Review of Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Review of Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2014), 284pp. ISBN: 978-0-300-18854-7.

By Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis

Review of Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2014), 284pp. ISBN: 978-0-300-18854-7.

Every so often, a work of historical scholarship appears that alters the trajectory in its field of research. Where the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is concerned, Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland was one such work, as were Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann’s The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 and Saul Friedländer’s majestic two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews.[1] Alon Confino’s examination of “the Nazi imagination,” a thoughtful, eloquent, and provocative work of intellectual and cultural history, plows substantially new interpretive ground and may change the state of play in Holocaust studies for years to come.

The core of Confino’s argument is that Nazi antisemitism was based in fantasy, not reality. For Confino, “a key to understanding this world of anti-Semitic fantasies is no longer to account for what happened – the administrative process of extermination, the racial ideological indoctrination by the regime, and the brutalizing war – because we now have sufficiently good accounts of these historical realities.” Instead, “a key is to account for what the Nazis thought was happening, for how they imagined their world. What was this fantasy created by Nazis and other Germans during the Third Reich, and the story that went along with it, that made the persecution and extermination of the Jews justifiable, conceivable, and imaginable?” (6) The Nazi regime was trying to re-write the origins of German and European history and civilization. This main argument gives shape to the book, which Confino offers in three parts.

Part I covers the first five years of the Third Reich, from the appointment of Hitler as chancellor in January 1933 to the months leading up to the so-called Kristallnacht (“night of broken glass”) in November 1938. Here, the “common denominator” for German ideas about “the Jew” was the motif of the Jews as “creators of an evil modernity that soiled present-day Germany” (31). In Part II, Confino analyzes the attempt by the Nazi regime to eradicate the idea of the Jew as “the origins of moral past” in the period from Kristallnacht to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in late June 1941. In a chapter titled “Burning the Book of Books,” Confino poses (and answers persuasively) the question “Why did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible?” The chapter rightfully appears at the heart of the book, as it represents the core of Confino’s main argument. This is significant, as it moves religion, a crucial component of culture, from the margins of the historical argument closer to the center.

Part III examines the culmination of the Nazi genocide against the Jews of Europe from the onset of the Final Solution to the end of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Here, the Nazi regime attempted to expunge the idea of the Jew as “the origins of history”; they did this via mass murder, an attempt to actually remove them from history (and, perhaps – though Confino does not emphasize this – from the future).

Confino gets underneath the actions of the Nazis, offering an interpretation of what the Nazis thought was happening and what kind of world they wished to create. In so doing, he goes beyond thick description of life in the Third Reich, positing why the Nazis did what they did. Students in my courses on the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust often ask in understandably perplexed tones “but, why did the Nazis attempt to exterminate the Jews?” Implicit in this question is another, deeper question, one that historians are not often sufficiently poised to answer – why did Nazi hatred of Jews so consume them that they felt compelled to kill them all? Confino posits an elegant, incisive and credible answer to these questions.

Despite the originality of Confino’s conclusions, nowhere does he suggest that previous scholarship on these matters is either worthless or misguided. In fact, his work can be seen as building upon the current consensus of a “modified intentionalist” or “modified functionalist” position on the genocide against the Jews of Europe. Further, one can read Confino’s account not as a complete departure from the idea of Nazi Germany as a “racial state” but as a new direction in historical interpretation of the Shoah that perceives the pervasiveness of racial ideology in Nazi Germany as an outworking of the Nazi imagination of a world without Jews. Confino also recognizes more recent trends in Holocaust historiography, maintaining that the Holocaust “should be placed within a history of Nazi war and occupation, empire building, and comparative genocide. The Holocaust was not unique.” Even so, “it was perceived during the war as unique by Germans, Jews, and other Europeans, and if we want to understand why the Holocaust happened, we ought to explain this” (13).

In trying to build a world without Jews, so Confino, the collective Nazi imagination was immersed in irrational fantasy. “In persecuting and exterminating the Jews, Germans waged a war against an imaginary enemy that had no belligerent intentions toward Germany and possessed no army, state, or government.” (6) Confino’s work demonstrates that, while fantasies operate on a deeper (more unconscious) level than ideologies, they also have concrete expressions – including the burning of Hebrew Bibles and synagogues in November 1938, an outburst of violence that Confino does not believe can be explained by the ubiquity of racial ideology alone.

The emphasis on the irrational aspect of Nazi antisemitism is welcome. “The view of Nazi beliefs as guided by modern racial science gave Nazi anti-Semitism a rational slant, even though it was all fantasy. In fact, Nazi racial science, similar to every science, had an element of mystery, a poetic side, that the Nazis themselves were aware of” (7). Here, Confino rightly underscores the irrational and nonrational elements of Nazi thinking. Yet, in describing Nazi hatred of Jews as “all fantasy” (as he does more than once), Confino may be, on occasion, overstating this aspect of Nazi thinking (and of thinking in general).

