Letter from the Editors: March 2015

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Letter from the Editors (March 2015)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

Our latest issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly is among the most diverse we have produced in quite some time. In it we review and report on research on the history of Christianity from right across Europe.

Church of Our Lady before Týn, Prague

Dirk Schuster leads off with a review of Hans-Joachim Döring and Michael Haspel’s study of two very different German churchmen: Lothar Kreyssig, the Confessing Church opponent of euthanasia, and Walter Grundmann, the German Christian advocate for a dejudaized German Christianity. John Conway follows that with a review article on two works relating to the Vatican’s response to the Nazi persecution of Jews: Susan Zuccotti’s book on the French Père Marie-Benoît, rescuer of Jews, and Paul O’Shea’s treatment of Eugenio Pacelli/Pope Pius XII’s Jewish politics. Lauren Faulkner Rossi assesses Rebecca Ayako Bennette’s book on Catholics in Wilhelmine Germany, while Stephanie Corazza examines Caroline Moorehead’s book on Le Chambon, France, and the rescue of Jews. Finally, John Conway reviews James Mace Ward’s study of the Slovak priest and politician Jozef Tiso, while Stacy Hushion surveys the latest volume in the fine Lessons and Legacies series of articles arising out of the biennial conference of the same name.

Two notes takes further afield. Kyle Jantzen summarizes the contents of the latest issue of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History, which explores the relationship between religion and national identity throughout Scandinavia and northern Europe, while Robert P. Ericksen summarizes the recent conference, “Resistance Revisited and Re-questioned: Church and Society in Scandinavia and Europe,” sponsored by the same journal. Finally, we invite you to peruse a call for papers for an interesting conference commemorating James Parkes, who promoted positive relationship between Jews and non-Jews throughout his long career in the twentieth century.

As ever, we invite your feedback on the reviews and other notes and notices we publish, and as both Passover and Easter approach, we wish you a blessed holiday season, in the truest sense of the word.

On behalf of the other editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Review of Hans-Joachim Döring and Michael Haspel, eds., Lothar Kreyssig und Walter Grundmann. Zwei kirchenpolitische Protagonisten des 20. Jahrhunderts in Mitteldeutschland

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Review of Hans-Joachim Döring and Michael Haspel, eds., Lothar Kreyssig und Walter Grundmann. Zwei kirchenpolitische Protagonisten des 20. Jahrhunderts in Mitteldeutschland (Weimar: Wartburg Verlag, 2014). 132 Pp., ISBN 9783861602520.
By Dirk Schuster, University of Potsdam; translated by John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Over the past twenty-five years, an enormous amount of interest has grown about the role of German Protestantism and its representatives during the period of the Third Reich. All sorts of new findings are appearing. One of the focuses of research has been on the so-called “German Christians” and their theological conflation of Protestantism and National Socialism; another is the fact that in recent years many of the provincial churches have begun to examine their own histories. For example, a conference held in 2012 and organized by the Lothar Kreyssig Ecumenical Center and the Evangelical Academy in Thuringia discussed the role of two controversial figures whose impact could hardly have been more different, namely Lothar Kreyssig and Walter Grundmann. The former was a member of the Confessing Church, who took a stand as a judge against the Nazi euthanasia program, while the latter was the ideological leader of the “German Christians” and academic director of the notorious Institute in Eisenach dedicated to the eradication of Jewish influence from German church life. The present volume which prints some of the papers given at that conference, as well as other contributions, demonstrates very clearly the ambiguous legacy the present German Protestant churches have to deal with.

Doering-Haspel Anke Silomon’s introductory chapter provides biographical details about both men. Even though she relies on already published research, the author does give a survey of their careers, which will be of value to those readers not familiar with the subject. Both men were born during the reign of the last Kaiser, and their careers spanned the whole period up to and including the time of the German Democratic Republic, i.e. after 1949. This is followed by an article by Oliver Arnhold, who in 2010 published a comprehensive study of the “German Christians” as well as of the Eisenach Institute, which took the title of“The Institute for the Research and Removal of Jewish influence on German church life”. This contribution was drawn from a lecture Arnhold gave in 2014, which was subsequently included in this volume, and concentrated primarily on the ill-fated Institute. Hence unfortunately this means that his portrait of Walter Grundmann, who is supposed to be the main topic of this volume, is too condensed.

For his part Tobias Schüfer discusses Grundmann’s understanding of the Church and the Law. He takes the view that for Grundmann freedom and equality were to be seen as “negative qualities, urgently needing to be abandoned” (p. 68). Such a pejorative opinion is not false, but also not new. More significantly, Schüfer’s article shows, on the basis of Grundmann’s post-war writings, the lack of any admission of guilt. Even though it was already clear that Grundmann never felt any personal guilt for his activities during the Nazi period, Schüfer confirms this conclusively by examining his post-war writings and his subsequent treatment of his earlier publications.

The most interesting and rewarding article in this book is that provided by Torsten Lattki, who proves, through a detailed examination of Grundmann’s depictions of the Pharisees, both before and after 1945, that Grundmann never abandoned his anti-Jewish opinions. In all of his writings the Pharisees are seen as being the true Jews, and excerpts are produced from both pre-and post-war publications, which clearly show that Grundmann continued to hold and express his polemical opinions. To be sure, his antisemitism and his attempts to depict Jesus as “un-Jewish” were more subtly voiced in his later years of teaching in East Germany. These points have already been made in the large-scale studies by Susannah Heschel and Oliver Arnhold, but Lattki has produced the most convincing evidence that Grundmann continued to expound his antisemitic views even after the end of the Third Reich. Equally significant is Lattki’s contention that Grundmann’s works and methods of study were all part of the contemporary Zeitgeist, which found a considerable following among theologians, students, and lay people in both east and west Germany (p. 92). It will be one of the task of future researchers to establish just how influential was Grundmann’s antisemitic picture of Judaism.

The essay by Karl Wilhelm Niebuhr stands in a marked contrast to the above scholarly contributions by Schüfer and Lattki, since it is largely a repeat of an earlier article from a 2007 collection. He is trying to show that, even though Grundmann did express anti-Jewish sentiments, he was largely being misled and misused by the Nazis. Thus he seeks to prove that the Eisenach Institute was only a marginal operation, and that Grundmann and his closest colleagues were “only a relatively small minority, never taken seriously in the academic world” (p.37). This reviewer is not convinced. The evidence surely shows well enough that articles by the leading figures in this Institute were accepted by prestigious journals such as the Archiv für Religionswissenschaft or the Theologische Literaturzeitung. Grundmann’s picture of a non-Jewish Jesus or the claim that the positions of Christianity and Judaism were incompatible and contradictory found a considerable following in the academic community of the 1930s and 1940s? We have only got to think of his teacher Johannes Leipoldt or the later director of the Institute Georg Bertram to see that both the Institute, its staff and its findings were widely known. In addition we could cite the activity of the well-known scholar of Persia Hans Hermann Schaeder who quite deliberately used the Institute’s facilities in order to propagate his conclusions about the racial connections between Eastern and Western religions. His attempt to reach a wider academic community by this means, however, failed to gain much support even from the “German Christians” with whom he had little or nothing in common ideologically. Niebuhr’s contention that Grundmann never argued in the sense of a “biologically-based racism” (p. 39), but believed that the separation between Jews and Christians was due solely to religious factors, is not provable. But we have to remember that such pioneers of this kind of völkisch thinking as Houston Stewart Chamberlain saw religion as one of the central characteristics of racial identity, and equally accounted for religious differences as being derived from racial characteristics, in exactly the same way as Grundmann was later to argue. The latest research, for example by Horst Junginger, whom Niebuhr quotes in a footnote, has convincingly proved that the so-called racial antisemitism was based on religious factors. And Grundmann, like other well-known researchers in the field of religious studies, such as Karl Georg Kuhn or Carl Schneider, sought to show that Jews had singular racial characteristics which Jesus allegedly and diametrically opposed. According to Niebuhr, Grundmann never enjoyed any following among the proponents of “a biologically-based racial antisemitism.” Indeed his views were perhaps rejected by such men (p. 42). It would have been good if Niebuhr had provided some quotations to back up such risky claims. The same is true for his suggestion that Susannah Heschel’s study of Grundmann and the Eisenach Institute has now been “largely superseded”.

The second protagonist in this volume, Lothar Kreyssig, is unfortunately described in only two articles, which are not enough to do him justice. He was after all one of the most active members of the anti-Nazi opposition, whose behavior demonstrated how churchmen could have behaved differently. And he continued the same oppositional stance against the dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic after 1949. Axel Noack describes his activities in the post-1945 era, such as his leadership in founding the Aktion Sühnezeichen (a religiously motivated German Peace Corps), or his attempts to establish a collaboration between Catholics and Protestants, which ran into considerable opposition among the more rigidly-minded church authorities. Erardo C. Rautenberg presents his findings about Kreyssig’s views on legal matters during the Third Reich. Written from a juristic perspective, this is a promising subject, but could have been more fully developed.

It is a pity that Lothar Kreyssig was not given more space in this volume of collected essays instead of the superfluous pieces about Walter Grundmann which can in any case be found elsewhere. It was an opportunity missed.

Review Article: The Vatican’s response to the Nazi persecution of the Jews

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Review Article: The Vatican’s response to the Nazi persecution of the Jews

Susan Zuccotti, Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue: How a French Priest Together with Jewish Friends Saved Thousands during the Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013). 277 Pp., ISBN 9780233008414.

Paul O’Shea, A Cross too Heavy: Eugenio Pacelli, Politics and the Jews of Europe 1917-1943 (Kenthurst, NSW: Rosenberg Publishing, 2008). 392 Pp., ISBN 9781877058714.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Two recent books have again stirred up the long-standing debate about the policies of Pope Pius XII and the Vatican in the face of the genocidal slaughter of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis during the Second World War. This controversy has now flourished for more than fifty years, and shows little sign of having reached any acceptable consensus. It has often been conducted more with political partisanship or religious loyalty than with a detailed examination of the evidence. Moreover this debate has suffered from the long delay in opening the most important sources held by the Vatican. Nevertheless most commentators express the confident hope that, when eventually the archives are revealed, their hypotheses will be found to be accurate. They therefore demonstrate a commendable integrity in allowing their findings to speak for themselves even where they differ in their interpretations. They show that there are still new aspects of the church’s rescue efforts on behalf of the persecuted Jews which deserve fuller consideration. These books will undoubtedly add to the wider corpus of scholarship which continues to be of interest to scholars of modern diplomacy and statecraft.

zucotti-pere Susan Zuccotti is an established American scholar who has written a number of studies of the Holocaust, particularly dealing with events in France and Italy. Her latest contribution provides us with a well-researched biography of a little-known French Capuchin friar, Fr. Marie-Benoît, who was to play a significant role in rescuing Jews first in Marseilles in 1942 and then in Rome in 1943-4. Although he was to live for several decades after the war, his exploits were only recorded in French and remained largely unnoticed in remote French archives. Zuccotti was able to interview him in 1988 shortly before he died, but he was clearly a reticent witness, and it has taken her another twenty-five years to piece together his full story and to explore the determining factors which led him to play such an active role in assisting the Jewish refugees and victims of Nazi tyranny. The result is a portrait of a valiant and courageous priest whose witness in the cause of Christian-Jewish relations deserves to be better known to an English-speaking audience. So we can be grateful to Zuccotti for this helpful addition to the debate about how much (or how little) was done by various sectors of the Catholic Church to assist the Jewish victims of Nazism.

Fr. Marie-Benoît was born the son of a country miller in that part of western France which saw violent persecution of faithful Catholics in defense of the ancient regime by agents of the Revolution in the 1790s. Zuccotti suggests that this may have been the source of his opposition to any state-directed persecution of religious minorities. In fact he wanted to join the Capuchins, a branch of the Franciscan order, but was called up in 1914 and served throughout the war at the front. Later he was called to Rome and taught at the Capuchin seminary there until 1940. He returned to France just as his nation was defeated and divided into the German-occupied north and the Vichy-led unoccupied south. It was here in Marseilles that he first became involved with helping refugees, particularly foreign-born Jews, fleeing from the Nazis. He was able to help some to escape to Switzerland or Spain, or to move to the safer area of the Italian-controlled region around Nice. He established good relations with Jewish organizers of relief efforts, and continued these after he was recalled back to Rome in early 1943. The situation grew far more perilous after Mussolini was overthrown in July 1943 and when the German army took control of Italy’s civil government in September. It was at this point that Fr. Marie-Benoît and his Jewish backers had the idea of using his presence in Rome to seek an audience with Pope Pius XII. As recorded in the printed Vatican documents, he was able to present the Pope with requests to help these foreign Jewish refugees, even though nothing came of his grander scheme to have these foreign Jews evacuated to North Africa. But, as he recorded later in his own memoirs, he successfully managed to help these stranded Jews by supplying them with forged identity documents, forged permissions to reside in Rome, and forged ration cards.

The few months between September 1943 and the liberation of Rome in June 1944 were particularly dangerous, and eventually forced Fr. Marie-Benoît himself into hiding. In October there followed the infamous round-up of the Roman Jews from Trastevere, when more than a thousand were deported to Auschwitz and only sixteen survived. As word spread through the foreign refugees’ ranks, the need for secure hiding places grew more urgent. Fr. Marie-Benoît was active in seeking assistance from various convents and monasteries, despite being warned of the danger that these institutions could well be searched by German agents.

Zuccotti deals succinctly with the question, addressed in her earlier books and articles, about the extent to which the Vatican and its officials—including the Pope—knew about these clandestine relief efforts. She concludes that the Pope and other Vatican officials were certainly aware of these developments, even if they did not know the extent or the details. She rightly denies the claims made afterwards by eager papal supporters that the Pope had issued explicit directions or had directed Vatican funds for such efforts. As Fr. Marie-Benoît himself testified, he never thought of himself as carrying out the Vatican’s instructions let alone receiving financial help. In fact the Vatican documents print some of the reservations felt towards Fr. Marie-Benoît on the grounds that his illegal activities endangered the Vatican’s carefully guarded stance of neutrality. One official who repeatedly urged him to be more prudent was recorded as being gravely disappointed by the Capuchin’s reckless readiness to engage in what he called his mission of mercy. Particularly grim was the fact that in these final weeks under German domination, several of Fr Marie-Benoît’s protégés were victims of informers, playing along with the Germans. At the same time, though, he and his partners amongst the Jewish community were aware of the broad support they enjoyed from much of the non-Jewish population. Zuccotti’s conclusion is that together they saved the lives of at least twenty-five hundred men, women and children, most of them refugees without resources in a nation controlled by Nazis determined to destroy them.

