Conference Report: Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories, Professional Interpretations

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Conference Report: Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories, Professional Interpretations, Capetown, South Africa, 20-22 August 2012

By Doris Bergen, University of Toronto

This conference, sponsored by the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research at the University of Cape Town in association with the South African Holocaust and Genocide Foundation, revolved around the theme, “personal trajectories, professional interpretations.” In keeping with this, the organizers – Susannah Heschel, Michael Marrus, Milton Shain, and Christopher Browning – invited participants to reflect on connections between their life experience and their scholarship. Each of the sixteen speakers tackled this challenge in a different way. The result was an intense and stimulating three days with a surprising number of presentations that addressed religion, specifically Christianity and Judaism. My report focuses on those parts of the conference most relevant to contemporary church history.

Robert Ericksen spoke most directly to the history of Christianity, in a paper titled “Pastors and Professors: Assessing Complicity and Unfolding Complexity.” Ericksen asked whether the churches and universities as a whole were complicit in Nazi crimes. “Yes,” he answered. Their praise for Hitler was genuine, he maintained; their lack of resistance was evidence of overall support; and they played a significant role by granting the regime a kind of public permission for its existence and its actions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s family never went to church, Ericksen noted, so “he didn’t catch that virus.” Ericksen’s presentation was not as personal as many of the others, although he began by presenting some formative moments, among them an hour-long conversation in 1989 with Emanuel Hirsch’s son. The topic: had Hirsch senior been a Nazi?

My paper was on “Protestants, Catholics, Mennonites, and Jews: Identities and Institutions in Holocaust Studies.” I used my research on the Volksdeutschen and the Wehrmacht chaplains to argue for the importance of ambiguous categories and institutional dynamics. Most relevant for our context, I analyzed how the chaplaincy served to legitimate the German war of annihilation. Rather than the familiar notions of “silent bystanders,” I showed Christians as participants – sometimes willing, sometimes reluctant – in the destruction of Jewish lives. I did not attribute these insights to the fact I am a “Mennonite farm girl from Saskatchewan” (as I was once introduced at a conference), but I did learn something about how religious institutions function from a decade at Notre Dame.

Karl Schleunes’s presentation, “Wrestling with the Holocaust,” looked back to publication in 1970 of The Twisted Road to Auschwitz. Often described as a foundational “functionalist” work, Schleuenes’s original edition did not even include the word “Holocaust.”  But it did inspire him to contemplate teaching a course on the subject, which he began to do in 1988, under the heading, “Holocaust: History and Meaning.” His religious upbringing, Schleunes told us, played a key role. He grew up a German Protestant in small-town Wisconsin, where he heard echoes of the Nazi era. The gospel accounts of the crucifixion – “May his blood be upon us and our children” – the myth of Jews as Christ-killers – these notions were deeply embedded in Christianity, Schleuenes said, not only in Luther’s “On the Jews and Their Lies,” but in the American Bible belt. When he tried to answer the question, “Why the Jews?,” he found the only way to do so was to begin with Christianity, a painful confrontation for many of his students.

But if Christian anti-Judaism were so crucial, asked Steven Aschheim, why did the Holocaust occur only in the 1940s? You can’t have continuity and uniqueness at the same time, he insisted. In his presentation, “Autobiography, Experience, and the Writing of History,” Aschheim emphasized the “massively transgressive nature of the Shoah.” It is not so much Judaism as “Jewishness” that interests him, he said, and the Germans who appealed most to him – Marx, Freud, Einstein, Kafka – were makers of modern universal thought whom he long didn’t even know were Jewish. Instead they embodied a humanizing impulse.  Aschheim, influenced by his childhood in South Africa and disillusioned with what he called the naïve Zionism of his youth, is currently writing a book on the political economy of empathy.

Antony Polonsky, who grew up just a few blocks from Aschheim, titled his talk, “From Johannesburg to Warsaw: How I Came to Write a Three-Volume History of the Jews of Poland and Russia.” Polonsky turned not to Zionism but to Communism, and he too grew disillusioned. In 1967-68 he identified with Polish students’ calls for democratic reform, and it pained him when the ANC supported the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia. Solidarity friends encouraged him to contact Jews in Poland, and in the 1980s he got involved in efforts to bridge the division between Jewish and Polish histories. His goal: to produce and foster scholarship that was neither sentimental nor negative.

David Cesarani gave one of the most personal presentations, under the tantalizing title, “Tony Judt and Me: Autobiographical Reflections on Writing History, the Holocaust, and Hairdressing.”  Highlighting parallels between his youth and Judt’s, Cesarani offered a glimpse into what it meant to grow up Jewish in Britain, where immigrants from many parts of the world crossed paths and where class, accent, and district of origin obstructed mobility. (Judt’s mother Stella grew up in a working-class district speaking Cockney; she was “very discreet about her Jewishness.”)

In “Holocaust and Comparative History” Steve Katz took a different approach and brought in his  personal details as jokes. (While at Cambridge Katz played cricket for his College, which made him “wicket keeper for Jesus.”) Katz’s main point was about the Holocaust’s singularity. With regard to the structure of mass murder, he contended, the Holocaust is distinct. In every other case, a central idea causes the violence but also limits it. Katz offered the example of the witch craze, which he described as rooted in Christian misogyny. But the Church found a way to domesticate the threat of women’s sexuality and offered not only Eve the seductress but also the Virgin Mary. The same is true of Christian antisemitism, Katz maintained: the Church did not murder the Jewish people; the Christian vision of Jews was dialectical. No comparable dialectic operated in the Shoah, Katz argued. For Hitler the Jewish issue was central, so every time there was a choice between the racially genocidal program and other options, the racially genocidal program won out.

In her paper, “From Lucy Dawidowicz to Timothy Snyder: Holocaust Studies Viewed from the Perspective of Jewish Studies,” Susannah Heschel provided a challenging and deeply humane perspective. She grew up among German Jewish refugees, and half her family are Hasidic rebbes. Yet her father’s friends included Christian theologians too, she noted, and he showed no bitterness or resentment. For him religion was the most important factor against racism and war. Heschel discovered the problems in Christian theology as a college student when she read Bultmann, she recalled. Protestant theologians were fascinated by racial theory and considered it modern and scientific. After the war the German Christians melted into the wider culture, and Christianity became a cover for old ideas – that the Jewish god was a violent god who commanded Jews to kill non-Jews; that Nazi obedience to authority came from Judaism.

Meanwhile, Heschel indicated, the field has its problems: Holocaust courses attract some people looking for an emotional experience, and instrumentalization of the Holocaust has become a “nightmare.” Where Dawidowicz promoted a sense of Jewish pride in being victims, Snyder’s book has a quality of ressentiment, and his explicit descriptions of horrors rob people of their humanity. For her part, Susannah said, she is returning to the sensibilities of her childhood. She misses the gentleness, piety, and holiness of the Hasidic rebbes and seeks to regain a sense of disbelief. At the same time, she concluded, yearning for religion cannot substitute for the hard work of democratic politics.

For those of us who were in South Africa for the first time, one of the most stimulating parts of the conference was the panel on “Nazism and Holocaust: Intersections with South African Experience.” Though religion was not a main focus, it came up here, too. According to David Welch, there is little evidence that Nazism had a direct influence on apartheid ideas. Certainly all of the rightist organizations were antisemitic, he observes, and the Afrikaans churches did not try to stop the Nazi virus from spreading in their communities. Still, apart from a few dissident clergy, they rejected the notion of a Nazi-style dictatorship. Milton Shain agreed that membership in South African Fascist groups was small but noted their high visibility. They exerted pressure against Jewish refugees from Germany and fueled wider attacks on Jews as promoters of miscegenation and enemies of the Afrikaner nation. When a ship with 500 Jewish refugees arrived in 1936, professors at Stellenbosch University led a protest.

An important intervention regarding Christianity came from a member of the audience, the freelance writer Claudia Braude. What about the discourse of forgiveness, she wanted to know. Hadn’t it been invoked in South Africa by people responsible for all manner of crimes, from corruption to murder, to push the burden of “reconciliation” onto the shoulders of those already victimized?  In South Africa, Braude maintained, a Christian “template of forgiveness” has reinforced a culture of impunity.

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Conference Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Meeting, 2012

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Conference Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Meeting, Emden, Germany, November 8-10, 2012

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University

On November 8-10, 2012, a conference took place under the title, “‘Befreier der Deutschen Seele:’ Politische Inszenierung und Instrumentalisierung von Reformationsjubiläen im 20. Jahrhundert.” Several preliminaries are important. First of all, this conference served as the annual meeting of the journal, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, and the papers will be published next year in the journal. Andrea Strübind, a Protestant professor of church history at Oldenburg, served as a prime organizer and will edit the subsequent volume. Johanna Rahner, a professor at the Institute for Catholic Theology at the University of Kassel, co-hosted this event, bringing a strong Catholic presence to this very Protestant topic of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Finally, this conference took place in a delightful setting of historical significance. Emden, a medieval town in the northwest corner of Germany, was home to a significant Reformed presence in the 16th century. Thus we were able to meet in the Johannes a Lasco Library, an institution of 160,000 volumes, including many books from Erasmus’s library, a Bible signed by Martin Luther as a gift to one of his sons, and a letter from Jean Calvin to the congregation in Emden.

The conference itself focused on celebrations of Martin Luther’s birthday and/or the Reformation. Three speakers looked back to the 19th century. Ralf Hennings and Hans-Georg Ulrichs compared anniversaries of the Reformation celebrated in 1817 and 1917, in Oldenburg and Heideberg respectively. Frederic Hartweg spoke on the 200th anniversary of the Edict of Nantes in 1885. It was celebrated quietly in France by small groups of Huguenots, frightened by the possibility of Catholic backlash, even though Michelet, for example, called Huguenots “the best French citizens.” Bismarck also praised Huguenots and Berlin celebrated the Edict of Nantes openly in 1885. By then a mythology of Huguenots gloriously escaping France to become good Prussians had veiled a harsher history of refugee status in previous times.

The rest of the conference focused on the 20th century, plus the 500th anniversary of the Reformation forthcoming in 2017. One theme emerged in the opening lecture, given by Professor Wolfgang Thönissen of Paderborn (just before he had to leave for Rome to fulfill his role as an ex officio member of the Vatican Council). Thönissen argued that Catholics in the twentieth century have begun to see the work of Martin Luther much less in terms of a “split” in the church and much more in terms of “reform.” Vatican II, for example, looked to Luther as it worked toward reforms of its own. John Paul II and Benedict XVI both studied Luther. Catholics began to focus on things like the Augsburg Confession and the doctrine of justification by faith. Thönissen argued that Catholics and Protestants can and should celebrate the “catholicity” they hold in common: 1) Salvation by faith, 2) a church standing under the Word of God, and 3) a church requiring a certain “Ordnung.” With these things in common, both Catholics and Protestants can celebrate Luther in 2017.

Additional Catholic speakers all followed variations on this theme. For example, Professor Barbara Henze from Freiburg spoke on “Die Katholische Entdeckung Luthers im Kontext des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils.” After Vatican II, in 1967, Freiburg hosted a conference on Luther. Speakers at this conference compared what Luther wanted with what Vatican II wanted. One participant even suggested that Luther finally achieved his goals at Vatican II, both in taking Scripture seriously and making the church accessible, as well as in certain reforms of monastic orders. Professor Johanna Rahner continued this theme, describing developments among Catholic theologians since Vatican II. In particular, she noted the Augsburg Confession as a statement now widely accepted among Catholics, and she pointed toward an increasingly ecumenical rather than a confessional hermeneutic of the Reformation. This approach stresses complementary rather than contradictory elements in the Catholic-Protestant relationship and it accepts a plural rather than a narrowly confessional ecclesiology.

This optimistic presentation on Catholics and the Reformation raised several questions during discussion. For example, each of the Catholic presenters mentioned the work of Joseph Lortz and his twentieth-century reassessment of Luther, though mostly in passing and without going into his Nazi enthusiasm. It was then acknowledged that his appreciation of Luther might have been rooted at least somewhat in his out-sized enthusiasm for the German Volk movement. One speaker also acknowledged that she does not assign Lortz, but has her students read Protestant studies of the Reformer instead. Another issue involved the present place of Vatican II and its advocates in today’s Catholic church. The optimistically ecumenical views presented here do come up against a conservative backlash against Vatican II, in Germany as elsewhere, so that the issues are not entirely decided. However, a broad stream of appreciation for Martin Luther certainly marked the Catholic Church in the twentieth century.

