Review of Hartmut Ludwig and Eberhard Röhm, eds., with Jörg Thierfelder, Evangelisch getauft—als “Juden” verfolgt: Theologen jüdischer Herkunft in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Hartmut Ludwig and Eberhard Röhm, eds., with Jörg Thierfelder, Evangelisch getauft—als “Juden” verfolgt: Theologen jüdischer Herkunft in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 2014). 473 pages, with illustrations. ISBN: 9783766842992.

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

The history of “non-Aryan Christians” under National Socialism has been a peripheral issue in much of the historiography and a notoriously fuzzy one even in works that focus on the German churches, reflecting the ambiguities of the category itself as well as the unpredictable fates of those who were so labelled. In Nazi Germany the term “non-Aryan” was often used interchangeably with “Jew,” yet for many Germans there was a distinction. Jews had been persecuted throughout European history, but the Emancipation laws of the nineteenth century opened the way to greater opportunity and assimilation, often but not only through conversion to Christianity.  For some, the decision to assimilate through conversion was a pragmatic one, made in the belief that it would lead to a better career and firmer standing in German society; for others, it was made for reasons of marriage or conviction. In any case, it was a double-edged sword, creating a dividing line in German society that became very evident after 1933.  Christians of Jewish ancestry did not think of themselves as Jews and were not viewed as such by religiously observant Jews, and many of these Christians shared the antisemitism of the times. After 1933, however, Nazi law designated anyone with Jewish ancestry as “non-Aryan,” blending the religious and racialized categories, and as a result many baptized Christians suddenly found themselves categorized as Judenchristen, Nichtarier, or nichtarische Christen.

Estimates of the number of people who fell into this category under Nazi law vary. This volume gives the total figure as around 400,000 (a figure that includes members of Christian churches as well as secular Germans with some Jewish ancestry). A 1945 World Council of Churches publication that quoted German governmental figures from 1933 put the number at 250,000 (and the number of religiously observant or secular Jews at 550,000), but some ecumenical leaders in the U.S. and Europe who were involved in refugee work in the 1930s gave numbers as high as one and a half million—based, I suspect, on the total numbers of refugees (not just Christians) that these organizations sought to assist.

The Nazi regime began to pass anti-Jewish laws immediately.  The two major 1933 laws—the April 1, 1933, “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” and the September 1933 law dis-barring “non-Aryan” lawyers—had sweeping effects. In both instances, there were exemptions for Jewish veterans of the First World War as well as for people who had been practicing law or serving in the civil service as of August 1, 1914, and throughout 1933 and 1934 these laws were irregularly implemented, particularly where so-called Mischlinge, or Germans of partial Jewish ancestry, were concerned.  It wasn’t really until the 1935 Nuremberg laws that the categories and degrees of “racial Jewishness” were legally defined.

In the instance of the April 1 law there was another important exemption, elucidated in the May 6 Reichsgesetzblatt: the churches. The April 1 law essentially left the implementation of the law up to the regional and provincial church governments, and in the case of the Protestant churches, of course, the German Christian Movement was eager to introduce a church version of the Aryan paragraph throughout Germany.  Their attempts to do so sparked the widespread theological and ecclesial debate that culminated in the Protestant Kirchenkampf.  As opponents of the Aryan paragraph argued, it directly contradicted church teachings on universal salvation, baptism, conversion, and ordination.  There were of course other church teachings, such as the centrality of love for one’s neighbor, that should have led to a broader solidarity with everyone persecuted under the Nazi regime, but for the most part Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany drew a clear distinction between secular and religiously observant Jews on the one hand, and baptized Christians who fell under the Nazi racial laws on the other.  Solidarity with the former group was virtually non-existent (on the contrary, Protestant leaders like Otto Dibelius rushed to justify the Nazi anti-Jewish measures). Concerns for the latter group proved to be erratic and short-lived, as the initial controversies about the Aryan paragraph dissipated and support for those affected crumbled under internal and external pressures.

Ludwig-EvangelischEvangelisch getauft—als “Juden” verfolgt is not a comprehensive history of this topic; nonetheless it is a valuable contribution to the literature.  As its subtitle indicates, it is primarily a Gedenkbuch with brief biographies of 180 German Protestants whose lives were changed by the racial laws and the responses of their church. The editors have cast a wide net. The individuals profiled here include not only theologians and members of the Christian clergy, but individuals who were barred from studying theology before 1945 and others who, barred from other professions, decided to study theology in exile. Also included are teachers of religious education, Christians in “mixed” marriages, Austrians who came under Nazi law after 1938, and even several individuals who were Deutsche Christen or members of the Nazi party. While most of those profiled were members of the German Evangelical Church, there are also several profiles of individuals from Methodist, Baptist, and other free churches.

The editors’ introduction is an admirably clear overview of the subject, portraying the complexities of the Nazi laws and the gradual intensification of pressures on these individuals, and concluding with a brief but devastating portrait of the churches’ responses up to and after 1945. There are several very useful appendixes, including a table that locates these individuals by Landeskirche and “racial” category as defined by the 1935 Nuremberg laws, a bibliography organized by name that gives the sources for the information about each individual, and an extensive bibliography of the relevant literature. An additional appendix is a compilation of all the various measures against each individual as well as their fates and subsequent careers—a listing that gives a poignant overview of the numerous ways in which many of these people suffered. Pastors and teachers were forced into retirement, spouses were publicly humiliated, anonymous threats were sent. A number of people were betrayed by colleagues; some were sent to prisons, concentration camps, or forced labor. Some found safety for a time in one of the Confessing Church institutions.  Most of them emigrated and many—though not all—remained abroad after 1945. Those who returned encountered a mixed reception by church leaders and had to wage legal and procedural battles in some instances in order to re-enter their careers. Several people briefly returned to Germany before deciding to leave again.

The 180 biographical studies, written by a number of clergy and scholars, comprise the heart of the book. By extending their study beyond the names of the clergy already known from the literature on the Kirchenkampf, the authors and editors demonstrate the diversity of this sector of the population and have included many women in their profiles, which gives a portrait of the gendered dynamics surrounding the issue. While some of these individuals were familiar names from existing studies of the Confessing church and the Gruber office, there were a number of individuals that I hadn’t realized were affected by the racial laws and there were other names that were completely new to me.  There are a number of individuals from “brown” regional churches, and the accounts of their experiences offer important information about how the actions of church leadership in those regions affected both opposition voices and “non-Aryan” Christians.

While some of these people found refuge and solidarity in the Confessing Church, for examples, others found it lamentably passive and silent. Ernst Althausen, the Russian-born grandson of an Orthodox rabbi, worked in the interwar period with ethnic German refugees in the east, leading him to study theology in Berlin. He joined the Pastors Emergency League but complained to Martin Niemoeller that it wasn’t enough to stand up to the German Christians. Althausen worked for the Berlin Judenmission and came under pressure from the Nazi party and the church alike. After he had to wear the yellow star in 1941 his Confessing Church colleagues in Berlin stopped allowing him to hold church services and (at the age of 80), he was banned from public speaking.

