ways and can withstand selective attacks. This is a very “low threshold” approach to the Bible: it is not understood as a norm; no dogmatic determinations are made; and so there is no strong awareness of a canon.

The attempt to decanonize the Old Testament or place it at the same level as the Apocrypha always results in a crisis situation: “The Old Testament will be up for debate when the gospel becomes murky.” So it is a crisis phenomenon, that we have to depart from the (seemingly!) murky in order for the (supposedly!) essentials to become clearer. The subject of the “Old Testament” has contributed to this crisis, in that it is understood essentially as a historical subject, oriented towards the past rather than the future. In this context, reference was made later in the discussion to the approaches of Frank Crüsemann und Jürgen Ebach.

The speaker listed several components of Schleiermacher’s thought which related to the Old Testament: the New Testament was the faith document of the early Christians; there were references to the Old Testament in the New Testament, but these concerned only historical aspects, not grounds of faith; the Old Testament was the legacy of a less developed religion, possessed therefore less dignity, and was perceived as somewhat alien, while the New Testament was understood to be distinct from the Old; the brilliance of the gospel was dulled by the proximity of the Old Testament.

Von Harnack took a more positive stance towards the Old Testament, particularly the Prophets. He sees in the Old Testament, however, a religion steeped in legalism and ritualism which was only broken by Christ; with Christ, the Old Testament had become irrelevant.

Gerhard von Rad thought very differently from this. For him, the Torah was not a monolithic block; rather, it witnessed to a movement “forwards,” because tradition had to be reinterpreted again and again. So also, the Jesus-event required interpretation, and this through recourse to the Old Testament, namely the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Wisdom Literature; this was not “e-mancipation” (leaving the Old Testament) but “mancipation” (taking the Old Testament in hand). Schüle’s closing point was that the question of Jesus Christ must once again be a component of Old Testament research. The influence of the Old Testament on the New Testament scriptures must be researched. Therefore, we can learn from Jewish biblical research.

The retired Württemberg state rabbi Dr. Joel Berger gave a lively presentation exploring “How Jews Read and Understand the Bible: An Orthodox Perspective.” Jews, as he began by asserting, do not “read” the Torah; they “study” it. Moreover, the Torah is not only “text” but also “revelation.” As he put it, “If Slenczka wants to leave us alone with the Old Testament—okay!” Scripture study is not about knowledge, but about living devotion, about imitating the saints. To learn from Abraham means to learn action.

After the Orthodox rabbi, a representative of the liberal wing of Judaism spoke: Rabbi Dr. Edward van Voolen of the Abraham Geiger College in Potsdam. His theme was “Love of Teaching: Jewish Exegesis of the Tanakh.” According to the rabbi, the Torah establishes tradition; the Torah was given to Moses, who passed it on to Joshua, who passed it on to the Elders and so on from generation to generation. Based on section Baba Mezi’a 59b of the Babylonian Talmud, van Voolen explained that the text of the Torah must be interpreted anew again and again, which represents our adulthood and with it our fundamental rejection of any dogmatism or fundamentalism. The interpretation of the Word of God is given into human hands. According to the Talmud Chagigah 3b, texts always contain several possible interpretations—even different ones. Does this lead to anarchy in exegesis? Not when the doctrine is being constantly renegotiated. Dialogue is necessary here.

The section on “Texts and Community” was opened by Dr. Alexander Deeg, Practical Theologian from Leipzig, and his paper “Hermeneutical Problems and Homiletical Opportunities: Preaching Texts from the Old Testament.” At the outset he introduced the discussion process with the compilation of a new series of pericopes. In doing so, he noted that there was great interest in including more Old Testament texts. Old Testament texts were not now perceived as foreign, but as true-to-life and of direct concern to people. In connection to this, he referred to the Protestant practice of reading daily watchwords: the nucleus of the watchwords is comprised of an Old Testament verse, to which a New Testament verse is matched. Moreover, self-selected scriptures for baptism, confirmation, and wedding ceremonies are often taken from the Old Testament. There are also countless examples of art and culture with Old Testament echoes. For instance, he found 3750 instances of biblical traces in modern lyrics alone.

One ground for this was that the Old Testament includes a wide variety of genres, and contains texts originating from an extremely long span of time and out of diverse life experiences. Exodus stories, lamentations, and biblical laws are not abstract treatises, but texts with great earthiness.

Concerning the “professorial problematization” of this enthusiasm for the Old Testament, the speaker stated that Jews are the first ones to whom these texts are addressed, and so it is easy to run the risk of monopolizing or even expropriating them. Beyond that, the choice of texts is rather selective: people choose “nice” selections and avoid “nasty” ones (displays of violence, psalms that curse). For many Christians, the Psalms constitute a natural supplement to the New Testament—baptized as quasi-Christian.

In dialogue between Jews and Christians, there must be an unlearning of the traditional Christian methods of handling the Old Testament, which rest on categories like “promise and fulfilment,” “universalist” versus “particularist,” “antithetical,” as in “christological interpretations.”