Rob Ventresca’s authoritative essay on the same subject, recently published in Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations lends support to the same conclusions. (“’The Vatican was for us like a mountain’: Reassessing the Vatican’s Role in Jewish Relief and Rescue during the Holocaust. Settled Questions and New Directions in Research,” SCJR 9, no. 1 (2014): http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/scjr/article/view/5601/4957). In his view the Vatican’s response to the plight of so many million Jewish victims of Nazism conformed to a familiar pattern of self-imposed restraint and self-serving resignation. While on the one hand, the Pope and his advisors consistently avoided the explicit papal condemnations being requested, yet Catholic rescuers on the ground, such as Fr. Marie-Benoît, might count on some modest measure of papal support, usually moral rather than financial. Such moves hardly amounted to a policy or a directive for Jewish rescue and could be curtailed if the results seemed to increase the likelihood of reprisals or damaging repercussions for papal diplomacy.

The limitations placed on the Vatican’s efforts to support Jewish victims of Nazism have long since been recognized. Direct protests to the German authorities were never answered. Requests to friendly governments, such as Brazil, to provide entry visas for Catholic converted Jews were ignored or only reluctantly accepted. Nevertheless the Pope’s clear preference was to continue his diplomatic representations as a means of exercising the Vatican’s leverage, limited as it might be, for the longer term issue of securing an eventual peace settlement.

It is within this envelope of diplomatic caution and restraint that the Vatican’s efforts to assist Jewish refugees, such as those supported by Fr. Marie-Benoît, have to be judged. But undoubtedly the supplies of food and other material goods given to these people were approved by the Vatican’s higher officials, and benefitted the numerous Jewish refugees hidden in Catholic institutions. But to date, no written order from the Pope has been discovered, let alone a “secret plan” as propounded recently in a journalistic account by a British writer. Yet Fr. Marie-Benoît’s activities were not prohibited by his superiors, despite the urging of certain officials to be more cautious. He emerged as the main contact with the Jewish organization DELASEM and as such paved the way for a new and much more positive relationship in the post-war years. It was in this new climate that the Vatican subsequently tried to claim that much more aid had been given, and that Fr. Marie-Benoît was supported by their instructions. This led the good friar, as Zuccotti notes, to deny any such approval or assistance. As he recorded in his memoir: “I received no mission from the Vatican, because I was unknown there…. The Vatican was for us like a mountain. We were in a hurry.” The only sum described in the Vatican published documents refers to a small amount dedicated for the support of converted Jews, but it is clear that the ingenuity of Fr. Marie-Benoît and his DELASEM colleagues enabled them to access other sources of financial support for which they did not need explicit Vatican approval. By such methods the Vatican did not appear to be engaging in questionable or possibly illegal financial activities, even if such aid was designed to assist poverty-stricken refugees.

In the post-war period, Fr. Marie-Benoit became one of the foremost champions of a new relationship between Christians and Jews. But Pius XII clearly had other priorities. It was only after two decades that these ideas found a new and much more favorable reception at the time of the Second Vatican Council, and in particular in its noteworthy statement Nostra Aetate of 1965. Fortunately Fr. Marie-Benoît was still alive at this time, and rejoiced. But there is no evidence that his war-time services played any part in the theological repudiation of Catholic antisemitism or anti-Judaism. He was never again to play any significant role even in his own Capuchin order. He died in 1991 at the age of 95.

Paul O’Shea is one of the small group of Australian scholars who have become interested in the Catholic response to the traumatic events of the twentieth century, and particularly in the career of Pope Pius XII, as he sought to deal with the crises brought on by the totalitarian regimes of Europe. Like all of his predecessors, O’Shea suffers the handicap that many of the relevant documents have yet to be released from the Vatican archives, so despite his assiduous survey of Pius’ earlier life as a Vatican diplomat and later as Cardinal Secretary of State, we still have to acknowledge the tentative evaluation of all hypotheses about his war-time policies, and especially about his so-called “silence” concerning the victimization of the Jews of Europe.

O’Shea, like his fellow biographer, Robert A. Ventresca (see my review of Soldiers of Christ. The Life of Pope Pius XII in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 65, no. 1 (January 2014): 230-1) lays great emphasis on Eugenio Pacelli’s integration and identification with the corporate Catholic community of the later nineteenth century. But he fails to stress the fact that, under both Pope Pius IX and Pius X, the Vatican was going through a highly conservative, even reactionary, phase, as could be seen in the vicious attacks on Catholic Modernism. O’Shea believes that there can be little doubt that Pacelli was affected by the affair. “But the fact that he remained an exceptional favourite through the crisis … and continued to be promoted while others were cast aside, tells us much about his discretion, his resilience and his survival skills” (P. 144), though also about his deeply conservative mentality. The fact is that by 1914 the Vatican had reached a nadir in its theological and political influence. Its hostility to the modern world was well known. And although new Pope Benedict XV wisely decided to adopt a policy of neutral impartiality during the First World War, the Vatican was pointedly excluded from the peace process in Paris in 1919. The 1920s saw vigorous efforts to reach legally binding treaties, known as Concordats, with many of the European states in order to safeguard the Catholic Church’s interests. Pacelli was in the forefront of such attempts, which however revealed the limits, obstacles and frustrations in dealing with such powers as the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy. The experience can hardly be said to have led Pacelli to a more liberal view of his fellows. He remained convinced of the superiority of the Catholic vision and of the need for centralized control over its affairs through cautious diplomacy, which would avoid confrontation but would harness the Vatican’s limited influence at a time of turmoil.

When Pius was elected Pope in March 1939, the war clouds were ominously threatening. Pius was horrified by the idea of the blood-bath of twenty-five years earlier being repeated. The Church’s duty was to serve the cause of peace. And for his first six months, Pius engaged in a ferment of diplomatic activity to this end. In vain. By September, he was forced to recognize not only the Vatican’s impotence, but also the impossibility of calling Catholics to a higher ethos than national loyalty. He therefore retreated to the same stance of neutral impartiality as advocated by his predecessor Benedict XV. He continued to hope, or possibly to indulge his illusions, that the Vatican’s mediation would eventually be required at the point when both warring sides recognized the need to halt hostilities and seek a truce or even a peace settlement. As Europe’s most experienced diplomat, Pius believed that his services would be vital at such a moment. No steps should therefore be taken, or seen to be underway, which would prevent such an efficacious intervention from taking place. Hence the strenuous efforts to preserve the Vatican’s neutrality throughout the course of the war, especially during the traumatic years 1943 and 1944 when the Vatican was surrounded by three changes of political-military regime. Despite all the pressures and pleas on behalf of the war’s victims, including the Jews, Pius consistently believed that unwise and intemperate language would only make matters worse. In O’Shea’s view, this was a leadership of reaction.

It is clear that Pius was deeply affected by the daily reports that flowed into the Vatican about the murderous practices of the Nazis, especially against the Jews. He agonized long and fervently about what he might say or do, but was continually restrained by the fear that such action would invite reprisals which would make matters worse. In a remarkably frank letter to his friend and colleague the Bishop of Berlin in April 1943, Pius expressed both his horror and frustration. “The seemingly limitless cruelty of the war machines makes the thought of a long drawn-out period of mutual slaughter unbearable. And what we have heard, day in and day out, of atrocities that are far beyond anything which could be ascribed to the necessities of war is even more horrifying and shocking.” The frustration of not being able to decide which course of action would be less damaging to the cause of peace was an unavoidable and recurrent challenge, and lay constantly upon the Pope’s conscience. It is small wonder that he concludes his letter to the Bishop of Berlin with the words: “In constantly striving to find the right balance between the mutually contradictory claims of his pastoral office, the path ahead for the representative of Christ is becoming daily more overgrown, beset with difficulties and full of thorns” (Actes et Documents du Saint Siege, Vol. 2, document 105, letter of 30 April 1943).

But to O’Shea this conscientious and pain-ridden policy of public neutrality and personal sympathy was not enough. To be sure, he acknowledges that as the war went on, we have a profoundly moving picture of the Vicar of Christ wanting to share the sufferings of the persecuted. But in the case of the Jews O’Shea suspects that Pius was the inheritor of a long and ancient tradition of suspicion and contempt towards a religion deemed “superseded”. The Jews were thus among the “lesser victims” for whom no especially dangerous actions or pronouncements were called for. For O’Shea the turning point came in October 1943, when the Germans rounded up the Jews of Rome and transported 1000 to their deaths in Auschwitz. The fact that the Pope did not protest in clear words which could not be misunderstood was an unforgivable moral failure. He believes that Pius did not speak out because he did not want to. His actions and words up to this Nazi atrocity in October 1943 are defensible. After October 1943, they are not. For this reason O’Shea closes his narrative at this point.

Review of Rebecca Ayako Bennette, Fighting for the Soul of Germany: The Catholic Struggle for Inclusion after Unification

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Review of Rebecca Ayako Bennette, Fighting for the Soul of Germany: The Catholic Struggle for Inclusion after Unification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 380 Pp., ISBN 9780674065635.

By Lauren Faulker Rossi, University of Notre Dame

Beginning in the 1990s, the history of Germany’s Catholics – and German Catholicism, by extension – enjoyed an abrupt surge of scholarly attention. As this surge picked up speed, one German historian lamented that German Catholics had moved out of their “traditional methodological ghetto” into one of mental and cultural isolation, as scholars focused on the supposed backwardness of Catholic social, political, and economic life during the Second Reich.[1] Since Oded Heilbronner made that remark, historians have worked resolutely to qualify, revise, or alter this image of German Catholics as always a step behind their Protestant co-nationals. Rebecca Ayako Bennette’s recent monograph, Fighting for the Soul of Germany: The Catholic Struggle for Inclusion after Unification, is a strong contribution to this historiography. In it, she shows deftly that, far from being out of touch with current events or politically estranged by the events of unification, Catholics in Germany in the 1870s were fully committed to the new nation. Defying established scholarship, which has stressed that Catholics achieved a sense of Germanness only after the Kulturkampf had waned, Bennette argues that it was during the Kulturkampf that German Catholics worked hard to develop a full sense of German national identity for themselves. The significance and legacy of the Kulturkampf was not simply, and negatively, that it reinforced conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Germany, but rather that it allowed for “the management of confessional differences in the service of national integration.” (14)

bennette-fighting Bennette’s book is organized in two parts. The first, consisting of five chapters, relates the familiar story of the Kulturkampf with particular attention to events that served the construction of national identity and integration. The second, more original section is composed of four thematic chapters, devoted to the examination of “significant, sustained elements in the construction of Catholic national identity” (12); these elements include gender and femininity, schools and education, and the geographies of both Germany and Europe. Based on the evidence she offers, Bennette’s conclusions are difficult to disagree with: beginning immediately after German unification, German Catholics worked actively to build a national identity, one that differed from the mainstream Protestant version of Germanness and embraced their own religious particularity. The Kulturkampf not only failed to distance Catholics from their German identity; in fact, it solidified their attachment to the new nation and convinced them that they were an integral part of it.

Bennette’s book begins with Catholic journalist Joseph Görres and the role that religion played in the nineteenth-century grossdeutsch-kleindeutsch debate that continued until unification. She then moves quickly through the wars of unification, which settled the debate in favor of the kleindeutsch option, and the opening of the Kulturkampf. At this point, she stresses, Catholics in newly unified Germany may have found themselves on the defensive against Protestant and liberal opponents in the Reichstag, but they continued to profess love and loyalty to the Kaiser and to Germany. Even at the height of the Kulturkampf, between 1873 and 1875, when they distanced themselves from the Kaiser and showed a fierce willingness to oppose the state and actively resist its policies, Catholics engaged in rhetoric that emphasized their continued commitment to the idea of national belonging. While some of this rhetoric employed antisemitic language, this “outburst” was relatively short-lived in Catholic newspapers (less than a year, according to Bennette), which quickly identified socialists as the more enduring threat to Catholic integration. As the Kulturkampf began to wind down in 1877, Center Party politicians retooled their message to the voting public, broadening their appeal beyond religious issues, inevitably leading the Center to move closer to other political parties.

The real punch of Bennette’s book is delivered in the four longer, theme-based chapters. Catholic newspapers’ attempts to bring the periphery – Catholic Germany, especially the vibrant regions of the Rhineland and Westphalia – to the center, in Berlin, and vice versa, contributed significantly to a Catholic German identity. Such activity went beyond merely contesting Berlin as the epicenter of the nation, as well, arguing that Germanness was not homogeneous but in fact regional and varied. This kind of identity set itself in opposition to the mainstream Protestant version, which emphasized militarism and masculinity. The Catholic identity, in contrast, was feminine – it was Germania herself. Catholic rhetoric on this point argued the necessity of Catholic integration into the nation in order to safeguard the national moral impulse, counterbalancing the potential “militarism and social debauchery” (120) of a Germany without Catholics. Education was another realm in which Catholics set foot, claiming that Catholic achievements in schools and scholarship were essential for the new nation. While at the primary level it continued to insist on confessional education, at the higher levels the rhetoric of Catholic newspapers sought to displace liberals as the vanguard of deutsche Wissenschaft and promoted Catholic scholarship as the true embodiment of German ideals. While Bennette cautions against accepting discourse as reality – integration of Catholics into mainstream education did not occur until the 1890s – she nonetheless shows that education was a central talking point for Catholics invested in creating a German identity. Nor did this identity limit itself to Germany; German Catholics, no less than German Protestants, identified themselves politically and morally against their non-German neighbors, especially France, Austria, and Russia. They also invested in and promoted the German idea of mission, and the spreading of German culture abroad through colonialism.

Throughout the book, Bennette is careful not to overstep her evidence. Thus, she offers many qualifiers: her primary subject is the “outlook shared by most [Catholics]”, but she acknowledges that “not all Catholics thought or acted alike regarding the nation” (5-6); in the chapter on German geography, Bennette’s analysis is centered on the Rhineland and Westphalia, following her sources’ disproportionate emphasis on “the area that appeared most easy to integrate into what their opponents envisioned as appropriately German” (13) – so, no scrutiny of Bavaria, Silesia, or Alsace-Lorraine, the other notable regions of Germany where Catholicism was dominant; as mentioned above regarding education, the distinction between what newspapers and politicians were claiming Catholic scholarship did, and what it had actually achieved, must be kept in mind. Pointing out these qualifiers is not meant as a criticism. They are examples of the meticulous attention to detail and context that Bennette has employed in her narrative. Her care in clearly defining two of her central terms – national identity (as opposed to nationalism) and integration – in the introduction is a further example.