The stories of “non-Aryan Christians” who were either sympathetic to Nazism or married to such people are particularly striking. Pastor Georg Börner, a supporter of the Deutsche Christen and the Nazi Party, didn’t join either organization only because his wife was one of the daughters of Kurt Eisner, the Jewish social democrat who was assassinated after leading the 1919 German revolution in Bavaria. Throughout the 1930s Börner was publicly attacked in Der Stürmer and the SS Schwarze Korps, but Nazi party members in his parish defended him, Bishop Hans Meiser stood behind him, and during the war the Bavarian governmental president issued a special order permitting him to stay in his pastorate.  His wife remained unscathed, and after 1945 the Börners remained in their parish until his retirement in 1968. One pastor who did become a member of the Deutsche Christen as well as the Nazi Party was Hellmut Fischer, who successfully hid the fact that he had a Jewish grandmother until 1938, when the Bavarian government decided to require Aryan certificates for clergy. Fischer quietly requested to be transferred to a non-pastoral position, but in December 1938 Landeskirche officials told Fischer he would have to leave the ministry.  His parish council stood up for him, declaring that he was a good pastor and “politically reliable.” The outbreak of the war resolved things: Fischer was drafted, the Landeskirche tabled the proceedings against him, and he was able to return to a parish after the war in Würzburg.

As these examples illustrate, many of these people are so interesting and surprising that readers will be tempted to do additional research (I found myself wondering, for example, where Eisner’s daughter stood politically in all this, and what happened to Eisner’s other children). The volume as a whole illustrates that those designated as “non-Aryan” Christian represented a broad spectrum of backgrounds and theological and political perspectives. As such it is a major contribution to our understanding of the complexity of the issue. The range of Germans affected by the Nazi racial laws was wide and their fates varied widely. Some people came under immediate pressure in 1933; others retained their positions until the late 1930s. Some of the people portrayed here moved toward a broader solidarity and engagement on behalf of all persecuted Jews, in contrast to the rest of their church. And, as the editors note in the introduction, the stories of these individuals attest to the widespread antisemitism not only during the Nazi era but afterward, when some of them continued to suffer under their church leadership and the antisemitism of friends and colleagues.

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

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Review of Keith Clements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Keith Clements, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest (Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications, 2015), 326 Pp. ISBN 978-2-8254-1656-3.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Keith Clements is a British theological scholar who served for many years as General Secretary of the Conference of European Churches, thus becoming well aware of the churches’ modern ecumenical dimensions. He has previously written a number of shorter works about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but in this more substantial study concentrates on Bonhoeffer’s connections to and involvement with the ecumenical church bodies of the 1930s. Drawing largely on the Collected Works, now fortunately all translated into English, Clements seeks to show that this was the most continuous thread of his life and activity, but one which has been rather neglected in earlier biographies which have concentrated on Bonhoeffer’s theology or his role in the German Church Struggle.

Clements-DietrichIn fact, Bonhoeffer’s participation in ecumenical affairs started immediately after his return in September 1931 from his visit to the United States. He was sent as a German youth delegate to a meeting in Cambridge of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches. This body had originally been established in 1914, but had to suspend its activities during the war, and had only been resuscitated in 1920. Its support came from influential lay and clerical leaders, particularly in the democratic countries of Western Europe and North America. They recognized the need for programs of reconciliation and peace activities in order to bind up the wounds caused by the destructive violence of the recent war. It was here that Bonhoeffer met with such leading figures as the Anglican Bishop George Bell of Chichester, with whom he was to collaborate for the next decade.In fact, Bonhoeffer made such an impact that he was forthwith appointed as an Honorary Youth Secretary and given responsibility for the World Alliance’s youth work in central Europe. This was a challenge he could hardly refuse, and one to which he brought his newly-minted skills in theological advocacy and his energetic support of the World Alliance’s aims.

As Clements makes clear, however, Bonhoeffer soon saw that the whole ecumenical endeavour was sadly lacking an adequate theology. Passing high-minded resolutions at conferences or engaging in moralistic wishful thinking about the need for peace was not enough. With all the brashness of a twenty-eight-year-old—Clements calls it boldness—Bonhoeffer set out to remedy this deficiency. At the World Alliance’s next major conference held in Denmark in 1934, he advanced the argument that what was needed was for a great ecumenical council of churches to be convened which would commit all its members to non-violence and abjure all forms of militarism. The cause of peace demanded a universal approach and was not a matter just for individuals, or even for local or national churches. In the absence of any such body, the World Alliance meeting should dare to act as that council.

It was therefore especially necessary to attack those theological ideas about “the orders of creation” which German theologians were using to justify their nationalistic sentiments. Against this, Bonhoeffer argued for an order of preservation which would obey God’s commandment to witness to truth and justice, and prepare the way for the reception of the gospel of Christ. But in fact the ecumenical community was not yet ready for this precocious and prophetic vision of Christian witness. And Bonhoeffer himself became fully occupied with the onset of the Church Struggle within Germany, following Hitler’s take-over of power in 1933. He was now taken up with combatting the eager support given to the Nazi Party, particularly by his contemporaries amongst the younger pastors who so eagerly began to spread Nazi militaristic, nationalistic and antisemitic ideas in the fallacious belief that this would bring ordinary people back to the church.

Bonhoeffer’s move to England in October 1933 brought him into more frequent contact with Bishop Bell, who indeed came to rely on Bonhoeffer’s valuable guidance about the hectic developments in the German Evangelical Church. On the other hand, Bonhoeffer was unsuccessful in persuading any of these ecumenical bodies to sever their connections with the now nazified official church structures, and to regard the Confessing Church as the only true vehicle for Christian witness in Germany. The tensions this dispute caused led to the result that no one from the German Evangelical Church was allowed to attend the significant ecumenical conferences which took place in Britain in 1937, or to participate in the discussions in 1938 which resulted in the founding of the World Council of Churches.

By this time, however, Bonhoeffer had returned to Germany to lead the Confessing Church’s seminary at Finkenwalde in the remotest part of east Pomerania. This necessarily cut down on his opportunities to be in contact with his ecumenical partners. But, as Clements points out, Bonhoeffer was insistent that “The German Church Struggle is the second great stage in the history of the ecumenical movement and will be decisive for its future. It is not an ideal which has been set up but a commandment and a promise—it is not high-handed implementation of one’s own goals that is required but obedience. The question has been posed.” But in this idealistic vision Bonhoeffer was to be disappointed.

Clements does not elucidate how far this set-back induced Bonhoeffer to be drawn increasingly into the ranks of those who now sought to oppose Nazism and Hitler by some form of resistance or revolt. But as the war clouds increasingly gathered in the late 1930s, and as the Nazi ambitions became ever clearer, the hopes of the peace party were doomed to disillusionment and frustration. To be sure, it was largely due to his ecumenical friends in the United States, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Lehmann and Henry Leiper, that Bonhoeffer was offered an escape route from the risk of being conscripted for military service by accepting offers from New York to return to the United States in the summer of 1939. Yet, shortly after his arrival, Bonhoeffer realized he had made a mistake. As he explained in the well-known letter to Niebuhr, it was not the call of family, or of his church, but of his nation which led to his decision to return to Germany:

I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people…. Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization.