A new hermeneutic must be followed:

The Old Testament is a necessary background of Christ, without which we do not know what we are talking about.
The Old Testament describes a history into which we listen, in which we belong, but which, at the same time, is the history of Israel and Judaism.
The Old Testament is the “No” to Jesus as the Messiah, which we have to hear and which protects us from any triumphalism.

To the last point, the texts of Israel illustrate that where there is a spillover of the promise [from Judaism to Christianity], there is also a void in the fulfillment, which makes it clear that we are both waiting, expecting—both separately and together.

From the Jewish side, Rabbi Dr. Andreas Nachama, Director of the Topography of Terror in Berlin, addressed the theme: “The Reception of the Biblical Text in the Community: Preaching on Texts from the Tanach.” His basic thesis concerning the debate at hand was that Jews can actually be, in the first instance, indifferent to the ways in which Christians see the texts of the Old Testament. Studying the Torah and the other scriptures forms the basis for the cohesion of the Jewish community. Studying the Torah means, in the first instance, that the text is carefully recited, intensively read. To understand, we have “to read not only the black of the letters, but also the white between them.” If we read the Old Testament only as a historical text, it is rather uninteresting; if, however, we read the text in such a way as to be personally involved, then the Passover story from Exodus, for example, becomes immediately existential: it is as if we ourselves are being liberated from slavery and bondage.

Jewish stories attempt to make the text come alive approximately in the manner of the Midrash. In this stream of tradition, the year 70 after that time is particularly important: the loss of the temple demands a paradigm shift. Religion can no longer be based on temple worship, priestly service, and sacrifice, but must now “work anywhere.” Out of the traditional religion of sacrifice, two new developments have emerged: Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

After the French Revolution, a liberal stream arose alongside the orthodox life of faith. Nachama explained the liberal approach using the example of dealing with homosexuality: the texts must be maintained, but the interpretation will change due to the fundamental changes in the cultural context, and after that the corresponding conduct will change. It is important in Jewish-Christian dialogue that Jews and Christians compare notes on their respective ways of handling the texts of the Tanakh.

The conference section “Text and Controversy” was cancelled, since the anticipated discussion participant Professor Slenczka refused to take part. In a letter to the speakers, he mentioned that the program—unlike what was previously discussed—ultimately pursued the goal of a “statement” of his position in order to arrange an “ostracism,” without him having the opportunity to adequately defend himself against “misinterpretations” and “insinuations.” He accused the Protestant Academy of “fear of debate.”

As a result, the final day—Thursday, December 10, 2015—began under the heading “Text and Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” with a presentation by Dr. Rainer Kampling, Professor of Biblical Theology at the Free University of Berlin. It was entitled, “‘For the One God is the Creator of Both’: A Roman Catholic Perspective.” Based on the document “Decretum de librissacris” from the Council of Trent (1546), the speaker explained that, without the Old Testament, not only would Christians be rid of their God, but also they would run into a linguistic homelessness in their religious existence. At the time of the Reformation, neither Protestants nor Catholics ever considered whether the Old Testament was fully valid, but rather only considered which scriptures could be taken in a more or less binding way. Thus the representative of the old belief, Eck, argued that the Maccabean Books were indeed not in the canon, but had to be believed canonically, while Luther retorted that only the canon is canonical.

On the question of the validity of the Old Testament and New Testament, the council determined that “Unus deus sit auctor” (“God alone is the author”), where “auctor” means “originator” and not “writer.” To fix the canon, the council decreed once and for all that the specified scope of the canon itself become an object of faith, and not only the content of the canon. Thus the Old Testament is in a full sense the Word of God, meaning that, in the Roman Catholic Church, no theology can modify this principle. This issue could well revolve around ways of reading.

So then the formula of the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s “The Jewish People and their Sacred Scripture in the Christian Bible” (2001): “The Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one, in continuity with the Jewish Sacred Scriptures [from the Second Temple period].”

The closing session of the conference was comprised of a discussion round under the question “Where does Jewish-Christian dialogue stand, and where is it going?” with the participants: Bishop Markus Dröge, Professor Julius H. Schoeps, Professor Christoph Markschies, Rabbi Joel Berger, Professor Rainer Kampling und Professor Micha Brumlik, moderated by Dr. Werner Treß und Dr. Eva Harasta.

Brumlink began from the concept of “shyness with strangers” (“Fremdelns”), which—in the development of a child—is always noticeable when fears arise due to changes in the environment and the child has to form new relationships. The stranger can appear as a source of fascination or trembling.

Bishop Dröge showed—starting with the image of a pulpit with Moses as a fundamental pillar—that Judaism has a continuing importance as a sign of God’s faithfulness. Moreover, the Church must repeatedly “make clear the fundamental role of the Jewish faith for the Christian faith.”

Schoeps referred to the “Rhenish Synodal Resolution” of 1980. At that time, he was full of hope for the dawn of better times; but then the resolution was repeatedly criticized by various parties (and immediately by the Bonn and Münster theological faculties), who fundamentally rejected the resolution. For Schoeps, this aroused a skepticism over the sense of Jewish-Christian dialogue.