A second major theme at this conference involved attention paid to Luther celebrations outside Germany. Keith Robbins, speaking on British reactions to the Reformation Jubilee of 1917, noted that a warm and collegial reaction to German celebrations could hardly be expected in that fourth year of The Great War. In that sense, his assigned topic provided almost no content. He did describe, however, close ties and cordial relations in the decade preceding World War I. A delegation of 120 Germans visited England in 1908, for example. In 1909, a British group–funded by Quakers–visited Germany and was received by the Kaiser in Berlin. In June 1914, Oxford awarded seven honorary degrees, five of them to Germans. At that time, it would not have been difficult to imagine British participation in a great Reformation Jubilee in 1917. At the outbreak of war in August, however, theologians and historians began to sharpen their sense of difference rather than commonality. Soon they were making their own hard-edged contributions to the national sense of what was wrong with the other side.

Anders Jarlert also noted, as had Keith Robbins, that his look at Reformation jubilees in Sweden during the twentieth century produced little of note. Swedes simply did not celebrate anniversaries of 1483 or 1517, as did Germans. Rather, Jarlert described a “Swedish Sonderweg.” During the 19th century, religious celebrations became bound up with Swedish nationalism. By the 20th century, this meant, for example, a 1941 celebration of the 400th anniversary of the first Swedish Bible, or a 1943 celebration of the Uppsala Synod of 1543. In the overall cause of national unity, a presence of Baptists and of Catholics in Sweden also complicated matters, so that the Lutheran presence became downplayed and compartmentalized.

My responsibility at this conference was to report on American reactions to the German celebration of Luther’s 450th birthday in November 1933. I too discovered very little to report, although Lutherans in the United States organized celebrations of their own, in some cases with thousands of participants. I broadened my approach by analyzing the response of half a dozen church newspapers to events in Germany throughout 1933. Most Lutheran weeklies, whether German, Norwegian, or Swedish in their ethnic background, indicated some attraction to Adolf Hitler and support for the changes he introduced in Germany. They liked Hitler’s attack on Bolsheviks and his campaign against vice. They often criticized the “secular press” in the United States, for its alleged exaggeration of the harshness of Nazi mistreatment of Jews. One column in the Lutheran Herald of the Norwegian Lutheran Church even exhibited its antisemitism, trying to explain the difference between “Kikes,” which it described as undesirable East-European Jews likely to be Bolsheviks, and “white Jews,” seen as more acceptable. (This did draw some critical reader response.) All of these papers, however (with the frequent exception of the Lutheran Witness of the Missouri Synod), expressed concern about political interference in the churches and criticized the excesses of the Deutsche Christen. I also read the more center-left Christian Century. In this publication, skepticism and criticism were handed out in larger portions. For example, Reinhold Niebuhr, reporting in August 1933 on his recent visit to Germany, wrote, “Evidences multiply that the German nazi effort to extirpate the Jews in Germany is proceeding with unexampled and primitive ferocity” (see “The Germans Must Be Told,” Christian Century, 9 Aug. 1933, 1014-15). He then described in detail the mistreatment of Jews, including arrests, torture, and beatings to death, asserting that only a “national neurosis” in Germany could cause Germans to complain that such reports were merely Jewish “atrocity propaganda.”

A final theme at this conference dealt with anticipation of the forthcoming 500th anniversary of the Reformation to be celebrated in 2017. Gerhard Besier placed this in the larger context of the instrumentalization of Luther. This mythology involved both nationalism and anti-Catholicism in some of its nineteenth-century manifestations, a fierce nationalism during World War I, and then a search for a new Luther myth after 1989. Besier suggested that the 2017 celebration could allow for a significant reworking and search into this tradition. Instead, however, he noted that the “Luther Decade” is now treated in FAZ on the business page. It seems to be a time for the selling of souvenirs and the sort of economic opportunities associated with hosting the Olympic Games or a World Cup. He also noted that Luther statues now available in souvenir shops have printed on the bottom, “Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders.” This is both an accurate physical statement for the object in question and. presumably, more of an ironic joke than a serious reflection on the Luther quotation.

Hartmut Lehmann also placed the present “Luther Decade” in historical context. He began by noting controversy over whether Luther actually nailed the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, or whether he merely sent them around to a few friends. We have the former story from Melanchthon, but no eyewitnesses or contemporary testimony. Luther with a hammer is a heroic figure and a builder of the Lutheran church. In the alternative image he is a reformer within the church. This works best for ecumenical purposes, including a friendlier conversation with Catholics. What about the full range of Luther, however, including his attacks on the Pope, on Erasmus, on peasants, and on Jews? Some see Luther leading to the Enlightenment, to democracy, and to pluralism. Lehmann is skeptical, arguing that we need to view him in his own time and in his full complications. If we focus instead on the Reformation rather than Luther, we still have difficult questions. Why did Luther’s followers quarrel right after his death? Why did they turn quickly toward orthodoxy, rather than a further exploration of reform? Why have Lutherans in Germany twice been ready to accept dictatorship? Why have Lutherans elsewhere, in the United States and Australia, for example, also quarreled with each other? A careful look at these issues could be a part of the Luther Decade, but it would fit less comfortably into the plans already in place. Finally, Lehmann in an afterword suggested that historians in 2017 may actually give little attention to the Luther Jubilee. In recent years, an interpretation has developed that gives the year 1517 merely one place among many in the fifteenth and sixteenth-century Renaissance that pointed toward the modern world.

This tightly-knit conference produced much to consider for those interested in contemporary church history.  It seems likely that the KZG volume which prints the papers in 2013 will be worthy of attention.

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Conference Report: Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Conference Report: Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust: “The Holocaust Today: New Directions in Research and Teaching,” November 1-4, 2012, Northwestern University.

By Lauren Faulkner, University of Notre Dame

Professor Emeritus Jacques Kornberg, from the University of Toronto, began his introduction to the panel on the German Protestant churches with the following observation: “I have been studying the Catholic Church in Germany for a long time. I’m happy to say, the Protestant churches were worse.” Kornberg drew a laugh from the sizeable audience, but it would be one of the very few moments of levity for the two panels of the conference devoted to investigating the German churches during the Third Reich.

Sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation and Northwestern University, Lessons and Legacies continues to be a major conference for Holocaust scholars in North America and Europe. This year’s theme emphasized new research and teaching methods, and the scholars giving papers on the German churches set out to emphasize this in their investigations.

The panel chaired by Kornberg consisted of Robert Ericksen from Pacific Lutheran University, Christopher Probst from Saint Louis University, and Gilya Gerda Schmidt from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Ericksen’s paper, entitled “Antisemitism Under the Faulty Gaze of Early Postwar Germans,” took the case study of Klaus-Wilhelm Rath, professor of economics at the University of Göttingen, to complicate the current understanding of the denazification process. Using the example of Rath, who was part of the “terror group” of pro-Nazi academics at Göttingen, Ericksen outlines the process: an initial charge by the Allies led to relatively severe penalties, followed by years of appeals and a gradual softening of the penalties. Rath was dismissed summarily from his position in 1945. He lost his first appeal; second and third appeals led to his classification as a category III offender (assigned to those who had enthusiastically supported the regime). He appealed one final time, in 1950, sensing the change in mood towards denazification in West Germany, and taking advantage of the fact that denazification proceedings were now controlled by Germans. The final appeal resulted in a category IV classification, as a so-called Mitläufer, or “fellow traveler” of the regime. Rath was not satisfied – he wanted a full exoneration – but the change in status meant that he was no longer deemed an antisemitic agitator. This for a professor whose 1944 publications included a book depicting the Jews as responsible for the manipulation of the economy aimed at world domination, and who was designated in 1944 by the Nazi regime as one of the most important Nazi professors at Göttingen!

Like Ericksen, Probst presented material that comes in part from his recently published book on the demonization of Jews in Nazi Germany. Unlike Ericksen, whose focus is on members of the higher levels of the academy, Probst is interested in lower-level clergy in rural areas. In “German Protestant Attitudes Towards Jews and Judaism in Württemberg,” he explores the changes in antisemitism exhibited by Protestant pastors from the end of the Weimar Republic to the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany. This snapshot across the conventional time periods is useful in presenting threads of continuity that otherwise are more difficult to follow. Probst shows that distinctions between religious and racial antisemitism are important insofar as the former identified Jews as a religious “other” capable of redemption through conversion, while the latter employed racial or biological language to describe an irredeemable, immutable “other.” The problem he underscores in his paper is that the Lutheran pastors he examines in and around Stuttgart used both modes of expression in their discussions of Jews before, during, and after the Third Reich. These same men, who used antisemitic tropes in their lectures and sermons, ultimately became part of a “rectory chain” that hid some seventeen Jews in their parsonages between 1943 and 1945. One of his subjects, the Heimsheim pastor Heinrich Fausel, delivered a lecture on “the Jewish question” in 1934. Seeking to distance himself from biological and racial notions of Jewishness, he borrowed liberally from the Bible and the writings of Martin Luther to emphasize the failings of Jews across centuries. At the same time, he insisted that the rejection of Christ was the pivotal moment for the Jews as a Volk, and that the German Volk must defend itself against the “terrifying foreign invasion” that began in the nineteenth century, with the emancipation of the Jews. By 1943, Fausel was hiding Jews in his home. There is no evidence to indicate that he changed his mind about them, leading Probst to argue that people often behave in ways that contradict their own beliefs, and that German pastors during the Nazi period are no exception.

Schmidt’s essay, “The Dilemma of being a Good Neighbor and a Good Citizen in the Protestant Village of Süssen,” based on research for her book about rural Judaism during the Holocaust, asks the same probing questions that anchor Probst’s study. Süssen was (and continues to be) a small town not far from Stuttgart. Her subjects are civil servants, in this case the mayor, Fritz Saalmüller, and the town’s pastor, Martin Pfleiderer. Both had deep associations with Lutheranism in the area, and both were early Nazi enthusiasts. Pfleiderer later changed his mind and left both the Nazi Party in 1936, claiming he had been ignorant of the “true” ideology at play. He did not, however, mention the Jews of Süssen, who were deported and killed. Saalmüller, who became mayor in 1933, did not share Pfleiderer’s change of heart, and as mayor he was definitively antisemitic, enforcing the regime’s policies that forced Süssen’s Jews to sell their property before they were deported. Like the pastor, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht upon the outbreak of war in 1939, but served for its duration. In 1944, he was ordered by a superior to shoot an American POW, which he did; in 1946, it was for this crime that he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Petitions for clemency came from all corners on his behalf, including from the bishop of Württemberg, who described Saalmüller as a “good, upstanding Christian” and loyal to his community. No mention was made of his dealings with the Langs and Ottenheimers, the Jewish families in Süssen who had been killed in the East. The postwar mayor of Süssen, August Eisele, was also not interested in pursuing these matters, and in fact for thirty years (!) suppressed Jewish reparations files submitted to him by three children of the deported Jewish families who had survived the Holocaust.

The panel analyzing the Catholic Church in Germany also treated antisemitism as its main focus. Panel members included Beth Griech-Polelle of Bowling Green State University, as chair; Martin Menke of Rivier College; Martina Cucchiara from Bluffton University; Kevin Spicer from Stonehill College; and commentator Suzanne Brown-Fleming, from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Like those who presented on Protestantism, these scholars aimed to complicate traditional notions of Catholic antisemitism and the ways it manifested itself during the Third Reich. The panelists limited their explorations to the pre-1939 period.

Menke’s paper, “German Catholicism and Nazi Racism, 1933,” highlighted a pressing question iterated recently by Thomas Brechenmacher: where is the agency in the Catholic Church in twentieth century Germany, particularly where antisemitism is concerned? Menke considered multiple answers: the individual bishops, the bishops as a whole, the Center Party leaders, and German Catholic laity. Although he did not tender an explicit answer to this thorny question, his paper made clear that he judged all parties at least partly responsible. He related what historians now commonly accept: following the examples of their Catholic bishops, Catholics in Germany rejected Nazi racism – understood distinctly here from antisemitism – as an intrinsically un-Christian ideology. On this ground, the episcopate condemned the Nazi movement as a whole. Antisemitism, however, was a different matter: In fact, the only public figure to denounce racism and antisemitism officially was Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Austria, who stressed Nächstenliebe vis-à-vis the Jews. (Innitzer was an active proponent of the Austrian fascist government of Dollfuß and Schuschnigg; he also endorsed the 1938 Anschluß, signing a declaration with an approving “Heil Hitler!”.) Menke is particularly hard, and justifiably so, on the bishops. They stated frequently, both during and after the Third Reich, that their priority was to defend the Church. Properly understood, this should have extended to a condemnation of any immoral action undertaken by the state. The bishops did not do this for several reasons: the Nazis did not take over the state until 1933; by that time, communism was accepted as the greater evil to be combatted; and finally, the Church treated Nazism as it did any other heresy, calling for a slow, unhurried examination. However, by the end of March 1933, when Hitler consolidated his hold on power, the bishops were ready to cooperate with his government, and set an example that permitted the acceleration of latent antisemitism among the Catholic populace.