Clements rightly comments that in speaking of “Christian civilization” Bonhoeffer recognized the threat posed by the Nazis not just to Germany but to the wider Christian community. He saw himself engaged in the struggle for the widest goals of Christian witness which now required him to go back and face this ”terrible alternative”. It was all part of the costly discipleship to which he was committed.

After the outbreak of war, and his recruitment as an agent of the Military Intelligence Service, Bonhoeffer found that the hostilities virtually paralyzed the activities of the ecumenical movement and forced its supporters to find new ways of upholding their sense of community and mutuality. Clements argues that in these circumstances Bonhoeffer’s commitment to ecumenism became still more pronounced even though carried out in a conspiratorial manner. Thanks to his connections he was able to travel abroad, twice to Switzerland, where he contacted both Karl Barth and Visser’t Hooft, now the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (in process of formation), and told them about the discussions for post-war renewal going on in the resistance circles in Germany

Bonhoeffer’s most significant journey came in April 1942 to Sigtuna, Sweden, where he met once again with Bishop Bell. Bonhoeffer’s objective was to persuade Bell to urge the British Government to make a public declaration of support for the German Resistance in the hope that any such declaration would provide evidence that, when Germany was defeated, she would not have to suffer an even more vindictive settlement than in 1919. To this end, Bonhoeffer revealed to Bell the names of the leading members of the anti-Hitler conspiracy, and eagerly looked forward to his nation’s eventual defeat, since Germany deserved punishment and ought to express repentance for the crimes committed in the nation’s name. But, in fact, when Bell fulfilled his mission on his return to London, the result was a disappointing rejection. Clements clearly admires Bonhoeffer’s dangerous venture as an example of ecumenism in practice. But other historians are more skeptical, pointing out that this plan was more the product of these churchmen’s wishful thinking than any realistic awareness of the international political scene, or the realities of choices facing the British authorities at the time.

In April 1943 Bonhoeffer was arrested and taken to Tegel prison on the outskirts of Berlin. He was never to regain his freedom. But from the letters, essays and poems smuggled out by a friendly warder, we have the evidence that his dedication to the ecumenical cause remained as before. As Clements shows, he used the opportunity to explore the dimensions of Christian discipleship in the service of the world when the church takes upon itself the needs of the world before God. We have one final glimpse of his ecumenical commitment from the day before he was murdered in April 1945. Together with a group of other notable prisoners, including a British P.O.W., Captain Payne Best, whom Bonhoeffer had discovered was acquainted with Bishop Bell, they were spending the night in a Bavarian schoolhouse. It was the Sunday after Easter, and Bonhoeffer was persuaded to hold a short service for them all. He had hardly finished when two SS policemen entered, and called out “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us”. He had just time to give a message for Best to pass on to Bishop Bell. “Tell him, Bonhoeffer said, that this is the end but for me the beginning of life. With him I believe in the principle of the Universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national interests, and that our victory is certain”. Then he was led away, taken back to Flossenbürg concentration camp, placed in front of a summary court martial, condemned to die, and on the following morning, 9 April, executed in the prison yard.

Clements’ final chapter describes the post-war reception of Bonhoeffer’s fame and ideas, beginning with the heartfelt tribute paid by Bishop Bell at a memorial service held in a large London church in July 1945, which was broadcast by the BBC’s German service and heard by members of Bonhoeffer’s family. It was the first intimation they had that he was no longer alive. It was the beginning of the process which Victoria Barnett has rightly called “the making of an ecumenical saint”, and culminated in the placing of Bonhoeffer’s statue on the front portal of Westminster Abbey in London, together with other Christian martyrs of the twentieth century. He was seen as a suffering Christian witness and defender of the faith. The emphasis was on his unconquerable piety and his unyielding trust in God.

But in fact, there were also contrasting reactions which Clements does not mention. In post-war Germany, not a few of the more conservative members of the Evangelical Church, including those in the ranks of the Confessing Church, took a much more hostile view of Bonhoeffer’s past. To many of these men, Bonhoeffer was not a Christian martyr but a national traitor. It was inconceivable to them that a pastor should have been involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the head of state, should have openly refused to pray for Germany’s military victories, or should have welcomed the prospect of his nation’s downfall and defeat. It took some twenty years before Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s closest friend and biographer, was able to overcome these prejudices. Another and more favourable reception came in the 1950s in Britain and North America with the English translation of Letters and Papers from Prison and the revelations about Bonhoeffer’s political activism and participation in the anti-Nazi struggle. At the same time, these letters aroused a tremendous excitement, especially in the younger generation, because of the stimulating critique of existing church doctrines and the enigmatic assertions about the “world come of age”, the call for a “religion-less Christianity”, or the necessity of being “the church for others”. These were the themes which gave, and still give, Bonhoeffer an enormous appeal as a major source of inspiration and guidance.

Fortunately, in so praising Bonhoeffer’s legacy, Clements has avoided the distortions and omissions which have marked the recent American biographies by Metaxas and Marsh. Instead he points to Bonhoeffer’s posthumous appeal and influence, which have established his reputation far beyond his native German Lutheran home. Indeed, Clements can claim that in view of Bonhoeffer’s response to Nazism and the Holocaust, he has also become a significant figure for Christian-Jewish dialogue. In so doing, Bonhoeffer belongs internationally and irrevocably to the ecumenical scene. His witness to this cause remains his most lasting memorial and is one which still commands respect. We can therefore be grateful to Keith Clements for so fully and convincingly outlining Bonhoeffer’s contributions to the ecumenical world view to which he was so seriously committed and in which he believed so passionately.

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Review of Heike Springhart, Aufbrücke zu neuen Ufern: Der Beitrag von Religion und Kirche für Demokratisierung und Reeducation im Westen Deutschlands nach 1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Heike Springhart, Aufbrücke zu neuen Ufern: Der Beitrag von Religion und Kirche für Demokratisierung und Reeducation im Westen Deutschlands nach 1945 (Leipzig: Evangelisches Verlagsanstalt, 2008), 360 pages. ISBN: 9783374026128.

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

The immediate aftermath of World War II was one of the most eventful and decisive transition periods in twentieth century history.  The Axis nations had been defeated, but there were millions of displaced persons and refugees, extensive destruction of cities and infrastructure, and a rapidly shifting postwar political landscape that eventually culminated in the formation of the Soviet bloc and NATO, the division of Germany into east and west, and the onset of the Cold War.

There was a widespread sense among the victorious Allied authorities that the postwar agenda for Germany was just as crucial as the military defeat of the Nazi regime, and that the long term stability of Europe would depend on addressing the German situation differently than the victors of the First World War had done after 1918.  Thus, the postwar policies of the British, U.S., and French occupation governments were focused not just on immediate political and military issues but on the longer-term challenge of ensuring political and civil stability, a task that included changing the political culture of Germany through re-education, denazification and various civil society programs.