State Rabbi Berger was intensely critical of the behavior of specific parts of the Protestant Church (“Pietcong” [i.e. radical Pietists] in Württemberg parlance), asserting that dialogue would be used as a cover for pure Jewish mission, and that with highly questionable methods. Along the way, he called attention to the destructive activity of the so-called “Messianic Jews.”

The church historian Christoph Markschies pointed to the guilty history of theology at German universities. At the “Institutum Judaicum” [a preparatory course for Protestant theologians intending to engage in missionary work among Jews], the Old Testament was taught as a “placeholder of pre-Christian experience of God.” He expressed the wish that an information sign would be placed beside the memorial plaque for Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Berlin’s Humboldt University, which would indicate that in 1936 this university dismissed Dietrich Bonhoeffer as private docent, and moreover that the church historian Erich Seeberg energetically campaigned for the abrogation of the Old Testament and its replacement with texts from Meister Eckhart.

Professor Kampling stressed that since the [Second Vatican] Council resolution “Nostre aetate”—promulgated exactly 50 years ago and just now this day again realized through a Vatican pronouncement—it has become increasingly clear that Judaism is in salvation; Jesus as the mediator of salvation remains a mystery. “There is a thin trace of friendliness towards Jews in the history of theology!”

Overall, it was agreed that Jewish-Christian dialogue has generated many positive things. Bishop Dröge brought forth as evidence “Study in Israel” [a year-long study program for German theology students at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem], new exegesis (“Preaching Meditations in Christian-Jewish Context” [a publication from “Study in Israel”]), various meetings and significant changes in preaching and religious education. Brumlik even spoke of a “success story.”

More critically, Professor Markschies noted that the departure taken in 1980 had not been carried on decisively enough, especially in the direction of the theological education of the following generations. Many emerging theologians simply lack a solid study of the Old Testament. Correspondingly, Micha Brumlik asserted that it is necessary for more Jewish people, especially from the younger generation, to become interested in Jewish-Christian dialogue. The Reformation jubilee of 2017 would surely illustrate this—there are still aspects [of the Jewish-Christian relationship] to be negotiated that revolve around more than simply narrowly religious matters.

Finally, it must be noted that despite the refusal of Slenczka to attend the meeting, a productive exchange of views took place, in which both Jews and Christians highlighted the importance of the Old Testament. The presentations illustrated how much the question of the importance of the Old Testament relates to the very core of Christian theology. It became clear that not the detachment but the engagement with the diversity and the richness of the canon is not only theologically necessary but also illustrative of the great benefit derived for Christianity from the participation in the Hebrew Bible. Thus the title image for the conference—the sculpture “Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time” by Joshua Koffman—was very well chosen. The artwork illustrates how Jews and Christians can enter into a dialogue on eye level with one another on the foundation of a common collection of texts, and how the will of God can be rightly understood in their sacred scriptures.

Conference Report: Faith and the First World War, University of Glasgow, 21-23 July 2016

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Conference Report: Faith and the First World War, University of Glasgow, 21-23 July 2016

By Geoff Jackson, Ambrose University

In late July, I had the opportunity to participate in the “Faith and the First World War” conference at the University of Glasgow. The conference explored the wide diversity and significance of religious faith for those who experienced the First World War, addressing themes such as faith in the armed forces and on the home front, religion, war resistance and the peace crusade, as well as the role of religion in remembrance.

The keynote address was delivered by Michael Snape of Durham University, a leading Anglican historian, who delivered the fascinating paper “From Flanders to Helmand: Chaplaincy, Faith and Religious Change in the British Army, 1914-2014.” While commenting on the obvious differences between the ways wars have been fought from the First World War to present-day conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, he argued that the role of chaplains was largely unchanged. He demonstrated convincingly that the relationship of faith to soldiers was still as important today as it was 100 years ago. This idea of faith and soldiers was the dominant theme of the conference, and ran throughout most of the presentations.

The papers covered a broad range of themes ranging from discussion of the use of the Old Testament in mobilizing Germans for the war effort to comparative studies on how the Scottish and Irish Reformed churches participated in the First World War. Gerhard Besier of the Technical University of Dresden presented on “Harmonizing Conflicting Demands and Emotions: Christian Believers during WWI.” Cyril Pearce of the University of Leeds examined Christian war resisters and their protests during the war. Pearce has mined war documents, letters, images, tribunal records and diaries to create a list of over 16,000 First World War conscientious objectors. He has also begun mapping these names, where possible, to identify communities were conscientious objection was more prevalent.

Another excellent paper was British archivist James W. Fleming’s “‘All war being contrary to the spirit and teaching of Jesus Christ I could take no part in its prosecution’: Faith and Conscientious Objection in the First World War.” Fleming analyzed conscientious objector applications–both those that were accepted and those that were denied. This could be a valuable source for those interested in studying the topic.