While the chapters on gender and femininity and education are measured and insightful, the chapters dealing with geography are the most intriguing and provocative parts of Bennette’s argument. Here she lays out her case most strongly, that Catholic newspapers, periodicals, politicians, and religious leaders participated in the construction of a German Catholic identity through the reimagining of the nation’s contours, vis-à-vis both their German co-nationals and their European neighbors. Such alternative reimaginings stressed the longevity, dynamism, even modernism of the Rhineland and Westphalia, centers of industrialization and urbanization. The intrinsic Catholicity of these areas was as significant as their Germanness. Beyond Geramny’s borders, Catholics’ attachment to their German identity was reinforced by other events in the 1870s, notably the threat represented by Russia both to Germany and to the rest of Europe. In this they found common ground with German Protestants. It was up to Germany to step forward as a world leader and bulwark, to defend civilization from “‘further pan-Slavic development’” (182). This could only be done, according to Catholic rhetoric, if Germans were united. While firm Catholic backing for other national projects, including the military build-up and the maintenance of overseas colonies, gathered speed only in the 1880s, Bennette points to their roots in the first decade of German unification. It was at this time that German Catholics began to feel closer to their fellow Germans than to their cross-border co-religionists, whether in France or in Austria.

Bennette uses multiple sources, including popular novels of the time and personal correspondence, but her main source is Catholics newspapers and periodicals. This explains why so much of her investigation is taken up with rhetoric, which she also refers to as reporting. She is after the elusive and unstable “imagining” of the nation to which Benedict Anderson, among other theorists of nationalism, has referred. This is also why she offers the qualifications she does. This critic wondered if she might have done more extensive interrogation of her source base (i.e. who is running the papers, who is funding them, who is writing the articles, though she does sometimes identify the authors) as well as source reception: how widely did the main Catholic papers circulate, and what relations did they enjoy with Center politicians or with clergy? Admittedly Bennette is asking different questions, about national identity and Catholic integration, but some background on the central newspapers would be helpful. This is especially salient in light of the fact that her sources lead her to concentrate on the Rhineland and Westphalia, to the exclusion of other Catholic areas of Germany. What shall the reader assume about the reception of this rhetoric in Munich or Posen? Did Bavaria and Silesia have competing German identities in development? Bennette is silent on this note. One also wonders why the brief surge of antisemitism in the mid-1870s so quickly petered out: what doused the flames? This is especially pertinent considering that it was at this time that extremist political parties on the right began to emerge that were increasingly willing to employ such language.

Aside from these lingering questions, however, Bennette’s book proves that the molding of a German Catholic identity began earlier than scholarship has previously argued. Catholics were deeply invested in forging a national identity during the Kulturkampf years, and not even a hostile state could disrupt this commitment. Using their example, Bennette has given us an impressive and valuable testament for scholars of German Catholicism as well as nationalism more generally: she has rendered both the determination of Catholics in Germany not to capitulate to Bismarck’s anti-Catholic legislation, even as they articulated a particular German identity, as well as the powerful draw of national belonging even at a time of domestic crisis.

[1] Oded Heilbronner, “From Ghetto to Ghetto: The Place of German Catholics in Modern German Historiography,” in Journal of Modern History 72 (2000) 456-457.

Review of Caroline Moorehead, Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Review of Caroline Moorehead, Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2014), 374 Pp., ISBN 9780307363084.

By Stephanie Corazza, University of Toronto

Scholars of rescue during the Holocaust are very familiar with the story of Le Chambon, the French village that sheltered many Jews during the Second World War. Its success as a haven for the persecuted and its international recognition as a recipient of Yad Vashem’s title of Righteous among the Nations add to its distinction. Yet, accounts of this rescue effort are marked by inconsistent interpretations. Some suggest that individuals and families acted singly and silently to shelter Jews; others show that religious leaders directed operations and that networks funneled people into the region. Secrecy was paramount and many Jews used false identification papers; yet Le Chambon had a reputation as a safe haven and its activities were an open secret known to French and German authorities. Religion motivated the pious, mainly Protestant, rescuers, although people of different faiths were involved at all levels. These sometimes discordant claims help to explain the continued interest in the region by scholars, politicians, local memory custodians, and the descendants of rescuers and survivors.

moorehead-village Philosopher Philip Hallie wrote the first study of Le Chambon in 1979, and his work continues to shape the writing of this history. Using the framework of ethics, he sought to understand “how goodness happened” in Le Chambon by evaluating the behaviour of the villagers, and attributing a special role to the Protestant pastor André Trocmé. His explanation is that this was a religious community guided by a shared conscience and the principle of non-violence, so that sheltering Jews seemed “natural and necessary.”[1] The next significant contribution was Pierre Sauvage’s 1989 autobiographical documentary film Weapons of the Spirit. His interpretation aligns with Hallie’s and they share a moral tone, but the film introduced important nuances including the essential support provided by people and pastors in surrounding towns on the plateau as well as a variety of outside individuals and welfare organizations. Although Sauvage presents the rescue as a primarily Protestant endeavour, his film includes Catholic and Jewish rescuers. Following the film and a 1990 colloquium held in the town, interest in Le Chambon increased, as did dissent over what happened there and why. For instance, Hallie and Sauvage put the number of rescued Jews at several thousand, while others offer the more modest figures of 800 or 1,000. Other subjects of debate include the role of non-violence versus the presence of different forms of resistance, and the singling out of Le Chambon from the surrounding localities on the plateau. Some scholars have de-centred Le Chambon by referring to the entire region, the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, reflecting the breadth of the rescue effort. Still, the standard view of a non-violent, Protestant rescue effort led by Pastor Trocmé in Le Chambon continues to dominate popular memory.

Caroline Moorehead’s Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France claims to offer a new interpretation of the subject. Despite the title, her book accents the variety of inhabitants of the plateau who cooperated to help the refugees arriving there. She situates her narrative within the broader context of occupied France by treating French attitudes toward Jews and the Vichy regime, anti-Jewish measures including camps and deportations, self-help and rescue efforts in southern France, and French resistance. Her narrative of an increasingly persecuted Jewish population is compelling, if unsurprising to anyone familiar with this topic. Moorehead’s strength is her ability to trace individual stories throughout the entire period, weaving them into the larger historical narrative. For instance, she begins with the saga of the Polish Liwerant family in Paris, follows its two sons as they struggle to connect with each other while sheltered on the plateau, and the last we hear is of the older boy, Simon, waiting for his parents to return from the east.

Moorehead casts her work as the complete, never-been-told-before story. Certainly, she expands the standard scope of rescue in Le Chambon. Rather than rescue activities centered in one village, she shows how the surrounding areas also welcomed refugees. She insists that the rescuers were not just the descendants of the Huguenots, but rather a more diverse group of Christians that included Catholics and followers of a little-known Protestant sect called Darbyists. Most controversially, Moorehead minimizes the influence of André Trocmé by emphasizing the role of all pastors in the region and highlighting the variety of attitudes present on the plateau beyond non-violence. Her concluding explanation for the rescue includes a list of commonly cited reasons and “a felicitous combination of timing, place and people.”[2]

Although elements of Moorehead’s thesis are worth exploring – and indeed have been explored before – overall, it is weakened by problematic argumentation and a lack of methodological rigour. She seems unaware of the many discrepancies that her text generates. For instance, in order to establish her point about the diversity of religious groups involved in the rescue, she often refers to the self-effacing Protestant sects in the region, the largest of which were the Darbyists. She presents few examples, generally just referring vaguely to “Darbyists.” These were pious people, isolated from political concerns, who agreed to shelter children whom they may or may not have known to be Jewish; yet elsewhere she asserts that these same people were actively “defying the Nazis” and playing “a crucial role in the battle against Vichy for the Jews.”[3] It remains unclear just how they understood their own actions. Her claim that this modest group, too humble to seek recognition or accept the honour of Yad Vashem’s Righteous among the Nations, are among those who now feel bitterly shut out from the glory of Le Chambon, seems uncharacteristic.

Moorehead argues that faith was an important motivating factor for the rescuers, but she calls into question this point at the end of the book. Notwithstanding her insistence on a fresh interpretation, hers is a laudatory study of individuals motivated by faith to act bravely and with love, similar in tone to the early works by Hallie and Sauvage. Moorehead devotes a section to the history of the religious denominations in the area and her categorization of rescuers by faith suggests that she attributes significance to this factor. Then, in the Afterword, she adds “atheists and non-believers” to the mix of people involved in saving Jews, despite not mentioning anyone who fits those categorizations in the body of the work. And she leaves out Jews from this concluding list, even though the book covers several key Jewish figures.

Throughout, Moorehead paints vivid tableaux of daily life on the plateau. Her descriptions of scenes and terrain, personality quirks and physical features, evoke the period, the setting, and its characters. Yet it is in these details that she undermines the value of her work. Pierre Sauvage has already pointed out egregious errors to be found throughout the book.[4] One that stuck out to me appears in a poignant scene in the chapter on internment camps: Moorehead mistakenly identifies a relief worker who encountered many desperate mothers begging her to help their children as Mary Elmes, an American Friends Service Committee representative who spent time at the internment camp at Rivesaltes. She cites the well-known memoir by Vivette Samuel as her source, but having recently consulted this text I know that it was Samuel, not Elmes, who experienced this episode.[5] Such errors will likely be visible only to those familiar with the detailed history of this period, but scholars and others will worry about how trustworthy are other details, particularly since the author is not bound to the conventions of scholarly citation.

Some interpretive points that Moorehead raises are valuable, such as her challenge to the idea of Protestant exceptionalism and the attention she calls to the shaping of the memory of Le Chambon. However, she is not the first to make these claims. In a recent article pre-dating Village of Secrets, historian Marianne Ruel Robins considers alternative explanations to the standard view of Protestant faith-based hospitality. One of her findings is that local economic patterns (that is, habits of receiving seasonal paying visitors like sickly children and tourists) make it difficult to distinguish between hosting visitors and rescuing Jews. Significantly, Robins shows that her chronological look at the reception of Jews does not contradict the thesis of a region of morally courageous inhabitants: what was primarily an economic habit “took on a different meaning” as the situation for Jews and those who helped them changed over the years of occupation.[6]

Ultimately, Moorehead’s contribution does not get us much closer to understanding the contentious history of Le Chambon, nor does it help explain any of the lingering inconsistencies in its representation, such as the degree to which the plateau was ordinary or exceptional. In her final pages Moorehead claims that it was both: the plateau was exceptional in the scale of rescue and the unity of the inhabitants, but Le Chambon and the surrounding villages were just a few of many across France that did similar rescue work. The urge to turn this historical episode into a lesson about altruism reminds us of the different ways this story is used; some prioritize the understanding of the past on its own terms, while others see its commemorative and prescriptive possibilities. Moorehead’s book does not fully satisfy the first objective, but perhaps it will serve the second by eliciting some ethical reflection amongst its readership.

The author would like to thank Doris Bergen, Stacy Hushion, Michael Marrus, and Marianne Ruel Robins.

[1] Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 284.

[2] Caroline Moorehead, Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2014), 338.

[3] Ibid, 106.

[4] See Pierre Sauvage, “Does ‘Village of Secrets’ Falsify French Rescue During the Holocaust?” Tablet Magazine Online, Oct. 31, 2014.

[5] Moorehead, 57, 352n57. Vivette Samuel worked for the Œuvre de secours aux enfants, and in 1941 and 1942 she was a resident social worker at Rivesaltes. The previous sentence, also based on information pulled from Samuel’s memoir, is about Mary Elmes smuggling children out of the camp. She continues to use this source for the following sentence, but forgets to switch the subject back to Samuel. See Vivette Samuel, Rescuing the Children, A Holocaust Memoir (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 43, 78.

[6] Marianne Ruel Robins, “A Grey Site of Memory: Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and Protestant Exceptionalism on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon,” Church History 82 (2013): 329-30. Pastor Trocmé’s wife, Magda, makes a similar point about the arrival of Jews in the region: “At first, they were paying guests in the hotels and at the farms. Later they became refugees.” See Carol Rittner and Sondra Myers, eds., The Courage to Care: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 101.

Review of James Mace Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Review of James Mace Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). Xii + 362 Pp., ISBN 9780801419888.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Jozef Tiso was the only Catholic priest ever to become the head of a modern European state, namely the short-lived and ill-fated Republic of Slovakia during the turbulent and violently destructive years of the Second World War. Installed as President in 1939, he served until the final months of the war, when he was forced to flee to Germany and take refuge in a Benedictine monastery. Taken prisoner by American occupation troops, he was extradited back to Czechoslovakia, placed on trial as a war criminal, sentenced to death, and executed in April 1947. Branded as a fascist collaborator by his political enemies, he was mourned by faithful Catholics as a martyr to his faith. Fifty years later, when Slovakia regained its status as an independent country, the arguments about Tiso and his legacy still continued. We can therefore be grateful to James Ward for the first comprehensive treatment in English of this controversial figure, which most capably examines the rival views for and against this priest-politician and his convoluted policies in which religion and nationalism overlapped and often collided.

ward-priest When Tiso was born in 1887, Slovakia was an outlying rural part of the Hungarian kingdom, an enclave of conservative Catholicism staunchly resisting the approach of modernity, particularly in the commercial field. His education and spiritual formation as a young priest were in the highly reactionary tradition espoused by Pope Pius X. But at the same time, he welcomed the emphasis on social action, and the need for Catholics to promote a vibrant corporate life, along with engagement in corporate Catholic politics. He became the editor of a local Slovak newspaper, stressing the Catholic values of solidarity and modesty and attacking both the free-thinking Socialists and the rapacious capitalists, especially the Jews.

The downfall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 and the revolutionary events which followed only increased Tiso’s involvement in the political affairs of his community. He especially deplored the Communist revolution in Hungary, led by Bela Kun, a Jew, which only encouraged Tiso to throw his support behind the newly created nation of Czechoslovakia, and particularly to give allegiance to the Slovak People’s Party, led by another priest, Hlinka. As Ward puts it, Tiso was reborn as a nationalist, recast as a politician and redirected onto a Czechoslovak path. But in this new nation, Catholic Slovaks found themselves as a backward minority. The Czechs were more numerous, better educated and more progressive. During the 1920s Tiso’s role was therefore one of promoting Catholic and Slovak autonomy, and resisting any lessening of Catholic influence, especially in the schools where progressives argued forcibly in favor of secularization. As the champion of a religious minority in a highly fractured multinational state, Tiso found plenty of scope for his political activism.

In the 1930s Europe was overwhelmed by political extremism, revolutionary violence and totalitarian regimes. Czechoslovakia was threatened by its rapacious neighbors, Germany, Hungary and Poland, each seeking to claim parts of its territory. When Hitler launched his campaign to regain the Sudetenland in 1938, the resulting turmoil led to a large-scale international crisis, which led in turn within a few months to the dissolution of the Czechoslovak state. This presented the opportunity for Tiso and his allies in Slovakia to advance their claim to independent sovereignty, and Tiso promoted himself first as prime minister and then as president, despite the well-publicized remonstrance of Pope Pius XII, who objected to any priest holding such a partisan political position. Tiso ignored the Vatican, and instead rallied his followers around the new opportunities now available to Slovakians.