This approach particularly characterized the American zone.  Whether in Roosevelt’s speeches, Hollywood newsreels, military propaganda, or publications by U.S. aid organizations, the rationale behind U.S. involvement in the war had often been articulated as a fight for American democratic ideals. Hence, a central goal of many U.S.-led postwar programs was to educate and train Germans in the practices of democracy.

Springhart-AufbruecheHeike Springhart’s Aufbrücke zu neuen Ufern is a detailed history and analysis of one such program, the partnership between the U.S. military government and German Protestant church leaders and organizations in Württemberg. Her focus is the work there of the U.S. Branch for Education and Religious Affairs (ERA) between 1946-1948, which she sets in a broader historical context by examining the individuals and organizations, both in the U.S. and in Germany, who during the war helped lay the theoretical and political foundation for the ERA’s work. There is also a concluding chapter that offers a conceptual framework for understanding the potential role of religion in post-conflict processes of democratization and social transformation, drawing on the German example as a case study.

The ERA’s agenda cannot be understood separately from the wartime “White Papers” and programs that began to address these issues before 1945. Springhart particularly examines the influence of Paul Tillich, the religious socialist German theologian who left Germany in 1933, as well as the Council for a Democratic Germany, an organization of leading German emigres and U.S. intellectuals that was founded in 1944. During the war Tillich, who was teaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York, delivered a series of radio addresses for the Voice of America directed toward “the other Germany” (Thomas Mann regularly spoke on a similar series of radio broadcasts for the BBC).  In talks that combined criticism of Nazism, praise of democracy, and an appeal to the deeper cultural and moral standards of the German people, Tillich hoped to reach not only Confessing Church members, but potential oppositional groups in the military and among intellectuals. The Council for a Democratic Germany was one of several U.S. organizations that sought to raise American awareness of “the other Germany” and draft potential approaches for democratization programs after the defeat of Nazism.

Springhart also explores some of the literature that began to shape this thinking during that war, notably the work of Talcott Parsons, a Harvard sociologist who believed that societies could be changed through “controlled institutional change,” and Richard Brickner, a New York psychiatrist who in a 1943 book (Is Germany Incurable?) argued that the positive qualities of the German psyche had to be strengthened through social and political re-education programs. As early as 1942, U.S. military and political leaders began discussing such programs as crucial tools for the democratization of postwar Germany. It was clear that the implementation and effectiveness of such programs would depend on reliable German partners, and the primary partners identified early on were German church leaders, particularly those with ties to the Confessing Church.

The ERA emerged in 1946 as a distinct division under the auspices of the Office of Military Government (OMGUS), with sub-offices focusing on Catholic, Protestant, and “Interfaith-Relations and Free Church” affairs. General Lucius Clay’s directive to ERA officials was that they offer support and guidance to German religious leaders of all faiths to strengthen the work of existing religious bodies such as church youth organizations and the social welfare programs of the Evangelical Hilfswerk. The ERA also played a key role in the development of various postwar Evangelical Church press agencies and radio broadcasting services. The Allied goal was not that the ERA actually establish and run these programs themselves, but rather help the Germans themselves to do so.  Still, over the course of time the U.S. developed a number of programs in conjunction with the ERA’s agenda, including cultural and educational exchanges that brought German clergy and academics to the United States.

In Württemberg the OMGUS staff reached out to Bishop Theophil Wurm, whom the Americans regarded as a trustworthy church leader with a strong anti-Nazi record. Wurm put them in touch with a network of church leaders and theologians that included Eberhard Müller, who founded the first Evangelical Academy in Bad Boll in 1946, and Eugen Gerstenmaier, who as a member of the Kreisau Circle had been imprisoned after July 20 and after the end of the war became director of the Evangelical Church Hilfswerk in Stuttgart.

One of the most interesting aspects of Springhart’s study is the role played by figures like Gerstenmaier, Wurm, and theologian Helmut Thielicke in the ERA’s work in Württemberg.  Wurm was nearing the end of his career (he died in 1953), but Gerstenmaier went on to political prominence as a CDU political leader, eventually serving as Bundestag president, and Thielicke became a prominent theologian. Gerstenmaier and Thielicke, both of whom traveled to the United States on governmental cultural exchange programs in the late 1940s, became conservative, pro-Western voices in the German political debates of the 1950s onward, in contrast to other Kirchenkampf veterans like Martin Niemoeller, who quickly became an outspoken critic of U.S. policies.  Their early postwar involvement in the ERA programs gives greater insight into their subsequent political perspectives as well as the internal controversies and debates within German postwar Protestantism. All three, of course, had been involved in the internal Protestant Kirchenkampf debates of the 1930s, but they had not stood on the radical Dahlemite end of the Confessing Church spectrum and there were strong tensions between them and more radical Confessing Church voices in Württemberg like Hermann Diem even before the end of the war.

Those tensions erupted in the early postwar period, particularly with respect to how the Nazi past should be addressed. Even among partners like Wurm, there was growing resentment about programs like denazification and the beginnings of the war crimes trials. Springhart’s study reveals considerable ambiguity in how ERA officials addressed the ongoing legacy of National Socialism in the churches, although the reports she cites by OMGUS officials (as well as by critical outside voices like Karl Barth) show a growing awareness that their German church partners were not as consistently anti-Nazi and pro-American as they had thought.  In addition, one of the major American church donors to ERA programs for German churches was the U.S. Missouri Synod Lutheran church, whose leaders had a good relationship to Missouri-born President Truman (Truman was Baptist). The German staff officer in the Württemberg-Baden ERA office was Karl Arndt, a Missouri Synod Lutheran accused of making antisemitic and pro-Nazi remarks; despite ongoing controversy about Arndt he retained his position and even defended the revival of a pro-Deutsche Christen group.

The ERA programs were but one part of the extensive outreach by U.S. government groups and churches in postwar Germany, but Springhart’s case study is particularly useful in its portrayal of the philosophy behind many of these initiatives, and for all the challenges they faced they did leave a permanent infrastructure of programs dedicated to broader democratic political discourse in Germany. In the decades that followed, the Evangelical publishing branches, radio and television programming, the Evangelical Academies, and other programs that emerged from the ERA’s work became defining aspects for the public voice of the Evangelical Church of Germany and, it must be added, for the emergence of a different understanding of the public responsibilities of the church from that before 1933. Although published several years ago, Aufbrücke zu neuen Ufern remains a timely and valuable study of the Branch for Education and Religious Affairs and its local impact, especially amidst the growing number of works on this critical period in German history.

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

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Review of George Faithful, Mothering the Fatherland: A Protestant Sisterhood Repents for the Holocaust

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of George Faithful, Mothering the Fatherland: A Protestant Sisterhood Repents for the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), xvii+270 pp.

