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

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

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

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review of Dietrich von Hildebrand, My Battle Against Hitler: Faith, Truth, and Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Review of Dietrich von Hildebrand, My Battle Against Hitler: Faith, Truth, and Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich, Translated and Edited by John Henry Crosby with John F. Crosby (New York: Image, 2014), 341 Pp, ISBN 978-0-385-34751-8.

By Christopher S. Morrissey, Redeemer Pacific College, Trinity Western University

An earlier and shorter version of this book review was published in The B.C. Catholic (Oct 20, 2014).

When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889–1977) fled Germany to Austria, where in Vienna he founded and edited Der Christliche Ständestaat (The Christian Corporative State).

“That damned Hildebrand is the greatest obstacle for National Socialism in Austria. No one causes more harm,” fumed Franz von Papen, the Nazi ambassador to Austria, who proposed to Hitler a plan to assassinate Hitler’s public enemy number one. Because von Hildebrand’s anti-Nazi paper was so widely read, von Papen called him “the architect of the intellectual resistance in Austria.”

Hildebrand-battleDietrich von Hildebrand was a German Roman Catholic philosopher opposed to the Nazis from the earliest days. Ever since 1921 the Nazis had him on their blacklist. The Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project, currently headquartered at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio, oversees the translation, publication, and promotion of von Hildebrand’s work. Despite their efforts, his work continues to be not very well known.

Thanks to their newest publication, however, that fact may be changing. My Battle Against Hitler, which is being widely disseminated by arrangement with Random House’s Image Books imprint, allows us to read for ourselves the most substantial excerpt of von Hildebrand’s heroic anti-Nazi publications ever available in English.

The book also makes a significant new contribution to the historical record because it chronicles the years from 1921 to 1938 with never before published selections from von Hildebrand’s handwritten memoirs.

“It is an immense privilege,” writes the volume’s main translator, compiler, and editor, John Henry Crosby, “to present to the world the shining witness of one man who risked everything to follow his conscience and stand in defiance of tyranny.”

Many readers will be familiar with the similarly heroic witness of Protestant pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But most will have not yet heard of the Catholic von Hildebrand, despite the fact that Pope Pius XII is said to have remarked, “Von Hildebrand is the twentieth-century doctor of the Church.”

Although widely quoted and attributed to Pius XII, this remark must be considered apocryphal, since uncontestable documentary evidence for it is not available, as John Henry Crosby insisted in conversation with me. Yet von Hildebrand was a friend of Eugenio Pacelli, so the remark understandably has the ring of authenticity.

But Pius XII is not the only one to direct our attention to von Hildebrand’s historical importance. “There is but one man who can stand with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, both in intellectual brilliance and in bravery toward the Nazis; that man is Dietrich von Hildebrand,” writes Eric Metaxas, New York Times bestselling author of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.

In addition, the work of the Hildebrand Project also has more recent papal approval. “I am personally convinced that, when, at some time in the future, the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time,” Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI once said, speaking as Joseph Ratzinger.

My Battle Against Hitler makes an invaluable contribution to that intellectual history. Its publication has most likely taken so long because, during the last decades of his life, von Hildebrand produced over five thousand handwritten pages of memoirs at the request of his second wife, Alice von Hildebrand, whom he married in 1959.

His first wife, Gretchen, to whom he had been married for forty-five years, had died in 1957. Being over thirty years younger than him, Alice expressed regret at having missed out on so much of Dietrich’s life. Purely out of love, he produced the handwritten pages for her, as an intimate communication of his earlier life.

These memoirs are especially interesting because of the fact that von Hildebrand never sought to promote himself by publishing his memoirs or reprinting his essays against Nazism. It is an essential mark of his character that he was not someone who thought of himself as a hero or as someone who deserved special praise.

In spite of whatever obstacles his habitual modesty may have erected to historical inquiry, thankfully with this book we can now start to review the record for ourselves. As we read his autobiographical revelations to Alice, the immediacy of his recollections transports us into the scene in a most striking way.

Targeted for assassination because of his anti-Nazi publications, eventually von Hildebrand had to flee from Vienna on March 11, 1938. He fled across Europe, from Czechoslovakia to Switzerland to France to Portugal. In 1940, he came via Brazil to New York, where he taught philosophy until 1960 at Fordham University, where he met Alice.

When von Hildebrand first spoke out in 1921 against Nazi ideas, he had been placed on the blacklist of enemies whom they would execute immediately when they came to power. On November 8, 1923, Hitler with six hundred Storm Troopers attempted to seize power in Bavaria with the Beer Hall Putsch. The next morning, after attending 7:00 a.m. morning Mass and before teaching his 9:15 a.m. class, von Hildebrand learned of the unfolding events.

With the help of a Benedictine monk who was also von Hildebrand’s confessor, arrangements were made for him to flee to safety with his wife and son. Fortunately, as the family was in flight, the Nazi putsch was meeting with failure. The Nazi threat was averted and Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment on April 1, 1924.

Yet during this time, until October 1924, Hitler worked on his infamous book, Mein Kampf, which was published in two volumes, in 1925 and 1926. It coldly outlined his racist agenda and insane political goals. Its title is usually translated as “My Struggle” but could also be rendered as “My Fight” or “My Battle.” Among the papers of von Hildebrand’s memoirs, one outline was found titled Mein Kampf Gegen Hitler, “My Battle Against Hitler.”

It was decided that this would make the best possible title for the posthumously published memoirs, although the book was originally developed by the Hildebrand Project under the working title He Dared Speak the Truth. Now published under its final title, My Battle Against Hitler chronicles the heroic struggle of one of the Catholic Church’s greatest philosophers and his fight against Hitler’s evil ideas. “It is precisely our struggle against evil that God wills, even when we suffer external defeat,” said von Hildebrand in a memorable phrase, alluding to the title of Hitler’s evil book.

“Dietrich von Hildebrand often quotes the Latin saying tua res agitur, which means ‘this concerns you,’” observes Crosby.  “He would say his battle against Hitler concerns you. Why? Because as a human person you are no less called than von Hildebrand himself was to know, to serve, and to bear witness to truth.”

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Review of Rudolf von Thadden, Trieglaff: Balancing Church and Politics in a Pomeranian World, 1807-1948

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Review of Rudolf von Thadden, Trieglaff: Balancing Church and Politics in a Pomeranian World, 1807-1948, translated by Stephen Barlau (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 235 Pp., ISBN 978-0-85745-927-5.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Trieglaff is a small village in rural Pomerania, now in the north-west corner of present-day Poland. Following the Napoleonic wars, it was situated in the kingdom of Prussia and was the seat of the aristocratic family von Thadden, who for a hundred-and-fifty years used the castle and estate as their home base for very active participation in the wider spheres of church and politics. The author of this sympathetic account is a direct descendant in the fifth generation of this remarkable family. He was born and lived in Trieglaff until it was overrun by the advancing Soviet troops in March 1945, bringing to an end this era of Junker ascendancy. His narrative has been drawn from the surviving records, along with personal contacts with relations and tenants, both in Germany and the United States, to give us an attractive and instructive description of Trieglaff and its owners across the years. In contrast to many other books written by Germans exiled from their eastern homelands, Thadden avoids both nostalgia and recriminations, and instead adopts an irenic tone, seeking to stress the virtues of all those involved.

VonThaddenTrieglaffThe patriarch, Adolf von Thadden, inherited the estate after Napoleon’s defeat and was greatly influenced by the wave of pietistic fervor which swept across Germany in those years. He turned Trieglaff into a center for revivalist meetings for the whole of Pomerania. This was a strongly conservative faith which maintained an uncritical biblical fundamentalism and often expressed itself in sectarian excesses. But it sought to uphold the witness of the individual believer and to prevent the incursion of rationalist or secular ideas. In particular, the Trieglaffers resented the top-heavy controls exercised over the church by state officials, who obeyed the commands of the monarch King Frederick William III in uniting the Lutheran and Reformed adherents into one United Prussian Church. The result was a clash in the village and the secession of a group true to their former loyalties and calling themselves Old Lutherans. They even built their own church at the other end of the village which still survives today.

This determination to maintain the historic orthodoxy of their faith and to thwart all attempts at modernization for liberal or political reasons remained the hallmark of Trieglaff’s conservatism. It was to be revived again a hundred years later, after the Nazis came to power, when the so-called “German Christians” attempted to change both the doctrine and the practices of the church to accommodate Nazi ideology. The then owner Reinhold von Thadden became a leading figure in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church in the 1930s, and made Trieglaff a bastion in this cause. As a young student he had been attracted by the witness of the World Student Christian Federation and by the theological writings of Karl Barth, which he saw as a call to return to the deep roots of the Christian faith which alone could counter the current crises in the political and international arenas.

But at the same time, the whole Thadden family was imbued with the Prussian tradition of loyalty to the state. In both wars they loyally sought to enlist in the best regiments, and fully accepted Hitler’s justifications for the campaigns against the godless communists of the Soviet Union. In fact, three of the author’s elder brothers lost their lives while fighting against the Soviet troops on the eastern front.

By contrast, Reinhold’s elder sister Elisabeth demonstrated her obstinate conservatism by strongly disdaining the whole Nazi movement. In September 1943, while at a private tea party, she made some incautious remarks for which she was denounced to the Gestapo. This led to her arrest, imprisonment in Ravensbrück, and in September 1944, to her execution. This heart-wrenching news only increased the conflict of loyalties which assailed the whole Thadden family. As Reinhold later meditated, these events forced him to “consider the share contributed by our Christian conservatives, our patriotic classes to the political conceptions and the monstrous repercussions of the former regime, down to our militaristic thinking and acting, in a word, our share in the actual guilt of our people.”

As it happened, Reinhold had served as a senior officer in the German military occupation forces in Belgium and France. But when he returned to Trieglaff he was immediately arrested by the Soviet authorities and taken off to serve time in a prisoner-of-war camp in northern Archangel. Luckily he was released after several months there, and repatriated to Berlin. Only a few days later he was joined by his wife and young son Rudolf, who had been expelled from their home in Trieglaff by the newly arrived Polish authorities. The joy of being reunited was however marred by the awareness that they could never hope as a family to return to Trieglaff again.

In later years, Reinhold dedicated himself to the new venture in German Protestant life, namely the institution of biennial Church Rallies, which drew adherents from all parts of the country, including to begin with East Germans, for a week of discussions about the witness and future commitments of the church. These rallies proved to be highly popular, and indeed still continue. Reinhold’s service in this cause was marked by his determined advocacy of both repentance and reconciliation. He came to be revered as the patron of the now much humbler Protestant church, which sought out ecumenical contacts and adopted policies of social reform in deliberate repudiation of the nationalistic and militaristic attitudes of the past.

His son Rudolf, the author of this book, studied history and theology, and opted to enter academic life. He has since had a distinguished career as a professor of modern European history at Göttingen University. As this reminiscence of his family’s connection with Trieglaff shows, he also wanted to bring his father’s message of reconciliation and international friendship back to the place of his early years. But until 1978 Germans were forbidden to go back across the Oder River and revisit Pomerania. Once that restriction was lifted Rudolf found opportunities to take his wife and family to see his original home and to strike up friendships with the new occupants of the village and estate. Despite the denominational and language barriers, he succeeded in this aim, and returned on a number of occasions in later years. Largely at his initiative, and in memory of all those Germans forcibly expelled in the immediate post-war years, Rudolf arranged for a large-sized bronze plaque to be installed at the entrance of the Old Lutheran, now Catholic Church, which was unveiled in September 2002. The text of the plaque reads, in both Polish and German:

Pax vobis (Peace to you)

In memory of the many generations of German Trieglaffers who lived here and found happiness,

And with all good wishes that things might go well for those

Who make their home in Trieglaff today.

This plaque surely stands as a witness to the power of Trieglaff’s historic traditions to overcome the legacy of domination, conflict, ethnic cleansing and exile, and to build new bridges of hope for the future.

The book has been excellently translated into English by Stephen Barlau, and includes a useful glossary of terms used to describe the structures of the German Protestant Churches.

 

 

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Conference Report: Religion in Germany in the 20th Century: Paradigm Shifts and Changing Methodologies

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Conference Report: Religion in Germany in the 20th Century: Paradigm Shifts and Changing Methodologies. Seminar at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association, September 19-21, 2014

By Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University

More than two dozen historians and German language and literature scholars from North America, Germany and Great Britain traveled to the annual meeting of the German Studies Association in Kansas City to take part in this seminar from September 19-21, 2014. The seminar was convened by Thomas Großbölting of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster and Mark Edward Ruff of Saint Louis University.

This group of scholars made their focus the changing methodologies in the field of German church history. Undergirding this seminar was the assumption that old models of church history have been superseded. Whereas an earlier generation of church historians typically painted a narrow picture of theologies and old men in church towers, younger scholars have sought to broaden the canvas. In their picture of the German religious landscape, both Protestant and Catholic, they now analyze social forms of organization, political networks, societal relationships, gender, religious vocabularies and alternatives to Christianity that range from Islam to political religions, cults and new forms of religious spirituality.

Yet these younger scholars, critical of old orthodoxies, have been unable to achieve any sort of consensus. This lack of consensus stems, at least in part, from the lack of a methodological common denominator. Sociologists, confessional theologians, scholars of religious studies and historians have long often used different vocabularies and definitions of the transcendent, the immanent, the spiritual and religion. Such problems of definition are familiar to anyone entering the field of religious studies today but they have posed a particular challenge to the historiography of German religious history in light of the fact that so many more scholars have recently entered the field.