As I have argued elsewhere, following Gavin Langmuir, irrational thought conflicts with rational empirical observation while nonrational language, which lies at the heart of religion, is the language of symbol, the kind of language found in art and affirmations of belief. Crucially for Langmuir, much of our thinking is “so habitual, so much a reflex, that most of the time we are not aware of which way we are thinking.”[2] Further, Shulamit Volkov argues, “Any interpretation of reality is an independent, creative product of the human mind, and it is often all the more powerful for being partially or entirely false.”[3] Though Volkov was applying this rationale to nineteenth-century German antisemitism, it certainly applies to Nazi fantasies about purportedly “Jewish” Bolshevism, capitalism, criminality, and degeneracy. Such nuance in describing Nazi antisemitism occasionally eludes in Confino’s otherwise lucid and elegant account.

This sole caveat aside, Confino’s original and provocative interpretation gives historians and other specialists working on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust a welcome and penetrating jumping off point. It is bound to provoke discussion among historians and lay readers alike. Even more importantly, it might spur helpful new directions and methodologies in Holocaust studies.

Notes:

[1] Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993); Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany And The Jews: The Years of Persecution (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998); Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945: The Years of Extermination (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008).

[2] Christopher J. Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 3–5.

[3] Ibid., 23.

Review of David Nash, Christian Ideals in British Culture: Stories of Belief in the Twentieth Century

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Review of David Nash, Christian Ideals in British Culture: Stories of Belief in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) ISBN 978-0-230-57265-2.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

Nash-Christian The cover announces the character of the theme: it is the image of a stained glass window in Worcester Cathedral showing three resolute figures looking up towards the sky, intent, devout, broadly sanguine. One is a nurse and the other two are men of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. The task that David Nash has set himself here is a striking one: in what kinds of narratives might the historian find the relationship between religious faith and active public life in the British twentieth century? How are we to locate the dimension of personal faith in the discussions and dramas of society at large? How are we to know when it is there – or when it is not?

Such a project, of course, requires some recasting of conventional understandings. This book is only to some extent a study of what is often now called ‘corporate’ religion. Nash knows the importance of chasing up other, less obvious paths in search of a new prospect. Above all, he looks purposefully at the sprawling realm of the Christian laity. His chapters enjoy titles like ‘Pilgrims, Seekers, Samaritans and Saviours’, and ‘Salvation, Old and New’. Two chapters explore ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ wars and ‘Loss’ and ‘Remembrance’. The material is lively and the argument vigorous and, in the best sense, provocative. Nash asks many questions which historians have often simply ignored: how did people read the Bible? What was it in their eyes to live and die ‘well’? What was it to doubt, or to be ‘saved’? There is a persistent emphasis on the Church of England which is justified at an early stage, but which still leaves some questions hanging in the air, for it is easy to claim too much for the Anglicans and expect too little of the others. There is also a fair amount of jumping about as far as dates are concerned and this might well unsettle those who look for chronological order. In one chapter the Abdication Crisis of 1938 finds itself in company with the prosecution of the Gay News for blasphemy in 1979 and the death of Princess Diana in 1997.

Yet chronology certainly does matter in this book. Nash regards the secularization debate as something tyrannous. Are so many diverse reconfigurations of faith and unfaith really amenable to one vast, unrolling trajectory of decline and extinction? ‘Secularization’ has tried to explain a great deal, no doubt, but has often only ended up distorting perspectives and getting in the way. An awareness of it has even affected the way a pessimistic Church of England, in particular, has come to understand itself. It is surely high time to claim a new freedom and to argue with quite different terms and possibilities. In short, Nash hands back the telescope that many other scholars have provided and instead picks up a kaleidoscope. The new view is fascinating, even if it is difficult quite to know what picture it presents and sort of trajectory might be at work.

This book is something better than an historical polemic and the overall effect is both alert and constructive. Perhaps best of all, it does not seek to lock the subject up inside some self-serving thesis. It frames some bold ideas and opens a variety of new doors. It invites. Does it persuade? That will depend on many things. It is surely right to suggest that later twentieth century religion came to reveal not simply a decline but a ‘diffusion of authority’ (p. 192) and to observe that this should not be seen automatically as a narrative of ‘dilution’. Scholars of secularization may well have been too ready to characterize the contemporary history of religion as a glum history of waning churches and chapels and declining weekly congregations. But secularization, however we understand it, remains difficult to repudiate because there is simply so much diverse evidence about to justify it. This is not to say that it hasn’t acquired an accumulation of questionable forms, or even become something of an ideology. Nash observes sharply that even the most adept secularization theses rather often end up preaching the end of religion and creating for themselves a kind of eschatology, a definitive ‘end time’ for religion altogether. This is plainly dubious. By contrast, Professor Nash is surely right to suggest that it is better to think cautiously and sensitively, not of cycles and grand trajectories but of patterns which might be difficult to identify with confidence. Nothing, after all, is predetermined. At the last this is both a subtle book and a hopeful one. It deserves to be read by an international audience.