Reviewed by Christopher J. Probst, University College at Washington University in St. Louis

This review appeared originally in Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 10 (2015), available at http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/scjr/article/view/8852. It is reproduced here with permission.

Faithful-MotheringMothering the Fatherland is a focused and sympathetic study of the life and work of a unique group of women who were so haunted by the Holocaust that, in the wake of the Second World War, they formed a Protestant sisterhood focused on intercessory repentance by the “true” Christians of Germany for the sins committed by the nation during the Third Reich. It is an absorbing work of historical theology that is especially significant for the effective manner in which the author situates the theology and practice of the sisterhood in their historical and intellectual contexts and for the author’s thoughtful analysis of the theology of the sisterhood’s co-founder.

George Faithful argues that the Ecumenical Sisterhood of Mary (Ökumenische Marienschwesternschaft), which was founded in 1947 by Klara (later Mother Basilea) Schlink and Erika Madauss (later Mother Martyria), sought to prevent via intercessory prayer the judgment of God on Germany, which both believed would come unless the nation repented for its sins, chief of which was its involvement in the Holocaust. The idea that Germans, much less Protestant Germans, should repent for the Shoah, was not widely shared in the early post-war era. This fact alone makes the sisterhood a fascinating case study. That the sisterhood also exhibited affinities with elements of German Pietism and (later) with the Charismatic movement enhances the curiosity all the more.

As Faithful recognizes, many Protestants held views that were consonant with some crucial aspects of Nazi ideology, including ardent nationalism and antisemitism. During the Third Reich, a substantial, outspoken minority of Protestants avidly and openly supported the Nazis in their reprehensible goals concerning the Jewish Question. Even so, open resistance to Nazism and secret assistance for Jews living under Nazi oppression and threat of murder were found among small groups of German Protestants. The “Büro Grüber” (Grüber Office), based in Berlin, provided Jews (in­cluding Jews who converted to Christianity) who were under dire threat from the Reich with advice about emigration, finding employment abroad, social assistance, legal matters, and educational support. For example, in Württemberg (in southwest Germany), a group of pastors and parishioners sheltered at least seventeen Jew­ish refugees in sixty church parsonages in a so-called “Rectory Chain.”

Though Schlink published numerous theological works after the war, including books that emphasized the collective guilt of the German nation for the Holocaust, she does not seem to have viewed her work as part of a broader theological discussion that might have included participants in such war-time Protestant rescue groups. Despite their differences, where the Holocaust and Jewish-Christian relations is concerned, there is a congruence of views between groups such as the Büro Grüber, the Württemberg rectory chain, and the sisterhood. A comparative scholarly study of such groups would be welcome.

The most intriguing chapter of the book is titled “Schlink’s Pseudo-Judaic, Germanic Vision of Nationhood,” in which Faithful examines, among other things, Schlink’s theological outlook on peoples (Völker), in particular “Germans” and “Jews.” Faithful finds that Schlink’s views of peoples, nations, and ethnicities were derived in the main from the Hebrew Bible and from (chiefly nineteenth and twentieth century) German views of nationalism. Ironically, for Schlink, Faithful writes, “To be a Jew was to be a member of a God-ordained, uniquely blessed people whose long centuries of suffering were over. To be a German was to be a self-professed Christian and a Gentile. For Schlink, Jew and German were two mutually exclusive categories, and this, more than any of her ideas, resonated with the worldview of the German nationalists. … That Schlink so comprehensively inverted which pole was positive, elevating the Jewish people to a status above what even many German nationalists had claimed for Germany, marks her thought as definitively anti-Nazi” (p. 132). Faithful highlights here incisively some of the ironies inherent in the thought of a remarkably unique woman – a philosemitic, anti-Nazi theologian and Protestant nun.

On occasion, the main argument is hampered by assertions that are a bit too tentative. Yet, this is mitigated by succinct chapter conclusions and helpful sub-headings within chapters, both of which make the book very readable. Mothering the Fatherland will be of interest to anyone engaged in the study of the Holocaust, twentieth-century German Protestantism, Jewish-Christian relations, and, more broadly, historical theology in the modern era. Caveats aside, this work substantially deepens our knowledge of a previously unknown and fascinating corner of German Protestantism.

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Article Note: Todd H. Weir, “The Specter of ‘Godless Jewry’: Secularism and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Article Note: Todd H. Weir, “The Specter of ‘Godless Jewry’: Secularism and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Central European History 46 (2014): 815-849.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

Todd Weir’s article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on Imperial Germany that explores how the “Jewish Question” was imagined and articulated across the ideological spectrum, particularly in secularist and anticlerical movements associated with the political left.  He finds that conservative defenders of the confessional state and their liberal opponents shared an assumption that integration required Jewish self-transformation, though they differed in terms of what kind of transformation was required.

Weir draws on examples from the “Berlin Antisemitism Controversy” that began in 1879 to show that “the conflation of modern Jewry with worldview secularism was a unifying feature across the political and religious spectrum of the emerging antisemitic discourse” (823).  He concludes that racial thinking did not replace religious antipathy but recast it by associating Judaism with national degeneration along with atheism and the erosion of Christian society.  Although this part of the article focuses on the usual suspects (Adolf Stöcker and Heinrich Treitschke), Weir adds a significant twist with his claim that “modern antisemitism must be understood in the context of the struggle over secularism” (821).

Even more important is Weir’s observation that philosemitic defenses of Jews were often accompanied by hostility toward manifestations of Jewishness.  For example, the Union of Free Religious Congregations welcomed individual Jewish members but refused to accept Free Religious Congregations that identified with Judaism.  In such cases, the unity of Jews and non-Jews required “exclusion of Jews as Jews from this unity” (831).  Likewise, Freethinkers tended to be “intolerant of the survival of any religious dogmas alongside their humanistic, monist, natural-scientific Weltanschauung” (838).  Jews were welcome to join, but they were expected to “convert” to secularism.

Jewish secularists like Wilhelm Loewenthal, founder of the Berlin Freethought Association Lessing in 1881, resisted such pressure and tried “to find a means of overcoming confessional division through science that did not eradicate the right to subjective affiliation with religious and cultural communities” (842).  The German Society of Ethical Culture promoted a similar kind of pluralism, in which a “science of ethics” served as a basis for cooperation among various confessions (844).  Yet philosemites like Wilhelm Foerster also complained about “Jewish separatism” and admonished Jews: “do not organize among yourselves, rather join with us against all evil, also in your own ranks, against German and against Jewish nationalism” (845).

Weir’s study is limited to a comparison of conservative Protestant, free religious and secularist subcultures in Imperial Germany.  Catholic and liberal Protestant approaches to the “Jewish Question” are not part of his analysis.  Nevertheless, he provides an important corrective to earlier scholarship that reduced the story to a two-dimensional contest between conservative antisemites and liberal proponents of emancipation.  Racism, religious bigotry, and fears of “godless Jewry” may have been part of a “conservative-nationalist cultural code” (847), but secularist philosemitism was not necessarily the antidote to this poison, for even as these secularists condemned antisemitism they also demanded “Jewish assimilation within the secularist fold” (847).