This seminar was intended to take stock of these fundamental transformations in the historiography and point to new directions for the future. The first day of the seminar explored traditional models of church history that predominated well into the second half of the 20th century. Participants analyzed portions of classic primer for Catholic Church historians, Kirchengeschichte, by Karl Bihlmeyer and Hermann Tüchle. They turned to an article from 1981, “Christ und Geschichte” by the profane Catholic historian, Konrad Repgen, a long-time director of the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte who put forward his vision of Christian scholarship in this lecture-turned-essay. They concluded with an overview and critique of these approaches by the Professor for Mittlere und Neuere Kirchengeschichte in Tübingen, Andreas Holzem in an article entitled “Die Geschichte des ‘geglaubten Gottes’: Kirchengeschichte zwischen ‘Memoria” und ‘Historie.’”

The second day of the seminar was devoted to an analysis and critique of the classic model of the the Catholic milieu from 1993, “Katholiken zwischen Tradition und Moderne: Das katholische Milieu als Forschungsaufgabe” by the Arbeitskreis für Katholizismusforschung in Münster, Germany. One of the participants, Christoph Kösters of the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, had served as one of authors of this pioneering article and provided an account of this article’s genesis. Participants subsequently examined a recent and powerful challenge to these models posed by Benjamin Ziemann of the University of Sheffield in his article, “Kirchen als Organisationsform der Religion: Zeitgeschichtliche Perspektiven.”

The third day analyzed the current state of fragmentation in the field. Participants began by examining a plea for embracing cultural history and the linguistic turn by the Swiss historian, Franziska Metzger, in her article, “Konstruktionsmechanismen der katholischen Kommunikationsgemeinschaft.” They subsequently turned to an essay, “Further Thoughts on Religion and Modernity” by the Harvard sociologist of religion, Peter Berger, who since the 1990s has largely repudiated his writings from the 1960s on secularization. They also drew upon a survey of recent literature, “’Sag: Wie hast Du’s mit der Religion?’: Das Verhältnis von Religion und Politik als Gretchenfrage der Zeitgeschichte” by the London-based historian, Uta Andrea Balbier.

Almost all of the participants agreed that the paradigms that have long dominated the field – paradigms of church history, secularization and “social-moral milieux” – suffer from distinct weaknesses. These include undue teleologies and the fact that the social-moral milieux were as heterogeneous as they were homogeneous.

But it was probably inevitable that the group of two dozen scholars did not agree on precisely where the field is heading – and should be heading. The assembled represented a diverse group including graduate students, freshly-minted Ph.D.s, junior faculty, associate professors and senior scholars in the field. Some taught at religiously-affiliated colleges and university, others at secular institutions. The majority focused on the twentieth century, but even there, their interests were diverse. Two-thirds were scholars of Catholicism, one-third scholars of Protestantism, the inverse of the confessional balance in Germany through from 1870 through 1945. Some focused on the Weimar era, others almost exclusively on the Nazi era and its immediate aftermath; others focused on the Federal Republic, including the Vatican II era. With such diversity in the seminar, perspectives naturally – and refreshingly – differed.

Why else was there such a lack of consensus?

The lack of consensus stemmed the fact that not all participants were willing to throw the baby out with the bath water. Many sought to retain the most valuable insights from these earlier models, while jettisoning their outdated features. While all of the participants agreed that “salvation history” (Heilsgeschichte) was dead, for instance, not all participants were willing to a priori reject the notion of Christian scholarship as defined out by such distinguished scholars as the Notre Dame historian, Mark Noll. In response to criticisms that the model of the Catholic milieu papered over the very real diversity within, some participants pointed out that there was a coherence to the Roman Catholic milieu (how could there not have been during eras of religious persecution!) The models of the Catholic milieu, they observed, had always taken into account the social, economic, political and intellectual diversity within the flock and fact that the Catholic milieu had been anything but static. Religious organizations, their social-forms, and even their message changed with the times – and had to out of necessity. And no one would deny that the major churches today show far lower rates of membership, church and mass attendance and cultural influence than they did even as late as the 1960s.

The lack of methodological consensus also arose out of a lack of agreement over how to describe the contemporary German religious landscape. Conscientious observers of the religious landscape of modern Germany disagree over what religious forms took hold following the era of religious upheaval in the 1960s. Are Germans even religious today, or even spiritual? If so, where are their religious and spiritual roots, if they are no longer anchored in the established churches? Do existing religious and spiritual practices even exert any significant claim over daily lives of Germans or have they become utterly diffuse? These questions become all the more important for historians today, since most inevitably read the past through the lens of the present. If it is unclear which methodological tools are needed to make some sense of a muddled German religious present, how can we grasp the transformative processes from fifty years ago that ushered it in?

Where was there widespread agreement? Most participants agreed it was necessary to integrate religious history into mainstream narratives of German history. They also concurred that religious history would profit from the insights and methodologies gleaned from cultural history. All agreed on the need for additional comparative studies, in which the German religious experience would be placed alongside that of its neighbors and those from the other side of the Atlantic. Finally, all recognized that the field of contemporary German religious history has become a much more vibrant place since having been freed from often stifling methodological orthodoxies and a narrow focus on churchmen and dogmas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Holocaust Survivors and Holocaust Scholars: A Changing and Challenging Relationship

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Holocaust Survivors and Holocaust Scholars: A Changing and Challenging Relationship

Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

On November 17, 2014, I gave the Rudolf Vrba Memorial Lecture at the University of British Columbia. The lecture honors the memory of Dr. Rudolf Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz in 1944 and together with another Jewish prisoner, Alfred Wetzler, wrote the first eyewitness report of what was happening there. After the war he became a medical researcher and for many years a professor of pharmacology in Vancouver. There he became friends with John Conway, and that relationship contributed to some important articles and interventions by Conway on the subject of the Holocaust in Hungary. John, who was present on November 17, thought our readers might be interested in a synopsis of my lecture.

It is easy to think of Holocaust survivors and scholars in terms of dichotomies and oppositions – between emotion and detachment, authenticity and artificiality, memory and history. In the worst case, scholars are cast as antagonists who appropriate and discount survivors’ witness. In the best case, scholarship is sometimes seen as a pale substitute for the compelling voice of experience. I tried to complicate this picture by suggesting that we contemplate instead how survivors and scholars of the Holocaust are intertwined and have been since the earliest studies in the field. Indeed, it is precisely the close ties between the experiences of victims, the memories of survivors, and the work of scholars that has shaped the study of the Holocaust into a dynamic and resilient field.

I opened with two short film clips from Claude Lanzmann’s masterpiece, Shoah. The first showed Raul Hilberg, the most famous scholar of Holocaust, explaining how Nazi antisemitism was similar to preceding centuries of anti-Jewish measures yet broke with the past. The second showed Gertrude Schneider and mother, Charlotte Hirschhorn, survivors of the Riga ghetto, singing a song in Yiddish. At a glance, these segments present a study in contrasts, between the articulate scholar who sees the big picture, and the speechless survivors who are emotional – Hirschhorn is crying throughout the scene – and fatalistic: they sing “Azoy muss sein” – that’s the way it has to be. Both Hilberg and Schneider, however, are survivors and scholars. Both were born in Vienna, driven from their homes, and lost many members of their families in the Holocaust. Both received doctoral degrees in New York, with dissertations on Holocaust-related topics, and went on to produce numerous publications. These clips framed the presentation by reminding the audience that the views and voices of survivors and scholars are entangled and at times indistinguishable. In fact, in many cases they are the same people.

The rest of the talk sketched out three major stages of scholarship on the Holocaust. The first, which began before the war was even over, was driven not only by survivors but by people who did not live through the war. Some of the most important initiatives to “collect and record,” to use the phrase popularized by Laura Jockusch’s book, were by trained historians. I focused on two of them, Emanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw Ghetto, and Philip Friedman from Łódź, founder of the Historical Commission, which became the Jewish Historical Institute. As social historians trained in Polish universities, they sought to produce histories that were as credible as possible: empirically complete, analytical, and methodologically strong. Other works followed, by scholars writing in Hebrew, Polish, Dutch, and other languages, but these studies remained outside the scholarly mainstream.

During the second phase, stretching from the 1960s through the 1980s, scholarship developed a different relationship to survivors. Now the emerging field of inquiry increasingly separated itself from private, communal acts of commemoration. But survivors remained central to production of scholarship. Hilberg, Gerhard Weinberg, Nechama Tec, Henry Friedlander, Saul Friedländer, Yitzhak Arad, Dori Laub, and Yaffa Eliach are key contributors here. They did not incorporate their personal experiences into their scholarship in an explicit way but emphasized the importance of research that met the highest standards of scientific rigor. Under their leadership, study of the Holocaust became a recognized field of scholarship. They were joined in their efforts by an important contingent of non-Jewish scholars, many of them Germans – Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen, Eberhard Jaeckel. These people studied the Nazi system, Hitler’s role, the German bureaucracy, elites, and ordinary people. Their contacts across the Atlantic with colleagues who literally spoke the same language, proved essential to creating a dynamic, open field of inquiry. Before his death, Hilberg said the best scholarship on the Holocaust was being done not in Israel, North America, but in Europe.

Saul Friedländer’s two-volume “integrated and integrative history” of the Holocaust is part of the third phase, from the early 1990s until now. In these past decades, the field has taken off with enormous growth in every direction. Following Friedländer , scholars all over the world recognize the importance of writing “integrated histories” that take seriously Jewish sources and how they complicate and interrupt the narrative based on perpetrators’ records. Some survivor-scholars remain active and questions first raised by Ringelblum, Friedman, and others decades ago – about Jewish life in the ghettos, religious practice, Jewish-gentile interactions, collaboration, and more – have returned to the agenda.

I closed with a final clip from Shoah, with Rudi Vrba telling about an effort that failed to spark a general revolt in Auschwitz. Here Vrba embodied the tension between action and words, reason and emotion that is at the heart of Holocaust studies. He and others have given us powerful models of how to combine scholarly rigor and human engagement in pursuit of truth.

 

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Conference Note: Lessons and Legacies 2014, Boca Raton, Florida

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Conference Note: Lessons and Legacies 2014, Boca Raton, Florida

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, University of Notre Dame

The thirteenth biennial Holocaust conference, sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation, took place from October 30 to November 2 in Boca Raton, Florida. The conference prides itself on being the premier gathering of scholars across North America and Europe who share teaching and research interests in the subject of the Holocaust. This year’s theme, “The Holocaust After 70 Years: New Perspectives on Persecution, Resistance, and Survival”, echoes themes from previous years, emphasizing expanding perspectives (2010) and new directions (2012) in connection with the Holocaust’s continued relevance today. The Holocaust as a subject of historical inquiry continues to sustain immense scholarly interest, which makes it challenging to craft truly original or groundbreaking arguments. However, the scholars who meet at Lessons and Legacies are as devoted to revisiting and improving older arguments as they are to producing brand-new ones. Consequently, the quality of the papers is generally extremely high.

Gershon Greenberg delivered a keynote address on the first night, speaking about Jewish religious thought through the Holocaust. Marion Kaplan, discussing her research on Jewish refugees in Portugal, gave a second keynote address on the conference’s third night. There were two plenary sessions, the first considering new generational approaches to Holocaust studies, the second, featuring pre-circulated papers, about the impact of feminism and gender studies on Holocaust studies. Over the course of two and a half days, the conference held twenty-three panels, several special sessions, and four workshops geared towards teaching and discussion of sources.

As is often the case at this conference, panel topics were both specific – a discussion of the digital collections of the International Tracing Service, the Holocaust documentation center in Bad Arolsen, Germany; a consideration of the place of the Kindertransport in commemoration and literature; the role of Spain in the Holocaust – as well as broad, with panels on culture and memory, new cultural approaches to the Holocaust, gender, violence, resistance in camps and ghettoes, and the Holocaust in photographs as well as representations of the Holocaust in film and literature. While there were no panels devoted specifically to the churches or religion under Nazism, a paper by Joanna Sliwa of Clark University recounted the role of Krakow nuns in the rescue of Jewish children. Staying true to the general theme, several panels featured topics under revision or reconsideration, including scholars rethinking Nazi Germany beyond the racial state, a panel investigating the writing of Holocaust history beyond the “linguistic turn”, and a discussion of new conceptions of collaboration and perpetration.

The conference was well attended by many of the field’s established scholars, junior scholars, and graduate students. Four scholars – Steven T. Katz, Dagmar Herzog, Roger Brooks, and Francis Nicosia – received distinguished achievement awards from the Foundation for their contributions to Holocaust Studies. The conference’s book series also launched its most recent volume, Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World, edited by Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes, with essays drawn from papers presented at the 2010 conference.

The next Lessons and Legacies conference will take place in November 2016 at Claremont-McKenna College, in southern California.

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Letter from the Editors: September 2014

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Letter from the Editors: September 2014

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

It is with a mixture of delight and embarrassment that I wish to announce the new edition of Contemporary Church History Quarterly: delight at the illuminating content of this issue, and embarrassment at its late release, the result of a busy launch of the fall semester at my home institution.

Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche, Berlin

Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche, Berlin

In the course of editing the various reviews and notes, I have noticed afresh how deeply the central theme of much of the history regularly discussed in CCHQ–namely, the mixture of and relationship between Christianity, nationalism, Nazism, and antisemitism found in the Third Reich–is connected to earlier and later developments in both religious history and Christian theology. Topics in this issue of CCHQ range from the challenges faced by military chaplains in the First World War to the influence of Christian pacifism (so prominent in the interwar period) and the Harlem Renaissance on Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the efforts of Christians in Saxony-Anhalt, North Elbia, and Bavaria to suppress and later come to terms with their conduct during the Nazi era. In addition, you will find Barth scholars grappling with the historic and contemporary meaning of his positions on Jews and Judaism, Bonhoeffer scholars trying to glean new insights from the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, reflections on East German Christian responses to communist rule, and contemporary scholars struggling to find the right language with which to discuss historic Christian hostility to Jews and Judaism.

We hope you find this a stimulating collection of reviews and notes.

On behalf of all the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

 

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Review Essay: Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Post-Bethge

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Review Essay: Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Post-Bethge

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

Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). 544 pages.

Mark Thiessen Nation, Anthony G. Siegrist, and Daniel P. Umbel, Bonhoeffer the Assassin? Challenging the Myth, Recovering His Call to Peacemaking (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Publishing, 2013). 272 pages.

Reggie L. Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014).

In 2003 the British historian Andrew Chandler (one of the contributing editors to this journal) wrote “The Quest for the Historical Bonhoeffer,” a review essay of the German Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke (DBW) that to my mind remains the best analysis of the challenges of contemporary Bonhoeffer interpretation that has been written.[1] One of his main points was that most of the authors who have written about Bonhoeffer come from a theological or religious background and interpret him, as well as his historical context, through that perspective. The dramatic historical events of Bonhoeffer’s era and the individuals he encountered in ecumenical, political, church, and resistance circles serve primarily as the backdrop for the poignant personal and theological story that is center stage. For decades, the main source for that story has been Eberhard Bethge’s definitive biography of Bonhoeffer, but increasingly Bethge’s text is being augmented by the vast collection of documents now available in English in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition (DBWE) (the final index volume will be published this fall).

When I edited the new unabridged English edition of the biography about 15 years ago, I was struck by the thoroughness of Bethge’s research and by how much of it was correct. Although not a historian, Bethge went to great pains to get the history right. He himself had been part of the Confessing Church, the battles about theological education, and the resistance circles before he was conscripted into the German Wehrmacht, and he reconstructed the parts of the story that he had not personally experienced (such as Bonhoeffer’s early ecumenical period and his year of study in the U.S.) by consulting with others who had known Bonhoeffer during those periods, obtaining copies of correspondence from others and relevant documents from other archives.

There was a just-the-facts modesty in Bethge’s approach to the historical story. There were other versions of certain events, of course, and after the biography appeared there were people who disagreed with him on certain points, and there were pieces of the historical puzzle he did not have. New insights into Bonhoeffer have emerged in recent years from other historical studies that remind us that Bonhoeffer was not nearly as central or prominent as the biography made it seem. Finally, there were issues—notably the centrality of the persecution of the Jews and the churches’ reactions to this—that became dominant in the historiography only after the biography had appeared. Yet it must be said that Bethge was markedly open to all these developments, questions, and new challenges, and in later writings and lectures he began to address these issues.

Nonetheless, a Bonhoeffer mythology developed early on; in fact, it predated the publication of the biography. Particularly because of The Cost of Discipleship and the Letters and Papers from Prison, both of which were available in English by the early 1950s, Bonhoeffer was already being read as a Christian martyr by the time the biography appeared, and the historical narrative that Bethge laid out was interpreted accordingly. Bethge was as surprised by this as anyone. When he arrived in this country during the 1950s to begin writing the biography he observed that “everyone has his own Bonhoeffer,” and once the biography was published he had to spend some of his time countering popular re-interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s theology, notably those from the “death of God” movement.

The mythology remains the crux of the problem in Bonhoeffer interpretation. As Chandler noted, the common portrayal of Bonhoeffer as martyr and hero goes “hand-in-hand with a number of historical arguments about the world he inhabited.” Those historical assumptions emerged during a period in which the history of the German churches under Nazism was largely a hagiographic account. Not only was Bonhoeffer’s actual role in the Kirchenkampf, the ecumenical circles, and the resistance overemphasized, the role played by these groups were portrayed far more heroically and clear-cut than it had actually been.

In the decades since, historical research on the German churches, especially the church struggle and the Confessing Church, has given us a very different picture, and yet the popular historical picture of Bonhoeffer and his context remains frozen in time. The historiography shows, for example, that the Nazi state did not try to impose the 1933 Aryan paragraph on the churches and that the attempted nazification of the churches was carried out largely from within. The ensuing internal debates were the focus and framework for most of Bonhoeffer’s theological writings between 1933 and 1939. A side effect of these debates was pervasive caution throughout the Confessing Church about directly confronting the state. As the documents in DBWE indicate, Bonhoeffer had such moments of caution himself, even advising his seminarians in 1939 to fill out Aryan certificates if the state demanded it.

Yet the dominant narrative in most books on Bonhoeffer continues to portray the church struggle as a clear battle that the Confessing Church bravely waged against the Nazi state, rather than the reality, which was an ongoing internal series of disputes within the German Evangelical Church between German Christians, Confessing Church leaders, and so-called “neutral” church leaders. Until the 1980s the persecution and genocide of the Jews was largely ignored in historical works on the churches (and it was not a central theme in the Bethge biography), but as attention to this topic grew, it was simply assumed that concern about the Jews was Bonhoeffer’s primary motivation in opposing Nazism and that Bonhoeffer was far more outspoken on the issue than in fact was the case. That assumption ignores a number of important nuances—notably the distinctions made at the time by church leaders inside and outside Nazi Germany between secular and observant Jews and so-called “non-Aryan Christians” (i.e., Christians of Jewish ancestry who after 1933 were affected by racial laws). As a result, in much of the Bonhoeffer literature the phrase “the Jews” is uniformly applied to everyone affected by the racial laws, including those (like Franz Hildebrandt) who adamantly did not consider themselves to be Jewish.

The purpose of critically engaging such issues is not to pull Bonhoeffer off the pedestal but to understand the complexities that he himself confronted and wrote about. Chandler concluded his review essay by warning that unless the theologians learned from the historians, the DBWE volumes might themselves simply “become an imposing obstacle to a more mature and profound historical understanding of many substantial questions.”

There is now an extensive and more critical body of historical literature (much of it by the editors of this journal) on the German churches and the Holocaust, especially with regard to the Jews, that has definitively repudiated the early hagiography on this topic. There are new studies of sermons, the influence of Luther’s thought during this era, and localized studies of parishes and pastors that give a nuanced portrait of the Confessing Church. There are new theological and historical examinations of the ideological nationalism and antisemitism that shaped many Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox leaders of the period. There are now studies that show a broader, continent-wide phenomenon in which ethnonationalist, explicitly antisemitic forms of Christianity were emerging in other parts of Europe and the Deutsche Christen were simply the German expression of this.

The documents published in DBWE are themselves another possible source of historical information about these larger events.  They give a rare close-up view not just of the individuals and events in the German church struggle as it unfolded, but of the theological debates inside and outside Germany.  Thus it is possible to arrive at new interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s theology from within the opus itself, and there are elements that I think Bethge himself overlooked.

This is precisely where the theologians have something to offer, and where a closer examination of Bonhoeffer’s thought would be fascinating: because Bonhoeffer, while certainly writing within the context of Nazi Germany, was addressing these larger issues.  From early on—partly through his travels, his ecumenical engagement, and his exposure to a variety of cultural and theological perspectives, partly through his dialectical approach, partly through his sheer erudition—he thought in terms of the grand sweep of Christian theology and its intersection and engagement with the world. By the late 1930s he understood what was happening in Nazi Germany as part of a much larger phenomenon, theologically and historically.

The question before us is whether, with the completion of DBWE, these volumes will open the door to that new kind of theological scholarship about Bonhoeffer that seriously engages the historical challenges he faced.

As examples of the new ways in which the DBWE are being used, the three books reviewed here show both the potential for breaking new theological ground as well as some of the aforementioned historical shortcomings. The authors come from theological backgrounds. Charles Marsh is professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1994), a study of the philosophical influences on him, as well as several books on the civil rights movement. Mark Thiessen Nation teaches at Eastern Mennonite University and has authored several works on ethics, pacifism, and the works of John Howard Yoder; Anthony Siegrist teaches at Prairie Bible College and Daniel Umbel, a graduate of Eastern Mennonite University, is a pastor. Reggie Williams teaches Christian ethics at McCormick Theological Seminary and has written a number of articles on race, ethics, black theology, and Bonhoeffer.

Each of these books marks an attempt to break new ground in very distinct genres. Marsh has written a popular biography that focuses both on conveying Bonhoeffer’s theological development as well as offering a more personal picture of him. Nation and his co-authors focus on the development of Bonhoeffer’s pacifist thought, and openly challenge Bethge’s version of Bonhoeffer’s role in the German resistance. Williams examines how Bonhoeffer’s encounter with black theology and the Harlem Renaissance during his 1930/31 study year in New York shaped his larger theological development. (Disclosure: I am personally acquainted with all three authors).

Marsh - StrangeCharles Marsh’s book is an eloquent, well-written portrayal of Bonhoeffer and his theological development from his young student days to the end of his life. Marsh offers two primary re-interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s theological development: one concerns the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr on Bonhoeffer during his year at Union as pushing Bonhoeffer to a more concrete and activist ethics once he returned to Germany. The other is an attempt to show the extent to which Bonhoeffer’s theology was influenced by Judaism, particularly the work of Martin Buber.

Both topics, of course, have implications for understanding Bonhoeffer historically. I found the Niebuhrian connection more convincing; the case for the influence of Judaism is much thinner and Marsh notably avoids the issues raised by Bonhoeffer’s 1933 essay “The Church and the Jewish Question” entirely (he refers to it obliquely while discussing the Bethel confession). Although Bonhoeffer’s postdoctoral dissertation Act and Being makes striking use of the Ich-Du distinction that Buber employed in I and Thou, the interpretation of most Bonhoeffer scholars to date has been that Bonhoeffer meant something quite different than Martin Buber–and it’s worth noting that we don’t know whether Bonhoeffer even had read the book (he didn’t own a copy and nowhere in his writings does he actually cite Buber).  Because these are academic debates of little interest to general readers Marsh doesn’t develop these arguments in depth; on the other hand, precisely because he offers these as new readings of Bonhoeffer’s texts it would have been worth a footnote or two going into more detail to make his case.

Marsh’s primary aim, however, is to render a more personal portrait of Bonhoeffer. A combination of personal reserve and family considerations made Bethge remarkably circumspect about personal anecdotes, and the biography appeared before the era of tell-all biography. The only other sources for such personal glimpses have been Wolf-Dieter Zimmermann’s I knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer with its recollections by various contemporaries, Sabine Leizholz’s memoir of her family, and the published collection of Bonhoeffer’s letters to Maria von Wedemeyer, Love Letters from Cell 92, which did offer readers a completely different and often poignant glimpse of the man behind the theology. In addition to poring through the more personal letters in DBWE, Marsh went through Bethge’s personal papers that are now at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, and he also gives some wonderful more personalized descriptions of the very different circles in which Bonhoeffer moved.

The results are somewhat uneven, although that may be because this is such an ambitious and difficult thing to do. In rearranging the figure-ground relationship of a biography, how does one know what to emphasize, and does the selection of more personal letters obscure the broader sense of the person that can be gotten from other letters?  Much of the early material Marsh cites makes Bonhoeffer seem surprisingly superficial, and yet there are other letters in DBWE (not cited) by the young Bonhoeffer that show a real gravitas, as well as a closeness and respect for his parents and his siblings that is quite moving; both those qualities seem lost here. But there are strong portrayals of his travels, particularly the trip he took through the Deep South at the end of his Union year and the impression made on him by seeing American racism.

The aspect of the book that has drawn the most attention is the portrayal of the friendship to Bethge as a homoerotic one that on Bonhoeffer’s part really was a romantic attachment. It must be said that there are a few letters in DBWE that can be read this way, and in Bethge’s papers Marsh discovered a previously unpublished letter that, in the passage that is quoted, is quite striking. Ultimately, however, such an interpretation remains speculative. The love letters to Maria von Wedemeyer do indicate a real affection and certainly a hope in the possibility of a shared future, and in one of those letters Bonhoeffer actually wrote of his earlier love for Elisabeth Zinn. The relationship (and Bethge himself) can be seen in a broader context if one realizes where Bonhoeffer stood in life at the moment Bethge arrived in Finkenwalde: increasingly marginalized in his church as well as in the ecumenical movement, under growing pressure and surveillance, and tasked with overseeing one of the five Confessing seminaries that had been created in the wake of the 1934 Dahlem synod. Bethge–a steady, unflappable person if there ever was one–came along at the right time and Bonhoeffer soon turned to him for help with running Finkenwalde and increasingly leaned on him as pressures mounted. Reading some of the correspondence, it is possible to conclude that Bonhoeffer was often a demanding friend, but most of their exchanges were intellectual and theological.

The exercise itself is an interesting one that raises broader questions about how to interpret the DBWE texts; by highlighting the more personal and informal elements of some of these documents Marsh shows us a different and in many ways more modest Bonhoeffer. The book’s real contribution may be that by illustrating the personal turning points in Bonhoeffer’s life Marsh illustrates that these were theological turning points. Those theological turning points are often overlooked by historians, and yet as Marsh notes, they were the driving impulse in some of his decisions.