My (Geoff Jackson’s) paper examined the role of Canadian chaplains as part of the larger British Expeditionary Force. It examined the role of Church of England chaplains through the optics of a transnational study to demonstrate that Anglican chaplains, as part of the same religious organization, played similar but distinct roles in various national contexts. The paper argued that, depending on which national army the chaplains were working under, they had different objectives, motivations, outside influences and pressures, all of which affected the care they were able to administer to the soldiers. It generated some fascinating debate, and I also received a book from a chaplain who saw service in Afghanistan and Iraq–a really special treat.

The third day of the conference examined the role of women peace crusaders. The opening paper, “‘If Christ could be militant so could I’: Helen Crawfurd and the Women’s Peace Crusade, 1916-1918,” was delivered by activist and historian Lesley Orr, previously of the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. The balance of the day was spent on a walk to commemorate the first Women’s Peace Crusade. In its original form, the first Women’s Peace Crusade marched from George Square to Glasgow Green, drawing crowds of thousands. This Crusade grew into a mass international women’s peace movement. Since early 2016 a group of amateur women historians have been discovering some of the remarkable women involved. 100 years later to the day a similar parade was held (albeit, with far fewer participants). It was a poignant walk on a fortunately sunny day.

The people and campus of the University of Glasgow were fantastic. I had the chance to explore the university and its chapel which was built in remembrance of the students who fought and died during the First World War. This conference reinvigorated my desire to research Canadian chaplains and their roles in the First World War.

Film Note: Nazi Law: Legally Blind (2016)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Film Note: Nazi Law: Legally Blind (2016)

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

Nazi-Law In post-WWI Germany, law had been a most respected entity, with the country thriving thanks to its most capable lawyers and judges, many of them Jewish. In 1933, no law could inhibit the Third Reich’s political and military rise to power. In a step-by-step process, the National Socialist government dismantled constitutional law, usurped justice and created a lethal totalitarian system that soon engulfed Germany and all of Europe. Redefining the nation as a pure political and biological organism, the Nazi government imposed legislation that reinforced its ideological program in all aspects of German life, with a focus on race, business, religion and medicine. Filmed at Boston College during a conference on Nazi law, as well as in Nuremberg, Munich and Dachau, this documentary relies on the expertise of scholars from Germany, France, Israel and the US. They come from the areas of medicine, law, Jewish Studies, theology and other disciplines.

The film is co-produced by John J. Michalczyk and Susan A. Michalczyk. For more information, please see the Etoile Productions website or contact Professor John J. Michalczyk.

Call for Papers: Religion and Ethno-nationalism in the Era of the World Wars

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Call for Papers: Religion and Ethno-nationalism in the Era of the World Wars, May 21-23, 2017, University of Toronto

The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair of Holocaust Studies, University of Toronto invite scholars, including advanced graduate students, to submit applications for a symposium on religion and ethno-nationalism in the first half of the 20th century. The symposium will conduct a broad comparative and transnational examination of the intersections of religion, ethno-nationalism, fascism, antisemitism, and violence during this period. By analyzing the ways in which religious groups, institutions, and networks engaged political and social upheaval in and beyond Europe, we hope to identify broader patterns that can deepen our understanding of the dynamics shaping the roles of religious actors before and during the Holocaust.

Applicants should propose papers based on new research (including work-in-progress); submissions may focus on specific case studies or the broader themes suggested above. Papers will be pre-circulated to all participants. We especially invite applications from emerging scholars and from scholars across a range of disciplines whose work addresses a variety of geographic, religious, and linguistic traditions. Conference proceedings and papers will be in English. Travel costs, accommodations, and some meals will be covered for accepted participants.

Please submit a 1-2 page CV and a 1 page application including: a description of the proposed paper; a short explanation of the stage of your research (i.e., work-in-progress, new paper, previously published); and a brief statement on how your research and expertise might contribute to a broader discussion of the larger themes of the symposium.

Please submit applications as a single PDF to Dr. Rebecca Carter-Chand, Symposium Coordinator, at r.carter.chand@utoronto.ca by October 1, 2016. Accepted applicants will be notified by November 15, 2016.

The symposium chairs are Victoria Barnett, Director of the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Doris Bergen, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies, University of Toronto; and Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., James J. Kenneally Professor of History, Stonehill College.

Letter from the Editors (June 2016)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Letter from the Editors (June 2016)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Greetings friends,

Memorial tablet to Dr. Friedrich Weissler, member of the Confessing Church murdered for his Jewish ancestry and participation in the 1936 Confessing Church protest memorandum to Hitler. Photo courtesy of Axel Mauruszat, https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gedenktafel_Friedrich_Weißler.jpg

As summer unfolds, we are pleased to issue our newest edition of the Contemporary Church History Quarterly. It is highlighted by a short editorial written by Matthew D. Hockenos, who considers the mixed legacy of the May 1936 Confessin Church memorandum to Hitler, which has just passed its 80th anniversary.

Accompanying this are four book reviews–three by the indefatigable John S. Conway, who examines new works on the Anglican Church, the ecumenical movement, and the German Christian Movement, and one by Victoria J. Barnett, who assesses a substantial study of the German churches of the postwar era and their relationship to the history of the destruction of the Jews. Two short article notes–one on Bonhoeffer and one on Nazi religious policy–round out our reviews this issue.