Review of Andrew Atherstone and John Maiden, eds., Evangelicalism and the Church of England in the Twentieth century: Reform, Resistance and Renewal

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Review of Andrew Atherstone and John Maiden, eds., Evangelicalism and the Church of England in the Twentieth Century: Reform, Resistance and Renewal, Studies in Modern British Religious History, Vol. 31 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2014), 325 Pp. ISBN 978-1-84383-911-8.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

For nearly five centuries, the Church of England has prided itself on its comprehensive character, and has refused to allow any single uniformity to be imposed on its doctrinal, liturgical or political expressions. Evangelicalism has thus remained one of the main pillars of English religious life, drawing on the legacy of the Puritans in the seventeenth century, the pietistic impetus of the Wesley brothers in the eighteenth century, and the social and missionary zeal of men like Wilberforce in the nineteenth. These collected essays, written by a group of scholars from within this tradition, now provide a survey of Evangelicalism in the twentieth century, analyzing its struggles for reform, resistance and renewal over the past hundred years. Readers should be aware that, although two of the contributors are based in the United States, apart from David Cerl Jones’ short chapter on Wales, almost no mention is made of conditions in other English-speaking countries, and no attempt is made to place English Evangelicalism in its wider setting of world Protestantism.

Atherstone-Maiden The opening chapter, written by two Oxford scholars, examines the taxonomy of recent English Evangelicalism, describing the various strands within this spectrum of belief, which share common features in their adherence to the key truths of justification by faith alone and the supreme authority of Holy Scripture as the word of God. Nevertheless each of these strands places its emphasis on different aspects of the faith. Conservative Evangelicals stress the inerrancy of the Bible and refuse to accept the scientific evidence for evolution. More “open” Evangelicals have accepted both the modern theories about the world’s origins and many of the findings of biblical criticism, while most recently the contribution of the charismatic movement, drawn from Pentecostalism, and found in such London churches as Holy Trinity, Brompton or St Paul’s, Onslow Square, has reinvigorated and popularized Evangelicalism among young people. The rivalries—and sometimes the acerbic criticisms of these groups of each other—have meant that English evangelicalism often seems to have been in a constant process of reconfiguration.

Nevertheless, there are many signs of lively renewal, and we can be grateful to these scholars for analyzing both the successes and the failures of these movements during the course of the last century. Undoubtedly the twentieth century has been more testing for all branches of the English Church than was the nineteenth. The catastrophic effects of two world wars and the consequent loss of confidence in God’s benevolent providence eroded Christian faith in wide sections of the population, while more recently the impact of secularism, the sexual revolution, feminism, and political radicalization, have poised challenges which Evangelicals have sought to meet using the resources of their rich and vibrant traditions of personal faith. In some circumstances, Evangelicals have mobilized resistance to social changes, such as the toleration of homosexuality, but in other cases, such as the ordination of women priests and even bishops, they have welcomed the abandonment of long-standing Anglican traditions as a sign of faith-induced reform and renewal. The tension between institutional loyalty and biblical truth has been an ongoing preoccupation.

Within the Church of England’s witness, the Evangelical party has undoubtedly lost ground. For example, a hundred years ago, the usual Sunday morning worship consisted of Mattins, with a heavy emphasis on preaching, while the Holy Communion was an occasional, if prized, event. (In Queen Victoria’s court, Holy Communion was celebrated only twice a year, after considerable personal preparation). But in recent decades, the Holy Communion, along with an enhanced view of the importance of sacraments, has become the normal Sunday service, while Mattins has been relegated to a few odd Sundays in the month. So too, the Evangelical adherence to the doctrine of penal substitution has been softened, as has their resistance to the claims of Roman Catholicism. Leading Evangelicals have led the way in arguing against the kind of biblical fundamentalism or doctrinal rigidity which still prevails in some of their United States counterparts. On the other hand, Evangelicals have sought to play a more constructive role in national affairs, and have placed much more emphasis on the role of the laity in parish leadership. These signs of renewal mean that Evangelicals are no longer content to embrace the kind of reserved personal piety of their elders, but are engaged in social reforming movements of many kinds at many different levels. In the view of these authors, Evangelicalism in the Church of England is now much more diverse, no longer tied to its former rigidity of doctrine or to its defensiveness towards other branches of the church.