Cucchiara’s work on Catholic nuns in Nazi Germany introduces women agents to a scene that frequently focuses on men as the exclusive subjects. In “Jewish Girls in Catholic Schools in Nazi Germany,” she studies the German-based School Sisters of Notre Dame, whose motherhouse was located in Munich until the 1950s. Their behavior between 1933 and 1938 complicates the conventional understanding of Catholic nuns as rescuers and convents as good hiding places for Jews. Cucchiara finds that convent-run schools were spaces of fusion, in which Catholicism and Nazism co-existed with the full knowledge, even open support, of the nuns. Jewish girls did experience more safety hidden in convents in comparison to other hiding places they may have discovered, but this does not follow, she argues, that Nazism failed to penetrate. The nuns in question worked to preserve their classrooms as distinctly Catholic spaces in the Third Reich. However, preservation often occurred with the least difficulty through integration with the state. As a result, they worked hard to highlight the positive, good works of Hitler and his regime, and emphasized continuity and sacrifice, bringing the regime more closely in line with their own religion. Cucchiara reports that Jewish girls remembered later that there was a remarkable absence of antisemitism exhibited by their religious caretakers, but this does not mean that the convents were hotbeds of anti-Nazi activity. Cucchiara concludes by urging historians to avoid imposing a false separation of religion, as represented by Church members and leaders, and Nazi Germany, and to treat witnesses who testify to this separation with care.

Kevin Spicer’s paper, “The German Catholic Church and the ‘Judenfrage’ in Weimar Germany” rounded out the panel, concerned explicitly with the connection between religious and racial antisemitism during the Weimar era. He identifies the dual pillars of the “Jewish question” for Catholics at that time: the theological pillar, identifying conversion as a possible remedy, and the societal pillar, lamenting and fearing the influence of Jews on German-Christian culture and society. During the years of the republic, a third pillar evolved, identifying Jews as a racial and biological enemy, though many Catholics continued to adhere to the more traditional, culture- and social-based aversion to Jews. Spicer’s most intriguing revelations involve Augustin Bea, the provincial superior of the Jesuits in Germany from 1921 to 1924. Bea was convinced that antisemitism was inextricably linked to anti-Catholicism; occasionally using anti-Jewish and antisemitic language, he and others defended Jews insofar as they, like Catholics, were a persecuted religious minority in Germany, and that the problem could be better solved by working with, not against, them. Otherwise, they would continue to pose a distinct potential danger to future German prosperity. His role in the production of Nostra Aetate at Vatican II, and his work to bring Jews and Christians into greater and more open dialogue in the post-Holocaust world, present Bea as a staunch opponent of discrimination and prejudice and a champion of ecumenism (unusual for a Catholic). However, in the early 1920s in Germany, Bea had not yet found this orientation.

It was fitting that Suzanne Brown-Fleming began her comments with Nostra Aetate, that great and necessary Church document promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965 as part of Vatican II. Its importance to the post-Holocaust Church is undeniable, but Brown-Fleming adeptly highlighted the individuals presented by the panel, who in the 1920s and 1930s were still mired in anti-Jewish, antisemitic ways of thinking, but who nonetheless began to grope toward reforming their interactions with their Jewish neighbours. Although Menke, Cucchiara and Spicer present historical figures who found ways to accommodate a regime that ultimately tried to solve the “Jewish problem” by physically exterminating them, the Catholic bishops, the School Sisters, and Bea never condoned the extreme racial rhetoric of Nazism. She concluded by citing one of the most significant questions that calls for further investigation, that could easily be applied to the Protestant context as well: why did some Catholics resist and other did not, and of those who resisted, what prompted them to do so?

By way of concluding this report, I want to relate an unexpected occurrence that unfolded outside of the two panels devoted to the study of the German churches, that nevertheless has a direct bearing on scholars of the German churches. Immediately preceding the panel on German Catholicism was a workshop on new cultural approaches to the Holocaust. The afternoon workshop, featuring Doris Bergen, Alon Confino, Mark Roseman, and Amos Goldberg, attracted a large audience and engendered a lively discussion, following remarks that concentrated on the role of agency and that called for the decentering of “race” from the story of the Holocaust. Religion, Christianity specifically, was identified as an element that needed to be reinserted vigorously into the narrative to make the Holocaust imaginable and representable. In the Q&A, Alan Steinweis questioned the presentation of this as innovative and “new”, pointing to Bergen and several others in the audience, including Kevin Spicer, Robert Ericksen, and Dagmar Herzog, who have contributed substantial and acclaimed works on the role of religion and the Christian churches in the Holocaust. As a spectator who had listened closely to the remarks, I found myself in agreement with Steinweis: surely those of us who work on the German churches did not produce our work in a vacuum?  Hasn’t the field of modern German history been moving for a while now towards the full integration of religious history into its narratives? The workshop is perhaps a good reminder that this integration has not yet been achieved, and that studies of the German churches, both Protestant and Catholic, must continue to present themselves as vital to the study of German society and culture as a whole, and not simply as “church history” or “religious history,” in order to explain as accurately as possible how attitudes about “otherness” can lead to persecution and genocide. In Nazi Germany, racism and Social Darwinism is part of this, but Christian belief that for centuries had depicted the Jews as “other” is just as culpable. In the wake of the turbulent exchange, as the scholars for the panel on German Catholicism settled into their seats and awaited their audience, Kevin Spicer summarized it best: “Our colleagues who don’t normally deal with the churches are discovering religion, and we’re all very excited about that.”

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Journal Issue: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly 

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Journal Issue: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Volume 25, no. 1 (2012) “Expellees and the Church–A New Debate?”

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

The latest issue of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History, Volume 25, number 1, 2012, in which all the articles except one are in German, is entitled “Expellees and the Church – a new Debate?” In fact, the material covered deals only with one area, the territory of the re-constituted post-war Poland, and only one short time period, namely 1945-1949. At the Yalta Conference, Stalin insisted that the frontiers of Poland, both east and west, should be redrawn a hundred miles or more to the west. This settlement gave to Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine large areas formerly Polish, while in the west the border was fixed at the Oder-Neisse rivers, so that in turn most of Silesia and Pomerania became part of the new Poland. The inhabitants were not consulted. In the east, many Polish residents faced compulsory Russification, or feared living under continuing Stalinist dictatorship, so were expelled more or less involuntarily to central or western Poland.  In the west, the German residents, approximately two million in all, were expelled, and sent westwards to German-held territory, then still under Allied military occupation. They were to be joined by another approximately two million Sudentenlanders from the Czech Republic, which was a deliberate if harsh move to prevent the possibility of a repetition of the 1938 disruptions. In all these cases, the victims sought the help of the churches, particularly the Catholic Church, to relieve their sufferings, or if possible to reverse the political decisions imposed on them. How the churches, both Polish and German, responded to these appeals is the subject of the two major contributions to this issue, one by Piotr Madajczyk on the Polish Catholic Church and the expellees from eastern Poland, and the other by Robert Zurek on the German Catholic bishops’ declarations about the compulsory expulsions of the Germans and the fateful changes in the German-Polish frontier.

The only contribution in English is by Ainslie Hepburn, of Brighton, Sussex, who provides a heart-warming description of the work for peace and reconciliation of a German-Jewish refugee, Herbert Sulzbach. He had fled to England in the 1930s but was later employed as an Interpreter Officer at a PoW camp in north England after 1945, where senior German officers were given a re-education course before they could be repatriated. His services would seem to have been wholly beneficial and much appreciated. But the argument would have been strengthened if the author had made some comparisons to similar re-education efforts, as, for instance, those at Norton Camp in Nottinghamshire, about which Jurgen Moltmann wrote so positively in his autobiography, A Broad Place.

 

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Review of Daniel Heinz, ed., Freikirchen und Juden im Dritten Reich. Instrumentalisierte Heilsgeschichte, antisemitische Vorurteile und verdrängte Schuld

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Review of Daniel Heinz, ed., Freikirchen und Juden im Dritten Reich. Instrumentalisierte Heilsgeschichte, antisemitische Vorurteile und verdrängte Schuld. Kirche – Konfession – Religion, 54 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), Pp. 344, ISBN: 9783899716900.

By Nicholas Railton, University of Ulster

This review was originally published in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History Volume 63, no. 1 (January 2012): 202-203, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author and journal.

This volume of papers dealing with ten Free Church denominations in the so-called Third German Empire is an excellent study of key issues related to the themes of prejudice and guilt in Christians’ dealings with Jews. Being denominations organised and financed independently of the state, the Free Churches were not faced with some of the pressures challenging larger mainstream denominations. No constitutional bar to Jews becoming pastors or members was imposed on their ranks, but this did not necessarily signify that Jewish Christians experienced solidarity and protection. Notices on the doors of Adventist churches, for example, told Jews that they were not permitted to enter. There were indeed righteous Gentiles who dissented from official or semi-official statements made by their ecclesiastical leaders and sought to alleviate the suffering of Jews and Jewish Christians. Yet too many representatives of Free Church organisations conformed to the spirit of the age. The authors of these studies weigh their former leaders in the balance and find them wanting. The book concludes with an appendix which primarily deals with a single pastor in Vienna. Graf-Stuhlhofer regurgitates his fanciful speculations about the Viennese Baptist whom he incongruously considers to have been the single most vocal public critic of the National Socialist regime (p. 311). He achieves this by reading political messages back into innocuous sermon notes, which form his primary source base. Graf-Stuhlhofer’s feverish imagination transfigures Arnold Köster into a prophet of righteousness, standing out, Moses-like, against the diabolical forces of Nazism. This essay is certainly the weakest contribution to the volume. Whereas all the other chapters make an attempt to unearth the roots of prejudice and spiritual blindness, the appendix highlights a Free Churchman who, the reader is led to believe, was miraculously untouched by Austrian antisemitism. The author fails to explain how Köster could refer to Jews as ‘hook-nosed creatures’ (p. 326) and why he apparently believed that Germany was a divinely chosen rod to chastise Israel (p. 327). Throughout the volume, moreover, the issue of Vergangenheitsbewältigung receives little treatment. We learn nothing about why some Free Churches took decades before issuing paper statements about the sins of their fathers. Yet, even with these defects, this volume is an important addition to the literature on antisemitism and the shoah and will hopefully encourage more research on how and why members of minority religious groups internalised antisemitic views. The purely typological reading of the prophetical books favoured by Köster and other Free Churchmen was, and is, an essential ingredient of all anti-Judaism. Given that Bishop Wenner (p. 7) and Professor Heinrichs (p. 29) both misquote the Bible one wonders whether Free Church leaders are, however, in a position to correct traditional ecclesiastical exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures. Yet Bonhoeffer’s view is still valid today: only those who speak up for Jews (and the Jewish state) have a right to sing hymns or Gregorian chants.

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New Research on Nazism and Christianity: Samuel Koehne

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

New Research on Nazism and Christianity: Samuel Koehne

By Samuel Koehne, Deakin University

Sam Koehne is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute (Deakin University, Australia). He is working on the official Nazi positions on religion and on his first book, Nazi Germany as a Christian State: Liberal and Conservative Christian Responses from the Great War to the Nazi State.

I would like to outline my research in two fields, one being that of the Christian response to the rise of the Nazi Party and the other being my most recent research into the Nazis’ official views on religion. The concern of my doctoral work was to ascertain how ‘ordinary’ Christian Germans of the Protestant tradition responded to the rise of the Nazis. It was a close study of two German Protestant communities (based near Stuttgart) from 1914-1939 to understand Christians’ responses to the Nazis in the context of their experiences of the First World War and the Weimar Republic.