We hope you enjoy and are challenged by this scholarship on contemporary church history. We would love to hear any feedback you have, either through the comments section following each contribution, or via email to the managing editor at kjantzen@ambrose.edu.

On behalf of my editorial colleagues,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

On the Confessing Church’s June 1936 Memorandum to Hitler

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

On the Confessing Church’s June 1936 Memorandum to Hitler

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

This month marks the 80^th anniversary of the Confessing Church’s most courageous act of opposition to Hitler’s regime. On June 4, 1936, Pastor Wilhelm Jannasch of the Confessing Church delivered to the Reich Chancellery a memorandum addressed to Adolf Hitler that stands out in the history of the Church Struggle for its frank criticism of Nazi church policy and, more remarkably, the Nazi attempt to force racial anti-Semitism on the Christian population. It is both unfortunate and highly illuminating that this extraordinary act of resistance remains tarnished by the Confessing Church’s decision to distance itself from Friedrich Weißler, a Christian of Jewish descent, who the Nazis arrested for his role in the publication of the memorandum and eventually murdered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Following the decisive break in the confessional front at the fourth confessional synod in Bad Oeynhausen in February 1936, the Niemöller wing of the Confessing Church represented by the Second Provisional Church Administration and the “Dahlemites” in the Council for the German Evangelical Church drafted the memorandum to Hitler. The memorandum went through several renditions and, as is often the case with statements written by committees, it lost some of its sharpness as the process went on for several weeks. In Martin Greschat’s book on the memorandum, Zwischen Widerspruch und Widerstand, he identifies the theologian Hans Asmussen as one of its principal authors; other signees included Fritz Müller, Martin Albertz, Hans Böhm, Bernhard Heinrich Forck, and Otto Fricke of the Provisional Administration and Karl Lücking, Friedrich Middendorf, Martin Niemöller, and Reinhold von Thadden of the Council for the German Evangelical Church.

The primary focus of the memorandum’s seven sections was to criticize Nazi church policy, especially the state’s interference in the affairs of the church. Instead of providing the churches with the freedom and protection Hitler promised in 1933, the authors claimed that the Nazi state and party were guilty of publically assailing the Christian faith, muzzling church leaders, and trying to de-Christianize the nation. Church leaders had complained about all of these incursions in the religious life of the population before but never with such transparency and brutal honesty, calling out Nazi leaders Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Hanns Kerrl, and even Hitler for harsh criticism.

But by far the most impressive and distinctive section of the document is the one in which the Confessing Church turns its sight on Nazi racial thought and in two succinct sentences rejects the Nazi racial worldview and racial anti-Semitism:

When blood, ethnicity, race, and honor here receive the rank of eternal values, then the Evangelical Christian is forced by the First Commandment to reject this valuation. When the Aryan human being is glorified, God’s Word is witness to the sinfulness of all humans; when anti-Semitism, which binds him to hatred of Jews, is imposed upon the Christian framework of the National Socialist world view, then for him the Christian commandment to love one’s fellow human stands opposed to it.

These are extremely courageous words in the context of the mid-1930s when Hitler was cracking down on dissent with increasing brutality. Prior to the memorandum only a few lone voices from within the Confessing Church had the courage to condemn racial anti-Semitism toward unbaptized Jews. We should be clear, however, that while the fifth section calls on Christians to counter Nazi hatred toward Jews by following the commandment to love one’s neighbor, the memorandum does not condemn the religious anti-Semitism prevalent within the churches that viewed unbaptized Jews as “erring brothers” who crucified Jesus and lived under God’s eternal damnation.

The authors of the memorandum had hoped to keep its contents confidential until after Hitler had an opportunity to read the document and to respond. Despite their efforts, the document was leaked and published in the foreign press in July, just as Berlin was gearing up for the summer Olympics. Nazi officials were irate, as was the leadership of the Confessing Church. Among those responsible for its publication was Ernst Tillich, a down-and-out 26-year-old former theology student with connections to the press. He had borrowed a copy of the memorandum from Friedrich Weißler, the bureau chief and a legal consultant for the Provisional Church Government, copied it verbatim, and shared it with journalists for a fee. When the Provisional Church Government learned that it was Weißler who provided Tillich with a copy of the memorandum, it suspended Weißler for breach of trust.

In October and November 1936 the Gestapo arrested Tillich, his friend Werner Koch, and Weißler on “suspicion of illegal activity,” i.e., colluding with the foreign press against the Nazi regime. All three were sent to the police prison at Alexanderplatz, where they were interrogated, and then to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in February 1937. Because Weißler was a Jew as defined by the Nazi state, he was immediately separated from Tillich and Koch and, after six days of torture at the hands of the SS camp guards, Weißler died. Koch and Tillich, on the other hand, were released in 1938 and 1939, respectively.