Nation - BonhoefferBonhoeffer the Assassin offers a theological examination of Bonhoeffer’s writings on peace from a pacifist perspective (the authors are Anabaptists). It offers a good summary of these texts, from the early period of the 1930s through the prison period, demonstrating the strong theological continuity from his ecumenical speeches to Discipleship to Ethics that shows the centrality of a peace ethic in Bonhoeffer’s thought. The analysis and insights of these texts from a peace tradition perspective is a genuine contribution to the literature.

The more problematic section of the book is the historical section and its contention that because Bonhoeffer was a committed pacifist, he could not possibly have supported the conspiracy plans to kill Hitler and other Nazi leaders, and that his actual involvement and knowledge of such plans was peripheral.  This section of the book is an attack on Bethge’s historiography. The authors claim that the “myth” of Bonhoeffer as stated in the provocative title emerged directly from Bethge’s portrayal of this period of Bonhoeffer’s life in the biography and that there is actually no evidence in the DBWE documentation to support this version. The authors argue that Bonhoeffer remained opposed to the planned murders of Adolf Hitler and leading Nazis, and that far from playing an actual role in the resistance activities, Bonhoeffer primarily served as pastoral counselor to the conspirators.

They base their argument in part on Sabine Dramm’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Resistance (reviewed in this journal in 2008), but much of their methodology draws directly on the documents in DBWE—as the authors put it, by going directly to Bonhoeffer’s own words and not relying on what they describe as the secondary and erroneous account by Bethge. Dramm did something similar, it should be noted: drawing primarily on the documents in DBWE 16, she argued correctly for a more modest understanding of Bonhoeffer’s entry into and role in the July resistance circles.

Dramm’s outline of events does not contradict Bethge’s account in the biography, but Bethge did emphasize Bonhoeffer’s early knowledge of and support for the conspiracy aims, and this is one of the issues Nation and his co-authors focus on. While it is correct that Bonhoeffer did not write down information about the related discussions in the Bonhoeffer home that took place as early as 1938 (he would have been a fool to do so), there is substantial evidence to support Bethge’s version of things, both in the later accounts of people who knew Bonhoeffer and most particularly in Winfried Meyer’s recent studies of Hans von Dohnanyi and the Abwehr resistance circles, as well as in Marijke Smid’s study of Hans and Christine von Dohnanyi.  By these accounts, Bonhoeffer was Dohnanyi’s most trusted confidant and was informed quite early both about the regime’s atrocities as well as the emerging plans to overthrow the regime.

Moreover there is much evidence in Bonhoeffer’s own writings that contradicts the book’s claims.  Bonhoeffer did in fact speak about “tyrannicide”–in a 1935 study of the Augsburg Confession at Finkenwalde–and he also argued against a simple principled adherence to strict pacifism. Reconciling Bonhoeffer’s writings on peace with his role in the resistance is a challenge that requires an exploration of Bonhoeffer’s pacifism not only through his writings on that topic, but through his writings on ethics and the church/state relationship, with a recognition of the complexity of the circumstances he faced and the decisions he made as a result. Beginning with his deconstruction of the legitimacy of Nazi authority in 1933 and going through to his wartime writings, in fact, the church/state writings offer deep insights into Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the pacifist question.

In his July 1945 eulogy for Bonhoeffer, George Bell said that “deeply committed as he was to the plan for elimination, he was not altogether at ease as a Christian about such a solution.” Bell was in a position to know, since Bonhoeffer had given him information about the intended coup (including the plans to kill Hitler) in 1942 to convey to Anthony Eden. The second part of Bell’s sentence addresses the very dilemma that troubles the authors of this book: how did Bonhoeffer reconcile the conspiracy’s aims with Christian principles? The answer is that he didn’t, and he accepted the full responsibility demanded by such a “boundary situation.” Eberhard Bethge gave a similar reply to Bell’s when I interviewed him about this in 1985, saying that while Bonhoeffer believed that the killing of Hitler and others was necessary he deliberately refused to claim the sanction of the church for this action, saying that this was his personal choice and involved taking a certain guilt upon himself. Bethge’s version was also confirmed by Klaus Bonhoeffer’s widow Emmi when I interviewed her in 1986; she told me that the entire family was unanimous in support of the coup attempt. That might not satisfy doctrinaire thinkers, but I think it is difficult to understand Bonhoeffer fully if we insist on a version of him that ignores such contradictions and complexities.

Here there are insights to be gained from the perspective of contemporaries who were active in pacifist circles and were in fact consistent on the issue– Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, Corder Catchpool, George Bell’s sister-in-law Laura Livingston, many of the people in the Gruber office, and Andre Trocme in Le Chambon. One of Bonhoeffer’s closest friends before Bethge came on the scene was Herbert Jehle, who strongly championed Bonhoeffer’s pacifism in postwar debates about it. So this is an especially complex area where–as with the issue of Bonhoeffer’s engagement in helping for Jews–much could still be written.

Another such area is Bonhoeffer’s encounter with the African-American church and the realities of American racism during his year in New York in 1930-31. Bonhoeffer himself acknowledged the tremendous impact of this experience, writing, “I heard the gospel preached in the Negro churches,” and taking recordings of Negro spirituals back to Germany, where he played them for the somewhat baffled Finkenwalde seminarians. Josiah Young’s 1998 book No Difference in the Fare explored this period, particularly in terms of how it shaped Bonhoeffer’s critique of Nazi ideology.

Williams - BonhoeffersReggie Williams’ Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus builds on Young’s insights but breaks new ground in offering a detailed and vibrant portrait of the Harlem Renaissance that was in full blossom during Bonhoeffer’s time in New York. The course syllabi and reading lists for Bonhoeffer during this time (published in DBWE 10) show that Bonhoeffer read a number of books by black authors like Countee Cullen, and Williams talks about what it was the Bonhoeffer was actually reading, how authors like Cullen and W. E. B. Du Bois thought about racism in the broader sense, and what he would have encountered in the culture at Abyssinian Baptist Church and beyond.

William makes the case that these encounters shaped Bonhoeffer’s subsequent thought about the theological questions that were so central for him: what is church?  And who is Christ today? The breakthrough sections of the book are those that explore the influence of the black theology of the day on Bonhoeffer’s notion of Stellvertretung (“vicarious representative action,” in DBWE) and his ecumenism. Williams argues that the theological insights that emerged from Bonhoeffer’s exposure to the black church shaped his further exploration of ecumenical theological identity beyond strictly European concerns and actually included some of the concerns expressed by African-American thinkers at the time.

Historically, Williams offers new information about Bonhoeffer’s seminary friend Albert Franklin Fisher, the son of a prominent Baptist minister in Birmingham who became Bonhoeffer’s guide to this new world. The book also gives an evocative description of the Harlem Renaissance in its full radicality and rawness (similar to some of Marsh’s descriptions of the south). As in each of these books, there are places here where the historical understanding of Bonhoeffer’s immediate context and the issues he confronted falls short. Williams’s use of colonialization theory in particular sometimes leads him to make sweeping claims about the German church struggle and Bonhoeffer’s theological background. The ethnocentric theology of the German Christians, while it definitely has analogies in some aspects of American racism, included a complex mix of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and certain interpretations of Lutheran tradition that led to some distinctive challenges.

The strengths of all three books rest in the theological sections: Marsh’s tracing of the different influences on Bonhoeffer’s theology and where he took them; Nation, Siegrist, and Umbel in the exploration of the development of his pacifism; Williams’ discussion of how the larger context of the Harlem renaissance inspired both Bonhoeffer’s personal spirituality and broader ecumenism.

The other strength, especially in the books by Marsh and Williams, is the vivid portrait of the worlds in which Bonhoeffer wrote and lived: the travels to Spain and Italy, the time in New York, and the theological debates that shaped Bonhoeffer and his circles. Each author has made a serious attempt to go beyond Bethge–through new information, new interpretations of the documents and the history itself, and in the case of Nation, actually challenging Bethge’s version of the history. All three draw heavily on the lesser-known material that is now available in the new DBWE edition, including material that is less familiar to English-language readers. As one of the general editors of DBWE, I welcome this as the necessary step to bring Bonhoeffer scholarship to a new level.

There is important information in each of these works for historians to consider. Nonetheless, Chandler’s warning that theologians need to consider more recent historical literature remains true; in their historical sections these books reveal the inherent limitations of constructing a historical narrative primarily from within the DBWE opus.

Notes:

[1] Published in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (Jan 2003), 54:1, pp. 89-97.

 

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Review Essay: German Regional Churches Look Back on the Twentieth Century

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Review Essay: German Regional Churches Look Back on the Twentieth Century

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

 

Stephan Linck, Neue Anfänge? Der Umgang der Evangelischen Kirche mit der NS-Vergangenheit und ihr Verhältnis zum Judentum. Die Landeskirchen in Nordelbien. Band 1: 1945-1965 (Kiel: Lutherische Verlagsgesellschaft, 2013). Pp. 352. ISBN 9783875031676.

Antonia Leugers, ed., Zwischen Revolutionsschock und Schulddebatte. Münchner Katholizismus und Protestantismus im 20. Jahrhundert (Saarbrücken: universaar, 2013). Pp. 310. ISBN  9783862230594.

For the past seventy years, Germans in general, and their churches in particular, have wrestled with how to come to terms with their stances during the Nazi period, and especially with their complicity in the mass murder of their fellow citizens of Jewish origin. A no less troubling situation has been their experience in the post-war period, as the political and personal crises of the Cold War preoccupied the German people and divided them into rival political camps.

The books under review examine the record of two regional churches, the first in the area north of the River Elbe and the second in Bavaria. These are both written or compiled by younger church historians, often aghast at what they now see as the misguided attitudes of their forebears in these churches. Their objective is clearly to try to rectify, and if possible to improve, the premises for future church political and theological attitudes, especially towards Judaism.

Linck - NeueIn Neue Anfänge? Der Umgang der Evangelischen Kirche mit der NS-Vergangenheit und ihr Verhältnis zum Judentum. Die Landeskirchen in Nordelbien. Band 1: 1945-1965, Stephan Linck analyses the situation in the four Protestant churches which united in 2012 to form the Evangelical Church of North Elbia. He had earlier organized a travelling exhibition which did much to break the silence about these churches’ failures in former years. His central point is that this part of Germany had a long history of extreme nationalism, backed by Lutheran authoritarianism. This made these congregations particularly susceptible to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and encouraged their extremist and anti-communist attitudes, which were only reinforced in this region after 1945, when so many refugees fled to the region to escape the Russian occupation and the subsequent Communist domination of eastern Europe. These churches’ active support of the refugees’ desire to regain their homelands, in Linck’s view, only exacerbated their reactionary political attitudes and entrenched their prejudices.

Linck’s study, of which this is only the first volume covering up to 1965, analyses the primary factors in determining the churches’ political and social stances towards their Nazi past, which can be characterized as evasion and silence. It was only in 1998 that the North Elbian Synod took the first steps to commission Linck to examine the record of their behavior before and after 1945. This was followed in 2001 by a far-reaching declaration which “recognized our errors, admitted our war guilt, opposed all forms of mission to the Jews, supported Christian-Jewish dialogue and respected the difference between us and Judaism”. Similar sentiments were written into the newly-formed united church’s 2012 constitution. But these were all belated steps taken against considerable opposition from the congregations and many of their leading members.

Linck’s aim is clearly to overcome the legacy of the past in order to combat the ultra-nationalist and xenophobic attitudes of many North Elbian Christians. He is encouraged by the evidence that these attitudes have receded since 1965, and plans to provide a further analysis in his second volume for the period up to 1989.  In the major sections of this present volume, Linck describes in full detail, and with increasing exasperation, the mentalities and the policies adopted  by the leaders of these churches, both clerical and lay, in the immediate post-war years. He quotes, as the basic stance taken by many pastors and their congregations, the view that “Never before has a people who have survived a lost war been so humiliated and placed in a hopeless position as we have today.” Indeed, during these traumatic years, many churchmen’s attitudes were marked by their refusal to acknowledge their complicity in Germany’s war crimes, their total lack of sympathy for the victims apart from themselves, their unwillingness to face up to the enormity of the mass murder of the Jews, or their widespread complaints about the mistreatments allegedly being imposed by the vindictive Allied occupation forces. Among the North Elbian church hierarchies, there was widespread reluctance to admit Germany’s war guilt, along with the evasion of personal responsibility and the white-washing of many leaders’ pro-Nazi activities. These were challenged by only a handful of isolated and prophetic voices. At the insistence of the Allies’ investigating commissions, all active Nazi Party members were to be dismissed from their posts. But the churches were allowed to denazify their own structures. This in fact led to a lenient and self-interested defence of those pastors who had been strident supporters of the former regime, and who were merely invited to take early retirement, lest they suffer worse penalties. In many cases these men were reinstated after a few years, apparently with the full approval of their congregations. Another problem was the widespread negative feelings towards the members of the German Resistance movement. The only pastor in the north German region who was arrested and subsequently executed by the Gestapo was regarded after the war not as a hero but as an embarrassing maverick, then forgotten. The reforming initiatives taken by other branches of the Protestant Church were either sidelined or ignored. Only in a few isolated and exceptional cases were pastors willing to take steps to encourage a spirit of reconciliation and repentance for the past.