In this sense, it fits with the recent trend in scholarship (as in works like those of Manfred Gailus and Kyle Jantzen) towards examining the complex and heterogeneous nature of German Protestantism and the question of the particularity of response. My aim was to examine the response at a local community level and provide the contrast between theologically liberal and theologically conservative Christian communities. Given this, my central questions were threefold: How did Christians at opposite ends of the theological spectrum respond to National Socialism and the changes engendered by it when the Nazis came to power? Why did they respond as they did? What difference (if any) did their faith position make?

The two groups that were chosen as case-studies represented fairly neatly one of the major sections of society that were likely to vote for the Nazis: nationalist and politically conservative Protestants. However, they were also both ‘free church’ communities located near Stuttgart whose origins lay in Württemberg Pietism: the conservative Christian Brethren in Korntal (Evangelische Brüdergemeinde Korntal) and the liberal Christian Temple-Society in Degerloch (Tempelgesellschaft). The Temple-Society had actually split from the Brethren in the nineteenth century and established further communities in Russia and Palestine (under Turkish rule and the British Mandate).[1]

Such communities formed fixed points of reference for their members. As micro-societies that were already self-defined and focused inward, they constitute particularly interesting subjects in their responses to wider changes, especially as spheres of the public and private became blurred in the Third Reich. Their Christian faith was integral to their identity and their members’ lives were dictated by religious belief, as they were mean to demonstrate an ‘active’ or lived Christianity in everyday life. This included a direct concern with politics, given a chiliastic focus on reading current events through a ‘religious lens.’

Some of the most interesting discoveries were precisely how aware both communities were of the Nazi agenda before 1933, and how little this mattered in 1933 itself, which they tended to call a ‘year of wonder.’ There are some interesting links to recent work that has been reviewed in the ACCH Quarterly. By 1932 the perception of Nazism in both groups was very similar to that of the Kulturkampf bulletin during the Nazi regime itself (ACCH Quarterly Vol.16, no.4, December 2010): that Nazism was ‘totalitarian…an ideologically conceived religion or substitute for religion’ and fundamentally antisemitic.

Those living in Korntal were advised by 1930 that Nazism was built ‘upon an anti-Christian glorification and absolutism of race,’ that its ideology was inherently violent, revolutionary, and formed an ‘ersatz religion.’ One prominent Korntaler even called it a ‘blasphemy’ for the ‘hate-filled’ Nazis to claim they adhered to ‘positive Christianity.’ The Templers reached similar conclusions by 1932: that the Nazis were fundamentally antisemitic and adhered to a racial ideology, that Nazism itself was a new faith, that Hitler sought to establish a dictatorship and was relying on mass-psychology and a time of crisis in order to rise to power. Yet both communities embraced the rise of a ‘new Germany’ under Hitler in 1933. Although they first believed they were supporting a DNVP-NSDAP coalition government, a fascination with Hitler quickly developed and he was described consistently as having been ‘given by God.’

There is also a link to the recent work by Robert P. Ericksen on the question of complicity (ACCH Quarterly 18, no.2, June 2012). There were certainly instances of antisemitism in both groups, although the best characterization of the response to the Nazis’ violence and antisemitism in 1933 itself was an ‘active’ passivity. The most enthusiastic support was for the perceived national and spiritual rebirth of Germany, a perspective deriving very much from pre-1933 experiences. From this initial enthusiasm, the two groups gradually moved in opposite directions, to a point where those in the Korntal Brethren were saying ‘No’ to the Nazi state at the same time that leading Templers were just as emphatically saying ‘Yes.’ Generally the dominant trends in the Temple-Society by 1939 were at least in line with the German Christian Movement although some leaders were going so far as to link the community to the neo-pagan German Faith Movement. The Brethren position became one of retreat in the face of what was increasingly seen to be an ‘anti-Christian’ state. The situation was complex, but these final positions were largely dictated by the theological stance of the two communities.

My most recent research has considered the question of the official Nazi position on religion. While there are many excellent studies regarding church responses to the Nazis, or leading Nazis’ religious beliefs, there exists somewhat of a gap as to what the Nazis themselves chose to represent with respect to religion in their official publications. Given this, my current project is driven by the query: how did the Nazi Party present its official position on religion and what was promoted in those texts that were viewed (both within and outside the Nazi movement) as representing the official stance? This clearly carries the burden of ascertaining what was considered ‘official.’ A necessary second component of such research is to examine the reception of such official texts and how they were interpreted, though this will form the next stage of my work.

Given the very vigorous debates of recent years on the Nazi Program, especially Point 24 and ‘positive Christianity,’ the first stage of this research has been to consider the origins of the Nazi Program (undertaken through detailed research into the Hauptarchiv der NSDAP) as well as examining the two official commentaries (by Alfred Rosenberg in 1922 and Gottfried Feder in 1927) and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The commentaries have sometimes been overlooked, even though they were official statements and aimed to describe to both the Party faithful and a broader public what “Nazism” was (and was not). Though also clearly serving a promotional or propaganda purpose, these were statements that people at the time could turn to in understanding the Nazi Party.

The initial results of this research are that Point 24 appears to have been designed principally to serve an antisemitic function, illustrated by the fact that there is consistency from the first ‘Foundational Principles’ or Grundsätze of the German Workers’ Party through the 25 Point Program of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party to the commentaries and also Mein Kampf on this major point: religious teachings or doctrines (Religionslehren, Glaubenslehren) would be opposed if they failed to satisfy German ‘laws of morality and ethics,’ (Grundsätze) or the ‘ethical and moral feelings of the Germanic race’ (Program).

There does not seem to have been any comprehensive sense to ‘positive Christianity.’ The first commentary certainly argued more in favor of the idea that both religion and class would act to splinter rather than cohere Nazism as a movement, which seems to have been maintained in official statements. For instance the ‘Fundamental Regulations for the Re-Formation of the NSDAP’ that were issued when the Nazi Party was formed again in 1925 stated: ‘Religious or class conflicts will not be tolerated in the Movement.’ This was reconfirmed at the Bamberg Conference of 1926, as reported in the Völkischer Beobachter: ‘Religious problems have no role to play in the National Socialist Movement and are only suitable for undermining its political effectiveness. It is incumbent on every individual to sort out such problems for themselves.’[2] What this means is that when Rudolf Hess caused controversy in October of 1933 by arguing that the Nazi Party adhered to ‘freedom of conscience’ in religion, it was not a new concept.

What was essential (at least in official statements) was that religion meet racial requirements. The official position on religion was not principally about the form of faith, but the actual content of faith. Further research is required, yet this appears to help towards explaining the great disparity that was to be found amongst the Nazi leaders, from those advocating a ‘Germanized’ Christianity through to the ‘pagans’ or ‘paganists.’ Rosenberg’s commentary was explicit that ‘Morality is completely racially conditioned, and not abstract Catholic, Protestant or Muslim.’ It has been fascinating to find (as indicated by Rosenberg’s statement) that there was opposition to the notion of revealed religions in favor of the view that what was repugnant or acceptable in religious teaching would be ‘revealed’ through the response of one’s moral conscience, itself supposedly conditioned by race.

To use the example of Christianity and such a conception of ‘Germanic’ morality: depending upon how one measured the cloth of religious belief against such a racial yardstick, it was possible to cut out sections (the Old Testament, parts of the New Testament), create a patchwork (joining fairy-tales or the Nordic sagas to the story of Christ), or throw it away and sew a new garment altogether (neo-paganism, German Faith). ‘Germanizing and dejudaising’ religious teachings was a major concern––as it was in movements amongst the German Christians (see the reviews of Susannah Heschel’s work in ACCH Quarterly Vol.16, no.4, December 2010).

This perhaps takes us beyond current discussions, which have tended to focus on the promotion of ‘German Christianity’ or an ‘Aryan’ Christianity, or alternatively on the ‘new faiths’ of neo-pagan organizations, both of which topics have a number of studies examining such questions ‘from below’ or ‘from above.’ The official position may provide us with insight into what was meant to be common to all Nazis, regardless of the faith they professed.

[1] Some of my previous research considered the internment of many members of the Temple-Society under the British Mandate of Palestine in WWII and their subsequent deportation to and internment in Australia. The major history is Paul Sauer, The Holy Land Called: The Story of the Temple Society, trans. Gunhild Henley (Melbourne: Temple Society Australia, 1991). I have dealt with the literature on the Korntal Brethren at greater length in S.P. Koehne, “Pietism as Societal Solution: The Foundation of the Korntal Brethren,” in Pietism and Community in Europe and North America, 1650–1850, ed. Jonathan Strom (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic, 2010). The major history remains the account in Hartmut Lehmann, Pietismus und weltliche Ordnung in Württemberg vom 17. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert  (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1969).

[2] Translations from Detlef Mühlberger, Hitler’s Voice: The Völkischer Beobachter, 1920–1933, vol. 1: Organisation & Development of the Nazi Party (Oxford: P. Lang, 2004), 125, 149.

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Letter from the Editors: September 2012

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Letter from the Editors: September 2012

 

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to present you with this new issue of the ACCH Quarterly.   In this issue, we cover much ground – thematically, temporally and geographically.

With respect to Germany, John Conway reviews both a collection of essays about the Christianity of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and what it may offer in terms of both politics and theology and an edited collection on völkisch religious movements in Germany during the Nazi era.  Lauren Falkner, a welcome new addition to the editorial team, reviews Sascha Hinkel’s examination of the church politics of the influential and controversial Adolf Cardinal Bertram during the Kaissereich and the Weimar Republic.  My contribution is a review of Hansjörg Buss’s fine study of the Lübeck Protestant church’s approach to Jews and Judaism from 1918 to 1950.

Covering a wider reach, both geographically and thematically, we have contributions about relations between the Church of England and the Russian Orthodox Church during the Second World War (John Conway), important developments in European and global Christianity during the twentieth century (Heath Spencer), and the resurgence of religion as it relates to global politics (Steve Schroeder).

Also included are several conference and seminar reports, including a Bonhoeffer conference in Sweden (Keith Clements), a seminar on the complicity of churches in the Holocaust (Lauren Falkner), and a conference on the memorialization of the Church Struggle in contemporary Berlin (Diana Jane Beech).

We hope that these and other contributions to the journal will continue to promote a deeper understanding of contemporary church history.

On behalf of all the ACCH Quarterly editors,

Christopher Probst, Saint Louis University

Table of Contents

From the Editors

Letter from the Editors: September 2012 – Christopher Probst

Announcement: Important Changes to the ACCH Quarterly – Kyle Jantzen

Reviews

Review of Florian Schmitz and Christiane Tietz, eds., Dietrich Bonhoeffers Christentum. Festschrift für Christian Gremmels – John S. Conway

Review of Uwe Puschner and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Die völkisch-religiöse Bewegung im Nationalsozialismus. Ein Beziehungs- und Konfliktgeschichte – John S. Conway

Review of Hansjörg Buss, “Entjudete” Kirche: Die Lübecker Landeskirche zwischen christlichem Antijudaismus und völkischem Antisemitismus (1918-1950) – Christopher Probst

Review of Sascha Hinkel, Adolf Kardinal Bertram. Kirchenpolitik im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik – Lauren N. Faulkner

Review of Hanna-Maija Ketola, Relations between the Church of England and the Russian Orthodox Church during the Second World War, 1941-1945 – John S. Conway

Review of Katharina Kunter and Jens Holger Schjørring, eds., Europäisches und Globales Christentum/European and Global Christianity: Herausforderungen und Transformationen im 20. Jahrhundert/Challenges and Transformations in the 20th Century – Heath Spencer

Review of Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, Timothy Samuel Shah, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics – Steven Schroeder

News and Notices

Seminar Report: Annual Seminar for Seminary and Religious Faculty, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., June 18-22, 2012 – Lauren N. Faulkner

Conference Abstract: “Confessions of a Protestant Past: The Memorialisation of the Kirchenkampf in Contemporary Berlin” – Diana Jane Beech

Conference Report: XI International Bonhoeffer Congress, Sigtuna, Sweden, June 27-July 1, 2012 – Keith Clements

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Announcement: Important Changes to the ACCH Quarterly

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Announcement: Important Changes to the ACCH Quarterly

Dear Friends,

Over the past two years, we have made significant changes to the ACCH Quarterly, which grew out of the deep roots of John Conway’s “Association of Contemporary Church Historians” monthly e-mail newsletter. For fifteen years, John wrote reviews and passed along timely news concerning contemporary German and European church history. At the end of 2009, a group of John’s friends and colleagues in the field joined him to form an editorial board and began issuing his newsletter as a quarterly journal called the ACCH Quarterly. Our transition to a new web-based format, using the Open Journal System, was made possible thanks to the technical support of staff at Ambrose University College, Calgary.