During the crucial weeks and months of Weißler’s internment—when intervention by leading churchmen might have been effective—leaders of the Confessing Church, including Martin Niemöller, deliberately distanced themselves from their colleague in order to protect the reputation of the Confessing Church from the political charge that Weißler had acted treasonably by publishing the memorandum. Let there be no misunderstanding: Hitler’s racial state was responsible for the murder of Friedrich Weißler—not the Confessing Church—but it is a shame that his brothers in Christ did not even attempt to intervene on his behalf, being well aware of his special status as baptized Jew.

The Niemöller wing of the Confessing Church should be applauded for the unequivocal stance it took in June 1936 against Nazi racial anti-Semitism. At no time before or after did the Confessing Church repeat this rebuke with such clarity. But in the aftermath of the memorandum’s premature publication, fearing a Nazi crackdown, they disassociated themselves from their most vulnerable of colleagues, leaving Weißler to his fate at the hands of the SS. The legacy of the “Hitler Memo” is in many ways the legacy of the Confessing Church, a legacy that includes courage and cowardice, opposition and accommodation, and resistance and complicity.

Review of Tetyana Pavlush, Kirche nach Auschwitz zwischen Theologie und Vergangenheitspolitik

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Review of Tetyana Pavlush, Kirche nach Auschwitz zwischen Theologie und Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Auseinandersetzung der evangelischen Kirchen beider deutscher Staaten mit der Judenvernichtung im “Dritten Reich” im politsch-gesellschaftlichen Kontext (Frankfurt: Peter Lang Edition, 2015). Pp. 573. ISBN: 9783631656655.

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

This book (the author’s 2014 dissertation at the Freie Universitat in Berlin) examines how the Holocaust and its legacy were addressed between 1945 and 1989 by Protestant church leaders, journalists, laypeople, and theologians in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). It is an ambitious work that traces church and public discourses about the Holocaust, antisemitism, Jewish-Christian relations, post-Holocaust theology, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and issues of memorialization, in conjunction with the major events and anniversaries that raised public awareness of these issues and often provoked national debates. The Cold War issues always lurk in the background.

Pavlush focuses primarily on four events: the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann and the wave of antisemitism that swept Germany around the same time; the controversy about Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy); the 1967 Six-Day War; and the 1979 national broadcast in the FRG of the U.S. television docudrama The Holocaust. In a separate chapter she examines the 1968, 1978, and 1988 anniversaries of the November 9 pogroms (“Kristallnacht”) as indicators of how East and West Germans viewed their history.

She sets her discussion of these events within a larger framework that draws on three intersecting levels of analysis to trace how German Protestants in general addressed their past throughout this period. The first level is a comparison between public and church conversations about the Nazi past and the Holocaust in the GDR and FRG. The second charts the chronological course of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (the process of dealing with the past) over the decades as evinced by the aforementioned controversies and responses to them. Here she examines how the public discourses in East and West changed over time as measured by specific events (this is best illustrated by her comparisons between the different “Kristallnacht” anniversaries). The third examines how international events, such as the Eichmann trial, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Vietnam war, influenced church and public conversations about Germany’s past and its contemporary obligations.

Clearly, any one of these topics would suffice as a dissertation topic, and the scope and complexity of this work is simultaneously its strength and weakness. In many ways this is a masterful survey of the major postwar controversies and developments over the decades as Germans addressed their past. It illustrates how engaged the Protestant churches were in this process. There is a wealth of background information and documentation, the events she has selected were indeed turning points, and she gives helpful context to the various debates. Juggling so many events, time periods, and underlying narrative currents, however, makes for an extraordinary level of complexity, and Pavlush navigates this complexity more successfully in some places than in others.

She does a fine job of tracking and contextualizing the different discourses in East and West, and this may be the book’s most valuable contribution. From the beginning, the two postwar German states defined their relationship to the Nazi past differently. Aligned with the eastern bloc, the GDR became tied to Soviet narratives that emphasized anti-fascist and Communist opposition to the Third Reich. National Socialism was portrayed as a capitalist phenomenon, and the issues of antisemitism and the genocide of the European Jews were seldom addressed. Although there was a small Jewish population in the East (and her account of the role of Jewish leaders in the GDR is fascinating), Jewish-Christian dialogue existed only to a limited degree, whereas it quickly developed a visible and importantly symbolic function in the west. Throughout its history the GDR never established diplomatic relations with the state of Israel. As Pavlush notes, this reality led to an “asymmetrical” dynamic between East and West: there was a lot more going on in the FDR than in the GDR. As a parliamentary democracy firmly anchored in the West, the FRG quickly assumed the mantel of responsibility in the international arena for addressing the past through reparations, war crimes trials, and relations with Israel. By the early 1950s, there was a public square in the FRG in which the Nazi past had become a constant point of reference for international and domestic issues.