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Conference Report: “Verständigung und Versöhnung: Beiträge von Kirche, Religion und Politik (Understanding and Reconciliation: The Contributions of Church, Religion, and Politics)”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Conference Report: “Verständigung und Versöhnung: Beiträge von Kirche, Religion und Politik (Understanding and Reconciliation: The Contributions of Church, Religion, and Politics)” 18th Dietrich Bonhoeffer Lectures, Institut für Gesellschftswissenschaften und Theologie, Europa-Universität Flensburg, July 10-12, 2015.

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

The role played by religious leaders and institutions in political processes of reconciliation, particularly in the wake of conflicts and wars, is a topic of growing interest, due both to the revival of interest in interfaith work and the number of contemporary conflicts in which religion is a factor. It’s a topic in which the historical precedents are often obscured by the realities of contemporary issues, but it’s interesting to reflect on how those precedents shape our assumptions today. In U.S. popular culture the reputation of the Second World War as “the good war” is based not only on the clear-cut moral and political issues surrounding the war against Nazi Germany but on what unfolded in the aftermath of that war. European cities were rebuilt in what in historical terms seems like record time, Germany was reintegrated into collective European society, and despite the Cold War the Second World War was followed by decades of relative political and economic stability throughout Europe.  One has only to reflect on the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the ongoing conflict in the Sudan to realize what a rare phenomenon postwar Europe was in all these respects, despite the widespread scope of the war’s damage, the millions of displaced persons, and the fact that a genocide had just occurred.

The contemporary challenges of multiculturalism and political stability in Europe and the historical period of reconstruction after 1945 were the topics of this year’s Bonhoeffer Lecture conference in Germany, a two-day conference organized and hosted by the Institute for Social Science and Theology at the Europa-Universität in Flensburg. The German Bonhoeffer Lecture, sponsored by the Stiftung Bonhoeffer-Lehrstuhl, is a biennial program that convenes U.S. and European Bonhoeffer scholars in a wider conversation with European scholars on historical and contemporary issues.

The focus of the first day was “Religious Pluralism as a Challenge for Social Understanding Today,” with a particular focus on Muslim-Christian relations in Germany. Conference host Ralf Wuestenberg, professor of systematic and historical theology at the university in Flensburg, introduced the theme by analyzing the applicability of Bonhoeffer’s late writings about the “scarring over of guilt” to conversations about guilt, reconciliation, and the challenges of inter-European reconciliation today.  Klaus von Stosch, a professor of Catholic theology in Paderborn who also teaches at their Center for Comparative Theology and Cultural Studies, discussed the ways in which theological Muslim-Christian dialogue in Germany today has led to deeper understandings of his own Catholic theology, and the potential of the intercultural programs at the Paderborn Center for a better understanding of pluralism. Çefli Ademi, a postdoctoral fellow for Islamic Theology at the Westphalian Wilhelm University in Münster, delivered a paper on the possibilities within Islamic jurisprudence for co-existence and in some cases integration into western European legal systems. Christiane Tietz, professor of religious philosophy at the University of Zurich whose recent work has focused on interreligious understanding, analyzed and summarized the ways in which interreligious work and dialogue function in today’s Europe.

The second day, “Reconciliation as a Service of the Church and Task of International Politics after 1945,” offered an overview of post-World War II reconciliation in Europe, particularly with respect to the role and responses of the different churches. Konrad Raiser set the foundation by giving an overview of the history of the ecumenical movement in the twentieth century, particularly in terms of its dedication to international peace. My own paper traced the engagement of U.S. churches in postwar Germany, particularly through the work of the Federal Council of Churches and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Karsten Lehmkühler, professor of ethics at the University of Straßburg, talked about the ongoing process of German-French reconciliation after 1945, and Tim Lorentzen, who teaches church history at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, analyzed the role of Christian memorial culture in the process of German-Polish reconciliation.

As the topics indicate, most of the presentations (as well as the discussion that followed) explored theologically-based approaches to dialogue and the ways in which such dialogue can shape broader political discourse. The presentations on the second day, however, illustrated that even theological agendas and discourses are shaped by the historical realities of the respective dialogue partners.  A conference volume is being planned.

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

 

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Research Report: Summer Research Workshop “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Research Report: Summer Research Workshop “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945”, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, August 3-14, 2015.

By Victoria Barnett, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The rise of fascism, ethno-nationalism, and antisemitism after 1918 was a transnational phenomenon. Across Europe, fascist and nationalist groups, many of them religiously aligned, began to appear, laying the foundation for the subsequent involvement of these groups and their sympathizers in the Holocaust. This research workshop conducted a broader comparative examination of this phenomenon among Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches from different regions in Europe, with the goal of better understanding the broader dynamics at work as well as the specific factors that motivated each group.  What political, cultural, and theological factors in the different religious traditions and regions facilitated the appearance of such groups? Were they aware of and in touch with each other, and what theological or ideological features did they share?  How did religious leaders, theologians, and institutions in the respective countries and churches respond to these developments?  While much research has been done on groups like the German Deutsche Christen and the Romanian Iron Guard, relatively little has been done on the other smaller groups and individuals who played a role—although such movements can be found in all three of the major Christian churches, despite significant theological and ecclesiastical differences between and within Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity.

Three central themes emerged from the workshop discussions: 1) the challenges of understanding the role of “religion” in these developments; 2) the diverse forms of ethno-nationalism and fascism that appear in this period; and 3) the significance of antisemitism as a bridge between these radical groups. Discussions about religion addressed the complexity of the theological understandings and institutional realities of the three traditions, as well as the often-overlooked role of transnational movements and ecumenical organizations. Even within a single tradition like Catholicism, for example, there were very different levels of action, ranging from the role of Vatican officials, to regional bishops’ conferences responding to events in places like Poland, Slovakia, and Germany, to radical individuals like the pro-fascist Monsignor Umberto Benigni in Rome and Charles Maurras, who become a leading voice in the right-wing French Aktion Française. Daniela Kalkandjieva’s presentation on the Russian Orthodox churches identified the very distinct traditions and groups that fell under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate, with one group in particular, the Karlovci Synod, emerging as an antisemitic movement that had a transnational following. Other points of discussion included Samuel Koehne’s analysis of Nazi racialized ideology as a kind of “ethnotheism” that resonated among pro-fascist groups but alarmed other bodies, such as the Protestant ecumenical movement and interfaith movements which were driven by an explicit anti-nationalism and anti-racism, particularly in the United States.

The acknowledgment of the complexity of these religious dynamics shaped the workshop approach to the history of fascism and ethno-nationalism, particularly in terms of the different religious “players” that surfaced in these radical movements: religious institutions and organizations, religiously aligned political parties, individual clergy, theologians, and public intellectuals.  The differences and similarities between such figures as the Slovakian priest and political leader Josef Tiso, German Reich Bishop Ludwig Mueller, the Romanian theologian Fr. Liviu Stan, and French Mgr. Ernest Jouin, co-publisher of the radically antisemitic  Revue Internationale des Sociétés Secrètes, were explored.