More recently, however, it has become clear to us that more changes are necessary. Increasingly, academic researchers are recognizing the potential of the technology and format of social networking as an outlet for their scholarly work. Students, academics, and the broader public now regularly turn to search engines and online networks to access new research in history, theology, and many other fields of study. Neither our current journal name nor our existing online platform make effective use of the search engines that now give order to the Internet. Additionally, we have found that our journal website and “subscription” (i.e. sign-up) process are not as user-friendly as we would like them to be. Most problematically, we are currently unable to host all of our past issues in one place online.

For these reasons, we are excited to announce that, beginning this fall, we will be moving to a new WordPress platform for our journal and publishing future issues of our quarterly under a clearer, more concise name—Contemporary Church History—one that captures the original intent of John Conway’s newsletter.

By the end of September, you will receive an e-mail from us, formally announcing the new name and directing you to the journal’s new website. There you will find a livelier, more interactive site, with all the archives (going back to the beginning of John’s newsletter) available in a fully searchable form. We think this will give our work new life, not only for you our regular readers, but also for others interested in contemporary German and European church history, but who haven’t found us yet on the Internet.

On behalf of all the ACCH Quarterly editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

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Review of Florian Schmitz and Christiane Tietz, eds., Dietrich Bonhoeffers Christentum

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Review of Florian Schmitz and Christiane Tietz, eds., Dietrich Bonhoeffers Christentum. Festschrift für Christian Gremmels (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlag, 2011), 432 Pp. ISBN 978-3-579-07142-8.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Dietrich Bonhoeffer must surely be the most discussed and written about theologian in recent German history. His life and thought have brought him a large international following. His praises have been sung continuously in the nearly seventy years since he was murdered. One of the latest contributions is this bilingual collection of essays, written as a tribute to the retiring head of the German section of the International Bonhoeffer Society, Christian Gremmels. He was also one of the main editors of the German edition of the now completed seventeen volumes of Bonhoeffer’s works.

Despite the huge amount of both theological and historical discussions of Bonhoeffer’s influence and legacy, there are still some vital questions unanswered. For example, we are still not clear about the exact evolution of his theology from the kind of pious communitarianism as commended in “Discipleship” to the enigmatic “religionless Chrisstianity” of his last prison letters. So too we need to know more about the progress of his political ideas from his early pacifism to his joining the conspiracy to overthrow Hitler by force, and if necessary assassination.

The first half of this book comprises theological essays in both English and German, which shed more light on the above questions. Keith Clements begins with an examination of Bonhoeffer’s sermons preached during his stay on England from 1933 to 1935. He is followed by Bishop Wolfgang Huber’s valuable discussion of “religionless Christianity”. He suggests that it is inadequate to accept one of the more common interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s intentions. In Huber’s view, he did not mean merely the stripping away of the centuries of accretions in both dogma and ritual in order to obtain a purified form of Christianity without “religious” trappings. Rather what Bonhoeffer advocated was the more radical view that, since the world had now come of age, it no longer needed religion of any kind as a means of either interpretation or support. How to declare the love of Christ for such an autonomous humanity is the question Bonhoeffer poses. Huber claims that Bonhoeffer was incorrect in suggesting that “religion” had come to its end point. There is still much evidence of its continuation and validity, even when some forms of Christian witness misuse it for their mistaken sectarian points of view.

On the political side, the Australian scholar, John Moses, pertinently asks the question: “Bonhoeffer was a Revolutionary, but was he a Democrat?” Many commentators have supposed that, since Bonhoeffer so resolutely opposed tyranny, he must have been a democrat at heart. But Moses suggests that, in fact, he shared many of the reservations of his educated bourgeois class against popular sovereignty, which could so easily lead to the kind of demagoguery that Hitler had exploited. But in the opinion of those survivors associated with Bonhoeffer in drawing up plans for a post-war Europe, Bonhoeffer would have had little difficulty in endorsing the kind of political evolution in West Germany after 1949.

More problematic is Bonhoeffer’s role in the attempt to gain support for the resistance conspiracy through his contacts with the churches’ ecumenical movement, most notably through his well-known meeting with Bishop George Bell of Chichester, England in Sweden in 1942. On that occasion he asked Bell—as a member of the House of Lords—to obtain from the British Government some sort of statement supporting the conspiracy in return for a rapid end to the hostilities on the western front. When this project came to nothing, it led some of the resisters to believe that their subsequent failure could be attributed—at least in part—to the Allies’ cold-shouldering of their valiant attempt to overthrow Hitler.

What has never been made clear—and Moses leaves the matter unresolved—is why Bonhoeffer and his friends should have so fully miscalculated the likely response from London, or why he thought Bell had sufficient political influence to succeed in such a task. From today’s vantage point, what stands out is Bonhoeffer’s political naivety. Perhaps it was a matter of the conspirators having so few trustworthy contacts abroad. But the episode surely confirms our impression that any acute political awareness was sadly lacking in the ranks of the Confessing Church.

The latter part of the book contains short personal contributions by a number of Bonhoeffer’s disciples testifying to his continuing inspiration and influence, and ends with an epilogue written by Ruth Alice von Bismarck, the sister of Maria von Wedemeyer, who is now in her nineties. It makes for a heartwarming conclusion.

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Review of Uwe Puschner and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Die völkisch-religiöse Bewegung im Nationalsozialismus. Ein Beziehungs- und Konfliktgeschichte

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Review of Uwe Puschner and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Die völkisch-religiöse Bewegung im Nationalsozialismus. Ein Beziehungs- und Konfliktgeschichte. Studien des Hannah Arendt Instituts für Totalitarismusforschung, 47 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 592 Pp. ISBN 978-3-525-36956-8.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

This collection of essays, skilfully edited by two experienced historians of Germany’s early twentieth century, plunges us at once into the turgid controversies as to whether National Socialism was a “political religion” or a “surrogate or substitute faith”, and invites us to examine the role played by a whole bunch of so-called ethno-religious associations, in order to investigate the extent to which they may have contributed to or detracted from the Nazis’ successful exercise of power from 1933 onwards.

This massive volume is divided into three sections: the völkisch-pagan movements, völkisch Christianity, and the relationship between National Socialism and these völkisch factions. All are thoroughly dissected by the contributors, not one of whom, however, would appear to have any sympathy with the people about whom he or she is writing. Many of the contributors recapitulate what they have already written at greater length, or summarize the numerous studies of earlier years. The objective of the editors would therefore seem to be not to break new ground with fresh insights but to remind us of the marginal influence of such völkisch-religious adherents and the situations of conflict into which they were drawn.

The contributors certainly do well in reminding us of the enormous variety and the frenetic activity of these groups. More particularly, they successfully evoke the kind of climate in which any number of cranks, crackpots, charlatans or opportunists appeared to flourish in the 1920s and 1930s. As Klaus Vondung points out, these groups saw themselves as the heralds of the future. They sought to elevate the cause of Germany, its race and its blood to be a focus of loyalty for the whole nation. The Nazi Party very successfully mobilized such sentiments through its efficient rallies and parades. One common thread was the idea of national rebirth or redemption, which most of these groups fostered, and which easily enough led to support of Nazism and its charismatic leader. But as several contributors rightly point out, the pervasive characteristics of these movements were all negative—anti-liberalism, anti-Semitism, anti-democratic hatreds, fanatical nationalist beliefs in the worship of Germany or the Germanic God or ethno-centrism of the worst order. Typical of those in this category was Professor Ernst Bergmann, who already in 1923 was sending urgent messages to Hitler not to water down his anti-Semitic crusade. “What is needed is the complete extermination of Jewry in Germany by fire and sword. If you, my honoured Führer, make even the slightest concession on this matter, you will have lost my allegiance.”

Manfred Gailus leads off the section on völkisch Christianity. Its principal adherents were the so-called “German Christians” whose excessive distortions of the Gospel were so ably outlined for us by Doris Bergen nearly twenty years ago. Gailus’ analysis reinforces the view that these men’s motivation was opportunistic and superficial. Many of them preached nothing more than thinly-disguised apologias for their political ambitions, clothed in the garments of Christian righteousness, or faithfulness to the German spirit. Their arsenal of nationalist heresies was all too obviously drawn from Nazi sources. Their disdain for theology or abstract theorizing was matched with fervent expressions of loyalty to the Führer with Nazi flags swirling in or above their churches. But, as Gailus notes, they never achieved the support from the Nazi hierarchy they so enthusiastically longed for, and their internal squabbles soon led to their irrelevance and eventual disappearance.

Susannah Heschel does a suitable demolition job on the notorious Institute established in Eisenach to research and remove the Jewish influence from German church life, about which she has written before, and which she places in the context of racism and Christianity. So too, Lucia Scherzberg is suitably critical of those deluded Catholics, including some prominent priests and professors, who, like their Protestant counterparts, sought to amalgamate their Catholic faith with their pro-Nazi loyalty to the Third Reich, including its virulent anti-Semitism. Their totally nebulous ideas about uniting all Germans in a German national church soon enough ran into destructive criticisms and accusations of fostering a syncretistic cult. But, in fact, these Catholic spokesmen were never disciplined—even after 1945.

Martin Leutzsch provides an interesting pathological diagnosis of the career of the Aryan Jesus between 1918 and 1945. Hitler himself in 1922 called Jesus “our great Aryan leader.” Other Nazis, such as Rosenberg and Goebbels, were quick to take up this idea. Jesus as a Nordic hero was already being voiced in the nineteenth century, but the cult gained impetus through the rapid spread of anti-Semitism in and after the first world war. Its proponents had however to contend with their counterparts in other völkisch movements who wanted to eradicate the idea of Christianity altogether and substitute a purely Germanic deity. But they had the support of no less a figure than Hanns Kerrl, from 1935 Minister of Church Affairs, in whose opinion: “ it is intolerable that German children should be taught that Jesus was a Jew. . . This is an attempt to make the Party ridiculous. True Christianity is represented in the Party and the German people are being called to this true Christianity by the Party and especially by the Führer.” In the end, the issue was too contentious, so orders were given that further discussions were to be suppressed.

Similar prohibitions on almost all these variant sects and cults were implemented in stages by the Gestapo, on Heydrich’s orders. They were suspected of threatening the Nazi Party’s totalitarian controls. A good example can be seen in the case of the Anthroposophists, whose ambivalent position in the Nazi period is here excellently described by Peter Staudenmaier. He shows that many of this sect engaged themselves eagerly in the Nazi ranks, and were then bitterly disappointed to find that the SD dismissed their support by labelling them as “purely individualistic, and their teachings incompatible with the National Socialist ideas about Race”. Similarly, in the case of Freemasonry, as Marcus Meyer explains, the Nazi hostility to a group suspected of secrecy and conspiratorial rituals was long-standing, despite the evidence that many Masons were prominent supporters of the Nazi Party. In fact, as these essays show very well, the thoroughness with which these groups were watched by the Gestapo and the ruthlessness with which they were eventually stamped out was a measure of the Nazis’ determination not to tolerate the existence of any organization which might lay claims to loyalties other than their own.

The third section of this volume covers the attitudes towards Christianity and the churches held by the Nazi leadership.. As is well known, there were numerous and conflicting views held by the Nazi hierarchy which were never resolved. Ernst Piper gives a useful summary of Alfred Rosenberg’s anti-Christian polemics, and the plans he elaborated to institute a Germanic religion of the future. Heinrich Himmler, on the other hand, had his eyes firmly on the glories of the Germanic heathen past. Wolfgang Dierker ably summarizes the findings of his recent book on the policies of the SS and its Security Service, which was responsible for most of the predatory persecution of the churches. He again makes clear that the plans of such leaders as Bormann, Heydrich, Himmler and Goebbels called for the elimination of the Christian religion which would have no place in a future Nazi state. This would have been the end-product of a fateful combination of ideological fanaticism and the exercise of an all-encompassing totalitarian power.

With the Nazi defeat such nefarious schemes came to nothing. So too did the activities of the numerous völkisch-religious cults whose wayward perversity is amply documented in this volume. We can therefore be grateful to the contributors for what can be seen as a post-mortem evaluation of this regrettable chapter of recent German history.