Subsequent chapters, written by various authors, give us brief histories of Evangelical groupings in England throughout the century, many of which demonstrated buoyant ambitions but disappointing results. The conservative wing of English Evangelicalism was successful in recruiting younger members through such organizations as the Oxford and Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Unions, but its more liberal counterpart suffered from a certain diffuseness of theological proclamation and a theology which appeared to many as “vague, ephemeral and unsatisfactory”. There was a constant and recurring tension between adaptation to changing circumstances and fidelity to traditional evangelical faithfulness.

Readers unfamiliar with the details of developments in the Church of England and its Evangelical sections over the past hundred years will learn a lot. A great many names of prominent clergymen are dropped, which leads to considerable repetition in successive chapters. Fortunately the contributors avoid self-congratulatory tendencies, and adopt a suitably critical approach both to the subject and its practitioners. Their evaluations are balanced and well researched. In the latter half of the century, as John Maiden notes, younger evangelical leaders, such as John Stott of All Souls, Langham Place in central London, or Jim Packer of Larimer College, Oxford, demonstrated a greater openness to dialogue and liturgical flexibility. Packer called on evangelicals to renounce obscurantism, isolationism, pessimism and party spirit, and to adopt a warmer relationship with other branches of the church. They were horrified by the extremism of their so-called Protestant brethren in Northern Ireland. As Packer wrote in 1981, “It is a fact and a happy one, that within the past thirty years the previously felt convictional and kerygmatic gap between the more conservative evangelicals and the more conservative anglo-catholics has shrunk.” At the same time, there were also evangelicals who felt that they continued to be treated with reserve by the Church of England hierarchy, and passed over for suitable preferment. John Stott was never offered a bishopric, and Jim Packer left to join the new evangelical Regent College in Vancouver. Tom Wright, although appointed in 2003 to the prestigious See of Durham, only stayed for seven years before retreating to a much less conspicuous professorship at a Scottish university.

The final chapter, by Alister Chapman, looks at how much Evangelicals in England learned from the world in recent decades. The answer is: not much. This chapter is more introspective than outward-looking, but reveals the limited extent to which English evangelicals responded to outside influences. For example, the early Billy Graham crusades met with considerable resentment to the idea that English evangelicals had much to learn from such brash American presentations, even if well-organized. So too with the loss of the British Empire, the very considerable evangelical engagement in colonial missions faded away and was not brought back to England’s shores. Evangelicals continued to think of themselves going abroad to teach, rather than learn, so the reverse flow was minimal. Or, as in the case of evangelicals in Australia, the influence was perceptibly reactionary. To be sure, the sources of the charismatic movement among evangelicals came from abroad, but had to be suitably “anglified” by such groups as Michael Harper’s Fountain Trust before becoming popular. The original Pentecostals from the Caribbean too often found that they were rejected in local white churches, and so founded their own black assemblies. Their spiritual influence was therefore handicapped by English social conservatism. As Chapman remarks, old habits die hard. And it is doubtful that they are dead, even in this post-imperial generation.

It is a pity that no one was found to give a forecast of Evangelicalism’s place in the twenty-first century. In view of the massive changes in Britain’s social composition with the arrival of so many immigrants from Asia, Africa and the non-Protestant parts of Europe, the impact on all branches of the Church of England has to be far-reaching, and the priorities for evangelism very different. Attempts to integrate and assimilate these newcomers have found strict barriers against religious proselytism. Most of these communities have brought their own religious leaders with them, hampering social intercourse. For the first time in English history, violence and riots have broken out in English towns, spurred on by religious and racial antagonisms.

Evangelicals are therefore confronted with new and often demanding assignations. But these will have to be left for future analysis in a subsequent volume.

Review of Timothy Jones, Sexual Politics in the Church of England 1857-1957

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Review of Timothy Jones, Sexual Politics in the Church of England 1857-1957 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Pp 218. ISBN 978-0-19-965510-6.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

In the 1960s the Church of England suffered a striking decline in the number of supporters in many parishes across the country. Some commentators attributed this to the prevalence of science-backed secularism. Others held it was the result of the church’s uncritical support of militaristic nationalism in two world wars. But in 2000 Callum Brown advanced the controversial thesis that this decline was due to the impact of the feminist sexual revolution of those years which exploded traditional sexual morality and led to the radical challenge to the established patterns of behaviour in the church’s constituency. In particular, Brown claimed that it was women’s rejection of Victorian narratives of femininity and subordination which brought about a wholly new set of allegiances amongst church members and introduced new challenges from various women’s movements, especially those urging the right of women to be ordained to the priesthood, and even to the episcopate.