Leugers - ZwischenThese same features were on display in the Bavarian Protestant Church, too. They are the subject of Björn Mensing’s chapter in the collection of essays edited by Antonia Leugers, entitled Zwischen Revolutionsschock und Schulddebatte. Münchner Katholizismus und Protestantismus im 20. Jahrhundert.   Mensing also comments acerbically on the apologetic and self-serving accounts of Bavarian Protestantism written by survivors, which excused the early and enthusiastic support given to Adolf Hitler as stemming from a desire to prevent a victory for Communism and as a sign of the “rechristianising” of a war-torn Germany. Those few voices calling for a more critical and less self-justifying account of the Nazi years were quickly sidelined. So too those who had been involved in the 1944 plot to overthrow Hitler and had been executed as a result, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were regarded by the majority of the Bavarian Protestant leaders as “traitors to the national cause”. Mensing, who is now the Pastor of the Church of Reconciliation erected in the former concentration camp at Dachau, recounts with some bitterness the opposition to the building of this chapel by the former pro-Nazi pastor of the neighboring parish, clearly backed by the majority of his parishioners. It was only after the generation of participants in the Nazi years had all passed from the scene that a more fitting recognition of the church’s failures and a new sense of repentance could be encouraged. Mensing blames the continuing influence of the conservative leadership in the Bavarian Protestant Church for the slowness with which a greater sense of repentance and reconciliation has at last been adopted. But in view of the entrenched national conservatism of most Bavarian Protestants, Mensing  believes there is still a long way to go before the deficiencies of the past can be finally laid to rest.

Other essays in this collection deal with the experience of Catholics in Bavaria from 1919 onwards.  The editor, Antonia Leugers, is a junior member of the Catholic Faculty of Theology at Tübingen University, where once Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and the intrepid scholar Hans Kung both taught. Leugers’ own essay provides more insights about the attitudes in 1918-9 of the Cardinal Archbishop of Munich, Michael von Faulhaber, drawn from his recently opened diaries for this period. These sources confirm the already established view that Faulhaber’s deeply conservative and monarchist sympathies were shattered by the events in Munich in those revolutionary months. Not surprisingly, he saw these alarming events as a deliberate challenge to his vision of a Christian-led authority, and readily enough accepted the stereotypes of “the barbarous Bolshevik hordes” whose attempts to overthrow the existing order were at least partly inspired by the fact that many were Jewish communists inspired by the revolutionary successes in the Soviet Union. Faulhaber’s subsequent political views were, in Leugers’s opinion, largely influenced by his experiences in those traumatic days.

In a second article, Leugers follows Faulhaber’s mixed utterances during the 1920s on the subject of international peace. On the one hand he called on Catholics to support world peace efforts, but on the other he deplored the actions of the victorious allies in imposing on Germany the unjustifiably vindictive terms of the Versailles Treaty. He also took issue with the decision of the French government to station black African troops in their zone of occupation in the Rhineland, which aroused enormous hostility, and led to a campaign against the so-called “Rhineland  bastards”. Such racially-based resentments only played directly into the hands of the newly-formed Nazi Party. Indeed, Adolf Hitler frequently quoted Faulhaber’s views, which probably was the basis for his later cordial meeting with the Cardinal in November 1936, when both agreed on their common hostility to Communism.

A parallel article by Axel Töllner describes the very similar reactions of the Bavarian Protestant press, which equally mourned the loss of the monarchy, deplored the moves made by the new Education Minister to sever the links with the churches and remove all church subsidies, and welcomed the forcible restoration of a conservative government in May 1919.  At the same time, these press organs gave little or no support to the democratic impulses in the  Weimar Republic, but clearly preferred authoritarian governance.     Hence they were already susceptible to the kind of propaganda shortly to be launched by the Nazi Party in Bavaria with ever increasing success.

In a second article, Töllner describes the perverse influence during this period of Erich and Matthilde Ludendorff. Ludendorff had been one of Germany’s leading general during the war but was subsequently misled by his wife to break with his Protestant upbringing and to establish the Tannenberg League as a centre for the propagation of belief in a German God, combined with radical nationalism. Ludendorff used his considerable prestige to wage a violent anti-Christian and anti-Semitic campaign, which included the assertion that Germany’s defeat in 1918 and its subsequent enslavement had been due to an unholy alliance of Jesuits, Freemasons and Jews. Despite the similarity of views with those of the more radical Nazis, the Ludendorffs openly criticized Hitler for his “capitulation” to the Vatican in signing the 1933 Concordat. That same year, the Tanneberg League was prohibited.  A reconciliation only followed when Ludendorff died in 1937 and Hitler ordered him to be given a state funeral. The churches demonstrated their loyalty to the Führer by having their buildings fly the swastika national flag. In the 1940s, the Nazis’ prohibition was thrown out and Matthilde Ludendorff resumed her sectarian campaigns. At the time of her death if 1966, her group had apparently some 400 adherents.

Thomas Forstner provides a useful overview of German Catholic attitudes since 1945 about their experiences under the Nazi regime. To begin with, their leaders depicted the Catholics as being resolutely opposed to Nazism, a view conveniently also adopted by the Western Allies. The bishops’ early pastoral letters talked of Catholics being the victims of a clique of criminals who had seized power and inflicted their anti-Christian views on the nation. Where Catholics had collaborated, this was due to their feelings of loyalty and to their innocence in political affairs. Any accusation of collective guilt had therefore to be rejected. Such an idealization of the recent past left no room for a more critical examination of Catholic complicity in the Nazis’ crimes, and so it was passed over in silence. It also gave opportunities for favourable treatment of former Nazis, especially if they rejoined the Catholic ranks. Priests only too readily provided letters of exculpation, which then served to consolidate the conservative forces dedicated to averting the dangers of communism or socialism in post-war Germany. The victims of Nazi crimes and injustices were largely forgotten or ignored.

This favourable view of the Catholic Church’s record during the Nazi years was later supported by the large-scale academic productions of the Catholic Commission for Contemporary History. In the 1960s, however, such apologetic accounts were challenged, most strikingly by the 1963 production of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy, which accused the then Pope Pius XII and by implication the entire Catholic hierarchy of failing to stand by the Nazis’ victims, and of being interested solely in preserving  the church’s own institutional life. Such protests were frequently regarded by leading Catholics as designed to weaken the political hold of conservative Catholicism, as established since 1949 under the Catholic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Left-wing Catholics in West Germany had continually to contend with accusations that they were sympathetic to the Communists in East Germany. The collapse of the latter regime in 1989 was taken as an indication of the correctness and validity of conservative and nationalistic Catholicism.

In the most recent years, in Forstner’s view, there has been a tendency to compensate for the lack of support for the Jews during the Holocaust by stressing the religious commemoration of Catholic converts such as Edith Stein, murdered in Auschwitz in 1942 and declared a saint nearly sixty years later. Similar attempts to canonize Pope Pius XII have so far not succeeded. In Forstner’s opinion, such encouragement of martyrology rather than accurate history-writing is a mistake and will not increase the credibility or reputation of the Catholic Church in a now largely secularized world.

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Review of Edward Madigan, Faith under Fire: Anglican Army Chaplains and the Great War

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Edward Madigan, Faith under Fire: Anglican Army Chaplains and the Great War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Ix+296 Pp. ISBN 978-0-230-23745-2.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The first casualty of the Great War, beginning in August 1914, was the wave of patriotic enthusiasm, which led thousands of men, in all European countries, to volunteer for active combat. They expected that the conflict would be short, sharp and victorious, and that they would be home by Christmas. They had also been led to believe that victory would be theirs because God was on their side. But when the fighting began in the muddy fields of Flanders, the resulting death and devastation was disillusioning both militarily and spiritually. For many, if not for most of these eager recruits, one of the salient consequences was that the credibility of the Christian gospel, as preached by the army chaplains, was tested and often found wanting.

madigan - faithEdward Madigan’s valuable study begins with a comprehensive survey of the literature about chaplains and their war-time contributions, some written by chaplains themselves, such a Ernest Raymond’s Tell England, or the far more influential novel by Robert Graves, Goodbye to all That. Many of these books presented a largely negative picture of the war records of these chaplains, finding that they were generally not respected by either officers or men, being considered inadequate to the tasks they faced.

Such critical, or even cynical, assessments in the post-war period only accelerated the decline in the fortunes of the Church of England, which has since proved irreversible. Madigan’s book seeks to examine more closely how far these pejorative judgments are supported by the surviving archival sources.

In his view, the Anglican chaplaincy service was handicapped from the beginning by serious obstacles, both civilian and military. The War Office, to be sure, had an establishment of a Chaplain-General–a Presbyterian–with a limited staff of regular army officers. But the Army High Command thought in terms of a short, mobile professional-conducted campaign, and were therefore reluctant to have the services of any non-combatants anywhere near the front lines. They were unwelcoming of the large number of civilian clergy–and amateur soldiers–who now offered their services as volunteer chaplains. As such, they would have to be given officer status, which meant that each would have to be provided with a servant, a horse, a groom, and space for extra luggage, not to mention basic food and shelter, but none of whom would actually do any shooting. As such they were seen as an unaffordable luxury whose number were best kept to a minimum.

At the same time, the Church of England bishops were reluctant to release men from their parish duties to undertake military activities, for which, despite their eagerness, they had no training. The bishops held that participation in front-line fighting contradicted not only the Ten Commandments but also their ordination vows. Very obviously, none of these potential chaplains had any pastoral experience of war-time conditions, and most had lost touch with the generation of young men, especially from the working classes. Their status as officers, and their clerical training mostly as university graduates, created social barriers which limited their effectiveness. Furthermore, the Army’s reluctance to let them get anywhere near the front lines was a cause for resentment among the troops. They were often relegated to rear echelons or hospitals, and were often suspected of being too lily-livered to actually fight. In these same rear areas, these clergymen were often confronted with restless, sex-starved soldiers, who were eager enough to sample the military-established or at least-tolerated brothels as a relief from the deadly dangers of the trenches. The chaplains’ pious exhortations to maintain standards of decency often fell on deaf, mocking ears.

Only slowly did the War Office realize the value of the chaplains’ contributions to building and maintaining morale, or appreciate their pastoral care for the wounded or the dying. But the chaplains themselves often felt they remained outsiders. Their high hopes that the Church’s witness to the troops, and its evident support for the war effort, would lead to a large-scale return to church worship and attendance were to be sadly disappointed. The example set by many chaplains of diligent and inspiring service was not enough to staunch the post-war ebbing away of the Church’s following, or to reverse the war-induced skepticism about the Church’s message.

As Madigan makes clear, many of the chaplains themselves entertained unrealistic expectations. They had had no previous exposure to the dehumanizing effects of battle combat, so their idealistic optimism was easily shattered. They were unprepared to meet the difficult circumstances in which their religious ministrations were often rejected or regarded as irrelevant. The majority of the troops demonstrated apathy, indifference or even hostility to organized religion. The army’s compulsory church parades were particularly resented. There was little or no sign of any spiritual revival. Such conditions presented an acute challenge which few chaplains were able to deal with successfully.

The result was often loneliness and isolation, making it hard for the chaplains to get alongside the men in the ranks. The situation was only reinforced by the lack of training for service among men under intense moral and physical stress. Only in the later stages of the war were these defects overcome, but they did little to tackle the wider questions about the incompatibility of war itself with the Christian gospel.

Madigan does his best to amend the pejorative views of the chaplains’ services as expressed in later memoirs. He produces the evidence of laudatory testimonies from their superior officers, and points to the number of chaplain decorated for their war-time accomplishments. But he is obliged to note that while many chaplains were respected and well-liked, this was in spite of, not because of their status as priests and representatives of the Established Church. He also notes that their hard-hewn skills at providing comfort and inspiring courage in front-line troops were qualities not much in demand in post-war Britain.

The fact was that the horrors, tensions and bloodshed on the battlefields destroyed faith in a beneficent God for many men, including chaplains. They were overcome by the atmosphere of death and devastation, and adopted a grim fatalism, which made more bearable the impotence and insignificance of the individual soldier. And yet, Madigan points to the unspoken, virtually unrecognized fact that many soldiers adhered to an “essential” or “unconscious” Christianity and to deep-seated beliefs in the goodness of man. It was these manifestations of self-sacrifice, fraternity, charity and humility which enabled them to cope with the strains of trench warfare. It was a vague but real faith.

After the Armistice, the veterans returned home and were treated as heroes. But Britain was far from being a place fit for heroes to live in. The reforms in both church and state which many chaplains longed for never came. There was much disillusionment. But, in his final chapter, Madigan describes some of the more progressive initiatives arising from the chaplains’ war experiences. Dick Sheppard at St Martin’s-in–the-Field in Trafalgar Square, “Tubby” Clayton and his Toc H fraternity, Studdert Kennedy and his Industrial Christian Fellowship, and William Temple and the Life and Liberty Movement, evoked new and reforming images of the serving church. These post-war social service organizations owed much to the former chaplains’ charisma, and were testimony of their founders’ determination to improve the lot of their fellow combatants. They now had the advantage of a much improved familiarity with working-class men, and an enhanced sympathy for their interests and welfare. These contributions were not therefore just to the Church but to society as a whole.

In Madigan’s view, the negative representations of chaplains in post-war literature seem unwarranted and biased. His book will undoubtedly help to dispel the myth of insincere or cowardly parsons, who indulged in un-Christian demonization or preached hatred of the enemy. Instead he tells the story of chaplains who ministered effectively to men in extreme conditions, and who drew from these experiences the strength to serve both church and state in their post-war careers.