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Review of Hansjörg Buss, “Entjudete” Kirche: Die Lübecker Landeskirche zwischen christlichem Antijudaismus und völkischem Antisemitismus (1918-1950)

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Review of Hansjörg Buss, “Entjudete” Kirche: Die Lübecker Landeskirche zwischen christlichem Antijudaismus und völkischem Antisemitismus (1918-1950). (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2011), 559 Pp. ISBN: 978-3-506-77014-1.

By Christopher J. Probst, Saint Louis University

Hansjörg Buss’s comprehensive, fascinating study of the machinations of the Protestant church in Lübeck during the Weimar, Nazi, and immediate post-war eras is a highly original work that takes seriously predominant social, cultural, and intellectual currents over a tumultuous three-decade period of German history. With a focus on the views of Lübeck’s Protestants toward Jews and Judaism, the author manages to weave together “sacred” and “secular” threads of history in seamless and effective fashion. In the process, numerous important issues are addressed, including: the question of continuities and ruptures, the interaction between local and national issues and points of view, and the nature of anti-Jewish hostilities and how their various manifestations should be understood.

While the political ruptures of the period under study are obvious—Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the dissolution of the Kaiserreich, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the ascent to power of Hitler and the Nazis, the collapse of the Third Reich at the end of the Second World War, the Allied occupation of Germany in the wake of the war—Buss rightly and deftly emphasizes the nationalprotestantische Mentalitäten that were consistently present during these troubled times. The divinely-sanctioned “inextricable connection” of church, Volk, and nation espoused by many Lübeck pastors during the Kaiserreich (50), a complex of ideas embraced by scores of their theological descendants during the succeeding decades, is just one example of this phenomenon. The prevalence of anti-Judaism and antisemitism among German Protestants, beginning especially with the rise to prominence of the Berlin court preacher Adolf Stoecker, is another.

One of the most significant contributions of the book is its regional focus, which, to Buss’s credit, is set firmly within the broader national context. After a prologue in which he examines the church, civil (especially bourgeois) society and nationalism during modern German history prior to 1918, he devotes significant space to each of the three most relevant timeframes (Weimar, the Third Reich, and the early post-war period). For each era, we are made intimately familiar with important areas of Lübeck society, including demographics, economics, and politics. Those seeking only a narrowly focused examination of Protestant views of Jews and Judaism from 1918-1950 will be disappointed. But, those who are patient enough to follow Buss on this thoroughly contextualized journey will be rewarded handsomely.

The ways in which Lübeck Protestants dealt with Jews and Judaism is at the heart of the book. Fearing a deeper descent into secularization and immorality—not to mention their perceived drift into irrelevance—during the Weimar era, most Lübeck Protestants, like many of their co-religionists in other parts of Germany, espoused conservative, anti-democratic, and anti-Jewish views. The outcome of the Church Struggle in Lübeck, according to Buss, was a church government take-over by “radical” German Christians. The radicals who led this regional church ardently supported the Nazi State, the National Church Movement of German Christians (NDC), and the virulently antisemitic Institute for Research into and Elimination of Jewish Influence in German Church Life (commonly called the “Eisenach Institute”).

Yet, all of this masked the fact that the Confessing Church in Lübeck, together with other Protestants who, despite their initial enthusiasm for the Hitler regime, largely rejected National Socialist incursions on Protestant autonomy (but did not openly protest anti-Jewish measures promulgated by the regime), actually represented a majority of Lübeck Protestants. As a result, from April 1937 to the end of the war, there were in Lübeck essentially two independent churches, joined only administratively (485).

On the one hand, Buss argues that a striking feature of the history of the Lübeck Church during the Nazi period was a radical antisemitism, which led under Bishop Erwin Balzer to adopt the goal of creating a “Jew-free” church to correspond to the “Jew-free” state that the Nazi Party was striving for (490). Buss suggests that this radical antisemitism was most prevalent among the leaders of the Lübeck church government.

On the other hand, however, he asserts that antisemitism and the state persecution of Jews was a non-issue in parish life. For the most part, Lübeck Protestants explicitly recognized and welcomed the state regulatory authority to limit the influence of Jews in politics, society, and culture. “There also were no reactions to the increasing restrictions on the Jewish community, to the open exclusion of Jewish Lübeckers, to the November 1938 pogrom, and finally to the beginning of the deportations.” There is simply little evidence, Buss argues, to suggest that these exclusionary policies aroused special concern among knowledgeable Protestants, even in the Confessing Church (493).

This lack of expressed concern was based at least in part on the “totalitarian” nature of the Nazi government and the “theological-ideological orientation” of the Balzer church government, both of which would have inhibited significant Protestant protest. Yet, he stresses that a lack of consciousness for the plight of Jews and Protestant “anti-Jewish resentments” (as well as some other church-political dynamics) played the greatest role.  These conclusions are nuanced, but there may be some reluctance here to attribute antisemitic attitudes to Protestants who were not aligned with the German Christians and/or the Nazis. At the national level, certainly anti-Judaism and xenophobia seem to have been more prevalent in the Confessing Church and the Protestant “middle.” Yet, antisemitic ideas can be found in those camps as well.  It is a bit surprising that such attitudes were seemingly less prevalent in Lübeck.

In the post-war era, cautious rapprochement between Protestants and Jews predominated in Lübeck, as elsewhere in Germany. Despite all that had transpired, Lübeck Protestants were not ready to welcome their Jewish neighbors with open arms. The differentiated description of events at the local level over three decades presented here helps to nuance our prior understanding of Lübeck Protestantism as a purely German Christian stronghold.

Buss’s inclusion of the experience of Lübeck Jews is commendable. Rather than a one-sided conversation featuring the dim views of Jews and Judaism purveyed by most German Protestants, Buss deals with the lived experience of Lübeck’s tiny Jewish minority during all three eras. He also consciously sets the actions and attitudes of Lübeck Protestants in their context; that is, he is careful to demonstrate the marked contrast between their often narrowly constructed abstract theological arguments about Jews and Judaism with the horrific terrestrial events being perpetrated against Jews in Europe at the same time.

This excellent study significantly broadens our previous knowledge about the Lübeck Protestant church. Buss’s judgments are measured and his analysis acute. He is also cognizant of the sensitivities involved in the issues being discussed. “Entjudete” Kirche is important reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century German Protestantism, and would be similarly useful for those interested in the history of Christian antisemitism.

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Review of Sascha Hinkel, Adolf Kardinal Bertram. Kirchenpolitik im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Review of Sascha Hinkel, Adolf Kardinal Bertram. Kirchenpolitik im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik. Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Forschungen 117 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010), ISBN: 978-3-506-76871-1.

By Lauren N. Faulkner, University of Notre Dame

In his first published book based on doctoral work in Mainz, Sascha Hinkel does not set an easy task for himself. His subject is Adolf Cardinal Bertram, chairman of the Fulda Conference of Bishops from 1920 to 1945 and, as such, the most powerful Catholic bishop in Germany. Although Bertram is “among the most controversial German bishops of the 20th century” (336), he lacks a definitive, updated biography.[1] Bertram’s accommodation of the Nazi regime is notorious: “his opponents criticize him as vigorously as his proponents defend him.” (336) Rather than recounting Bertram’s well-known Nazi-era activities, Hinkel observes “a younger Bertram … who was not prejudiced by later events.” (12) The Kaiserreich and Weimar Republic are the twin epicenters of the book as Hinkel seeks to explain Bertram’s post-1933 behavior in his pre-1933 experiences. Thus, Bertram’s activities during the Third Reich are limited largely to a ten-page section at the end of the final chapter. The result is a portrait of a man who was not yet the acquiescent cardinal who kowtowed to Adolf Hitler. And though Hinkel’s biographical approach limits him to the reach of one man, there is no denying Bertram’s considerable influence in the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. His actions impacted Catholic Germans, Vatican policy, the ethnic Poles who resided in Prussian Upper Silesia before the post-WWI territorial redistributions.

In scrutinizing his experiences as bishop in Hildesheim (1906-1914) and Breslau (1914-1945) and his 1920 accession to the cardinalate and simultaneous appointment to the chair of the Fulda Conference of Bishops, rather than Bertram’s more well-known Nazi period activities, Hinkel reminds us that it is worth looking closely at an individual’s formative years in order to explain later behavior. Bertram came of age during the papacy of Leo XIII, whose Harmoniemodell, or model of harmony, served as the basis for Bertram’s own approach to church-state relations. This paradigm preached compromise because God’s authority informed all earthly governments, and that the state was God’s designated instrument for preserving social order and peace.

With this, Hinkel explains Bertram’s remarkable adaptation to regime change in Germany. From monarchy to parliamentary democracy to dictatorial regime, Bertram accommodated the successive shifts while holding strong reservations. Bertram was a classic Vernunftrepublikaner, hostile to democracy like many other Church leaders of the time but recognizing the inevitability of its coming, and he rejected much of Nazi ideology despite his endorsement of Hitler as the legitimate head of state.

Arguably the most valuable part of the book is the section detailing Bertram’s involvement in the resolution of the “Upper Silesia question.” Its story comprises more than a fifth of the book, and it is one of Bertram’s defining pre-1933 moments, showcasing his capabilities as bishop, political player, and administrator. The re-emergence of Catholic Poland necessitated the re-drawing of national and ecclesiastical borders between 1919 and 1925, which impacted the Catholic Church in Germany significantly and sparked political battles between Germans, Poles, and Vatican administrators for control of the new territories. James E. Bjork has done valuable work in this area already; Hinkel’s portrayal of Bertram adds to this, though Hinkel does not reference Bjork in his bibliography.[2]

It is difficult to get a grasp of the ethnic and national identities of the contested province of Upper Silesia: the inhabitants of the region, which had been part of Prussia since the eighteenth century, included German and Polish speakers. How many of these considered themselves Silesians (German-speaking, or Polish-speaking)? Alternately, how many classified themselves as German nationals or, after 1919, Polish nationals? Hinkel does not dwell long on these slippery distinctions. Instead, he reconstructs the events that led to the  1921 plebiscite that split Upper Silesia in two, with the eastern (mostly Polish) portion going to the Polish Silesian Voivodeship and the western (mostly German) portion remaining part of Germany.

It is in this section that Hinkel’s Bertram comes most vividly to life, as he attempted to prove himself a major player in the power contest surrounding the plebiscite. Of particular note is the relationship between Bertram and Achille Ratti, nuncio to Warsaw and later Pope Pius XI. They formed their mutual and enduring coolness toward each other here: Bertram saw Ratti’s presence as disruptive and a challenge to his own authority, and Ratti regarded Bertram as on edge, malcontent, and self-interested. Bertram’s attitude vis-à-vis the Poles was forceful, and it made him unpopular: he encouraged them to vote in elections, but he advised steadfastly that Upper Silesia remain part of Germany, and in late 1920 he forbade clergy, irrespective of nationality, to use their pulpits for political lecturing. (This did not go over well with either the German or the Polish priests.)

Hinkel has used documents from eleven archives in Germany, the Vatican, Poland and Austria, including documents recently released from the Vatican’s secret archives. He admits to having limited access to files in Wrocław (formerly Breslau) as well as in the Vatican, which has yet to release to the public much of its documentation pertaining to the Second World War. Despite these limitations, the book holds together well. Readers may be interested in the biograms at the end, comprised of a list of people in ecclesiastical and political circles whose paths crossed with Bertram, including their birth- and death-dates and their positions.[3]

Some minor editorial adjustments could have made Hinkel’s study more accessible, including a map of Upper Silesia showing shifting national and diocesan boundaries. The retention of quotations in their original language in the main body of the text will be problematic for scholars with no knowledge of Latin, French, or Italian.

There are some deeper questions for which Hinkel’s argument cannot account. The “model of harmony” does not explain well Bertram’s role in two concordat negotiations. He was a minor player in the processes that led to both the 1929 Prussian concordat and the 1933 Reichskonkordat, but both concerned him directly. No persuasive explanation is tendered for Bertram’s minimal involvement in either, beyond the observations that Bertram’s relationship with Eugenio Pacelli was distant (at the time, Pacelli was secretary of state and the overseer of both concordats), the Breslau cardinal was skeptical of a federal concordat, advocating instead for state-level concordats (he famously said, “a frame without a picture is merely ornamentation without content” – 209 fn. 412), and that he was overworked. This does not marry persuasively with Hinkel’s portrayals of Bertram as autonomous and authoritarian.