Jones-Sexual Timothy Jones follows this lead by undertaking a study of the major changes in gender politics in the Church of England from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. He focusses on six episodes during this period which, he claims, demonstrated the often reluctant posture of the church leaders when challenged to take a stand on matters affecting gender or sexual politics. Over the course of this hundred year span, English society evolved rapidly and adopted a much more liberal stance, which was often reflected in parliamentary debates, and found its way into progressive legislation. The result was a frequent clash of interest with the more conservative and traditional sectors of opinion, including those of the Church of England. Jones begins his survey with the debates about marriage in the mid-1850s and concludes with the heated controversies about consensual homosexuality in the 1950s. Rather than indulging in detailing the reactionary attitudes of some Church of England leaders, Jones skillfully weaves into his account the variety of positions taken over the years, and displays a commendable sympathy for most of the participants in this on-going search for new understandings amongst church members about gender and sexual politics.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, the long established pattern of Anglican marriage and gender politics was disrupted by a series of secular legislative reforms, such as women’s suffrage, the official acceptance of birth control, the call for women’s equality in employment (including positions within the ordained ministry), and the pressure for more relaxed acceptance of homosexuality in later years. None of these movements originated from within the Church, but public opinion, including that of church members, was so strongly affected that the Church was obliged to recast its regulations or guidance principles in order to accommodate the changed climate. The most significant change was brought about by the suffrage movement at the turn of the century, which resulted in women being granted the vote, first in 1918 and more fully in 1928. In Jones’ view, this step radicalized Anglican discussions about gender. It brought the politics of equality into the heart of the Church’s discussions, and profoundly unsettled the balance of forces in the various parts of the community. It is not difficult to see the connection between this step and the decision of the Lambeth Conference in 1930 to amend the marriage service to stress equality between men and women, as also to accept the findings of modern medicine and to remove the previous prohibition against contraception. The arguments of the conservative opponents of such steps were usually based on either the Bible or tradition. But by the 1920s already the biblical injunctions of the New Testament were seen to be completely compatible with gender equality, while the arguments from tradition were increasingly regarded as outmoded. Women’s political emancipation was most prominent in a series of legislative changes which marked a significant cultural shift from a hierarchic to an egalitarian understanding of the sexes. Anglo-Catholics, in particular, had difficulties with such egalitarianism, since in their view, the position of a priest represented the authority of a male God and a male Christ. Both social and metaphysical order would be upset if the previous patriarchal system were overthrown.

On the other hand, Anglo-Catholics applauded the efforts of women to establish their own sisterhoods and nunneries since these reinforced the ideals of spiritualized femininity and service. Certainly the spread of such communities in the later nineteenth century provided middle-class women with much more effective and fulfilling opportunities than the life of an unmarried spinster. But the twentieth century’s opening of many more professions to women inevitably led to alternative and possibly more attractive occupations. The devotion and piety of these sisters was much praised, but did not encourage those women who might have hoped that this would lead to future ordination to the priesthood.

The campaign for the ordination of women engrossed the Church of England throughout the twentieth century, and has only now come to a completion after many adherents have abandoned their loyalty to the Church of their birth. It brought the Anglican Church to the limits of its capacity to imagine sexual equality. When it was first proposed at the 1920 Lambeth Conference, it was greeted with shock and almost universal incomprehension. In the 1920s and 1930s a series of reports struggled to find an ideological basis for such opposition, but fell back on the traditional defence that the Church was not ready for such a revolutionary move. The question was forcefully raised by the movement’s advocates as to why the priesthood merited the maintenance of the sex-bar in contrast to other professions. They never received a satisfactory answer. In 1935 the Archbishops’ Commission could still say “We believe the general mind of the Church is still in accord with the continuous tradition of a male priesthood … based on the will of God”. Such sexual double standards were naturally rejected by the supporters of women’s ordination, who argued persuasively that gender and sex were not theologically relevant to ordination. But nevertheless in this period the leading minds of the Church were unable to frame a persuasive and broadly acceptable theological argument for any change. Such a view asserted that there was a natural divinely ordained gender order which involved women’s subordination to men, though not implying women’s inferiority. Women priests were hence seen to invert a hierarchy of spiritual and domestic authority which stretched all the way to the Godhead. The male priest as symbol of religious authority had many centuries of unbroken tradition behind it, not only in the Christian version. Such considerations were only overcome after the 1960s when the impact of the so-called secular sexual revolution led to a much more open and generous realization of the contributions that women priests could offer.

Jones’ final chapter deals with the question of the Church’s attitudes towards celibacy and homosexuality. Remarkably enough, it was the Church of England which took a lead in 1952 in promoting homosexual law reform, and urging the decriminalization of homosexual acts. He argues that the Church’s negotiation of new understandings of sexual identity led to a striking level of institutional accommodation and acceptance of homosexuality. The change in the 1930s saw an abandonment of moralistic condemnation and an acceptance of medico-psychological theories about sexual preferences. In 1954 the Church of England Moral Welfare Council produced a report “The Problem of Homosexuality” which was written in almost exclusively medical terms and proved to be highly influential. Homosexuals were no longer to be regarded as perverts but to sublimate their urges into positive social roles. Nevertheless the ambiguity about the morality of homosexuality still remains widespread throughout the Church of England.