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Conference Report: “Karl Barth, The Jews, and Judaism”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Conference Report: “Karl Barth, The Jews, and Judaism,” 2014 Annual Karl Barth Conference, Princeton Theological Seminary, June 15-18, 2014.

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

The connections and tensions between Karl Barth’s theological approach to Judaism, his stands on the Aryan paragraph in the early period of the German Kirchenkampf, and their greater implication for the entire period of Nazism and the Holocaust have been explored by theologians and historians alike. Barth is often compared unfavorably with Bonhoeffer on this point, primarily because of the different position he took in September 1933 as to whether the time had come to break with the German Evangelical Church, which at the its General Synod had just passed an Aryan paragraph that would apply to clergy. In a letter to Barth, Bonhoeffer urged such a break; Barth’s reply of September 11, 1933, urged caution at that particular moment, arguing that the best tactic was to fight from within (“we must be among the last actually to leave the sinking ship”). That position has been strongly criticized, particularly in Wolfgang Gerlach’s work on the Confessing Church, and has led to a general assumption that Bonhoeffer was clearer than Barth on this issue not only in the Kirchenkampf  but in his general political critique of Nazism. At the same time, the theological centrality of Israel in Barth’s thought made it foundational in his opposition to the German Christians and Nazism. Eberhard Busch, the dean of Barth scholars, as well as theologians like Mark Lindsay have long argued that Barth’s theological approach to Israel needs to be taken into account in any analysis and conclusions about his role between 1933-1945.

This issue was the theme for this year’s annual Barth conference at Princeton Theological Seminary. While the focus of many of the plenary and session papers was on Barth’s theology, there were several historical papers, including my own plenary remarks. Other plenary presentations included remarks by leading Barthians Eberhard Busch, Mark Lindsay, and George Hunsinger, and papers by Ellen Charry (Professor of Theology at Princeton), who has done much work in this area, as well as two leading Jewish scholars, David Novak (Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Toronto) and Peter Ochs (Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at The University of Virginia).

The result was a far-reaching discussion that covered a great deal of theological and historical territory. In my own paper I focused on Barth’s significance for the early postwar interfaith circles. Barth’s theology of Israel influenced several of the early interfaith pioneers of Jewish-Christian relations. People like Karl Thieme and John Oesterreicher began to incorporate this theology into their thought during the 1930s, and Barth was invited to attend the 1947 Seelisberg meeting of the International Conference of Christians and Jews (Barth was unable to attend). Barth’s student Friedrich Wilhelm Marquardt brought Barthian theology to bear on postwar Jewish-Christian dialogues in Germany. In addition, Barth’s outspoken support for the war against Nazi Germany and his connections to Swiss refugee and German resistance groups (not only his Bonhoeffer connection, but his active support for the activities of Gertrud Staewen and the Kaufmann resistance circle, and the cover letter he signed with Willem Visser ‘t Hooft, Emil Brunner, and Paul Vogt for the Auschwitz Protocol, a 1944 document with details about the death camps that was sent to international leaders) led to postwar invitations to dialogue with Jewish groups.

Eberhard Busch traced Barth’s development both historically and theologically, noting that Barth was incorporating the theology of scholars like Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber during the 1920s; in turn German Jewish thinkers like Emil Bernhard Cohn and Leo Baeck read and engaged Barth in conversation. Even before 1933 Barth was critical of the strong anti-Judaism in German Protestant theology. His attack on völkisch theology was based on three points that were central in his own theology: the notion that Christianity constituted a completely new religion, the rejection of Judaism as a result, and the “orders of creation” theological understanding of God’s law. Busch argued that this led to a theological clarity about Judaism that went beyond that of Bonhoeffer.

David Novak offered an overview of some of the key elements of Barth’s theology that have opened the door to Jewish-Christian conversation, notably his understanding of the law and his emphasis on Christianity’s continuities with Israel. Novak observed that Barth demands that Jews address Christians precisely as Jews, which changes the conversation and makes it possible for Jewish thinkers to engage with Barth’s work in a deeper way. Peter Ochs explored Barth’s interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures and Judaism, noting both the ways in which a Christian (particularly a Christocentric) interpretation of these texts is necessarily supersessionist and yet because Barth affirms the Tanakh there are ways to engage. Nonetheless, the interpretation of these texts from within Judaism itself will always differ from the Christian approach, which references and interprets them retrospectively from the theological standpoint of the Christian gospels.

Ellen Charry offered a much more critical analysis of Barth’s understanding of Christianity, both in light of his Christology and particularly his interpretation of Romans. In viewing the Jews as a people essentially “elected for rejection,” she noted, Barth’s support for modern Judaism was grounded in the supersessionist notion that their existence served the church and the Christian understanding of salvation. Mark Lindsay, author of the recent Reading Auschwitz with Barth: The Holocaust as Problem and Promise for Barthian Theology, acknowledged some of these elements in Barth’s thought, yet argued that because of the continuities he draws from Judaism to Christianity, there are opportunities for post-Holocaust theologians to engage with Barth.

There were several other conference papers of particular interest to historians, including a presentation on the Baptists responses to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, particular the statements that emerged from the 1934 International Baptist Congress held in Berlin by Lee B. Spitzer (an American Baptist scholar in New Jersey); a study of Confessing Church pastor and postwar theologian Helmut Gollwitzer’s understanding of Judaism by W. Travis McMaken (who teaches religion at Lindenwood University); a paper on Hans-Joachim Schoeps by David Dessin (University of Antwerp); and an overview of Barth’s encounters with Judaism in America (Jessica DeCou, University of Basel). In the concluding conference remarks, George Hunsinger (Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton and director of the Barth Center there) stated that the influence of Barth’s theology has shaped Christian understandings of Judaism in a way that does not undo the damage of Christian antisemitism but opens the way for other conversations. The publication of the conference presentations is being planned.

 

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Article Note: Luke Fenwick, “The Protestant Churches in Saxony-Anhalt in the Shadow of the German Christian Movement and National Socialism, 1945-1949”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Article Note: Luke Fenwick, “The Protestant Churches in Saxony-Anhalt in the Shadow of the German Christian Movement and National Socialism, 1945-1949,” Church History 82, no. 4 (December 2013): 877-903.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

In the years immediately following the Second World War, the denazification of the German churches exhibited many of the same shortcomings as denazification in the broader society.  Church leaders rarely acknowledged the complicity of their institutions during the Third Reich, and many former supporters of Nazism remained in positions of authority in the postwar era.  The broad contours of this story are well-known, but there is still a need for further research on regional and local variations, and this is where Luke Fenwick’s article makes an important contribution.  His close analysis of the postwar “self-purification” of two regional Protestant churches in Saxony-Anhalt reveals diverse motives and priorities among key players as well as the continuation of the “church struggle” under new circumstances.

In his analysis of the Church Province of Saxony, Fenwick notes that in 1946, 170 of the approximately 1400 pastors and other church employees were former members of the German Christian Movement or the Nazi Party.  The regional church administration dismissed only four of these pastors, while four others were placed on probation, six were transferred, and ninety were encouraged to participate in re-education seminars.  Not surprisingly, state authorities found these measures to be insufficient.  However, religious leaders insisted that the Church Province had been a bastion of resistance against Nazism, the state had no right to interfere in church affairs, and church policy had to be oriented around forgiveness rather than vengeance.  Fenwick argues that an additional, unacknowledged motive was simply the need to maintain adequate staffing at the parish level.

The State Church of Anhalt had a different history and followed a slightly different path forward.  About half of the pastors in this regional church had belonged to the most radical faction within the German Christian Movement.  The postwar church administration established a commission to determine which of those clergy had been “activists” and which had been purely “nominal” affiliates, and by May 1946 it had dismissed ten pastors and transferred six others.  In addition to mandatory re-education for former members of the German Christian Movement, church authorities required individual declarations of repentance from those who hoped to remain in office.  Overall, denazification in Anhalt was as lenient as in the Church Province of Saxony, yet in this case state authorities expressed their approval rather than their displeasure, because they had been consulted throughout the process.

Fenwick draws a number of important conclusions from his study of these two regional churches.  He confirms for the Soviet zone what Doris Bergen (Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich)found to be true in the American zone—that a more accurate description of clerical denazification would be “de-German-Christianization.”  Though both regional churches were now controlled by former Confessing Church members, these postwar leaders were willing to leave former German Christians in office for the sake of church unity, pastoral care and evangelization—so long as they submitted to the new church regime and its theology.  However, church unity was elusive.  On the one hand, Confessing Church pastors complained that former German Christians were still in the pulpit.  Some also invoked their Confessing Church credentials to gain advantage when competing for positions or when in conflict with other clergy.  On the other hand, ordinary parishioners were inclined to protest the dismissal or transfer of clergy, for personal rapport often mattered more to them than whether their pastor had supported the German Christian Movement.

Fenwick’s article focuses primarily on the highest levels of authority in the two regional churches, but some of the most provocative illustrations revolve around individual pastors and their parishioners.  For example, we see Pastor Erich Elster (Dessau-Ziebigk) explain his former affiliation with the German Christians in such a way as to satisfy the Anhalt church council, and we see Pastor K. at the church of St. Martin continue to preach nationalistic sermons and use the German Christian hymn book until he is transferred in 1946 (much to the dismay of his congregation).  The local particularities and variations revealed by such examples suggest that additional research on denazification at the parish level would yield important insights.

 

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Article Note: On Christian Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Article Note: On Christian Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Robert Morgan, “Susannah Heschel’s Aryan Grundmann,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 32, no. 4 (June 1, 2010): 431–94.

Susannah Heschel, “Historiography of Antisemitism versus Anti-Judaism: A Response to Robert Morgan,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33, no. 3 (March 1, 2011): 257–79.

Many of our readers will be familiar with Susannah Heschel’s important and widely-reviewed work, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Fewer may know of these two articles from the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, which take up the long-standing debate over the use of “anti-Judaism” and “antisemitism” in the context of Christian hostility towards Jews and Judaism, whether in pre-modern Christian history or in the history of the Holocaust. This exchange between New Testament scholar Robert Morgan and Jewish Studies scholar Susannah Heschel highlights key disciplinary differences between theological and historical approaches to this question. Morgan hopes to distinguish between various theoretical categories of Jew hatred, while Heschel focuses on the historical confluence of theological, cultural, and racial attitudes and language of hostility towards Jews.

In his sixty-page critique of Heschel’s book, Morgan argues that The Aryan Jesus presents a one-sided impression of 1930s German church history,” based on a “failure to distinguish clearly between the churches and the völkisch movement that stands behind Nazi antisemitism.” (431) In contrast to her, he makes the case for a conceptual distinction between medieval Christian antisemitism, theological anti-Judaism, and modern secular antisemitism.

Morgan minimizes the connection between modern German theological developments and the participation of masses of German Protestants and Catholics in the Holocaust–simply put, for Morgan, the failure of Christians of the Nazi period to live up to their beliefs was nothing unusual in the history of Christianity, and didn’t require an associated failure of theology. In that vein, he argues that the efforts of theologian Walter Grundmann and his Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (established in 1939) had little if anything to do with the Holocaust (434).

With this as his starting point, Morgan raises the broader question of the historical relationship between theological anti-Judasim and secular antisemitism. His answer revolves around setting theological scholars like Grundmann and those involved in the Institute, who “introduced the racial issue into their older liberal Protestant theology,” into a separate category from the masses of Christians who supported the Hitler movement during and after 1933. He maintains that Heschel fails to examine Grundmann’s theological context in sufficient detail or to assess carefully enough his relationship to and responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust.

In contrast, Morgan argues that the Institute was an outgrowth of a particular radical Thuringian wing of the German Christian Movement. Apart from this development, most Germans were caught up in “a pervasive antisemitism” which was fueled by factors like “nationalism, hostility to modernity, to secularism, to left-wing politics, resentment against rich bankers at a time of national distress, and a perceived disproportionate influence of assimilated Jews in the professions and national life. But little of this passive antisemitism was ideologically driven, as it was in the völkisch movement and its political expression in the National Socialist party” (441). Morgan goes on to distinguish what he calls “this (passive) cultural antisemitism” from both “the more aggressive völkisch racist antisemitism” and “theological anti-Judaism” (441). Morgan admits that “some modern antisemitism surely included religious and tribal echoes and memories along with its more obvious social, political and economic ingredients,” but argues we still need more investigation about “how far (when at all) it was fuelled by theological anti-Judaism” (441). As a way to distinguish between older and newer eras, he introduces a new term for medieval and Reformation-era Jew hatred, which he calls “theological antisemitism,” and which occurs “where monstrous religious beliefs such as the guilt and curse of Israel for the death of Christ lead directly to antisemitism.” Moving forward to the Nazi era, Morgan argues that theologians like Grundmann and Gerhard Kittel were not guilty of this “medieval ‘theological antisemitism'” but rather promoted a “poisonous modern antisemitism” which was “distinct from the results of their New Testament scholarship” (441). Their scholarship, which contained a measure of “theological anti-Judaism,” was “less inflammatory, and concerned with Christian self-definition, not (in principle) defamation of Judaism” (441-442).

What emerges from this detailed process of categorization is the sense that Morgan would like to rescue the term “theological anti-Judaism” and redefine it to mean simply the disagreement of Christians with Jews concerning the one God they both worship–in other words, criticisms of the religion, not the people. As an example of his granular approach to categories of hostility towards Jews and Judaism, Morgan describes the Confessing Church leader Martin Niemöller as “untouched by racial theory,” but sharing in “the pervasive cultural antisemitism of the time, which was presumably reinforced by the tradition of Christian theological anti-Judaism and even contained residual traces of ‘theological antisemitism’.” This was, Morgan adds, “social and cultural non-violent antisemitism” (444).