One may also quibble with the presentation of Bertram’s antisemitism, which Hinkel qualifies as “a latent existing religious anti-Judaism.” (280) The subject of Bertram’s attitude toward Jews is hardly a central tenant of the biography. Its presence towards the end of the book, and mostly confined to a footnote, reads as an aside. Yet how useful is the distinction between religious-based anti-Judaism and racist antisemitism? While certainly one cannot argue that Bertram belongs among the blatant, unapologetic antisemites of the Third Reich, he was also hardly neutral regarding the Jews. What Bertram really thought about Jews is a question Hinkel does not resolve, but one is reminded that they were not an irrelevant minority in Breslau – statistics indicate they made up as much as 4% of the population, and paid as much as 20% of the city’s taxes.[4] Two of his most damaging statements (which, Hinkel acknowledges, approximate Nazi language) describe a Jew-controlled international press, in March 1933, and refer in early 1938 to the conversion of Saint Paul as a rejection of “the errors of degenerate Jewishness [Judentum]” (280 fn 198). Susannah Heschel reminds us that words must be understood in the context of their time. In the 1930s, the German word Judentum could be used to refer both to the religion, Judaism, as well as the people who adhered it, “shifting meaning away from a theological-based polemic to a polemic against people.”[5] This important point applies to Bertram, and makes his comments about Jews more ominous than Hinkel presents them.

Finally, there is Bertram’s unwavering enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler after March 1933. Although he remained staunchly critical of its race-based world view and promotion of positive Christianity, Bertram did approve the regime’s restoration of social order, its fight against communism, and Hitler’s professed respect for the Christian churches. But this is hardly enough to explain the effusive praise that he (and the other bishops) offered after the signing of the 1933 concordat, or the personal birthday greetings he sent to Hitler every year. Why did Bertram lose no opportunity to show his loyalty to Hitler, sometimes estranging even his own colleagues in the process?

The way that Hinkel has organized his argument may be the problem here. The book focuses on the 1906-1933 period, which at the beginning of this review I describe as one of its strengths. But this periodization makes it difficult to account fully for Bertram’s behavior under the Nazi regime and his support for Hitler. Because Hinkel stops his biography in 1933, the reader is left with many questions about Bertram’s legacy in its entirety. Can the model of harmony account for Bertram’s post-1933 behavior? Upon reflection, the answer is: not persuasively. The kind of dictatorship that Hitler erected was then unprecedented, and it may be unfair to expect Bertram to recognize it for what it was, let alone repudiate it publicly. This is tantamount to asking him to break with his training and decades of Church tradition. On the other hand, his unwillingness to be critical of Hitler is rooted in more than a stubborn perception of the Nazi Party as a God-given, legitimate authority. Moreover, the model of harmony fails to suggest what course of action to take when the state ceases to compromise for the sake of social order, or attacks the institution of the Church, as Hitler’s regime did after 1933, leaving one to wonder if the “model of harmony” argument determined Hinkel’s periodization.

Despite the limitations of his central argument and the questions that remain, Hinkel’s book provides critical information about an important figure in the Catholic hierarchy in twentieth-century Germany. It is valuable to scholars studying episcopal politics and church-state relations in Germany from the Belle Epoch to the end of the Weimar Republic. It provides a new angle along which to study the impact of national and ecclesiastical border drawing on Germans, Poles, and the Vatican. Finally, it belongs to a growing body of literature that demonstrates the necessity of rethinking conventional periodizations in modern European history. The twelve-year Third Reich will always be bracketed because of the horrific devastation it spawned. But Hinkel proves that what came before 1933 is just as much worth studying on its own terms, and not simply as context for what came next.

 

[1] Hinkel gives a thorough overview of the literature dealing with Bertram on pages 14-27. These include works by Joachim Köhler, Bernhard Stasiewski, Werner Marschall, Antonia Leugers, August Hermann Leugers-Scherzberg, and others. Hinkel’s explanation as to why it has taken so long for scholars to engage with a study of Bertram is persuasive: the timing of his death at the end of the Second World War; the transfer of Breslau to Poland in August 1945, when it became Wrocław; the early postwar “memory literature”, which upheld Bertram as “the epitome of a lost, transfigured homeland [Heimat]” (12); and the domination of the 1933-1945 period in historiography that depicted Bertram as the compliant leader of the Catholic bishops without delving into his personality.

[2] Bjork’s book, based on his dissertation work, is Neither German Nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008).

[3] My thanks to my colleague John Deak for helping me refine my understanding of the biogram, and for his helpful comments on an early draft of this review.

[4] Statistics taken from http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Silesia, accessed 12 July 2012.

[5] Susannah Heschel, “Historiography of Antisemitism versus Anti-Judaism: A Response to Robert Morgan” in Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33 (2011), 261. The article lays out an eloquent argument favoring a move away from a rigid distinction of the terms anti-Judaism and antisemitism.

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Review of Hanna-Maija Ketola, Relations between the Church of England and the Russian Orthodox Church during the Second World War, 1941-1945

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Review of Hanna-Maija Ketola, Relations between the Church of England and the Russian Orthodox Church during the Second World War, 1941-1945 (Helsinki: University of Helsinki Faculty of Theology PhD thesis, 2012), 231 Pp.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

It was a striking paradox that the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 led to a major change in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Communist dictator, Stalin, after twenty years of hostility and persecution of the church, suddenly recognized his need for popular support from church members. So he changed his policy and allowed the Russian Orthodox Church unprecedented new possibilities. Amongst the changes was the permission to enter into relations with churches abroad. One of the first with whom contact was made was the Church of England. Dr. Ketola’s valuable account of how these relations developed is drawn largely from British sources, since the Russian documents are not (yet) available. She describes the opportunities and complexities which this unprecedented encounter gave rise to, and outlines the intricate balancing act which faced the British church leaders. Political pressures to support Britain’s new-found ally competed with deep-set suspicion of Soviet Communism and all its ways. There had been virtually no contact since the Bolshevik Revolution, though considerable sympathy had been extended to the clergy and laity who had fled abroad. The Communists’ murder of the Czar and his family had appalled everyone from the royal family down to the common man. Could this crime, and the subsequent oppression of the churches now be overlooked for reasons of political expediency? The only prominent Anglican supporter of the Soviet regime was Hewlett Johnson, the Dean of Canterbury, but he was a known maverick and enjoyed no support.

In the following month, the dilemma for the Church of England’s leaders only intensified. On the one hand, they were criticized for giving moral support to a regime which still maintained anti-religious propaganda in its official ideology; on the other they were criticized for not expressing more sympathy with the Russian people in their struggle. The main difficulty lay in the fact that no one in England had accurate knowledge about church life in Russia. Wishful thinking that the Soviet anti-church policy could change was not enough. And the British Government was concerned lest admiration for the Russian people’s resistance could turn into admiration for Communism.

In 1942 the situation became more problematic when the Metropolitan Nicolai of Kiev approached the British Embassy suggesting an official exchange of visits between the churches, and bringing a gift of a newly-published and handsome book “The Truth about Religion in Russia.” This was followed by an offer to translate the book into English, and a request for a foreword by the new Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple. The book stressed the Orthodox members’ devotion to their country and gave details of the devastation wrought by the German invaders. Shortly thereafter, 700 copies were delivered to Lambeth Palace. This resulted in a flurry of exchanges between the British Foreign Office, the Ministry of Information and various Church of England officials. But Temple declined to write anything since he could not paass over the earlier persecution of the church, nor the conduct of the Soviet occupiers in the Baltic countries. “I should either offend the Soviet authorities by what I put in, or the Continental Churches by what I left out.” It all pointed to the regrettable absence of first-hand information about the true state of the Russian Orthodox Church.

So at the end of 1942 the Church of England leaders came to the conclusion that the invitation to send a church delegation to the Soviet Union was an opportunity not to be missed. It would be politically interesting but very delicate. However much the church connection was stressed, the political overtones were inescapable. On the other hand, there had been no contact for twenty-five years. It was time to begin again. The British churchmen wanted to be the first to visit, and in return agreed to make a joint declaration against fascism. But how far was the Russian Orthodox Church eager to promote Christian brotherhood, or just to escape from the solitary confinement of so many years?

The Anglicans then chose their second highest cleric, the Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, to lead a small delegation. His instructions were very narrowly drawn. He should avoid any open political pronouncements. No substantial discussion of dogmatic or liturgical questions was envisaged. It was simply to be a goodwill visit without commitments. But, in order to avoid any criticism from their own members, the visit should be kept secret until the Archbishop arrived in Moscow. War-time security prompted the same caution. So in fact it was not until mid-September 1943 that Garbett and two younger clerics flew out via Gibraltar, Cairo, Tehran and Stalingrad. They arrived a few days after Stalin had unilaterally made a significant concession to the Orthodox Church by allowing the revival of the Patriarchate and the election of a new Holy Synod. This seemed a good augury for the future of the Church in Russia, and Garbett’s visit as the first foreign dignitary was most welcome. In return the British churchman gained first-hand impressions of the Russian church leaders, even though the language barrier prevented any heart-to-heart exchanges. But they gathered as much information as they could, and reciprocated with news about the Church of England. They attended several lengthy church services and were impressed bgy the piety of the worshippers. More significant issues were however skirted. Ecumenical friendship prevailed. And the delegation met briefly with the Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov, which indicated the support given by the Soviet Government to the visit.

On his return, Garbett stressed that he had found that worship in the churches was fully allowed, and that the Russian people were now giving wholehearted support to the war effort. His impressions had been positive, and he looked forward to a return visit by the Russians to Britain. This would help to break the isolation of the Russian Church, and would enhance the prospects of future peace. But Garbett was realistic enough to acknowledge that the positive achievements of his visit were rather limited. The religious situation in Russia had improved but the state was still ”non-religious” and very many churches were still closed or secularized.

In early 1944 the idea of a return visit was taken up. But the death of Patriarch Sergii in March, the Normandy invasion in June and the sudden death of Archbishop Temple in October caused a postponement Not until June 1945 did the Russian delegation eventually arrive in Britain. By that time the European war had ended. After the defeat of Germany and the overthrow of Nazism, the need for Anglo-Soviet co-operation was no longer a top priority. At the same time, the climate of relations between the Soviet Union and its allies had grown noticeably cooler. In church circles, increasing concern, even alarm, was felt about the Soviet re-imposition of control over the Baltic countries and Poland, and to a lesser extent over Finland. The Russians had shown no willingness to join in the task of European reconstruction to which the Church of England was heavily committed. The warmth of sympathy expressed by the hosts could not obscure the fact that no substantial dogmatic or political issues were touched on. So the return visit proved to be even less of
a success that Garbett’s two years before.

Dr Ketola’s careful appraisal of the extensive documentation on this matter shows how assiduously the British officials, both governmental and ecclesiastical, took up the complex issues involved. She does not however attempt to give an overall assessment of the events she so capably describes. In fact, the verdict must be a negative one. The outbursts of sympathy for the Russian people were short-lived; the optimistic hopes that the Russian Church would gain more scope for its activities and that the Soviet state would allow more freedom for religion, were soon enough disappointed. It was to be many more years before relations between the Church of England and the Russian Orthodox Church could improve. But we can be grateful that Dr Ketola has shed such a clear light on this short and transient period of apparent reconciliation and inter-church harmony.

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Review of Katharina Kunter and Jens Holger Schjørring, eds., Europäisches und Globales Christentum/European and Global Christianity: Herausforderungen und Transformationen im 20. Jahrhundert/Challenges and Transformations in the 20th Century

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Review of Katharina Kunter and Jens Holger Schjørring, eds., Europäisches und Globales Christentum/European and Global Christianity: Herausforderungen und Transformationen im 20. Jahrhundert/Challenges and Transformations in the 20th Century (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 381 Pp. ISBN-13: 978-3-525-55706-8.

By Heath A. Spencer, Seattle University

What were the most important developments in twentieth-century Christianity? If the focus is on Europe, we might emphasize secularization, declining church attendance, Christian complicity in an era of war and genocide, or the challenges faced by churches under various dictatorships. If we are more global in scope, our attention might be drawn to the peculiarity of the United States in comparison to Europe, the dramatic expansion of Christianity in the global south, the global prominence of Pentecostal-charismatic varieties of Christianity, and relations between European and non-European Christianities during a transition from colonial empires to newly independent states. All of these themes are addressed in European and Global Christianity, a collection of papers presented in Denmark in 2008 at the conference “Taking Stock of Church History in the Twentieth Century from an International Perspective.” While the book does not propose a new master narrative for the history of world Christianity, individual contributors offer an indication of themes and questions that would have to be included in such a project.