While none of these figures can be understood independently of the political circumstances that brought them to prominence, it became clear that the primary “bridge” issue among them was the hatred of Jews.  While the roots of such antisemitic discourse rested deep in early Christian theology, more modern forms of racialized, socio-economic, and nationalist antisemitism gained steam in many parts of Europe between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s. In some of the groups studied antisemitism was the dominant theme; in others it converged with ethnic divisions, anti-Communism, and localized political factors.

In many ways this workshop served as a preliminary exploration of a number of important issues for further study. Even these preliminary research findings, however, illustrate that an understanding of the role of “religion” or the churches during the Holocaust cannot be gained purely from the study of specific cases such as the German churches, and that there is much to learn from a comparative look at the entire religious landscape of that era.

The participants in this workshop and their topics are listed here:

  • Pantelis Anastasakis (independent scholar, New York): “The Church of Greece and the Holocaust: The Limits of the Ethnarchic Tradition”
  • Victoria Barnett (USHMM): “International Protestant Ecumenical Interpretations of the Rise of Nazism, Fascism, and Antisemitism during the 1920s and 1930s”
  • Ionut Biliuta (currently at the Simon Wiesenthal Institute for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Vienna, Austria): “When ‘God Was a Fascist’: The Antisemitic Radicalization of the Orthodox Theology under the Impact of Fascism in Interwar Romania”
  • Giuliana Chamedes (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “The Vatican, Catholic Internationalism, and Nation-Building”
  • James Felak (University of Washington): “Catholicism, Anti-Semitism, and the Radical Right in Interwar Slovakia and Beyond”
  • Daniela Kalkandjieva (Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria): “Russian Orthodoxy, Fascism and Nationalism”
  • Samuel Koehne (Deakin University, Victoria, Australia): “Racist, Brutal, Revolutionary: A Conservative Christian View of Nazism by 1933”
  • Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College): “Antisemitism, Catholicism, and Judaism in Germany 1918-1945”
  • Nina Valbousquet (D. Candidate at the Sciences Po Paris, France): “An Anti-Semitic International? Catholic and Far-Right Connections in Monsignor Benigni’s Roman Network (1918-1930s)”
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Letter from the Editors: June 2015

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Letter from the Editors (June 2015)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

Once again this quarter we’re delighted to offer you a diverse collection of reviews and other contributions relating to twentieth-century German and European religious history. The trend at Contemporary Church History Quarterly is that we’re regularly branching out beyond our core interests in German church history to include diverse developments from across Europe.

Braunschweig Cathedral. Photo (cc) via Flickr user Huehnerauge. https://www.flickr.com/photos/27086904@N03/2545022352/in/photolist-yXYx5-JovpS-3K4YeQ-agNFSu-4dG2uu-9odkaJ-Yo27-4STUtJ-4uqTAM-7ho3Yf-7ciTw-sHX6hf-stPfBF-stFFC7-stPebV-sHX6SJ-sLhjiz-rPgh8d-sHX3S5-sL5jTU-sLgDkk-sLgGwR-rPsMtV-4rTRNk-4rTR1i-4rTS3D-4rTRVn-4rTSi8-4rTR7F

Braunschweig Cathedral with the heraldic lion of Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and of Bavaria. Photo (cc) via Flickr user Hühnerauge: https://flic.kr/p/4STUtJ

In this issue, guest contributor William Doino Jr. has written an overview of recent research on Pope Pius XII’s wartime efforts to rescue Jews. Doino Jr. assesses a number of recent publications from Italy, where scholars have unearthed a variety of primary sources which argue in favour of Pius XII in the so-called “Pius Wars.” His article includes many links to further information on these publications, enabling readers to make their own assessments about the current state of the Italian branch of Pius scholarship.

Our reviews begin with Christopher Probst evaluating Alon Confino’s A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. We think this is an important book for our readers to know about, since as Roger Morgan explained in Times Higher Education, Confino argues “that the main reason why the Holocaust happened lay not in a basically racialist anti-Semitic ideology, nor (in the end) in the momentum of a banal extermination machinery, but rather with Hitler’s quasi-religious obsession with annihilating the entire tradition and memory of Jewishness, from the Old Testament onwards, as a force antithetical to Christianity as well as to Nazism.” Such an interpretation thrusts religion back into the centre of our ongoing consideration of the Holocaust, which is, as Probst maintains, important.

Andrew Chandler and John S. Conway have written three fine reviews of intriguing books on twentieth-century Britain: David Nash’s Christian Ideals in British Culture: Stories of Belief in the Twentieth Century, Andrew Atherstone and John Maiden’s Evangelicalism and the Church of England in the Twentieth Century: Reform, Resistance and Renewal, and Timothy Jones’ Sexual Politics in the Church of England 1857-1957. Finally, John S. Conway alerts us to a little book with a big message: Rainer Stuhlmann’s Zwischen den Stühlen: Alltagsnotizen eines Christen in Israel und Palästina, which describes the work of the Northern Israeli Christian community Nes Ammim to bridge the social and religious divide between Israelis and Palestinians.

Our last contribution in this issue is a description of an interesting new article by the late Friedrich Weber and Charlotte Methuen concerning church building in Braunschweig during the Nazi era. The Braunschweig Cathedral (here pictured) was an important site of this ideological interplay between National Socialism and Christianity.

With apologies to our readers in the Southern Hemisphere, let me wish the rest of you a wonderful summer, as the days grow longer,the temperatures warmer, and (hopefully!) the schedule lighter.

On behalf of the other editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

 

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Papal Rescue in Wartime Rome: A New Documentary and Commentaries

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Papal Rescue in Wartime Rome: A New Documentary and Commentaries

By William Doino Jr.

On April 1st, a documentary was televised in Italy entitled, “Lo vuole il Papa” (The Pope Wants It), exploring the role Pius XII played during the German occupation of Rome, when thousands of Jews were given shelter by Catholic institutions in and around Vatican City. The film is based upon the enterprising work of historian Antonello Carvigiani, who cites new evidence indicating  Pius XII personally supported these rescue efforts.

Last year, Carvigiani published a scholarly essay, “Aprite le porte, salvate i perseguitati,” (“Open the Doors, Save the Persecuted,”) published in Nuova storia contemporanea (September-October, 2014) one of Italy’s leading academic journals.

In his essay, Carvigiani examined the histories of several female religious communities in wartime Rome, and– analyzing the texts and records they left behind– found evidence that each acted under a common directive of Pius XII to take in persecuted Jews and other endangered people. Though some critics of Pius XII have questioned whether such instructions were ever given, Carvigiani maintains that he has “found evidence of a written or oral order” which was “delivered to all religious houses in Rome, as well as to all parishes and ecclesiastical structures.”

The documentary, based upon Carvigiani’s essay, expands upon his findings, with new testimony of individuals connected to these wartime events.