In fact, his options were few. German predominance in central Europe was made clear when he was summoned to Berlin in March 1939. In Ward’s view these meetings were the most decisive in his life. Hitler proved to be cordial, and offered his help in advancing Slovakian nationalism under German auspices. He accepted this offer of protection even without the approval of his own legislature or executive, as the best way of heading off the Hungarian or Polish claims on Slovakian territory. But the price was to be paid later when Slovakia was drawn into the German attack on Poland, and later on the Soviet Union. This agreement also strengthened Tiso’s hand against the intrigues and rivalries of his compatriots, some of whom were more radical in pursuit of a system patterned on the Nazi example. But Tiso, as a priest, was also aware that his dream of a Catholic corporate life was threatened by the Nazis’ clear antipathy to the church in Germany. He was therefore obliged to adopt a balancing and flexible course, which enabled him to dissemble about his ultimate intentions. While voicing public admiration for Hitler’s leadership, privately he expressed misgivings. His public image as a priest hid his capacity for outflanking his opponents but earned him the respect of his compatriots. In the view of one of the German envoys, Tiso was “without doubt the craftiest, most powerful and most level-headed politician in Slovakia”. But a more critical view was taken by the newly-appointed papal Apostolic Delegate, Giuseppe Burzio, who reported to his superiors in the Vatican: “The question is how long Tiso’s political convictions and especially his conscience as a priest let him march hand in hand with his National Socialist masters”.

One aspect of his policy which was to arouse much controversy concerned his treatment of the Jewish minority. In Ward’s view, Tiso was not motivated by religious prejudice or racial paranoia, but by more pragmatic grounds. He sought to recapture the wealth which he believed Jews had extracted from the Slovak people, and was prepared to grant exemptions for those Jews considered indispensable such as doctors. In early 1941 Tiso supported measures to “Aryanize” businesses when thousands of Jewish firms were transferred to “Christian hands”. There were then squabbles over the spoils, even corruption in the bureaucracy. These steps escalated in March 1942 when the Slovaks signed an agreement with the Nazi authorities to deport young Jews to work in labour camps in German-occupied Poland. In April the first transports took several thousand Jews out of Slovakia. There is no evidence that Tiso objected to the patently cruel enforcement measures. On the other hand, protests were aroused by numerous Slovak dignitaries, including the bishops, and above all the Vatican. The Slovak representative there was summoned by the Cardinal Secretary of State himself and Slovak’s inhuman policies were soundly berated. From Bratislava the Apostolic Delegate reported that “the proposed deportation of 80,000 Jews would condemn the great majority to certain death”. But these representations were not enough to overcome Tiso’s prevarications or the radical measures implemented by his subordinates. The Vatican’s impotence aroused not merely feelings of frustration but of betrayal. As one of the senior Vatican officials commented in July 1942: “It is a great misfortune that the President of Slovakia is a priest. Everyone knows that the Holy See cannot bring Hitler to heel. But who would understand that we cannot even control a priest”. Nevertheless these cumulative protests from the Catholic bishops denouncing the inhuman deportation measures did have an effect. From mid-1942 until August 1944 deportations ceased.

By the end of 1943 it was clear that Germany was not going to win the war. Tiso tried to save his Slovak state in the face of the impending German defeat, but his record of collaboration doomed both his government and his attempt to build a Catholic political entity. The war was increasingly unpopular and Tiso’s prestige sank rapidly. In 1944 Slovakian insurgents tried to overthrow his regime, but this led to an immediate escalation of the German military presence, and the eventual suppression of the revolt. But the advance of the Red Army from the east proved unstoppable. In March 1945 Tiso’s government collapsed, and he was forced to seek refuge in a monastery in Germany. But his plea for asylum in the Vatican was refused. And in July he arrested by American occupation troops and extradited back to Slovakia in shackles. His subsequent trial as a war criminal before a court staffed by Communist or pro-Czech advocates was an opportunity to denounce him and his policies. The verdict was never in doubt. He was able to make a last appeal to his Slovak nation before he was taken to the gallows in April 1947. But with his execution, Tiso became a symbol of war-time complicity or alternatively a Slovak martyr.

Ward devotes his final chapter to describing the historiographical and political battles over Tiso’s legacy. Condemned as a clerical fascist collaborator by Czechoslovakia’s new rulers, it was left up to émigrés to celebrate him as a staunch Catholic and anti-Communist. It was only in the 1990s that a few historians in the now independent Slovakia began to seek a more balanced verdict. The first Slovakian biographer described him as a talented advocate for Slovak autonomy but found his participation in the Holocaust inexcusable. Subsequent evaluations were equally ambivalent. But with Slovakia’s admission to the European Union, and with the advocacy of Pope John Paul II, the arguments for a renewed commitment to Catholic or Christian values in Europe’s constitution echoed many of Tiso’s concerns. The battle for the soul of Europe still continues. But for many observers in the post-communist era, the Slovak hierarchy’s defense of Tiso compromised the church and dissipated the moral capital built up by years of Communist persecution. In Ward’s opinion, Tiso’s personality was constantly caught up in contradictions. His attempt to combine his loyalties to his church and his nation tore him apart but were part of his heritage from the era of the Hapsburgs. He was, in Ward’s view, a “Christian National Socialist” in whom three theologies struggled for supremacy. The first was a traditional Catholic belief in which God sets the agenda, and in which priests function as moral experts. The second was a more nationalist understanding of social values, while the third is the more current evaluation of individual human rights which sees the Holocaust as the epitome of evil and excoriates any priest or politician who collaborated in such disasters. Tiso will likely remain a figure of controversy so long as the future of central Europe and its values continue to be unresolved. But we can be grateful to J. M. Ward for his penetrating analysis and detailed exploration of his mainly Slovakian sources.

Review of Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes, eds., Lessons and Legacies, Volume XI: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Review of Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes, eds., Lessons and Legacies, Volume XI: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014). Xxii + 372 Pp., ISBN 9780810130906.

By Stacy Hushion, University of Toronto

The eleventh volume of the Lessons and Legacies series reflects on the study of the Holocaust in a shifting political, social, economic and scholarly landscape. Editors Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes point out that, some seventy years after the end of World War II, fundamental issues pertaining to the origins and history of the Holocaust remain divisive. The book highlights the remarkable diversity of scholarship on the Holocaust and is instructive reading for anyone seeking to keep abreast of developments and current research in Holocaust studies.

earl-schleunes The bookend essays by senior scholars Omer Bartov and Timothy Snyder offer both critiques of current trends in the field and directions for future research. In his introductory piece, Bartov evaluates scholarly efforts of the last decade to situate the Holocaust as part of a broader phenomenon of genocidal violence in the modern world; in other words, the Final Solution is not the genocide but a genocide among others. Bartov is unsettled by attempts to compare the Holocaust to other genocides, arguing that such comparisons often obscure the particularities of the Nazi genocide and result in the erasure of the experiences of its primary victims, European Jews. Rather than understanding the Holocaust – with its enormous arsenal of scholarship and domination of popular culture – as a barrier to the study of other genocides, Bartov invites us to conceptualize it as a singular historical example of extreme violence that can in fact enrich the field of genocide studies.

Snyder likewise addresses the place of the Holocaust in a changing world but from the vantage point of geography. Snyder encourages scholars to shift the geographical centre of Holocaust research eastwards to Poland and the Soviet Union, the central homelands of prewar Jewish life and the primary landscapes in which the Final Solution was executed. In so doing, Snyder provocatively argues that the analysis of the Holocaust would necessarily move away from a disproportionate focus on German perpetrators and German-Jewish victims, who amounted to approximately three percent of those killed. However, one wonders if a primary focus on the killing (and its geography) runs the risk of reducing the Holocaust to its final murderous stage, rather than viewing it as a much longer and larger process that began in 1933. German Jews of course suffered Nazi discrimination first and for the longest amount of time, a point highlighted by Mark Roseman’s essay in this volume. Tying the Holocaust more closely to the Nazis’ expansionist and military agenda – a relationship Snyder insists is crucial to understanding how the Germans came to control the majority of European Jews – may be one way in which to balance a focus on Jewish life and death in eastern Europe without losing sight of Jewish experiences in other parts of Europe, such as Austria and Czechoslovakia, whose Jews fell under the Nazi yoke already in 1938. In shifting the research program of Holocaust studies eastwards, scholars must also take care to not erase Jewish history from Western Europe. It may alternatively be more fruitful to investigate the political, economic, social and military-strategic dynamics between the different spaces of German-occupied Europe, rather than conceptualize them as completely disconnected.

Snyder concludes with an incitement to return Holocaust studies to its “firm foundations” – traditional subjects of study such as diplomacy, foreign policy, economics, geography and military and social history – and away from the focus on culture, representation and memory of recent years. While he astutely acknowledges that our understanding of the Holocaust can only be enriched by more knowledge about its basic geographical and chronological parameters, it is worth observing that many of the essays in the volume owe something to the “cultural turn” and were only possible due to new and non-traditional theoretical and research approaches. The essays by Regina Mühlhäuser, Pascale Bos and Robert Sommer all investigate the place of sexual violence in the Holocaust, a subject largely ignored until recently. Mühlhäuser challenges historical assumptions that Nazi racial ideology (unintentionally) “protected” Jewish women from sexual assault by German men, whereas Bos demonstrates how sexual violence against Jewish women became mythologized in postwar memory culture. Sommer’s analysis of situational homosexual relationships in the camps opens up the discussion of sexual violence to include men, although it is unclear precisely what is to be gained by comparing male and female sexual slavery and the ethics of doing so.

At the same time as scholars have addressed aspects of the Holocaust previously marginalized, they have also reopened older debates and questions. Rebecca Margolis and Toni-Lynn Frederick reconsider central films of the Holocaust canon: Allied (here Canadian) footage of the liberated concentration camps in 1945 and Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary film Shoah. Both contributions demonstrate how films construct narratives of atrocity and suggest that there is still much to glean from studies of the representation and cultural transmission of Holocaust history. Margolis shows how the Canadian reels struggled to present the particularity of Jewish suffering in a national context far-removed from the actual events. Moving forward in time, Frederick recognizes the visual power of Shoah but questions the ethics of forcing survivors to relive their experiences for dramatic impact.

The impetus to reflect backwards is evident in the renaissance of the contemporary historical record. Shulamit Volkov reassesses German ideas of race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that Jews, including the philosopher Martin Buber and prominent state figures like Walter Rathenau, found essentialist notions of race useful in conceptualizing a multi-faceted Jewish identity. Volkov’s findings prompt a reconsideration of the seemingly direct line from nineteenth-century theories of race to the Holocaust; racial discourse neither necessarily nor unilaterally signified racist ideology. Robert D. Rachlin shifts the dialogue from racial to legal discourse in his chapter and offers an expansive definition of de-Judaization, arguing that it signified not only the prohibition of Jews from the legal profession but also the excision of allegedly “Jewish ideas” from German jurisprudence. The twist was that the de-Judaization of law in fact showcased the important contributions of German Jews to long-celebrated legal discourses and institutions.

The histories of everyday life, social networks and individual experience during the Holocaust are also reflected in a scholarly hearkening back to more “personal” contemporary sources, such as correspondence, personal papers and diaries. Mark Roseman’s chapter uses diaries to argue that German Jews in the 1930s were better informed and more attuned to the political, social and cultural changes uprooting their daily lives than scholars have hitherto suggested. Relying primarily on correspondence, Manfred Gailus’s essay examines the intellectual relationship between Karl Barth, Germany’s most prominent Protestant theologian, and Elizabeth Schmitz, a theologian and schoolteacher. Deeply distressed about the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, Schmitz encouraged Barth and his students to take a firm stance against Nazi actions and policies. In 1935-6, Schmitz reproached the Protestant Church for its silence on the persecution of German Jewry in a memorandum influenced by Barth’s 1934 Barmen Declaration. Though not widely circulated, Schmitz’s text became one of the most explicit protests of the situation of all non-Aryans (and not just non-Aryan Christians). Gailus illustrates how one ordinary individual could help create a space – however limited – for protest against injustice.

The volume also draws attention to some of the ways in which present-day concerns about the “uses and abuses” of the Holocaust stimulate academic inquiry. Joanna Beata Michlic analyzes the dynamic “boom of the ‘theater’ of Jewish memory” in Poland since 1989, which has yet to slow (p. 145). She aptly demonstrates the multiple representations of the Holocaust that veer from genuine commemorative efforts to superficial mea culpas in order to gain international stature to the outright whitewashing of the past. Even today, there is not yet a clear public consensus on how to remember the Holocaust in Poland. James E. McNutt’s contribution is similarly motivated by twenty-first century politics, but in the realm of religion. McNutt returns to the figure of Adolf Schlatter, a leading German Protestant theologian and professor at the University of Tübingen. A specialist in the New Testament, Schlatter argued that Jews bore responsibility for the death of Jesus Christ and thus could not be “God’s chosen people.” Though Schlatter’s argument was by no means original, his prominence and close relationships with other important religious scholars, including Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch, helped widen his influence and spread his anti-Jewish hostility in Protestant circles after 1933. Disconcerted by the current revival of Schlatter’s scholarship by evangelical theologians, McNutt insists that Schlatter’s anti-Jewish theological legacy is not one that should be rehabilitated.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of the volume is its recognition of the growing interdisciplinarity of Holocaust studies. Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano and Waitman Wade Beorn all take seriously Snyder’s call to attend to geography. Cole and Giordano’s essay uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies to map spatial patterns of dispersed ghettoization in Hungary. Their work highlights how qualitative and quantitative approaches can be complementary and offer new insights; for example, the continued presence of non-Jews in “ghetto houses” in Budapest meant that the ghetto wall was actually often the apartment wall. Beorn’s spatial approach, prompted by his visit to Krupki in Belarus to retrace the footsteps of the town’s Jewish victims, reconsiders the relationship between the scholar and his/her place of study. Beorn argues that fieldwork – a word not often associated with the historical discipline – can illuminate how space and place shaped the experience of the Holocaust. After all, the perpetrators were the first to consider geography in assessing their actions, often connecting the level of their complicity to their physical location in relation to the killing sites.

The geography of the Holocaust has expanded in other ways too, as Wolf Gruner and Esther Webman’s essays on precedents and responses to the Holocaust outside of Europe proper demonstrate. Gruner shows that by 1933, newspapers, memoirs and books had so successfully embedded knowledge of the 1915 Armenian genocide in the German consciousness that Jews and other social commentators were able to make explicit parallels between the fate of the Armenians and the persecution of Jews under Nazism. It would be interesting to know if Hitler and the other architects of the Holocaust also reflected on the Armenian genocide in their planning. Shifting to the Middle East during the Holocaust, Webman analyzes how Egyptian intellectuals and politicians vacillated between recognition of the genocide as a human tragedy and concern about the political ramifications of Jewish immigration to Palestine. By 1945, the political approach won out, and the fate of European Jews was minimized or relativized in Egyptian public discourse.