Morgan continues in this vein throughout the rest of the article, criticizing Heschel for not distinguishing clearly between various scholarly theological developments, cultural antisemitism, the rise of the völkisch movement and Nazi party, nationalism, and racism (461). He is willing to admit to the indirect influence of theology on popular belief, but attempts to keep these areas as distinct as possible (465). In his conclusion, he reasserts that Heschel has not properly demonstrated the “contributions of theological anti-Judaism to Christian antisemitism,” that Christianity is not racialist, nor a kind of anti-Judaism, nor antisemitic, though Christians themselves have acted in those ways (488-489).

Not surprisingly, Heschel disagrees with Morgan’s critique, particularly with respect to his categories of theological anti-Judaism, and modern, racial antisemitism. In her article, she argues “that the texts of pro-Nazi German Protestant theologians integrate race and religion with a fluidity that obviates a sharp distinction between the two terms. Antisemitic propaganda produced by Christian theologians during World War II leaves the strictly theological realm in its use of Nazi language and concepts, even when framed in a Christian context, and demands a different kind of conceptualization by historians” (257).

In the first instance, Heschel highlights the significant difference between her approach and that of Morgan, noting how she and many other scholars “no longer find the distinction between theological anti-Judaism and antisemitism to be helpful.” She argues this categorization tends to “mask rather than illuminate the historical material we are studying,” and that she and many other scholars are now “less interested in establishing definitions and boundaries than in finding slippages, similarities, influences and parallels” (258). More concretely, Heschel demonstrates how intertwined Christian and Nazi racial ideas were with one another. For instance, she characterizes Morgan’s view that Martin Niemöller exhibited cultural antisemitism, theological anti-Judaism, and theological antisemitism as “quite a brew” (258). To drive this home, she asks how we should understand the mixture of ideas in the speech of Siegfried Leffler, a well-known leader in the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, who stated in 1936: “Even if I know ‘thou shalt not kill’ is a commandment of God or ‘thou shalt love the Jew’ because he too is a child of the eternal Father, I am able to know as well that I have to kill him, I have to shoot him, and I can only do that if I am permitted to say: Christ” (258-259). Simply put, Heschel doesn’t find Morgan’s taxonomy useful as a means to historical explanation. Instead, she points out how the historical context of Leffler’s words–the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws prohibiting sexual relations between “Aryan” Germans and Jews and the widespread fear-mongering about the dangers of Jewish impurity–goes a long ways to explaining the passion in Leffler’s outburst against the dangers of Jews and Judaism for German Christianity.

Heschel also questions Morgan’s chronological differentiation between anti-Judaism and antisemitism, with theological anti-Judaism giving way to secular racism and antisemitism. Indeed, she notes how this view has been abandoned by many scholars, who prefer to describe all hostility to Jews and Judaism as antisemitism. Religious hostility, which might be called anti-Judaism, is just another kind of antisemitic discourse, alongside economic, political, nationalistic, or racial modes of speech. For instance, Heschel quotes a New Testament scholar, who explained: “The problem is that even in the patristic and medieval eras, long before the coinage of the term antisemitism as such, it is almost impossible to distinguish between the racial and religious/ethnic elements. Form many of these authors, as I’ve seen in my Caiaphas research, Jews were by their nature evil, and their rejection/killing of Christ is evidence of that evil nature” (260). Heschel adds that racial language and imagery were used to describe Jewish degeneracy in the Middle Ages, creating “an otherness of the Jewish body … that, already by the thirteenth century, was believed to be immutable and incapable of erasure even by baptism” (260).

As for the Nazi era, Heschel lists four reasons why scholars increasingly employ “antisemitism” to describe Christian hostility to Jews and Judaism: 1) explicitly Nazi language plays a central role in Christian discussions of Jews, while older terms took on new connotations in the Third Reich; 2) negative theological statements about Jews have to be understood in their wider social and political context; 3) “‘das Judentum’ is an ambiguous term in German,” meaning “Judaism, the Jews, or Jewishness,” which in turn creates an ambiguity in German theological language; and 4) “given the Nazi regime’s policies towards the Jews, terms such as ‘Entjudung’ (dejudaization) of Christianity or ‘Beseitigung’ (eradication) of Jewish influences insinuate practical implications and not just theoretical allusions” (261).

Heschel goes on to criticize Morgan for an outdated historical understanding of the German Christian Movement and an outdated theoretical understanding of the relationship between racism and nationalism, providing examples to show how racially-oriented German Protestant leaders were. For instance, she notes how Walter Grundmann “spoke about fighting on the ‘spiritual battlefield’ to protect Germans from Jews, Christianity from Judaism,” how he described “Jews as the underlying enemy of Germany,” and how he wrote that “‘the Jew’ is ‘the Antichrist [who] wants to unleash itself and overthrow the Reich’ through the war, Bolshevism and liberalism” (264). Heschel adds that this mixture of theological and racial antisemitism can be found in Grundmann’s scholarly and popular writing, making it impossible to separate his words and ideas into different categories of antisemitism.

Heschel restates the interpretation she puts forward in The Aryan Jesus: Grundmann and his colleagues “were theologians predisposed to accept the nationalism, antisemitism, anti-liberalism and anti-Bolshevism of Hitler and to view politics through religious lenses.” They viewed Nazism as a means to revitalize Christianity and sought to support Nazism with spiritual means. “To that end, Nazism had to be defined as embodying Christian values, and Christianity as embodying Nazi values.” They sought “to eradicate Jewishness from Christianity, just as the Reich sought to eradicate Jews from Europe” (265). And Nazi theologians need to be understood not only in their theological context, but also in their political and social context. She illustrates this last point by reminding Morgan (and her readers) of the wide-ranging evidence of Grundmann’s Nazi affinities and activities and the broad consensus of scholars such as Robert Ericksen, Guenter Lewy, and Kevin Spicer. In the end, Grundmann and his theological allies provided Hitler with ideological and propaganda support for “the disenfranchisement, deportation, and murder of the Jews,” (268) just as so many other academics and functionaries did throughout German institutional life.

To summarize, Heschel argues persuasively that the older distinction between theological anti-Judaism and racial antisemitism is increasingly difficult to sustain, given current scholarship on either historic Christianity or the churches in the Third Reich. This is certainly the interpretive path most historians now follow. Taken together, the Morgan and Heschel articles outline the two main perspectives in this terminological debate.

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Reflection on Pastor Christian Führer of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Reflection on Pastor Christian Führer of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig

By Roger Newell, George Fox University

Pastor Christian Führer of the Nikolai Church in Leipzig, the founding organizer of the famous peace prayers in the 1980s, died on 30 June, at the age of seventy-one. Not long ago, Professor Roger Newell of George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon took a party of students to visit sites of special significance in European Church history. One of their stops was in Leipzig, about which he reported as follows:

We were welcomed by the good Pastor who led us straight into the church, right up to the main altar, explaining that this was formerly reserved for the priests in centuries past, but now was open to everyone. There we got a short tour of the church building, its history and the tradition of music (including the link with J.S. Bach, who functioned mainly in the nearby Thomaskirche). Then he took us to the adjacent priests’ vestry, where he told us the story of his ministry beginning in the early 1980s.  He reminded us that it was a time of increasing tension between East and West. The Cold War’s trench cut Germany in half.  On both sides of the Berlin Wall, Germans grew increasingly anxious that Germany could become the battleground for Europe’s third war in this century.  At the same time, what was then the government of East Germany vastly increased its police-state controls through its secret policy (the Stasi) which deployed a huge force backed by unofficial collaborators to keep tabs on any possible opponents and dissidents.  It made for a highly oppressive situation where suspicion and mistrust reigned.

This was the brooding climate in which Pastor Führer opened the doors of the church to young people anxious to discuss such things.  The initial gathering took place in 1981 when Pastor Führer invited people with concerns about peace and the arms race to meet at the Church late in the evening (possibly to avoid Stasi attention).  He expected maybe ten or so people to come and let off some steam. But to his astonishment ten times that number showed up. They were mostly young, many of them dissidents who were not getting along with the Communist government.

Next, Führer described how he brought everyone right to the central altar, sat them on the floor of the church  and laid a large rough wooden cross on the floor in their midst. He asked everyone who wanted to raise a point to take a candle, light it, and speak to their concern as they placed their candle around the cross.  If the dissidents were surprised to find themselves at an old-fashioned prayer meeting, it was Pastor Führer’s turn to be surprised when every single person lit a candle, spoke a concern and shared in what turned out to be the most significant prayer meeting in the forty year history of the German Democratic Republic  The sharing continued past midnight as gradually the bare wooden cross changed into a cross glowing with light.  The mood of openness, freedom and acceptance was so life-giving that no one wanted to leave. It was a harbinger of things to come of which no one sitting there could have foreseen.

As I read later in the Nikolai brochure:

When we open the church to everyone who has been forced to keep silent, has been slandered or maybe even imprisoned, then no one can ever think of a church again as being simply a kind of religious museum or a temple for art aesthetics.  On the contrary, Jesus is then really present in the church because we are trying to do what he did and what he wants us to do today. This is the hour of the birth of the Nikolai Church–open for everyone–also for protest groups and those living on the margin of society. Throw open the church doors!   The open wings of the church door are like the wide open arms of Jesus: “Come unto me, everyone who is troubled and burdened, and I will relieve you! ”  And they came and they come!

From this first event Führer would eventually arrange what he called ‘peace prayers’ to meet every Monday evening at 5 p.m. to pray for peace in both local and international situations of conflict. Later these prayers were sometimes followed by the people walking into the streets carrying candles to witness for peace and freedom. These were the largest and also the most peaceful of any such demonstrations in the GDR.

A particular moment of tension occurred in May 1989 following a blatantly fraudulent election in which the Communist party claimed to have received 98% of the votes cast. The public was outraged at such a flagrant deception.  Calls for reform grew louder.  The police reacted by blocking all driveways to the church, seeking to shot down the Monday prayer meetings, which they determined had become a cover for political insurrection. Nevertheless the crowds only increased.

On October 7, the GDR was due to celebrate its 40th anniversary. President Gorbachev, the author of the movement for openness and Perestroika, attended from the Soviet Union. Naturally the government did not want the occasion to be used for any kind of public expression of discontent. In Leipzig, for ten long hours police battered and bullied defenseless demonstrators who made no attempt to fight back. Many were taken away in police vehicles.

In this heightened atmosphere, just two days later, Monday 9 October, the peace prayers were to be held.  The government warned protesters that any further demonstrations would not be tolerated. All day long, Führer told us,  the police and military tried to intimidate them with a hideous show of force. Schools and shops in the city were shut down. Roadblocks were built. The police had guns loaded with live ammunition. Soldiers with tanks were mobilized and surrounded the central area. Extra beds and blood plasma had been assembled in the Leipzig hospitals. Rumors from many reliable sources circulated that the government intended to use the “Chinese Solution” and repeat the massacre of Tienanmen Square in Beijing.

To neutralize and perhaps disrupt the prayer meeting, 1ooo party members and Stasi went early on to the church. 600 of them filled up the nave by 2 p.m. But,as Führer described it in the brochure:

They had a job to perform. What had not been considered was the fact that these people were exposed to the word, the gospel and its impact!   I was always glad the the Stasi agents heard the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount every Monday. Where else would they hear these?

So the stage was set, the actors assembled for the climatic Monday prayer service. Huge numbers came out to pray, not only at the Nikolai Church but at other churches throughout the city, which had joined the peace prayers. During the service, the atmosphere and the prayers were serenely calm. As he prepared to send the people out into the streets, Pastor Führer made a final plea to the congregation to refrain from any form of violence or provocation. The Sermon on the Mount was again read aloud.

As the doors opened for the worshipers to depart, something unforgettable happened. The 2000 people leaving the sanctuary were welcomed by tens of thousands waiting outside with candles in their hands. That night an estimated 70,000 people marched around the main city streets. Though the police and the military were everywhere, Pastor Führer said: Our fear was not as big as our faith … Two hands are needed to carry a candle and to protect it from extinguishing. So you cannot carry stones or clubs at the same time.

As the good pastor noted: 

There were thousands in the churches. Hundreds of thousands in the streets around the city centre. But not a single shattered window. This was the incredible witness to the power of non-violence. … It was an evening in the spirit of our Lord Jesus for there were no winners and no defeated. Nobody triumphed over the other, nobody lost his face. There was just a tremendous feeling of relief.

It was later reported that Horst Sindemann, a serving member of the Central Committee of the GDR, summed up both the extensive preparations of the authorities as well as their inability to know how to respond to the events of that evening:

We had planned everything. We were prepared for everything. But not for candles and prayers.

A month later the Berlin Wall was breached, and the whole Communist empire crumbled away.

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Review of Thomas Forstner, Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbayern 1918 bis 1945

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Review of Thomas Forstner, Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbayern 1918 bis 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 603 pp., ISBN: 978-3-525-55040-3.