Dr. Andrea Tornielli, one of Italy’s leading Vatican commentators and author of a major biography on Pius XII, praised the documentary: “The story of the docu-film is not told by a narrator but by the actual images and testimonies of two survivors, only boys at the time, and by the nuns of the cloisters who had heard from the older sisters what had happened….The director chose to concentrate on the cloisters of SS Quattro Coronati, Santa Susanna, and Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori, and the community of the Istituto di Maria Bambina, whose walls still harbor diaries and chronicles handwritten by the people at the heart of the stories. All of them vouch that the call to offer charity and refuge to the persecuted came from above. Written and oral testimonies refer repeatedly to the Pope, but also to the Deanery of Rome or to Giovanni Battista Montini [the future Pope Paul VI] and close collaborator with Pius XII.”

The aim of Carvigiani’s documentary is “not to be apologetic,” writes Tornielli. Rather, it is to “shed light on an, until now, little-known aspect of it.”

In the war diary of the community of Maria Bambina, continued Tornielli, “every day there was another request [and] every so often a telephone call from the Secretariat of His Holiness from the Vatican, and the reason was always the same: someone on the run, a persecuted family to take in, to protect, to help. One could not have refused a request from the representatives of the Pope…”

The wartime diary of the Augustinian Nuns of the convent of the Santi Quattro Coronati, first publicized in 2006, is one of the most explicit on record regarding Pius XII’s assistance. Relating events in the Fall of 1943, we read:

“Having arrived at this month of November, we must be ready to render services of charity in a completely unexpected way. The Holy Father, Pius XII, of paternal heart, feels in himself all the sufferings of the moment. Unfortunately, with the Germans entry into Rome which happened in the month of September, a ruthless war against the Jews has begun, whom they wish to exterminate by means of atrocities prompted by the blackest barbarities. They round up young Italians, political figures, in order to torture them and finish them off in the most tremendous torments. In this painful situation, the Holy Father wants to save his children, also the Jews, and orders that hospitality be given in the convents to these persecuted, and that the cloisters must also adhere to the wish of the Supreme Pontiff….”

In the register of the cloister of Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori, we read: “At this time, Jews, fascists, soldiers, caribinieri and nobility sought refuge with religious institutions, who, at great risk to themselves, opened their doors to save human lives.”  This was the desire of Pius XII, “who was the first to fill the Vatican with refugees, using the Villa of Castel Gandolfo and the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran.”

The reference to Castel Gandolfo is significant, since many historians have overlooked, or are unaware that Pius XII protected many refugees there, including Jews. During the war years, contemporaneous reports put the number of refugees at Castel Gandolfo at 10,000 or more desperate and frightened people who were clothed, fed and protected there (a number of women even gave birth). Moving pictures of the overflowing refugees survive, and highlight one of the Church’s most significant humanitarian accomplishments during the War.

Of special significance is a dispatch   published in the June 22, 1944 issue of the Palestine Post (today’s Jerusalem Post), from a correspondent reporting directly from Vatican City, just weeks after the liberation. Under the headline, “Sanctuary in the Vatican,” the correspondent wrote:

“Several thousand refugees, largely Jews, during the weekend left the Papal Palace at Castel Gandolfo–the Pope’s summer residence near Marino–after enjoying safety there during the recent terror. Besides Jews, persons of all political creeds who had been endangered were given sanctuary at the palace. Before leaving, the refugees conveyed their gratitude to the Pope through his majordomo.”

Since only Pius XII had the authority to open the doors of Castel Gandolfo, it is unreasonable to maintain that these “several thousand refugees, largely Jews,” were given aid only by other Catholic officials, acting without a clear directive from Pius XII. The sincere gratitude expressed by Jews in Vatican City that day was not misplaced, but given to the man who had supreme authority over Castel Gandolfo, Pius XII, who obviously made their survival possible.

Carvigiani’s new research and documentary is consistent with the testimonies of  priest-rescuers like Cardinals Paolo Dezza and  Pietro Palazzini (honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations)  and Msgr. John Patrick Caroll-Abbing, who testified to Pius XII’s active support for the Jews of Rome, and to their rescuers. (There is also evidence and testimony that Pius helped the famous anti-Nazi Irish priest, Msgr. Hugh O’Flaherty, as well). Carvigiani also builds  upon the work of noted historians Michael Tagliacozzo, a survivor of the Nazi raid on Rome’s Jews, and one of the outstanding authorities on it; Andrea Riccardi, author of  L’inverno piu lungo, 1943-1944: Pio XII, gli ebrei e I nazista I Roma (The Longest Winter, 1943-1944: Pius XII, the Jews and the Nazis in Rome, 2008); Anna Foa, Professor of Modern History at the University of Rome; and Sr. Grazia Loparco, who has done extensive research on papal rescue in Rome. Foa has written: “Precisely with regard to Rome, the ways in which the work of sheltering and rescuing the persecuted was carried forward were such that they could not have been simply the fruit of initiatives from below, but were clearly coordinated as well as permitted by the leadership of the Church.” Similarly, Sr. Loparco has stated: “From the documentation and testimonies emerges evidence of the full support and instruction of Pius XII…Many concrete events, such as the opening of monasteries and convents, prove the fact that many Jews were lodged because of the direct concern of the Vatican, which also provided food and assistance.” More recently, Loparco has written an article entitled, “An Order from the Top,” for the Osservatore Romano, (English-language edition, January 30, 2015)  in which she gives additional evidence of specific instances where papal instructions were given to rescue persecuted Jews in Rome.

It should also be noted that, after the liberation of Rome but before World War II ended, Vatican Radio was already broadcasting the life-saving assistance of the Holy See. A review of Pius XII’s charity was broadcast on March 12, 1945 and stated:  “During the occupation of Rome, between 8th September, 1943 and 5th June 1944, he gave shelter in 120 institutes for women and 60 institutes for men, as well as in other houses and churches in Rome, to more than 5,200 Jews who were thus able to live free from fear and misery.”(Cited in Reginald F. Walker, Pius of Peace (London: M.H. Gill and Son, 1945), p. 94).

No examination of the Vatican and the German occupation of Rome would be complete without a careful study of the most important primary documents available; such a collection has fortunately been produced by Pier Luigi Guiducci, in his work, Il terzo Reich contro Pio XII: Papa Pacelli nei documenti nazisti (The Third Reich Against Pius XII: Pope Pacelli in Nazi Documents). Though not yet translated, Professor Guiducci has given an interview in English revealing his findings.

While scholarly research continues around the record of Pius XII during the Holocaust and doubtless will be further assisted when the Vatican releases its remaining wartime archives, it is encouraging that researchers like Carvigiani have brought forth fresh evidence which provides a more complete and balanced picture of Pius XII’s pontificate.

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

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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.

Confino-WorldThe 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.

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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-ChristianThe 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.

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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-MaidenThe 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.

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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-SexualTimothy 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.

 

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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-ZwischenThe 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.

 

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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.

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