The writing of church history has traditionally focused on theological or political matters. Jones’ survey of what might be described as the undercurrent in gender and sexual politics therefore fills a vacant segment in this historiography. As of last year, 2014, with the appointment of the first female bishop, and with now a generation’s experience of women priests serving in numerous parishes across the country, we may hope that it not be long before a historian will be coming forward to comment on the repercussions of this significant change in the otherwise staid history of the Church as it approaches the five hundredth anniversary of its establishment in England.

Review of Rainer Stuhlmann, Zwischen den Stühlen: Alltagsnotizen eines Christen in Israel und Palästina

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Review of Rainer Stuhlmann, Zwischen den Stühlen: Alltagsnotizen eines Christen in Israel und Palästina

(Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag 2015), 155 Pp. ISBN 978-3-7615-6179-9.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

After serving for thirty years as a pastor in the Rhineland Evangelical Church, Rainer Stuhlmann is spending part of his retirement as Director of Studies at Nes Ammim, a Christian centre in northern Israel. Nes Ammim was established fifty years ago by a Dutch Reformed couple, who were convinced of the need to have a visible sign in the newly-established state of Israel of the Christian desire for reconciliation and repentance for Christian complicity in the Holocaust. They believed the best way to do this would be to follow the example of the Zionist pioneers, and build a farming community in order to contribute both practically and spiritually to building new relationships. For many years they grew roses, which were picked, packed and sent every day to the Frankfurt flower market. Some years ago, when this venture no longer proved viable, they switched to running a guest hotel, staffed mainly by young Christian volunteers from Germany, Holland and Switzerland. Pastor Stuhlmann helped to organize their free time with programs enabling them to study more of present conditions in Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. This book is essentially a record of these encounters, written as a series of snapshots from the perspective of a keenly involved observer doing what he can to enhance the growth of communal friendship and harmonious relationships.

Stuhlmann-Zwischen The Holy Land is of course full of holy history, also of holy geography. Stuhlmann sees his job as motivating his young guests from Europe to understand the dimensions of both these features and to encourage a courageous encounter with the many history-laced dilemmas which are met in so many corners of the “promised” land. He is clearly against the kind of religious tourism which brings Christian visitors to Israel, but seeks to isolate them in the first century without ever meeting with Israel’s present-day inhabitants or their troubles. He is equally opposed to the kind of narrow eschatological proclamation of certain Christian groups, especially some American evangelicals, or to the equally one-sided Jewish extremists who wage a continual battle against their Palestinian neighbours. He is grateful for the fact that he and his younger colleagues from Germany are now looked on as representatives of the “new Germany”, and that the horrors of the Holocaust, though loudly trumpeted in state-controlled media, are not attributed to the younger generation or to him personally. Likewise he is encouraged by the friendliness of the Palestinians who see these visitors from Europe as a hopeful sign that their cause is not being forgotten by the rest of the world. And he draws hope from the fact that there are many signs of confidence building between young Jews and Arabs, not least those established at Nes Ammim itself.

Anyone visiting Israel/Palestine cannot fail to be impressed, even intimidated, by the weight of history which pervades every corner of this Holy Land. Even more forceful is the evidence on all sides of the many centuries of nation building and the equally obvious evidence of these attempts’ downfall. Stuhlmann would like to be optimistic, but is obliged to recognize that the forces of national bigotry and self-preservation have a long start. Every time he takes parties of students to Jerusalem, they are confronted with the most recent evidence of the endemic hostility between Israelis and Palestinians, namely the so-called Separation Wall around the city, which was constructed a few years ago. This was built as a barrier against terrorist attacks but has since been extended to expropriate large sections of Palestinian land holdings and vineyards, which he sees as a most brutal robbery by the Israeli state. This Wall in fact forbids the inhabitants from the Palestinian side crossing into Jerusalem without control, and hence denies the opportunity to have social contact or conversations. This is exactly the contrary to Nes Ammin, where such relationships are deliberately encouraged. It all points to the fact that, in the ancient capital, where three religions have existed in rivalry for centuries, and every stone witnesses to unresolved conflicts, the atmosphere is much sharper and confrontational than in northern Galilee. But given the escalation of conflict in all the surrounding countries, the hope that Israel will maintain a precarious peace and allow more positive steps for creative relationship between the inhabitants must be seen as an exercise in faith.