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

In his work, Priests in Times of Upheaval: Identity and Culture of Catholic Parish Clergy in Upper Bavaria 1918 to 1945, Thomas Forstner, a freelance historian in Berlin, offers an in-depth examination of the world of parish clergy in Germany during the Weimar Republic and later under National Socialism. Originally produced as a 2011 dissertation at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich under the direction of Dr. Walter Ziegler, professor emeritus for Bavarian regional history, this edition, according to Forstner, has been slightly revised and slightly shortened. Still, the present work inherently reveals its dissertation origins with extensive, but certainly informative citations, which, at times, act as parallel narratives to the text itself. The sources constituting these citations are also equally impressive. Quite significant among the sources are twenty interviews Forstner conducted with priests who had first-hand experience of the priestly world so-well documented in this work. Forstner incorporates selections from these interviews convincingly throughout his work. While all of the above points are naturally of great interest to the historical specialist and perhaps to modern-day clergy, the study’s thoroughgoing nature will more than likely make it daunting for most readers.

forstner-priesterFrom the outset, Forstner makes it clear that his book will depart from the following works: Thomas Breuer’s Verordneter Wandel? Der Widerstreit zwischen nationalsozialistischem Herrschaftsanspruch und traditionaler Lebenswelt im Erzbistum Bamberg (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1992); Thomas Fandel’s Konfession und Nationalsozialismus: Evangelische und katholische Pfarrer in der Pfalz 1930-1939 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1997); and Tobias Haaf’s Von volksverhetzenden Pfaffen und falschen Propheten: Klerus und Kirchenvolk im Bistum Würzburg in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus (Würzburg: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2005). All of these works, he argues, centered primarily on questions relating to resistance and politics without significant consideration of priestly culture and everyday life. Forstner places my own 2004 study, Resisting the Third Reich: The Catholic Clergy in Hitler’s Berlin (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press) in the same category, though he does acknowledge that my work included “some” discussion of priestly culture. By contrast to these studies, Forstner seeks to understand specifically the all-too often hermetic world of Munich’s clergy, especially their pastoral training, outlook, and practices, quite closely akin to Monika Nickel’s Habilitation, Die Passauer theologisch-praktische Monatsschrift: Ein Standesorgan des Bayerischen Klerus an der Wende vom 19. Zum 20. Jahrhundert (Passau: Dietmar Klinger, 2004), a study upon which Forstner lavishes great praise. Nickel’s work examined pastoral practice addressed in the Passau Monthly of Practical Theology.

In his introduction, Forstner spells out the three aims of his work: (1) to describe the formation of the Upper Bavarian clergy in the period between the two world wars; (2) to build upon the research of the late Erwin Gatz among others by further examining the cultural, social and attitudinal history of German Catholic clergy; and (3) to detail the ways in which clergy did and did not overcome the challenges of the tumultuous time in which they lived, especially taking into account the strategies they employed to negotiate the difficulties they faced. In my opinion, Forstner convincingly accomplishes his first two goals, though falls a bit short of his third ambition.

In his efforts to address the aims of his work, Forstner regularly employs the term Lebenswelt, though he purposely avoids the term “milieu” when discussing the nature of Munich Catholicism. According to him, a unique single Catholic milieu did not exist in the archdiocese, even though 89% of its population professed Roman Catholicism. Despite the lack of uniformity, Forstner finds the Catholic clergy of Munich and Freising quite unified in their world view. According to him, the Catholic clergy’s ideals revolved around the understanding of Habitus clericalis – the imposed norms for priestly conduct in private and public life. These priestly ideals embodied the practices of self-sanctification and self-denial. The challenges of the modern world interfered significantly as the clergy strove to live ascetically pure lives. This was especially true as the society, in which they lived, especially following the First World War, became more tumultuous. Increasingly, Catholic clergymen found they often lacked the training and abilities to deal with the harsh realities of modern-day German society. The archbishop and his clerical staff were of little assistance in addressing this situation.

Forstner begins his work by offering an overview of the archdiocese from 1918 to 1945. Throughout this period, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, imposing archbishop of Munich and Freising (1917-1952), set the tone for the archdiocese. Yet, at the same time, his clergy found him distant and aloof. As one priest frankly commented, “Following my priestly ordination, I never saw Faulhaber in my life again, never again. We had no access; he was a feudal Lord in his palace. Any baroness had access to Herr Cardinal, but curates not…. I only remember Faulhaber from his majestic behavior, as if he was a noble’s son, even though he was, I believe, a master baker’s son” (p. 51). Still, Cardinal Faulhaber was an entity from whom many of Munich’s 1.47 million Catholics (in 1933) took heed. Such regard among Catholics did not translate into weekly Mass attendance. In fact, the Munich archdiocese had one of the lowest records for Mass attendance in Germany. Similarly, Munich Catholics offered less support for political Catholicism than Catholics in other regions of Germany. In the 1924 state elections, for example, three out of four Catholics did not cast a vote for a Catholic party. As the rector of the Freising seminary lamented, “The men of our age no longer enjoy the protection and advantage of an ideologically closed culture and a uniform milieu” (pp. 43-44). Yet, within such a diverse culture, Forstner stresses that the clergy maintained their united anti-modern conservative outlook. Only a few priests, minor figures, Forstner argues, embraced a reform anti-Ultramontane strain of Catholicism present in Munich and its environs.

In the following chapter, Forstner examines the recruitment and training of Munich priests. Interestingly, he reports that more than half the priests of the Munich archdiocese came from the countryside, though he finds that this trend began to change after the First World War, especially since German society experienced an upheaval in general. The majority of the priestly candidates began their studies as young teenagers (ages 11-15), attending one of the minor seminaries in Freising, Scheyern, or Traunstein. The seminarians continued their studies at either the Freising Major Seminary or at the more liberally structured Georgianum in Munich – the latter included seminarians from other dioceses who attended classes at the University of Munich, taught by members of its Faculty of Theology. Forstner offers pages upon pages of detail as he richly documents seemingly every aspect of vocation recruitment and seminary life. The directors and rectors of the seminaries made every attempt to ensure that the young men entrusted to their care were kept as far from possible from outside worldly influences. Still, the realities of the times did creep into seminary life. For example, Nazi enthusiast, Father Albert Hartl, a prefect at the Freising Minor Seminary, had his students read and discuss the contents of the Völkischer Beobachter during morning study period. By late 1933, Hartl had further awakened everyone at the minor seminary to the realities of living under National Socialism when he denounced seminary director, Father Josef Roßberger, for speaking against the government. Actually, Forstner reveals that seminary life was never as insular as one might believe. In 1929, for example, 43 seminarians at the Freising Major Seminary supported the NSDAP candidates in local district elections, despite the rector’s assurances to his superiors that no seminarian was a member of the NSDAP.

It became impossible for seminarians to escape the grasp of National Socialism. In June 1935, the German government instituted a law that made six months of labor service (Reichsarbeitsdient) compulsory for all young men ages 16 to 25. According to Forstner, the seminarians, who were used to being away from family and friends for long periods of time, actually fared better than the majority of their peers. Anti-Church propaganda also had a reverse effect, by primarily strengthening the resolve of most of them. In 1939, the German government added another impediment to seminary training by making membership in the Jungvolk (ages 10 to 14) and the ordinary Hitlerjugend (ages 14-18) compulsory. By this time, however, priestly formation was already under significant stress in Upper Bavaria as the government requisitioned seminary buildings for military use, disbanded theological faculties, and altered or ended seminary programs of study.

In chapters three and four, Forstner centers upon parish ministry and the ideals of priesthood within active ministry. He offers an extensive portrayal of parish life, including a detailed examination of pastor-vicar work relationships, priestly social life, and remuneration. In particular, he illustrates how parish life revolved around the pastor who served not only as a pastoral care provider who dispensed the sacraments but also as an individual from whom everyone in a particular area sought advice. The latter role underwent a gradual but significant change as mayors more and more assumed this role. After 1933, this was even more the case when the National Socialist government removed priests from most honorary local positions.

In chapter five, Forstner discusses a topic rarely addressed in the existing literature on the German Catholic Church in this period: clerical deviancy and punishment. After explaining the various penalties that Church hierarchy had at its disposal to deal with recalcitrant priests, Forstner examines specific problems that befell individual priests and offers brief individual case studies. These issues included breaking celibacy, partaking in financial irregularities, and suffering severe psychological illness. In the latter discussion, the case of Father Richard H. stands out. Soon after his ordination, Father Richard manifested schizophrenic symptoms so his superiors placed him in Schönbrunn asylum, a Catholic sanitarium run by Franciscan sisters. His condition worsened and the asylum’s director, Monsignor Josef Steininger, approved his transfer to Eglfing-Haar, a state asylum in which the decentralized euthanasia program was still taking place – a fact of which Steininger was well aware. Soon after his transfer, the 35 year old Father Richard was reported as having died “officially” of fever and pneumonia, but, quite possibly, Forstner argues, a victim of the euthanasia program. Forstner speculates about Steininger’s choices and role in Father Richard’s death.

The sixth chapter deals with complicity in the crimes of National Socialism. Here Forstner examines brown priests, clergymen who openly supported National Socialism. Forstner acknowledges my book, Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism, (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008) and various articles on this subject, but believes that I did not differentiate sufficiently enough the varying degrees of “brownness” among such priests. Instead he turns to four categories of complicity suggested by University of Heidelberg historian Olaf Blaschke: “(1) Selective Contentedness, (2) Cooperation and Conformity, (3) Loyalty to Consent, and (4) Active Collaboration” (p. 425). Forstner argues that scholars should only label priests “brown” if their behavioral pattern falls within the third or fourth categories of complicity. Such priests consented to the core aims of National Socialism and, in turn, cooperated with National Socialism against the beliefs and practices of their own religious tradition. From this group, he singles out seventeen Munich archdiocesan priests, of which eleven were members of the NSDAP. Forstner offers compelling informative overviews of the careers of almost all these brown priests and concludes that these clergymen can primarily be placed in one of two groupings to explain their reasons for siding with National Socialism: extreme nationalism and opportunism. Forstner also argues that most of these individuals belonged to the generation that Detlev Peukert called the “Superfluous Generation” and Michael Wildt termed the “Uncompromising Generation” – those born between 1900 and 1910, too late to prove themselves during the First World War. While such characterization may help to explain the motivations for some brown priests, it does not cover the overwhelming majority of them. Still, Forstner does build upon and add to the existing literature as he discusses these problematic priests, even if his conclusions are not entirely new.

In chapter seven, Forstner offers a comparative examination of the role of priests in both world wars. In World War I, 6.5% (90 priests) of the diocesan clergy and almost all seminarians served in the military. Of the 301 seminarians who carried arms, 95 perished, a third of these falling in direct combat. Like most Germans, the priests of Munich shared in the nationalism and monarchism that so filled the air in 1914. Michael von Faulhaber, then serving as Deputy Field Provost (Stellvertretender Feldpropst) of the Bavarian army, was no different. His sermons used terms such as “soldiers of Christ” and described the war as “sacred” and “just.” By contrast, Forstner argues that Faulhaber’s public rhetoric during the Second World War was much more reserved. He does acknowledge though that any positive statements about the war, even if in support of the soldiers or seminarians in military service, still served indirectly to support the war effort and Hitler’s criminal regime. Munich’s clergy and seminarians showed much less enthusiasm for this war than the previous one. The church-state conflict clearly had affected diocesan seminary life by then. Despite exhibiting a zealous enthusiasm for the war, theologians were still drafted due to a secret provision in the 1933 Reich-Vatican Concordat. Before the war was over, 230 Munich priests, 270 seminarians and 182 pre-theology students from the minor seminary took part in military service. 10% of the priests and 30% of the seminarians fell in military service, the majority on the eastern front.

In his final chapter, Forstner focuses on the question of resistance among Munich’s clergy under National Socialism. While making great effort to differentiate his argument from other historians, his conclusions are not novel. Few priests, Forstner concludes, participated in open resistance against the National Socialist regime. Most considerations were subordinated and guided by the necessity to administer the sacraments and maintain pastoral care. He arrives at such conclusions without significant archival evidence. Rather, he relies primarily on his analysis of the materials collected by Ulrich von Hehl and his collaborators, published in the third edition of Priester unter Hitlers Terror (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1996). Overall, this chapter seems wanting, especially when compared to the depth of study and analysis presented in the other chapters of this work.

According to the portrait Forstner offers, Cardinal Faulhaber did not inspire resistance among his clergy. In a 1940 pastoral conference, Faulhaber told his priests: “Guarding the tongue in the pulpit is the strictest Canon of the time” (p. 532). Evidently, from the number of priests who came into conflict with the state primarily over issues relating to pastoral care, such words of advice were not easily followed. Other priests found Faulhaber of little assistance in their daily negotiation with the state. One clergyman commented: “The man [Faulhaber] left us completely alone as chaplains in the difficult conflict over the schools and in our preaching. We never received any help in the time of the Nazis, never! … The bishops were not for us.” Another priest added: “There was no help to be expected from the Church” (p. 538).

Overall, Forstner has produced a magisterial study on the culture of priesthood in Munich and Freising during some of its most trying times in the twentieth century. Certainly, it will become a standard work on this subject. Despite this important contribution and the information that it contains, the work does little to address the larger questions about the relationship of the Catholic Church with National Socialism and less to engage existing literature in these areas. In all of its 552 pages of text and footnotes, Forstner devotes but five pages (pp. 510-514) to a discussion of relations between clergy and Jews. Neither is any general picture offered on this topic. Those seeking to gain a broader portrait of the Catholic Church in such troubled times will have to look elsewhere. By contrast, those who wish to know specifically about clergy, seminary training, and parish life will find a rich resource in Forstner’s work.

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