What Germans understood by the very concept of “the Nazi past” varied greatly, however, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. Public opinion polls in the late 1940s showed that almost 40% of Germans retained antisemitic attitudes, and there were outbursts of antisemitic violence. The EKD’s 1945 Stuttgart declaration made no direct reference to the murders of the Jews. The Württemburg Society’s 1946 declaration and the April 1948 declaration of guilt toward the Jewish people by the church of Saxony were the earliest church attempts to address the Holocaust explicitly. Like the EKD’s 1948 Wort zur Judenfrage, these statements offer a snapshot of the theological challenges and the political difficulties of the time. There was a general failure to address church complicity and acknowledge the relationship between Christian theological teachings about Judaism and Nazi antisemitism, and the persecution of the Jews was often conflated with general postwar German suffering.

Moreover, many of the leading Protestant figures in the postwar era had historical baggage of their own. In their responses to postwar controversies, they sought to justify their role before 1945 and place themselves on the right side of postwar history, as can be seen in the often opposing political positions taken by figures like Eugen Gerstenmaier, Otto Dibelius, Lothar Kreyssig, Martin Niemoeller, and Helmut Gollwitzer. Events like the Eichmann trial and the Hochhuth play became litmus tests for competing versions of history. One of the advantages of studying a forty-year period is that the differences between the different generations of prominent Protestants become evident. Pavlush delineates three clear generations, driven by different life experiences, postwar agendas and worldviews: those who were already active in or had begun their careers by the 1930s; those born during the late 1920s and early 1930s, who came of age during the Nazi era (Johann Baptist Metz, Jürgen Moltmann, and Dorothee Soelle), and the third generation, born during the late 1930s or 1940s (Bertold Klappert, Peter von der Osten-Sacken), who were still children in 1945. Many in the second generation turned critically against the first, often not only historically but politically in terms of Cold War issues. The last generation was the one that became most engaged in Jewish-Christian dialogue. She also examines the role of the different Jewish leaders on both sides of the border who engaged with Protestants about these issues: Siegmund Rotstein, Robert Raphael Geis, Eugen Gollomb, Nathan Levinson, and Edna Brocke.

The first Jewish-Christian organizations began quite early, often founded by those who had been engaged in rescue or resistance activities before 1945. In 1949 the German Koordinationsrates der Juden und Christen was founded, and during the 1950s groups for Jewish-Christian cooperation emerged in the major cities. The three German organizations for Judenmission, which had been dissolved during the Third Reich, reconstituted themselves as well, and so another ongoing tension in the German discussion was between those engaged in dialogue with Jews and those who wanted to revive Protestant efforts to evangelize and convert Jews. In 1958 Lothar Kreyssig, a judge and Confessing Church layman who had attempted to halt the euthanasia program, founded Action Reconciliation (Aktion Sühnezeichen) under the auspices of the EKD. The organization began to send young Germans to serve in countries that had been occupied by the Nazis, and the first AS volunteer to Israel arrived after the Eichmann trial.

By this time there were some striking differences between the FRG and the GDR. Young East Germans couldn’t get visas for the Aktion Sühnezeichen trips, for example. Yet the 1961 Kirchentag (which convened in the early summer before the construction of the Berlin Wall in August; it was the last Kirchentag that East and West Germans celebrated jointly until 1991) helped spur a new phase of Jewish-Christian engagement in both Germanys. Dusseldorf Rabbi Robert Raphael Geis gave the keynote address. The EKD working group on “Jews and Christians” (Arbeitsgemeinschaft ‘Juden und Christen’) was founded at the 1961 Kirchentag, as a sign of the churches’ commitment to fostering Jewish-Christian relations.
Pavlush’s discussion of the emergence of Jewish-Christian relationships and the related church statements is the most uneven aspect of the work. That’s partly because of how the book is structured; many of the seminal statements on Jewish-Christian relations were direct responses to the events she discusses separately in other chapters. Hence, her treatment of this issue is scattered across the different chapters and interwoven with other topics without a clear transition from one point to another. Sometimes there’s not even a clear chronology. She deals in a single paragraph, for example, with the national EKD study commission on Kirche und Judentum in 1967, its 1975 study, the 1981 Rhineland synod, and the 1965 establishment of the Institut für die Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland in Hamburg. Rather than going into detail about the genesis of these developments and the ways in which they addressed the past and contemporary issues, she then discusses Nostra Aetate before giving a brief overview of how the Middle East conflict affected Jewish-Christian dialogue in the GDR. Among other things, this book could really use an index.

The other problem is the blurring of lines between Catholic and Protestant issues and responses. Although this book is ostensibly about the Protestant churches, the author ventures into issues that were far more significant for the Catholic church (such as Nostra Aetate and the Hochhuth play), and she also refers to some of the Catholic Jewish-Christian circles and statements. This adds another thread of complexity to an already complex work, although it does illustrate the extent to which these events drew reactions from both churches. The primary example is her discussion of Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play The Deputy, which provoked a firestorm because of its critical portrayal of Pope Pius XII. Because of the considerable public debate and widespread media coverage of Hochhuth, one can make the case that Protestant reactions give some insight into the public discourse about Nazi history at the time. Some Protestant observers viewed the play as a broader critique on both the Catholic and Protestant churches. In the GDR, Hochhuth’s condemnation of the Pope was seen as part of a deeper critique against fascism and the West. In its timing, the play coincided with (and perhaps helped provoke) the beginnings of the attacks on the legends of the Church Struggle. Certainly this was how figures like Otto Dibelius viewed it; he attacked Hochhuth for a “cheap and highly naïve version of history.” As in so many other postwar events, the dividing lines from the era of the Protestant Church Struggle reappeared. In contrast to Dibelius, Helmut Gollwitzer and Gunther Harder supported Hochhuth’s critique of the Pope, extending it to the Protestant churches as well.