The field of Holocaust studies is simultaneously expanding and changing. Perhaps the most jarring shift is that the age of the survivor is almost at an end. What is left when there are no survivors remaining to bear witness to the past, both in terms of public education and academic research? The essays published in this volume highlight that, in fact, there is plenty left, including innovative approaches and perspectives as well as a re-thinking of questions and sources long since worked over. The mournful end of the survivor era by no means marks the end of Holocaust studies and perhaps instead offers a new resonance to this wide-ranging and dynamic field of study.

Journal Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History 27, issue 2 (2014)

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Journal Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History 27, issue 2 (2014)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

The latest issue of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History (Volume 27, Issue 2, 2014. See http://www.v-r.de/en/magazine_edition-0-0/kirchliche_zeitgeschichte_2014_27_2-1010266/#section_inhalte) is devoted largely to the publication of papers presented at the conference “Myths – National Borders – Religions,” held at the Akademie Sankelmark, Flensburg, Germany, in September 2014. Several articles will be of interest to our readers.

In “Myths of Religious Reconciliation,” Andrea Strübind of the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg explores the aftermath of the 1965 reconciliation ceremony in which Roman Catholic Pope Paul VI and Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras mutually revoked the excommunications of their predecessors. Through this act of “brotherly love,” the Great Schism of 1054 was to have been set aside. Strübund asks the important question of whether this event had any actual historical influence on the church-political relations between the two churches. Simply put, did it lead to greater unity? In her analysis, she finds that there was little theological consciousness of the events of 1965 in either church, and she notes that tensions even increased after 1989, when the two churches found themselves in competition with one another in post-communist Eastern Europe. In fact, in its year 2000 declaration “Dominus Iesus,” the Roman Catholic Church reiterated its self-understanding as the “mother church,” while Greek metropolitans recently signed a profession of faith in which Roman Catholicism is described as the “womb of heresies and fallacies” (p. 253-254). In other words, the 1965 gesture was a singular event which Strübind interprets as a reconciliation myth, just as the 1999 joint declaration on the Doctrine of Justification between the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation seems to be turning out to be (p. 255).

Anders Jarlert of Lund University has written an interesting article entitled “The Myth of Sweden as a peace-power state and its religious motivations.” In it he explores the history of Sweden’s self-identification as a peace-power state, an identity taken up forcefully by Archbishop Nathan Söderblom of Uppsala during his years of service from 1904 to 1931. Söderblom himself and Sweden more generally were to be mediators between churches and even states during and after the First World War. Söderblom understood “Sweden’s task and position as a God-given vocation” (p. 258). During the Second World War, however, Sweden was largely unable to use its neutrality for any purpose other than to stay out of the fighting, save that the country served as a site for international meetings and that Swedes took in the roughly 7000 Danish Jews rescued during the Holocaust (p. 259). Instead, a series of Swedish “modern martyrs for peace” (Count Folke Bernadotte, Dag Hammarskjöld, Raoul Wallenberg, Olaf Palme and Anna Lindh) served as heroes and “secular saviours,” becoming in the process the new basis for Sweden’s ongoing self-understanding as a country of peace and justice.

In his article “Norwegian National Myths and Nation Building,” Dag Thorkildsen of the University of Oslo explores the role of national religion in Norwegian identity. He describes the creation of the Norwegian national myth as a “secular salvation history” mimicking the story of ancient Israel, complete with migration story, founding myth, golden age, period of inner decay, and promise of regeneration (p. 269). Along the way he explains how both the cult of St. Olaf in Trondheim and the Cathedral of Nidaros have become components of Norwegian national identity.

Along similar lines, Inge Adriansen of the Museum Sønderjylland in Sønderborg, Denmark, analyzes the national-religious myth of Dannebrog (the Danish flag) in her article “The Danish national flag as a gift from God.” Formerly a symbol of the Danish monarchy, in the course of the nineteenth century Dannebrog was adopted by middle class Danes as a national symbol. According to tradition, the flag saved Danish King Valdemar II “the Victorious” during the 1219 crusade against heathen Estonians. As the Danish archbishop knelt in prayer for flagging Danish troops, Dannebrog floated down from heaven into his arms as a gift from God. Not surprisingly, the battle turned and the Danes were victorious (p. 277-278). As Adriansen points out, this Dannebrog myth is very like other ancient and medieval myths of flags and crosses in the sky leading to miraculous military victories (p. 279). She goes on to explain how Dannebrog became woven into Danish national identity, in school textbooks, as a royal and military symbol, as the people’s flag, in art and poetry, and on Valdemar’s Day—a civil-religious flag day. Two interesting aspects of Adriansen’s article are the special role of the flag in the Danish-German border region and as a tool for recruitment during the Second World War.

Kyle Jantzen of Ambrose University in Calgary, Canada, explores the relationship between German Protestantism, traditional religious nationalism, military patriotism, and National Socialism, in the construction of the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin-Mariendorf between 1933 and 1935. One of over 900 churches constructed or renovated during the Nazi era, the Martin Luther Memorial Church contained physical elements which fused Nazi, nationalist, and Christian ideology, including a crucifix portraying Jesus as an Aryan hero, a baptismal font ennobling the ideal Nazi family type, a pulpit depicting the Sermon on the Mount as an expression of the Nazi ideal of Volksgemeinschaft, and a triumphal arch comprised of ornamental tiles which included Christian, cultural, and National Socialist symbols. In analyzing the process by which this church was constructed, Jantzen finds that it was the product of a collaborative and largely local decision-making process that demonstrated the penetration of Nazi values into German Protestantism and the eagerness of German Protestants to work with the new Nazi state, from which they sensed little, if any, hostility.

In “Legendary Martyr: Maximilian Kolbe,” Christian Pletzing of the Akademie Sankelmark in Flensburg, Germany, has written a fascinating assessment of the problematic legacy of this Roman Catholic priest, editor, monastery director, and martyr. Kolbe is most famous for offering to take the place of a Polish family man sentenced to death in Auschwitz, in reprisal for an escape from the camp. In dying this way, Kolbe became “Poland’s martyr” (p. 365). He was subsequently beatified in 1971 as a “flower of Polish Catholic religiosity” and canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982 (p. 366). It would be hard to overstate the symbolic importance Kolbe came to hold in Poland. He was “an essential link between Poland’s national and religious identities;” the nexus of Catholic pilgrimage to and understanding of Auschwitz; the inspiration for the naming of well over a hundred churches, chapels, altars or other memorial sites; the symbol of resistance to dictatorship adopted by the Solidarity labour movement; and a general spiritual emblem of the vindication of death by sacrifice and the conquering of hate through brotherly love (p. 366-368).

Lost in this appropriation of Kolbe’s heroic act of martyrdom was the fact that his career as writer and editor for two papers, the monthly Rycerz Niepokalanej (Knight of the Immaculate) and the Catholic tabloid Mały Dziennik (Small Newspaper), included numerous antisemitic articles. Under Kolbe’s editorial watch, these papers portrayed Jews as “Poland’s cancerous ulcers” and “a threat to the Polish state.” He himself wrote an article in which he “accused the Jews of striving for world domination.” Other articles warned of Jewish conspiracy, noted the economic rivalry between Jews and Catholics in Poland, described Jews as “vermin” and called for a boycott of Jewish shops (p. 370). This legacy is counterbalanced somewhat by the fact that Kolbe’s monastery took in 1500 Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. Still, “most of the biographies and collections on the lives of saints about Maximilian Kolbe published in Catholic publishing companies essentially conceal his anti-Semitic publishing activities,” even as they highlight positive contributions he made as a publisher (p. 370-371). Pletzing also explains how Kolbe grew to become a symbol of German-Polish understanding, particularly in the years after 1971.

Finally, Katarzyna Stokłosa’s article, “Nationalism and the Church in the German-Polish border region after World War II,” explains the nature of the compulsory integration of the northern and western regions of Poland regained in the settlement of the Second World War. She describes a strongly nationalistic policy of Polonisation amounting to the “comprehensive destruction of all evidence of foreign elements that were reminiscent of the German era” (p. 375). This affected all manner of objects, including “pictures, maps, ash trays, plates, packaging, graves, crosses on the roadside, chapels, churches, religious images, etc.” in every kind of public space, including schools.(p. 375). Stokłosa demonstrates how the Roman Catholic Church played an important role in integrating these new territories into the rest of Poland. Indeed, “the Polish Catholic Church belonged to the strictest anti-German forces as it aimed to extinguish all remnants of German-ness in the new western and northern areas” (p. 381). The German language was forbidden for masses, in religious education, and at the cemeteries. Poles replaced Germans as parish priests, and the position of even Polish Protestants was so tenuous that many converted. In ways like these, the Polish Catholic Church played an important role in the Polonisation process of the post-war era.

Conference Report: “Resistance Revisited and Re-questioned: Church and Society in Scandinavia and Europe”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Conference Report: “Resistance Revisited and Re-questioned: Church and Society in Scandinavia and Europe”

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

A conference hosted by the Royal Academy of Literature, History, and Antiquities met in Stockholm on September 18-19, 2014, focusing on the topic of church resistance to an unjust state. Professor Anders Jarlert of the University of Lund served as organizer and host. This conference also coincided with the annual meeting of the Board of Editors of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, with the papers expected to appear in that journal in the fall of 2015.

A total of nine presentations looked broadly at the question of church resistance, especially against the Nazi state, and then focused more narrowly on Scandinavian responses to that regime. The first paper, presented by Gerhard Besier of Dresden, described the difficulty of assuming that Christian morality and resistance to the Nazi regime were naturally congruent. Though this idea dominated early postwar church historiography, and though it remains a default position for some even today, scholarship in recent decades has complicated that picture. While some Christians in Germany resisted the Nazi state and considered this a natural outcome of their religious faith, others attributed support for the Nazi state to their Christian beliefs. Hitler’s frequent references to “Providence,” for example, were designed to nurture such a connection. Besier advised against attempting to ascribe resistance to entire confessional groups or theological stances. Rather, one must consider individual circumstances and motivations as locate and interpret actual examples of resistance. Robert Ericksen of Tacoma, WA, stressed the importance of recognizing the widespread postwar condemnation of Nazi crimes and the nearly total loss of respect for the Nazi state as we try to assess church resistance to that state. Christians in Germany and their co-religionists abroad were eager to separate Christian values from Nazi crimes, with the result that the complex story of Christian behavior in Nazi Germany tended to get distorted. As we now ponder the reality of Church responses to the Nazi state, we recognize that resistance was hardly widespread. Ericksen also stressed the importance of acknowledging national identity and national experience in our analyses. We should not expect to find a typical “Christian” response to Hitler across national borders. It was far easier for patriotic Christians in Scandinavia, for example, to question and oppose Nazi policies than for patriotic Germans to contemplate treason against their own national government.

Katarzyna Stoklosa of Sønderborg, DK, mirrored Ericksen’s concern about the importance of national borders and national perspectives. Studying churches in Eastern Europe under communism, she has found no simple relationship between Christian faith and political resistance. For example, when Germans started to flee the GDR toward Poland, the Polish Catholic Church provided shelter and assistance. By contrast, the Reformed Church of Hungary did not, almost certainly due to its greater willingness to support the communist views of the national government. Recent events in Ukraine, according to Stoklosa, show a similar divide. The Greek Orthodox Church has shown sympathy toward the demonstrators who eventually produced the present government in Kiev. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, on the other hand, has tended to follow the Russian line, condemning the new government in Kiev. In none of these examples does one find a simple Christian stance in terms of values and politics. Andrea Varriale of Weimar presented the final paper within this broad focus on Christian resistance. Examining the Italian resistance during World War II, he described a postwar tendency to create an image of resistance unified in values and in class consciousness. A closer look, however, shows internal conflict within the Italian resistance and disagreements on the question of values. Varriale argued that popular culture, especially film, proved willing to acknowledge these internal conflicts more readily than professional historians.

The balance of this conference devoted itself to Christian responses to the Nazi presence in wartime Scandinavia. This too presented a varied picture. Palle Roslyng-Jensen of Copenhagen described a complicated response within Denmark, and a response that conflicts somewhat with Denmark’s positive reputation for its rescue of Jews in the fall of 1943. The complication began upon the German invasion, when the occupiers provided both the Danish government and the Danish Church a good deal of autonomy. This resulted, naturally, in a careful avoidance of harsh criticism toward German policies, for fear that the benefits of considerable normality in Danish life would be undercut by a clear critique of Nazi attitudes and policies. Beneath this official layer of Danish society, however, local pastors and laypeople grew increasingly critical of the Nazi occupation, based upon their pride in Danish attitudes and values and leading, among other things, to their defense of Danish Jews. In this case, a Danish population homogeneous in ethnicity and religion, still divided to a considerable extent on the question of cooperation with or resistance against Nazi Germans. Svante Lundgren of Lund described the case of Finland, allied with Germany for much of the war. The Lutheran Church in Finland worked to protect its flock and its prerogatives within this setting, including some resistance against the Nazi ideology. However, Lundgren described a small group of 150 Jewish refugees in Finland who failed to receive support or assistance from that church. Anders Jarlert of Lund also dealt with a nation never under direct German occupation. Swedish neutrality, however, did involve many connections with Germany that could prove complicated. Jarlert described how the Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935 could create problems in cases of intermarriage between Swedes and Germans. The response of the Swedish Lutheran Church was marked more by bureaucratic muddling and uncertainty than by a moral defense of Swedish citizens of Jewish descent.

Roslyng-Jensen’s paper on Denmark had already identified the Norwegian example as a model to Danes of a more heroic way to respond to Nazi occupation. Torleiv Austad of Oslo then presented that story, a story much less marked by the ecclesiastical vacillation found in Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The Norwegian government, taken over by Vidkun Quisling with German backing, was of course a willing puppet of the Nazi occupation. The Norwegian Lutheran Church, however, resisted the Nazi hope that this official institution would become a counterpart to the sycophantic Quisling government. Bishop Berggrav and clergy throughout Norway risked their comfortable and safe positions by taking up resistance. This included a pastoral letter read in churches in early 1941 in support of justice and human rights. Then, in February 1942, seven bishops resigned, with 93 percent of the clergy following that example and resigning their positions on Easter that spring. Bishop Berggrav prepared the ground for these responses by taking on Romans 13 and the standard Lutheran belief in obedience to state authority. In a paper of 1941, “When the Driver is Out of His Mind: Luther on the Duty of Disobedience,” Berggrav established a theological basis for resistance. The Norwegian Lutheran Church then produced a document for Easter 1942, “The Foundation of the Church: A Confession and a Declaration,” clarifying a doctrine of the two kingdoms that could allow for resistance to state authority. This statement included these words: “As long as the above mentioned conditions exist … the church and its servants must live and act in accord with their pledge to God’s Word and their Confession and accept all the consequences that may follow from that.” That statement marked the day when Norwegian bishops and clergy resigned their positions rather than collaborate with the German occupation.