In the first section, “Transformations and Historical Turning Points in the Twentieth Century,” Hartmut Lehmann and Hugh McLeod highlight broad trends in Europe and the wider world. Both see a weakening of confessional boundaries, greater religious pluralism and a dramatic decline in church attendance to be among the most important developments in European Christianity over the course of the twentieth century. McLeod identifies the 1960s as the tipping point for this ‘decline of Christendom’ but notes that the United States diverged from the European pattern in the latter part of the century. Lehmann is more attentive to trends beyond Europe and North America, drawing attention to the surge of Pentecostal-charismatic forms of Christianity and the complexity of Christian-Muslim relations. Within Europe, he also sees positive developments such as greater international understanding and a thorough discrediting of Christian anti-Judaism.

Aud V. Tønnessen and Uffe Østergård are less interested in megatrends and international comparisons than in the reactionary or progressive tendencies in Scandinavian Christianity. Tønnessen notes the persistence of an ideology of ‘gender complementarity’, not only in early twentieth-century debates about birth control and sexual morality, but also in more recent controversies over the ordination of women and the blessing of same-sex unions. Østergård’s “Lutheranism, nationalism and the universal welfare state” challenges the conventional view that trade unions and social democratic parties deserve all the credit for the modern welfare state. Instead, he concludes that “the Danish welfare state is a result of secularized Lutheranism in national garment rather than international socialism” (93).

The second section of the book offers two articles on the world wars and their repercussions for the churches. Martin Greschat shows both change and diversity in the responses of Christians to the violence of the twentieth century. During the First World War, most churches enthusiastically endorsed the slaughter. However, in the interwar period, leaders in the ecumenical movement were promoting peace and reconciliation and challenging the absolute claims of nations and states. During the Second World War, many Christians supported their governments out of a sense of fatalism and obedience to authority, but religiously-motivated resistance was also a possibility. Unlike Greschat, Nicholas Hope tells a more uniform story of Christian capitulation to the claims of ‘the State.’ Unfortunately, he does little more than raise interesting talking points (for example, the role of the churches in what James Sheehan has called the rise of the ‘civilian state’) and then drop them without further development.

The third section of the book addresses the Protestant and Catholic churches in postwar Europe. In his comparison of East German and other Eastern European churches, Miklós Tomka demonstrates that labels like ‘conformity’ and ‘resistance’ fail to do justice to the complexity of situations faced by churches and churchgoers in east bloc countries, where it was not always easy to distinguish between hypocrisy and pragmatic survival strategies. If we imagine ‘church’ to mean the clerical hierarchy and ‘resistance’ to mean openly confronting dictatorship, then these churches were seriously compromised. On the other hand, if we focus on the congregational level and pay attention to more subtle forms of opposition, then churches appear to be among the most important sites of opposition to dictatorship in the twentieth century, particularly after 1945. Tomka’s sociological analysis is complemented by Dag Thorkildsen’s historical theology in “Unconditional Christian Loyalty towards the Rulers?” Although Luther and his early modern successors left little room for challenging the social or political status quo, Norwegian theologians of the twentieth century interpreted Romans 13 (“Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities…”) in such a way as to justify popular sovereignty on the one hand and resistance to German occupiers and Norwegian collaborators on the other. In the study of scriptural religions, the history of interpretation is at least as important as the texts themselves, and “Norwegian history shows that Lutheranism does not necessarily have to lead to an unconditional Christian loyalty towards the rulers” (268).

Harry Oelke and Karl-Joseph Hummel offer narrower studies of the German Protestant and Catholic churches. Oelke highlights the ongoing relevance of national studies, noting that Germany’s recent past has given a particular twist to postwar debates among German Protestants over political engagement, collective guilt, and nationalism. Hummel surveys the research on the Catholic Church in Germany, much of which has focused on the Nazi era. Immediate postwar narratives of Catholic resistance and victimhood gave way in the 1960s to critical appraisals arguing that an illiberal and anti-modern Catholic hierarchy helped facilitate the Nazi ‘seizure of power.’ More recent scholarship strikes a balance, recognizing Catholic Resistenz to national socialist ideology and its totalitarian claims as well as broad areas of complicity. Hummel also explores cases where political, moral, and theological agendas have shaped and at times distorted postwar memories and representations of German Catholicism.

The articles in the final section of the book return to some of the global trends mentioned by Lehmann in the opening article. Klaus Koschorke stresses the need for a coherent narrative of World Christianity and points to promising areas for comparative study such as church independence movements in Asia and Africa, colonial-ethical discourses, and the year 1989 as a global caesura (rather than merely European). Kevin Ward and Ezra Gebremedhim follow up by highlighting the unique dynamics of African Christianities rather than presenting them as African adaptations of a ‘European’ religion. Ward argues that in Africa, religious pluralism has long been the norm, and “religion has been the midwife of modernity rather than its opponent” (303). As a result, African Christians do not feel compelled to fight the same kinds of culture wars as have Europeans and North Americans. Ezra Gebremedhim assesses progress toward independence and equality in the relationship between the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus and the Church of Sweden. The nature of that equal partnership is revealed in the current dialogue between the two churches over the Church of Sweden’s decision to bless same-sex partnerships. The section ends with Viggo Mortensen’s reflections on the state of Christianity as a global religion in a pluralistic world. Mortensen identifies fundamentalism, relativism, and syncretism as threats to the integrity of Christianity, arguing that Christians must hold on to their convictions while engaging in dialogue with others in a spirit of konvivenz. Unfortunately, Mortensen’s call for konvivenz is compromised by his references to ‘Eurabia’ and ‘dhimmitude’ as well as the dubious claim that ‘Islam’ has no history of multicultural sympathy with the ‘other.’ One is left wondering what he means when he poses questions like, “What will win out: Protestantisation of religion or the islamisation of Christianity?” (368).

Overall, this book delivers what the title promises, a useful constellation of articles on European and global Christianity, covering key moments, themes, and trends over the course of the twentieth century. Chapters are in English or German, and the authors represent a variety of countries (Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Hungary) and disciplines (church history, theology, and sociology of religion). The middle sections privilege European church history, but the others offer a range of global perspectives that suggest new ways to imagine and contextualize European developments. The individual articles are uneven in terms of quality, significance, and originality, but the collection as a whole gives evidence of the richness and diversity of twentieth-century Christianities, within and outside of Europe.

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Review of Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, Timothy Samuel Shah, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2012

Review of Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, Timothy Samuel Shah, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011), 276 Pp.

By Steven Schroeder, University of the Fraser Valley

Proponents of the secularization thesis have long-asserted that religion has been sequestered to the private realm, but the authors of God’s Century claim this view is outdated. Drawing on a plethora of events spanning the last few decades, the authors argue that “major religious actors throughout the world enjoy greater capacity for political influence today than at any time in modern history – and perhaps ever” (49). The authors set out to explain the resurgence of religiously-fuelled political action on the world stage by examining what is behind the phenomenon: the religious actors; their beliefs; and, the ramifications of actions.

Political scientists Monica Toft, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy Shah provide the necessary historical backdrop for their study, which also problematizes succinctly the oversimplified narratives that portray religion exclusively as friend, or foe, of democracy and peace. Moving on to foreground the global impact of religion in today’s world, the authors’ two central arguments are that religion has played an increasingly significant role on the world stage during the last forty years, and that this increase is due to shifts in political theology and the mutual independence of political and religious actors (9-10). They argue that the onset of religion’s resurgence in global politics began in the 1960s. Aided by modern communications, religious actors have made good use of their independence in creating “transnational civil societies,” (24) resulting in their increased strength in the political realm (81).

The measured increase in significance of political actors is based nearly exclusively on data gathered by the U.S.-based NGO Freedom House, which examined the ties between religion and democratization during the last four decades. In numerous cases involving Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, the data reveals a significant relationship between religion and democratization, which the authors measure according to specific criteria (e.g., open opposition to authoritarian regimes, supporting resistance groups, brokering mediation between combatants). Generally, they determined that “the democratization role of religious actors between 1972 and 2009 was massive,” (93) due to the liberal, democratic political theology—and independent action—of the religious actors (112).

To be sure, many examples of religion fuelling terrorism and war are also found in the world during this same period. Chapters five and six deal directly with the violence inherent in various political theologies, and how certain conditions render plausible the outbreak of this religiously-inspired violence. Citing numerous cases as evidence, the authors utilize their categorical approach to conclude that religious actors are more likely to use violence to alter the status quo when they are “not privileged by the state [and hold] political theology that runs counter to the interests of the state” (132). States that privilege one religious group over others (i.e., integrated states) often witness violence and even civil war, which is evident in recent conflicts in Sudan, Chechnya, Algeria, Tajikistan, and Iraq. Radical domestic and international terrorist groups (e.g., Al Qaeda) broaden this thinking to the point that a specific state—or the world, generally—is seen as ignoring or threatening their cause. Terrorist actions result when this view is fused with a political theology that endorses violence for the “right” cause.

The authors conclude the book with two chapters that focus on religion’s positive potential to promote peace in the world, and on prescriptive measures for us to apply in light of their discoveries. Religious actors can serve and even lead the way in peacebuilding they argue, but again this depends on the actors’ political theology and their relationship to state actors, and the belligerents in the conflict. The most effective peacebuilders are religious actors who: act independent from the state and from warring factions; are popular leaders; and, hold a political theology of justice, peace, and reconciliation (206). The authors identify peaceful components in the respective religious traditions and highlight many cases of religious actors brokering peace. Here, Catholic organizations (and mainly the lay organization, Sant’Egidio) get the most attention. Additional cases involving NGOs rooted in other traditions like the Muslim-based Afghan Institute of Learning, discussed in chapter seven, would have broadened the scope and strengthened the points of this section. Nevertheless, when the essential components are present together, religious actors—at times “with fervor equal to the religiously violent” (176)—are shown to advance peace through work in mediation, transitional justice, and reconciliation.

The prescriptive conclusion first reiterates the central role of religion in contemporary politics, and then suggests ten ways to address this role. “God’s partisans are back, they are setting the political agenda, and they are not going away,” (207) say the authors, and the best way to deal with this reality is to acknowledge and embrace it, and allow for religious freedom and autonomy. Conversely, the state will encounter significant problems—even violence—if it privileges one religion and excludes others, if it represses religious actors, or, if it doesn’t take religious actors seriously. Essentially, the authors recommend that educators and government leaders inform themselves of the role of religion in local and global politics so that political actors will learn to “treat their religious citizens in a way that promotes their best civic, democratic, productive and peaceful energies” (222).

The authors have done well in highlighting numerous cases from all parts of the globe. Additional details for some cases would have rendered clarity to numerous assertions and strengthened their conclusions. The study’s categorical approach serves to illuminate general tendencies and trends, but it is insufficient for a deeper understanding of the respective cases highlighted in the book. For example, Soviet and East German church leaders are portrayed as having been completely subservient to their respective governments, but no time frame or details of the church-state relationships are provided to explain these assertions. The limitations of the study’s main approach also became evident. Partly due to the Freedom House’s categorization of Israel as a “free” nation, the authors concluded that “Judaism has lacked the demographic opportunity…to mount serious pro-democratic activism in politically volatile and dynamic parts of the world” (104). To be sure, also identified in the book is the need to address seriously the “motivations” including “sociopolitical factors” of Palestinian suicide bombers (145). The clarity of other cases presented (e.g., Iran, Mozambique, and Guatemala) was excellent, and the authors did well to maintain their necessary, though ambitious, global approach throughout the book.

God’s Century is a compelling overview of a complex phenomenon that will be of great interest to a wide readership. The book’s focal points resonate in contemporary headlines that reveal religion as a powerful force in the world, a force that shows no sign of retreat. (For example, religious actors have had some role in the events of the Arab Spring, which the book pre-dates.) The numerous ways that religion can be employed for good or ill are handled in a balanced manner and reveal what is at stake in the relationship between religious and political actors. The authors conclude that religious actors serve democratic peacebuilding best when they enjoy independence from political authorities, and hold a political theology centered on impartial, peaceful activism. Fostering these qualities in ongoing, constructive engagement between political and religious actors seems to be the best way forward for those who want to see democracy and peace furthered in the 21st century.

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