Stuhlmann is well aware that the history and the land of Israel have been and still are full of promises. Some are extravagant, some are unfulfillable, but all contain at least the hint of conflict. For this reason he avoids giving support to any of the limiting or exclusivist claims, whether political or religious, which are put forward to back one or other of the opposing sides. But to act as a reconciler, it is necessary to face both ways. Praying with the Psalmist for the peace of Jerusalem may seem a lost cause, but for Stuhlmann it is the only and most heroic stance to adopt in the midst of the present Middle Eastern strife. He places his hopes in what Nes Ammim has always done best, which is to bring together young people from both or all sides, and hope that their personal contacts will allay hostilities and rivalries, and that they will then go on to work for a resolution, or at least the alleviation of the tensions so visibly shared by the inhabitants of this Holy Land. He is sustained by the memory of how, in Germany, for forty years from 1950 onwards, two sides across the Iron Curtain adopted the same kind of biased and obstinate prejudices, and refused any kind of personal interaction across the well-defined and defended border. But then in 1989 all barriers were broken down, and humanity reigned again.

But in Israel, the separation has now lasted for fifty years. And a very deliberate policy of “Boycott, Disengagement and Sanctions” has only increased the suspicions and hostility on both sides. While there are those on the Jewish side who recognize that the occupation of the West Bank and oppression of the Palestinians is a catastrophe for their vision of Zionism, their advocacy of a two-nation solution has achieved nothing, and indeed still raises doubts about its viability. Equally there are those on the Palestinian side who refuse any contact with Jews. Stuhlmann naturally deplores such intransigence or the unwillingness to enter into dialogue even on a personal level. He realizes how difficult a task it remains to be supportive of the Palestinians without becoming an opponent of the Israelis. But he also deplores the widespread anti-Muslim and anti-Arab animosity stirred up in many western countries. Above all, he rejects the continued use of Israeli force to humiliate the Palestinian population under its control and to deny the destructive impact of their land confiscations or the malignant policies of establishing more settlements in the West Bank territories. He is convinced that such tactics seriously damage the Israeli cause, and he knows how offensive such policies are to the many Jewish friends he has found in Israel. The quest for both security for Israel and freedom for Palestine remains elusive and seemingly distressingly distant. The human toll is incalculable.

Zwischen den Stühlen is chiefly directed to his German audience in the hope of inducing a more balanced presentation of Middle Eastern politics. He cannot avoid the feeling that the widespread sympathy for the Palestinians will be interpreted, by some Jews at least, as a replay of the anti-Semitic attitudes shared by many Germans in previous decades. And the call in some western cities for a boycott of Israeli-produced goods evokes a reminder of the similar boycott organized by Josef Goebbels in April 1933. On the other hand, those Germans who loudly profess themselves to be Friends of Israel are seemingly willing to overlook the gross injustices inflicted on the Palestinian population in what they refer to as their “Nakba” or catastrophe. Similarly Stuhlmann regrets the enthusiastic support given to Israeli policies by the right-wing Evangelical Christian Zionists, eagerly awaiting the return of the Messiah. In his view, all such confrontational attitudes can only be harmful for the cause of peace. But at the same time, he greets enthusiastically all demonstrations against anti-Semitism, which must be resolutely opposed. Part of the problem is that both sides like to portray themselves as victims. Israelis harp on their status as survivors of the Holocaust of seventy years ago, and Palestinians see themselves as the victims of a hundred years of Zionist aggression. Both sides justify their defensive measures accordingly, which successfully prevent the growth of any climate of accommodation or agreement. Nevertheless Stuhlmann and his team of expatriate volunteers remain dedicated to their aim of reconciliation and mutual understanding.

Nes Ammim is situated near Acre. As a Christian centre, it stakes a claim to be a place of peaceful encounter for all faiths. But in 2013, it was itself the near-target of rockets fired from somewhere across the Lebanese border. Neither the aggressors nor the reasons for the attack were discernible. But the Israeli defence shield saved it from further damage. The paradox of being protected by the military power he has so readily criticized for its mistreatment of its Palestinian population did not escape Stuhlmann, and only heightened his awareness of the difficulties of trying to face both ways. Steering such a course in the often polarized climate in Germany makes Stuhlmann’s message of reconciliation and inter-faith dialogue even more hazardous, but equally even more necessary. He is in fact attempting to express solidarity with both Israelis and Palestinians without attempting to judge or condemn either side. This short book will undoubtedly assist those who look for the spirit of Nes Ammim to be vindicated in the troubled circumstances of the Holy Land today.

Article Note: Friedrich Weber and Charlotte Methuen, “The Architecture of Faith under National Socialism: Lutheran Church Building(s) in Braunschweig, 1933-1945”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Article Note: Friedrich Weber and Charlotte Methuen, “The Architecture of Faith under National Socialism: Lutheran Church Building(s) in Braunschweig, 1933-1945,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 66 no. 2 (April 2015): 340-371.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In their article, the late Friedrich Weber, former university theologian and Lutheran Bishop of Braunschweig, and Charlotte Methuen, church historian at the University of Glasgow, consider the nature of church building in the Lutheran regional church of Braunschweig during the National Socialist era. This article had its genesis as a presentation by Weber at a Glasgow research seminar. This is reflected in the structure of the article, which begins with a brief explanation of Braunschweig church politics in 1933 followed by a general overview of the responses of the German Protestant churches to National Socialism. When Weber and Methuen turn to the discussion of church building in Hitler’s Germany, they begin not in Braunschweig but in Berlin, with a description of the Martin Luther Memorial Church, built between 1933 and 1935. In recent years, this church building, long neglected, has been studied by historians and preserved as a historic site.[1]