This conference concluded with a visit to the lovely Sigtuna Foundation buildings and grounds outside Stockholm, allowing those present to appreciate the setting where Dietrich Bonhoeffer met Bishop George Bell in his effort to secure British support for the German resistance as it attempted to overthrow Hitler.

Call for Papers: Jewish/non-Jewish Relations from Antiquity to the Present, University of Southampton, 7-9 September 2015

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Call for Papers: Jewish/non-Jewish Relations from Antiquity to the Present, University of Southampton, 7-9 September 2015

2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Parkes Library at the University of Southampton, which is now one of the largest Jewish documentation centres in Europe and the only one in the world devoted specifically to Jewish/non-Jewish relations. The dedication of the Parkes Library was the catalyst for establishment of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, which is based on the work of Reverend Dr James Parkes (1896-1981), one of the most remarkable figures within 20th century Christianity. A tireless fighter against antisemitism in all forms, including from within Christianity, he campaigned on behalf of European Jews during the Holocaust and was involved with the rescue of Jewish refugees in the 1930s. As part of his international campaigning, he built the Parkes Library and its associated archive, helped to found the Council of Christians and Jews, and worked throughout to promote religious tolerance and mutual respect in Jewish/non-Jewish relations.

This anniversary conference will examine the subject of Jewish/non-Jewish relations, past, present, and future, by looking at its history of research over the last fifty years, by presenting the latest research, and by determining future directions in the field. Keynote speakers include Todd Endelman, Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History, University of Michigan; Sander Gilman, Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University; Martin Goodman, Professor of Jewish Studies, Oxford University, and President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies; Tony Kushner, Marcus Sieff Professor of the History of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton and the Parkes Institute; Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History, Queen Mary University of London; Greg Walker, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, University of Edinburgh.

Proposals covering any topic related to Jewish/non-Jewish relations from antiquity to present day are welcome, especially in the areas of:

The legacy of James Parkes
Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim relations
Jewish/non-Jewish relations in the Hellenistic and Roman periods
Rabbinic literature and the representation of the ‘other’
Medieval and Early Modern Jewish/non-Jewish relations
History of antisemitism
Comparative migration and identity
The Holocaust and Jewish/non-Jewish Relations
Jewish/non-Jewish relations in literature and philosophy
Representations and constructions of the image of ‘the Jew’
Jews and non-Jews in the visual and performing arts
The role and representation of Jews in the heritage world, including museums, libraries and archives

Please submit proposals by 1 April 2015 to Dr Helen Spurling (H.Spurling@southampton.ac.uk), including:

Author’s full name, postal and email addresses, institutional affiliation
Abstract of paper to be presented (no more than 250 words)
Biographical information (no more than 50 words)
Panel proposals should not exceed one page in length
A limited number of bursaries are available on a competitive basis for postgraduates and early career researchers; please indicate if you would like to be considered.

For further information, please visit: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/parkes/jubilee/index.page?.

Letter from the Editors: December 2014

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Letter from the Editors: December 2014

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

I am pleased to introduce this new issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly for December 2014. Once again, the editors have prepared a delightful mixture of reviews and notes, and other writings on German and European religious history during the twentieth century. Indeed, once again this issue we venture beyond the confines of Europe, drawing in the relationships between European churches and governments with events in both central Africa and the United States.

The rebuilt Frauenkirche in Dresden

Leading off this issue is a short article by German historian Manfred Gailus, who assesses the place of the German churches during the First World War, using the war sermons of Berlin Court and Cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring to illustrate the religious patriotism of German Protestants a century ago. John Conway, who translated the piece, adds his comment as well. Next, Victoria Barnett, General Editor of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, adds a clarification and addendum to her review of Charles Marsh’s new Bonhoeffer book, Strange Glory, in which she questions Marsh’s use and interpretation of several key texts pertaining to the relationship between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eberhard Bethge.

Also in this issue, John Conway reviews two books on relations between the Vatican and the United States, as well as another on a prominent family of Christian German aristocrats. Guest contributors Björn Krondorfer and Christopher S. Morrissey contribute with reviews of works on Catholic politics in colonial Rwanda and on German Catholic philosopher and anti-Nazi Dietrich von Hildebrand. Finally, Mark Ruff, Doris Bergen, and Lauren Faulkner all add reports on recent conferences and lectures.

We hope you find this to be an enlightening collection of scholarly writings. Our best wishes to you during this Advent season of 2014.

On behalf of all the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

A Crusade, a Holy War: Protestant Preaching in War-time, 1914.

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

A Crusade, a Holy War: Protestant Preaching in War-time, 1914.

By Manfred Gailus, Technische Universität Berlin

This article is based on “Ein Gott, der Fahnen entrollt,” zeitzeichen: Evangelische Kommentare zu Religion und Gesellschaft, 7 July 2014, available at http://www.zeitzeichen.net/schwerpunkt/fruehere-schwerpunkte/kirchen-und-1-weltkrieg/ . Our thanks to John S. Conway for his translation of Manfred Gailus’ text.

For the Berlin Court and Cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring, preaching to a large crowd from the steps of the Reichstag in a spontaneous service on 2 August 1914 was the high point of his life. The war had hardly got underway, but Doehring expressed in his inflammatory address all the main themes of Protestant war theology. This war, he told the crowd, had been forced on Germany. As a result, this could be seen as a perfectly justified war of defense against a conspiracy of surrounding enemies.

Yes, if we didn’t have justice and a clear conscience on our side, if we didn’t feel – I should almost say implicitly – God’s presence, which encompasses our flags and leads our Kaiser to take up his sword and call for a crusade and a holy war, then we should be shaking in our shoes with timidity. But now we will boldly give a defiant answer, one which is the most German of all: We Germans fear God, and nothing else in the world.

This patriotic war-time euphoria which gripped so many Germans in the late summer of 1914 was accompanied by a wave of religious enthusiasm. In the church the heightened sense of comradeship brought about by the events of August was seen as the beginning of a new era. The outbreak of war was enthusiastically greeted by many Protestants (and hardly less by many Catholics). The war raised the level of religious fervor and was theologically justified as a “holy war” or “righteous war” undertaken by Christian Germany against an imagined world of enemies, consisting of sinners or heathen or godless barbarians. Pastors, theological professors and publicists all took this historic moment to be a clear signal from God calling the people back to faith and the church from the allurements of faithlessness.

On 11 August 1914, the leaders of the Prussian Protestant Church, which was by far the largest in the country, issued the following declaration: “Seemingly lifeless signs of faith are awakening once more….The fields are white and ripe for a spiritual harvest.” But what did these leaders mean by conjuring up this somewhat questionable image? Clearly they could expect a great deal of suffering, death and distress, which would lead to a new and more realistic sense of the need to take life seriously. This would put an end to the too long period of peace since 1870-71 which had induced indifference and a frivolous superficiality of life. Now the need for faith, the church, communion, pastoral care and prayer would once more be recognized.

Early reports in the first days and weeks of the war seemed to confirm such expectations. Years later, Pastor Paul Vetter, in Berlin Friedenau, recalled almost nostalgically the enthusiasms of those late summer days. On 5 August, in response to an edict sent out by the Kaiser ordering a “day of prayer in war-time,” his church was almost overwhelmed by the number of those who wanted to participate.

At first we planned to have an overflow evening service, then an extra early morning service. In fact we had to have five services. When the church was filled up by 10 a.m. the parishioners got the off-duty pastors to leave their studies and hold an extra service in the parish hall, and even to have the children’s room opened up, because everyone was so eager to have the chance of hearing God’s word. And this continued Sunday by Sunday, even though we organized every evening special war-time prayer services.

The desire to take part in communion services was enormous. Quite often there would be a spontaneous request to have a special communion service if a sudden command to march off was ordered. Or someone would knock on the church office door and call out: “Pastor, I can’t stay for the communion service. But please give me a comforting word to live and die by.” Young couples now sought to have a church war-time wedding, including quite a number who had already been married by a civil rite and who now “because of the shattering seriousness of the outbreak of the war wanted to have God’s blessing for their union and for the baptism of their children, which for so long they had neglected or despised.”

The Protestant churches put all their spiritual and material resources behind the war effort. There was even talk of a spiritual mobilization campaign. As evidence of this hugely patriotic enthusiasm, we can point to the petition signed by 172 Berlin pastors in which they protested against the clergy’s exclusion from active military service, and sought to obtain permission to have the honor, like other professions, of defending their country in the front lines. But in general this strongly expressed desire to take up arms was rejected by the church bureaucrats. Only young ordinands were allowed to volunteer their services, i.e. those who were not yet fully established or had families. Pastors in office were to stay there and serve the cause on the home front. They were called as preachers, pastors and publicists to advance the nation’s collective cause by upholding the people’s patriotism, readiness to sacrifice, and maintaining confidence in the final victory. If pastors were called up, they would be serving as chaplains or ambulance workers, i.e. not with weapons. And in fact, during the course of the war approximately 1400 pastors were posted as chaplains.

On the home front, the pastors’ contributions consisted mainly of highly morale-boosting services, with special “war sermons” or “prayers in time of war”, which were often held every evening. Later on, a carefully organized system of pastoral care was developed through letters sent to the soldiers at the front, which brought greetings from home as well as uplifting spiritual messages. On top of this, a service for sending parcels was arranged to bring the soldiers gifts from loved ones. At the same time, the pastors were keen to demonstrate their care for the families affected by the war, and especially for the war widows. Finally we should note the very considerable financial support given by churches, church organizations or well-endowed parishioners to the government-sponsored War Loans, as well as the numerous occasions on which parishes donated their church bells to be melted down for the war effort.

War sermons were very much in demand, and became the hall-mark of Protestant responses to the outbreak of the war. Pastor Ferdinand Vogel was one of those who had taken his wife to join the crowds rejoicing on the main street Unter der Linden on the evening of July 31. In his memoirs, he made a point of describing the scene, and then on August 23 he had preached his first war-time sermon in the Sophia Church on the text of Romans 8. 31-9, with the stirring words: “If God be for us, who can be against us?” This was the spirit, the pastor claimed, which prevailed throughout the country in those weeks.

Of course the number of those who are against us is not small. Not only in Europe, but even in Japan, an island nation in far east Asia, there are those who hate us or are envious. So we won’t be surprised if others also join in. But we have Luther’s great hymn to comfort us: ‘A mighty fortress is our God’, which is so appropriately used by our congregations in this time of war.

At the same time, in contrast to many other pastors, Vogel did not allow himself to overly indulge in patriotic rhetoric, since his sermon also included prudent passages calling for circumspection. “What right do we have as a people, he asked his parishioners, to claim that God is on our side? Why should we expect God to be with us, and not with those who oppose us? Of course we know that God deals not just with individuals but also with the destinies of whole peoples. Up to now God has given the Germans a great deal of support with which to build up his Kingdom. Look at Luther’s deeply spiritual powers of belief, the lofty flights of thoughts which are to be found in Schiller and Kant, or the depth of commitment to our people as seen in Bismarck or the old Kaiser, which they turned into legislated steps for social improvements. Yes, God has indeed called the German people to a great and glorious destiny.”

Very frequently these pastors referred in their sermons to the heroic spirit of the “Wars of Liberation” against Napoleon a hundred years earlier. The significant difference was that in 1914-18 it was not German territory which was occupied by foreign troops, but rather that all the most important theatres of war lay outside Germany’s borders. This fact was ignored in the fervor of patriotic enthusiasm. One of those in the forefront of jingoistic preachers was Bruno Doehring, already mentioned above, and his various colleagues in the Berlin Cathedral. He was born in 1879 in Mohrungen in East Prussia, the son of a farmer. In 1914 as a young pastor he was promoted by the Kaiser to be a Court and Cathedral Preacher. During the war, and because of it, this young and hitherto unknown country pastor became one of the best known preachers in the nation’s capital. His sermons were printed with large circulations. The titles of his collected war-time sermons say it all: A Mighty Fortress. Sermons from a Testing Time (1915), Religion on the Battlefield. Impressions and Reflections (1916), and God and the Germans. Thoughts for the Present Day (1917). Particularly notable was his sermon of 15 April 1917 when he preached to a congregation of between two and three thousand people in the Cathedral. The original enthusiasm of August 1914 for a quick victory had been replaced by a disillusioned sober assessment of the war’s experiences. Great controversy was raging about Germany’s war aims and about possible negotiations for peace. “Our enemies,” so Doehring claimed, “are trying to shatter our innermost faith and trust in God for our mission. But Germany will never capitulate, even when we fall in heroic sacrifice for our nation. If Christ dwells in our people, then even if we are murdered as the Jews murdered Jesus, then a new faith in Germany will arise from our graves.” Indeed, in his address Doehring painted a picture of the German people as a redemptive force, whose nearness to God had given them the mission of calling a lost world back to God.

What other people could undertake this task to save the world from the chaos around them? There can be no doubt that only a strong and courageous people can do this. So we must remain united and be led by men filled with God’s spirit. We have got to find those courageous elements who demonstrate exactly the opposite from the materialist-minded English, or the blindly hateful French, or the violence-loving Russians, or the treacherous Italians, or the bestial Rumanians, let alone the mendacious and greedy followers of the so-called mighty American dollar.

Doehring appealed to his hearers to remain strong in their faith and love, since God still had great things in hand for Germany and the Germans. In fact the tone of this sermon presaged the party line of the Fatherland Party which was to spring up a few months later, and which campaigned with fanatical zeal for the retention of all annexations in a truly imperialistic confidence of eventual victory.

This was the prevailing tone of war sermons. Only a few pastors adopted a more peaceful line. Amongst these men were the five Berlin pastors—Karl Aner, Walter Nithack-Stahn, Otto Pless, Friedrich Rittelmeyer and Rudolf Wieland—who in October 1917 issued a declaration in support of the Peace Resolutions passed by the majority of the Reichstag in July 1917. In view of what they called the “catastrophic consequences of war” they called on all Christians to reject the idea of using war as a means of settling international disputes, and instead to campaign for peace. The great majority of their clerical colleagues found such ideas to be outrageous. They immediately drafted up a counter-blast, which was signed by 160 of the capital’s pastors . “There are only two things in store for Germany: victory or defeat. Once we have achieved victory, that will be the time to show the English and French that we are ready to practice reconciliation. But in the meantime we are still entitled in the sight of God and man to righteous anger against our enemies. And therefore we will hold off from any offers of reconciliation until the enemy is defeated and ourselves and our children have secured peace and freedom.”