The 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem was another major turning point. In 1959/60 there had been a wave of antisemitic violence, which led the churches to issue statements condemning antisemitism. While many of the EKD leaders spoke out (Otto Dibelius, who was chair of the EKD council at the time, sent a telegram of solidarity to Ben Gurion in Israel) Pavlush observes that the substance of the statements didn’t really go beyond what had been said at the 1950 Weissensee synod. Yet the trial itself demanded and provoked a rawer engagement with the past.

It aroused special interest among Protestant leaders because the only non-Jewish German witness was Heinrich Grüber, who had led the Confessing Church’s office to help “non-Aryans” (most but not all of them baptized Christians). In that capacity Grüber had dealt with Eichmann directly. In a church newspaper before the trial, Grüber wrote memorably that “it was only the ‘Hitler in us’ that gave power to the ‘Hitler over us’” and urged the German press to report on the trial in a way that would help German readers to feel a personal connection to what had happened in the Holocaust. Grüber used the trial as the occasion to confront his fellow Germans, noting the number of Nazis who had found their way into prominent postwar positions, and he charged EKD leaders with the failure of repudiating their earlier antisemitic statements. He also warned that the trial could be misused in the Cold War context to awaken tensions between the two German states—and was criticized by East Germans as a consequence. Pavlush examines the reactions on both sides of the German border, as well as perspectives of the Israeli audience, including Holocaust survivors, for whom Grüber’s testimony often seemed defensive and an attempt at apologia.

The trial compelled Germans to take a position about their past and their German identity in the contemporary world. The 1967 Six-Day war was another such occasion. Pavlush contextualizes it in the broader landscape of the 1960s, which included the student rebellions, the Vietnam War, the beginnings of a more critical view of the German churches record under Nazism, and the emergence of a new generation of political theologians like Dorothee Soelle who applied the lessons of the Holocaust to the burning issues of the 1960s. This chapter offers a good discussion of the theological and political debates of that era. The Cold War realities and alliances shaped perspectives in East and West toward the state of Israel, which in turn affected how Protestants viewed the agenda for Jewish-Christian relations. Here too there were generational and political divides. Some from the first generation of Church Struggle veterans viewed solidarity with Israel as a necessary moral position for postwar Germans; others were critical of the West and Israel. The mood in the GDR was largely anti-Zionist, although there were isolated voices in the GDR churches that called for greater balance on the issues and supported Israel’s right to defend itself.

The final example, the 1979 nationwide broadcast of Holocaust, was another turning point in the West. Yet unlike the Eichmann trial and the Hochhuth play, it didn’t trigger a similar widespread discussion in the GDR. It was broadcast only in the FRG, of course, but as Pavlush notes, it is striking that East Germans didn’t seem to follow or engage with the intense press debates and coverage in the West. Once again, however, the broadcast coincided with other events to spur a new wave of discussion about the past. In the decade that followed in the FRG, there was a growing number of forums and conferences at the church academies, new and more critical scholarship on the role of the churches during the Nazi era, and civic initiatives around the country in which local communities began to examine their history. A related development was the 17-page 1978 EKD study, Zur Verfolgung des Judentums durch den Nationalsozialismus, which traced not only the church’s record between 1933 and 1945, but critically examined how the Protestant church had interpreted (and sometimes misconstrued) that history after 1945 – for example, by conflating the suffering of the Jews with that of postwar Germans and by politicizing the Kristallnacht commemorations.
Pavlush’s book illustrates that the process of theological and political Vergangenheitsbewältigung was shaped by numerous factors over the decades between 1945 and 1989, and she shows how often the attempts to address the Nazi past became part of contemporary political agendas. Ironically, the photograph on the book cover itself highlights the complexity of the issues that confronted postwar churches. It shows the main stage at the Jewish-Christian dialogue session at the 1961 Kirchentag, with the Star of David and the Kirchentag symbols prominently displayed. Then and now, the Protestant Kirchentag symbol consists of a large central cross surrounded by four smaller crosses in each quadrant—virtually identical to the symbol of the Romanian Iron Guard, an antisemitic clerico-fascist group that sought to merge Orthodox Christianity and fascism during the 1920s and 1930s. Its adoption as the Kirchentag logo was no doubt unintentional, but it’s unlikely that this went completely unnoticed by Jewish and international visitors (one of my colleagues at the Holocaust Museum immediately asked me about it). Over seventy years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the historical minefields continue to exist.

Note: The views expressed in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or any other organization.