Weber and Methuen use the building and renovating of churches as a window into the relationship between the churches and the National Socialist state. They do this by asking questions about “the motivation for embarking on building projects, the mood in which they were received, and the architecture and decoration that resulted” (p. 341). Their understanding of the complex church-state relationship begins with a consideration of the events of 1933, which they see as “a re-Christianization of Germany and a rejection of the principles of the Weimar Republic” (p. 345). Drawing on the work of Manfred Gailus, they argue that distinctions between the Confessing Church and the German Christian Movement were not absolute, and that many clergy embraced the Confessing Church without abandoning their ties to the German Christian-led state churches. Conversely, many Nazis considered themselves Christians.

When it came to church building, Weber and Methuen note that while the construction of churches was in places forbidden by the Nazi regime—as in the cases of various National Socialist model estates and of the expansion of industrial centres like Salzgitter and Wolfsburg—in other cases, church building was celebrated as a public work which helped reduce unemployment. As Weber and Methuen delve into the history of German church architecture in the 1930s, they note that even members of the Confessing Church called for traditional Christian Germanic art rooted in “blood and soil, family and community” (p. 354). Indeed, the churches were allies in the National Socialist drive to expunge “degenerate” modern art, and the growth of “Christian imagery … was one aspect of the process of re-Christianization under National Socialism” (p. 355).

With this extended preliminary discussion complete, Weber and Methuen turn to the topic of Braunschweig church building under National Socialism. The six Lutheran churches built in Braunschweig between 1933 and 1940 share similarities of design and intent, celebrating the German Volk community and embracing simplicity and modesty. Weber and Methuen use excerpts from dedication ceremonies to emphasize that church building was portrayed as symbolic of the protection of Christianity in Nazi Germany (as opposed to the destruction of churches in godless, communist Spain and Russia), the blessing of God upon Germany, and the important contributions of Protestant Christianity to the Third Reich (p. 360-361).

If these simple new church buildings were supportive of the Nazi ideal of national community without embodying Nazi imagery, such was not the case with the reordering of the Braunschweig cathedral, which was transformed in a most radical way: worship services were suspended in 1936, the pews, altar, and pulpit were removed, and the cathedral was reimagined as a “national memorial” to the medieval German prince Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria. In 1939, Hanns Kerrl, Reich Minister of Church Affairs, took the additional step of requisitioning the cathedral on behalf of the state. The memorial to Henry the Lion—in Nazi eyes, an early champion of German interests in Eastern Europe—was greatly enlarged, and Nazi symbols were introduced alongside depictions of Henry’s military campaigns in the East. Only a few remnants of the pre-existing Christian content of the cathedral remained after the “Braunschweig cathedral had undergone a process of almost complete de-Christianization, much more extreme that the co-existence of Christian and National Socialist imagery found in the Luther Church in Berlin-Mariendorf” (p. 367). Beyond the creation of a National Socialist shrine, though, Weber and Methuen argue that the stripping away of “superfluous” décor from the gothic era onwards was itself part of a Nazi attempt to cast off the degeneration of un-German influences and return the building to its original (“the healthy, the strong, the unspoilt”) Romanesque condition (p. 368).

Using these examples, Weber and Methuen show how church building in National Socialist Braunschweig demonstrated both the potential of church-state partnership under Hitler and the danger of Nazi ideological usurpation of church spaces. Yet “as a whole the building programme in Braunschweig testifies to the extent to which the aesthetic interests of the National Socialist regime were at one with those of the majority of German Protestants” (p. 371). These conclusions certainly mirror the outcomes of the construction of the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin-Mariendorf, a highly collaborative venture between the parish clergy, council, and congregation, along with higher church officials, the wider Mariendorf community, and the state. Like the church building in Braunschweig, its design, construction, and celebration exemplify the symbiosis and symbolic fusion of Christian faith and National Socialist politics.[2]

Notes:

[1] Stefanie Endlich, Monika Geyler-von Bernus, and Beate Rossié, Christenkreuz und Hakenkreuz: Kirchenbau und sakrale Kunst im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2008); Kyle Jantzen, “Church-Building in Hitler’s Germany: Berlin’s Martin-Luther-Gedächtniskirche as a Reflection of Church-State Relations,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 27, no. 2 (2014): 324–48.

[2] Jantzen, “Church-Building in Hitler’s Germany,” 348.

Letter from the Editors: March 2015

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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.