Such was the prevailing tone amongst these pastors in the fourth year of the war. Anyone who did not subscribe to such a view of the need for victory was quickly accused of being un-Protestant, even un-German. And it was this tone of unyielding militancy which could be seen in the founding of the Fatherland Party on the anniversary of Germany’s victory at Sedan on 2 September 1917. Numerous pastors, even some complete synods, church organizations and clubs were quick to join. And it is easy enough to trace a direct line between this kind of nationalist-conservative mentalities to the later German National People’s Party of the Weimar Republic, or to the militia groups and the subsequent radical nationalist associations such as the Stahlhelm and other supporters of the new Nazi Party in the post-war years.

“The fields are white and ready for a spiritual harvest” was the joyful proclamation made by the Prussian Protestant Church Council when war was declared. But at the end of the war many branches of the Protestant Churches experienced a collective spiritual collapse. Defeat had brought to an end the 500 years of Hohenzollern rule. And the subsequent democratic revolutions of 1918-19 seemed to be wholly disastrous. Many shattered people wanted to know from their pastors how God could have allowed this to happen. The pastor of the Good Shepherd Church in Friedenau, who had recorded the throngs coming to church in August 1914, was now obliged to deal with his own reservations about preaching at the end of the war in 1918. “The question, what should I preach about, seemed so easy and yet was so difficult, all the more because the nation’s defeat was so sudden after we had put so much effort into maintaining hope and trust.” The end of the war raised agonizing questions amongst the members of the congregations about God’s righteousness, which were not easily answered in either sermons or pastoral counseling.

The young Court and Cathedral preacher Bruno Doehring, already prominent for his fanatical war sermons, now at the end of the war became one of the significant propagators of the so-called “stab-in-the-back” theory. This attributed Germany’s defeat not only to the military superiority of their known enemies on the battle fields, but also to the decisive contribution of those treacherous and secretive elements who had betrayed Germany at home. The only way to regain Germany’s political resurrection would be to return to those values which had made Germany great, namely God, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther, Bismarck and Adolf Stoecker. It was in this sense that Doehring was to use his position as a political preacher and to combat Germany’s new and first democratic experiment in the years that lay ahead.

Comment by John Conway:

But what could the pastors say? They held a position of authority and stature in the parish, and were easily accessible. They were supposed to provide not only personal moral uplift to individuals but to nourish the parish’s corporate loyalty to the state. In any case, they lacked the knowledge or the capacity to be critical of the nation’s political or military leaders. The pastors’ conservative milieu, their nationalist sympathies and their loyalty to their God-given Emperor all induced them to play the expected role of spiritually equipping their parishioners for war. To have uttered a dissenting voice against the widespread feelings of the majority would have evoked tremendous resentment or even hostility. No pastor, even today, wants to play that role. To be sure, their readiness to predict Germany’s imminent victory, or to ascribe this to divine approval, or to demonize Germany’s enemies as agents of Satan, were regrettable features, which for the most part were replaced by more appropriate lamentations. But the inevitable conflation and contradiction of political and pastoral claims in war-time needs to be reckoned with. After all, I can myself recall that in September 1939 we all went to church to pray for God’s guidance and protection for our armed forces. And Bob Dylan surely expressed a widespread opinion when he wrote:

The First World War, boys

It came and it went

The reason for fighting I never did get

But I learned to accept it

Accept it with pride,

For you don’t count the dead

When God’s on your side.

Clarification and Addendum to My Review of Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Clarification and Addendum to My Review of Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory

By Victoria J. Barnett, General Editor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition

A closer look at the original sources cited in Professor Marsh’s book Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer has led me to write this clarification. In my review (September 2014) I commented on “a previously unpublished letter that, in the passage that is quoted, is quite striking” with respect to Marsh’s claim that there was a homoerotic relationship between Bonhoeffer and Bethge. The letter can be found on page 252 of the book; Marsh apparently found the original in the Bethge papers, although he gives no archival citation in the footnote (65). This is incidentally the only place in the entire book where a supposedly newly discovered document is cited in the notes.

Because the passage quoted was so unusual I didn’t immediately recognize it, but as it turns out, it’s from the letter published as nr. 102 in Bonhoeffer Works Volume 14, and the text of the letter differs significantly from the translation offered by Marsh. In his book, Marsh actually quotes a phrase from this letter (which he misdates) two paragraphs before: “I miss you often.” In the passage from the supposedly unpublished letter, Marsh renders the text as follows: “The heart is more deceitful than anything else, and is desperately sick….The semester is coming to an end, and I miss you often.”

The full passage as quoted on page 225 of volume 14 of the Bonhoeffer Works reads as follows:

There is a lot of confusion here at the end of the semester, and I miss you often. I always greatly look forward to your letters! And the unrest in church politics on top of it all. ‘The heart is a defiant and despondent thing.’ (Jer. 17:9) Defiance and despondency – all that just dies in prayer. Let us remain faithful and in the process also remain true to each other.

“The heart is a defiant and despondent thing” is actually a quotation from Jeremiah and Bonhoeffer is commenting on the unrest in church politics.

In other words, the translation is a very misleading version of the original text. Taken as an isolated example this might be overlooked, but unfortunately there are examples throughout the book of mistranslation and misinterpreted (or misunderstood) information, particularly with respect to Marsh’s portrayal of the Bethge-Bonhoeffer relationship. Facts are given without the larger context that gives a more accurate picture. It is not news, for example, that Bonhoeffer and Bethge had a joint bank account; Bethge essentially managed Finkenwalde as well as the underground pastorates in Bonhoeffer’s absence and had to pay bills (and there was always uncertainty as to whether Bonhoeffer might be arrested, which made a joint account a necessity).

In Marsh’s telling the entire section devoted to Bonhoeffer’s brief 1939 stay in New York emphasizes his longing for his friend Bethge, but it must be said there is really no indication of that in either his 1939 New York diary and the letters he wrote during that period, which I translated and edited for Bonhoeffer Works volume 15. What emerges from the actual texts is that Bonhoeffer’s sense of homesickness and remorse at having left Germany was shaped first and foremost by a deep connection and sense of responsibility for his students. He felt that he had left them in the lurch, and his letters to Bethge focused on these concerns.

Here again, the translations in the Marsh book are misleading. Throughout his 1939 diary (and even in some letters to Bethge) Bonhoeffer uses the second-person plural, which makes clear that he’s addressing the entire Finkenwalde community. In Marsh’s account these passages have been turned into the first-person singular and rendered incorrectly as personal notes to Bethge. For example, the quotation on page 280, “someday we will worship together in eternity” (which is not footnoted in Marsh) is from the June 11, 1939, entry in Bonhoeffer’s diary. The larger paragraph in which this passage occurs makes it abundantly clear that the “we” is the community (see the entire text on page 218-19 of Bonhoeffer Works, volume 15). Similarly, in the June 4 letter to Bethge in which Bonhoeffer writes “You will be tired and gone to bed now…” (Marsh, page 277) the “you” is plural and addresses the Finkenwalde community as a whole.

There are similar instances throughout the book of incorrect citations or historical errors that, while they make for a dramatic story, don’t reflect the actual record. For example, in his review of the book in Sojourners (http://sojo.net/blogs/2014/08/26/harlems-influence-bonhoeffer-underestimated-strange-glory), Reggie Williams noted the odd claim that Bonhoeffer broke ties with Abyssinian Baptist church in 1931 because the church was charging people admission to Easter Sunday services (Marsh, pp. 127-128). The source given is a letter Bonhoeffer wrote to his grandmother, but that letter says nothing about an admission charge or even Abyssinian; it’s only a mention of the common practice of major metropolitan U.S. churches to regulate the large Christmas and Easter crowds by issuing passes. Given the centrality of the Abyssinian experience for Bonhoeffer’s theology, a break with that church would be a dramatic development and worthy of further examination—yet there is no evidence of such a break. Indeed, as Clifford Green noted in his introduction to Bonhoeffer Works volume 10, there is some evidence that Bonhoeffer actually spoke at Abyssinian in 1939.

My review essay was titled “Interpreting Bonhoeffer.” As I stressed in that review, the books I was reviewing are all interpretations and attempts to carve out new ground. There is certainly room for that in Bonhoeffer scholarship. There is also room for new interpretations of seminal events and relationships in Bonhoeffer’s life and for new theological interpretations of what he tried to do. But historians will know that interpretation of any kind must be grounded in fact and scrupulous attention to detail and correctness. Interpretation in history and biography (which, as the history of a life, deserves the same kind of faithfulness to accuracy) is only as sound as the accuracy of the account itself.

Review Article: The Vatican and the United States during the Interwar Era

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Review Article: The Vatican and the United States during the Interwar Era

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Luca Castagna, A Bridge across the Ocean: The United States and the Holy See Between the Two World Wars (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014), Pp. xvii + 193, ISBN 978-0-8132-2587-0.

C. Gallacher, D. Kertzer and A. Melloni, eds., Pius XI and America (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012), Pp. 450, ISBN 978-3-643-90146-9.

The Vatican is the world’s oldest diplomatic entity. But in the last two centuries it was confronted with challenges and set-backs which threatened its very survival. In the mid-nineteenth century it was robbed of its long-held territories by the upstart new Kingdom of Italy and reduced to a small sliver of land in the heart of Rome. At the same time Pope Pius IX retreated into a theological obscurantism which led the church in hostility to any modern patterns of thought. The nadir of the Vatican’s diplomatic influence was, quite possibly, the era of the First World War, when a combination of intrigues by the new Italian government and the anti-Catholic obstinacy of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant President Woodrow Wilson barred the Vatican from the Paris peace conference and the Versailles settlement which resulted. At the same time, the United States saw a resurgence of anti-Catholic nativism and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, with its vociferous outbursts against Catholics, Jews and blacks. For its part, the Vatican was engrossed with trying to establish a set of legally-binding agreements or concordats with the numerous new states which had arisen in the wake of the war. These were supposed to secure the position of Catholic institutions and personnel, but, as the case of the German Concordat signed in 1933 was to show, the results were mixed. In fact, almost immediately protests were launched with the German Foreign Ministry about breaches of the agreement, but no satisfaction was ever given.

The situation in the United States did not improve until the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. His campaign for social reform in the New Deal was widely welcomed by the under-class which included many poor, immigrants and Catholics. The Catholic social work community was particularly impressed, and indeed this move paid off handsomely politically when Roosevelt swept many states into the Democratic fold in 1936. This convergence of ideas in the New Deal and the Catholic Church’s social doctrine, as expressed by the National Catholic Welfare Conference, opened the way for a new relationship of mutual collaboration. This also resulted in an unprecedented participation of Catholics in the national sociopolitical context.

In the 1930s, the resurgence of nationalist antagonisms, especially sponsored by the totalitarian powers, was alarming to both Roosevelt and the Vatican. This alignment of views on their common need to preserve the world for peace and to prevent further conflicts brought the two diplomatic entities closer together, as was symbolized by the highly successful visit of the Cardinal Secretary of State, Pacelli, (later Pope Pius XII) to the United States in 1936. He was even invited to have a meal with the President at his summer retreat in Hyde Park, where doubtless the two men discussed the looming dangers of hostilities in international affairs.

The principal difficulty in this rapprochement arose from the fact that the United States had no diplomatic representation at the Vatican, since such an arrangement had been abandoned in 1857. Roosevelt was well aware that any attempt to persuade Congress to vote the funds necessary for the resumption of diplomatic relations with the Vatican would likely arouse waves of vehement opposition from the extreme Protestant wing, as well as from Isolationists. It would be seen as part and parcel of his attempt to draw America into the vortex of world conflict, and hence would be strenuously opposed.

Roosevelt therefore delayed any decision, which was made even more hazardous by the events in Europe in 1938, with the annexation by the Nazis of Austria, which was initially greeted with acclaim by the leading Austrian Cardinal, for which he was strongly criticized by the Vatican. Isolationists in the United States were joined by some vociferous Catholics, such as the voluble “Radio Priest” Father Charles Coughlin, whose diatribes were undoubtedly followed by many of his followers. On the other hand, the possible outbreak of hostilities in Europe added to Roosevelt’s desire to recruit the aid of the Vatican for the active pursuit of peace. The death of Pope Pius XI in February 1939 and the election of Cardinal Pacelli as the new Pope further held up this process. So it was not until December 1939, after the outbreak of war in Europe, and the conquest of the largely Catholic Poland, that Roosevelt finally turned his long-held desire into reality. He subtly hit on the expedient of not establishing a normal embassy but rather of appointing a Personal Representative of the President, who would have the status but not the title of an Ambassador. His choice fell on the wealthy industrialist Myron Taylor, a Protestant Episcopalian, who arrived in Rome in February 1940, and behaved with impeccable style and astuteness, entirely avoiding any ecclesiastical or theological matters. As such, Roosevelt now had a direct line to the Vatican and readily assented to the vigorous attempts to prevent any escalation of the war’s hostilities, particularly with Italy. Mussolini’s decision in June 1940 to ignore the appeals of Roosevelt and Pius XII and to enter the war with his Nazi partner spelled the failure of these joint efforts to reserve peace and humanity.

Castagna’s excellently researched examination of the diplomatic archives of both the Vatican and the United States for this short period of twenty years provides a useful extension of comparative diplomatic history. He adds in various papal documents as well as notes the contributions of scholars of this subject in various languages. It is only unfortunate that the papers of Pope Pius XII are still unavailable, so that the next stage of the relationship between the Holy See and the United States, particularly where their policies diverged from 1940 onwards, remains to be told. (For these next events, see J. S. Conway, “Myron C. Taylor’s Mission to the Vatican 1940-1950,” Church History 44, no. 1 (March 1976): 1-15.) It can only be hoped that Castagna, who teaches at the University of Salerno, will be among those scholars invited to follow up this valuable study with a sequel, which could then demonstrate how, in the aftermath of 1945, this relationship actually became the bridge across the ocean of his title. The present short study must therefore be regarded as a prelude, describing the early stages of the thaw in Vatican-American relations which was only fulfilled when full diplomatic relations were finally established in 1984.

The collected essays in Pius XI and America, contributed by a variety of international scholars for a 2010 conference at Brown University, provide further evidence of the tangential and episodic relationships between the Vatican under Pope Pius XI and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. It is striking that these scholars limit themselves entirely to the secular realm. There are no papers given on the ecclesiastical, let alone on the theological developments of those years. Instead the articles concentrate on the political and diplomatic aspects of the Vatican’s outreach and how these overlapped with certain American interests. These essays confirm Castagna’s view that relations improved only after Roosevelt’s election in 1932, when the new President believed that the Catholic social and political thought was not far removed from his idealism. So too he came to the conclusion that the Vatican shared his endeavor to maintain peace in Europe and to restrain the vainglorious ambitions of the European dictators.

In their various explorations and elaboration of the papers from the Vatican archive, it is hardly surprising that these authors paint a favorable picture of the Vatican diplomats, especially of Cardinal Pacelli. Rob Ventresca, for example, in his survey of Pius XI, Eugenio Pacelli and the Italian Fascism, agrees with Castagna that Pacelli’s moderating influence was designed to head off any open breach with Mussolini’s aggressive tactics over Abyssinia, and to promote a negotiated settlement of the dispute. The price paid was to mute the Church’s public criticism of the morality of Mussolini’s imperial misadventures, which Ventresca suggests set a pattern to be repeated later with the even more serious breaches of the peace by Hitler. In her essay, Emma Fattorini takes a more critical attitude. She repeats the theme of her book Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican, pointing to the profound differences of position and temperament between Pius XI and Pacelli. Fattorini clearly prefers the irrepressible intransigence of the elderly pontiff. Jacques Kornberg is even more critical, suggesting that both Pius XI and Pius XII failed to conduct themselves according to their own moral standards. The Vatican issued no outraged protests about the Nazis’ November 1938 Crystal Night pogrom because this was seen as not being a threat to Catholic interests. In Kornberg’s view, civic rights, or universal human rights, were not a matter for the papacy’s concern. On the other hand, Fr. Robert Trisco, in recounting the furor over the outspoken criticisms of Hitler and the Nazi regime made by Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago in May 1937, praises Pacelli for castigating privately the malicious invectives and disparagement perpetrated against the Holy See by the Nazi leadership. Trisco also describes the widespread support for Cardinal Mundelein given by different sections of American opinion, including President Roosevelt. Indeed Roosevelt took Mundelein’s advice about the difficult issue of how to restore diplomatic relations between the United States and the Vatican, but otherwise does not feature much in these essays. In all, there are few surprises, since many of the contributors have already had their say elsewhere. But, as Charles Gallacher remarks, there are still unanswered questions, such as why Pius XI sent Pacelli to the United States in 1936, or what topics were covered when Roosevelt and Pacelli met privately at Hyde Park.

These essays provide additional details in support of the overview given in Castagna’s book, and as such are a useful and reliable addition to our knowledge of papal diplomacy in the inter-war period.

Review of J. J. Carney, Rwanda Before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Review of J. J. Carney, Rwanda Before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era (New York: Oxford University Press 2014), Xi + 343 Pp., ISBN 978-0-19-998227-1.

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

Much attention has been paid by contemporary church historians to questions of complicity of the German churches during the 1930s and 1940s and to theological responses to racist Nazi ideology that led to the genocidal murder of European Jews. Now J. J. Carney is shifting our focus to a similar set of questions regarding the role of the Catholic Church in Rwanda, asking how certain patterns of ethnic discourse and late-colonial missionizing efforts exacerbated the Hutu-Tutsi divide that culminated in the 100-day slaughter of an estimated 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu in 1994. “One of the most Catholic countries in Africa suffered the worst genocide of the late twentieth century,” Carney writes in the opening lines of his fine study. “Christians slaughtered Christians in Christian schools and parishes” (p. 1). What accounts for the failure of the church to uphold unity among Christians? How did clergy and missionaries contribute to dividing the banyarwanda (Rwanda people) along the lines of politically contested labels of ethnicity?

After the genocide, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray asked church leaders in Rwanda if “the blood of tribalism proved deeper than the waters of baptism”—a question that seems to speak deeply to Carney’s investigation of the role of the church. Carney quotes it both in the Introduction and the Epilogue (pp. 2, 207), though not in support of the idea of “tribalism.” On the contrary, he argues that the Hutu-Tutsi division was mobilized ideologically for defining Rwanda’s national independence from colonialism. As a historian, however, he wonders why people of the same faith ended up slaughtering each other. As a matter of fact, whereas Catholic parishes served as sanctuaries during anti-Tutsi violence in the years 1959 to 1964, this protection utterly failed in 1994, when “more Tutsi died in churches than anywhere else” (p. 197). An estimated 75,000 were slaughtered in the Kabgayi parish alone, the center of Catholic life since the early twentieth century. Throughout Rwanda, more than 200 priests and people from religious orders (mostly Tutsi) were killed, while other priests actively endorsed or supported the interahamwe militias, like diocesan priest Fr. Athanase Seromba, who burned down a church with 2,000 Tutsi inside (p. 308, n.124). How can we account for the dramatic shift from Catholic sanctuary to mortuary?

As the book’s title indicates, Carney does not focus on the1994 genocide itself but investigates Catholic Church politics in early decades, especially in the 1950s and early 1960s. Carney identifies this period as essential for setting up patterns that later get utilized and mobilized in the genocide. He carefully avoids pronouncing a sweeping judgment that either blames or exonerates the church. He also does not pursue a deterministic view of history: the patterns he identifies contributing to the increasingly hostile rift between Hutu and Tutsi do not point to a predictable (and therefore preventable) future genocidal outcome. Carney presents a nuanced picture of multifarious voices within the Catholic Church. Situated between, on the one hand, the church’s alliance with the Rwandan nobility and Tutsi elites dating back to successful early missionary efforts and, on the other hand, its growing support of social reform politics in the 1950s in favor of impoverished peasants (largely, but not exclusively Hutu), missionary and church leaders presented varying explanations for the woes plaguing Rwanda’s social and political landscape. Despite advocating unity in the church and condemning the sporadic pre-1994 violence, many of these leaders nevertheless actively participated in an ethno-political and national-reform discourse that, at least in retrospect, aggravated the conflict.

Carney suggests revising the standard explanation of the complicity of the churches. He distances himself from the more popular view of a “primordial tribal hatred between Hutu and Tutsi” ( p. 2) as well as from majority scholarly explanations that argue that colonial officials and Catholic missionaries taught Hutu and Tutsi “to see each other as separate racial groups” (p. 2). Whereas the former view has been debunked as a colonialist narrative, the latter simplifies complex historical developments and reduces the Rwandan people to puppets of colonial powers, thereby denying them active political agency. Carney also notes that current scholarship on Rwanda’s church history does not pay attention to the important decades of the 1950s and 1960s. According to Carney, the standard narrative correctly points to the missionary alliance with the Tutsi elite before the 1940s, but “then skips to the 1980s and 1990s” (p. 2), when the church had already realigned itself with the Parmehutu, the Hutu national party that assumed political power. Before the outbreak of genocide in 1994, the church had formed close ties to Hutu President Habyarimana and Hutu Archbishop Vincent Nsengiyumva.

This standard narrative, according to Carney, is present in the works of Mahmood Mamdani (When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, 2001) and Timothy Longman (Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, 2010). Carney does not dispute their observation that institutional church interests contributed to the entrenchment of ethnic labeling, but he suggests that the 1950s have been largely neglected, although they were crucial to the politicization of ethnicity. It was in the 1950s, Carney argues, that all other identities (such as clan, patron-client, religious) were “subsumed under the Hutu-Tutsi dynamic” (p. 3); it was also in the 1950s when major players in the Catholic Church and European missions shifted their sympathies to Hutu social reform ideas that advocated a “more egalitarian Rwanda society marked by social justice, democracy, and economic equality” (p. 3).

The shift of church politics from pre-1940 alliance with Tutsi elites to post-1950s Hutu sympathies (and subsequent close church-state relations to the Hutu political regime, first under President Kayibanda, then Habyarimana) deserves close attention, as Carney persuasively argues. This shift, however, seems contradictory, given the old colonial race theory as articulated in the Hamitic thesis. The Hamitic thesis perceived Tutsi as racially superior. Based on the biblical curse of Ham (Genesis 9), combined with nineteenth century race theories, European missionaries and colonial explorers considered the Tutsi as civilizers of the Bantu African population, the Hutu. Europeans felt an affinity to the Tutsi, described by some as “Caucasians under a black skin” (p. 11), ignoring the fact that social class divisions crisscrossed the Hutu-Tutsi difference (since many Tutsi belonged to the landless peasantry as well). According to the Hamitic thesis, the missionaries should have kept their loyalty with the Tutsi. But this is not what happened. Early missionaries actually poured their conversion efforts into the landless class—the disempowered, largely Hutu peasants, who, in turn, hoped that the Europeans would advocate on their behalf against their mostly Tutsi patrons. Yet, the missionaries did not succeed with their conversion program until the Tutsi king Mwami Musinga allowed them to establish missions in central Rwanda, like the above-mentioned Kabgayi. It eventually led to la tornade, a French term for mass conversions of mostly Tutsi in the 1930s, and to the establishment of Rwanda as a “Christian kingdom” in the 1940s.

The White Fathers, a French missionary order, played a crucial role in these developments. Carney’s study presents several leading figures among the White Fathers and analyzes their writings with respect to political and ethnic rhetoric. For example, Charles Lavigerie, the earlier visionary of the White Fathers in the 1880s, advocated that missionaries sent to Africa were to adopt indigenous customs and languages. His motto: “to the weak I became weak, to win over the weak” (1 Cor 9:22). Yet, Lavigerie also insisted on a model of top-down evangelization, a preference continued by Mgr. Léon Classe, another influential White Father, who therefore allied himself with the royal court of Mwami Musanga. By all accounts, this strategic choice paid off: by the 1940s, Rwanda had become a majority Catholic country.

In the 1950s, however, those sympathies began to shift toward the Hutu cause of social reform, and here the decisive role fell to White Father André Perraudin. Fearing communism and secularism more than anything, Perraudin and other White Fathers embraced Catholic social teachings (based on the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum) with which they sought to stem communist ideas. They advocated abolishing traditional feudal systems, like the ubuhake, in favor of Western economic and democratic policies. The ubuhake bound a landless client population to the protection of their mostly Tutsi patrons. In the early 1950s, White Fathers and Hutu leaders shared visions of a pan-ethnic, democratically reformed nation that would lead to equality among the banyarwanda and neutralize of what was feared as a godless communist revolution. Strangely—at least in retrospect—the Tutsi nationalist party UNAR (Union Nationale Rwandaise, formed in 1959), with its strong anti-colonial and anti-missionary rhetoric, was condemned as communist.

These contextualizing historical developments are covered in the first three chapters, setting the stage for the years 1956-1962, which are at the heart of Carney’s analysis. Chapter 4 looks at the period of 1956-1959, in which tensions between Hutu and Tutsi grew due to the political mobilization of ethnic divisions. Chapter 5 covers the period of 1959-1962, when the Tutsi monarchy was replaced by a democratic republic. De facto, however, this republic was a Hutu dominated one-party state, leading to the first waves of severe anti-Tutsi violence and expulsions.

In these two central chapters, Carney proves himself a prudent observer who skillfully weaves together material from an abundance of primary sources. I limit myself here to three salient points. First, Carney repeatedly refers to the role of the évolués, the indigenous African elite trained in European-style missionary schools and seminaries. The évolués are conceptually important for Carney’s study because they validate the role of indigenous Africans as major political agents (over against a simplified thesis of an all-powerful European dominance). The évolués are historically important since both Hutu and Tutsi students were groomed in the seminaries. Yet, instead of building a cohort ensuring the unity of the Christian church, they became leaders in separate and later antagonistic organizations, like the Parmehutu and UNAR. Some of the leaders became the first indigenous African priests and bishops in the then Belgian colony; other turned to secular politics. In either case, personal ties forged in the seminaries often extended into later political loyalties in church-state relations.

Second, Carney weaves into his historical analysis a comparison between two key figures, Aloys Bigirumwami, the first indigenous bishop in Belgian Africa, and André Perraudin, a Swiss White Father and Archbishop of Kabgayi from 1956 to 1989. These two men became protagonists in the church’s struggle, personifying two different perspectives as to the cause of, and remedy for, Rwanda’s increasing ethnic-sectarian discourse. Bigirumwami, from a mixed Hutu-Tutsi background, had been seen at his time as a conservative leaning bishop not swept up in the promotion of Catholic social teachings in support of the Hutu social reform movement. Instead, he incessantly cautioned “against the darker side of these movements” (p. 123), perceiving the real danger not coming from traditional feudalism or modern communism but from violence lurking in Rwanda’s growing ethnicism. Perraudin, in contrast, kept pushing the social reform agenda and aligned himself with the Hutu cause (and later with the Hutu one-party state). Though both Perraudin and Bigirumwami issued joint pastoral letters against the violence they witnessed, they had strikingly different views of the events. Perraudin kept downplaying the anti-Tutsi violence, justifying it as an understandable outburst of Hutu anger. As late as June of 1994, Perraudin, from his retirement home in Switzerland, laid blame for the genocide on the RPF, the Tutsi Rwanda Patriotic Front, that ended the genocide in July of 1994. Bigirumwami, for his part, was replaced in 1974 by Hutu bishop Vincent Nsengiyumva, who two years later became Archbishop of Kigali, with close ties to President Habyarimana’s government. Here, Carney allows himself an ethical judgment, articulating his frustration with Perraudin’s unwavering “air of self-righteousness” (pp. 200-01), while repeatedly calling Bigirumwami a lone prophetic voice. Bigirumwami, Carney laments, has been all but forgotten in the standard narrative, but he wants to rescue him from oblivion.

Third, Carney’s study teaches us to be careful about the abuse of a one-sided partisanship regarding social movements. Carney makes clear that the Hutu sympathies espoused by Perraudin and others were not rooted in liberation theology but rather in the conservative form of Rerum Novarum. He criticizes Perraudin’s church politics as a short-sighted support for the impoverished Hutu majority, falling prey to the “political instrumentalization of ethnic identities” (p. 206). Carney coins the term “analytical partisanship” to describe Perraudin’s ill-guided support of Parmehutu’s politics, preventing this churchman from naming accurately the “link between ethnicism and political violence” (p. 173).

In chapter 6, Carney presents, in quick strokes, developments after 1962, especially the escalating anti-Tutsi violence of 1963-1964 and 1973 as well as the 1972 genocide in neighboring Burundi, where a Tutsi government killed an estimated 200,000 Burundians—all leading up to the 1994 carnage. As important as these developments are, Carney makes a good choice by keeping his focus on the neglected 1950s and early 1960s—a choice partially driven by pragmatic reasons, as he explains in a footnote: the archives he consulted in Rome and Rwanda had restricted his access to materials after 1962 (p. 306, n.2).

In an eight-page epilogue, Carney ventures briefly into theological territory, drawing out some lessons for church and theology. Among others, he mentions the lack of “prophetic distance” to state power as main reason of the church’s complicity—surely a lesson learned from Bigirumwami’s lone prophetic voice; a lesson also, I might add, for many conflict zones today.