Dear Friends,

I feel sure that all of us have felt great sorrow at the passing of Pope John Paul II, and that we will want to express our best wishes to his successor, Benedict XVI. Fr Jay Hughes, a priest of the Catholic Archdiocese of St Louis, Missouri, has kindly agreed to give us a short appreciation of the new pope’s character and career.

Contents:

1) Pope Bendict XVI Fr John Jay Hughes

2) Book review

a) ed D.Lewis, Christianity Reborn

3) Journal articles:

a) Lee, Watchman Nee
b) Grams. Sankt Raphaels Verein and Canada

1) The lectures on the Church by Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, at the University of Münster in the summer semester of 1965 were the most beautiful I have ever heard on any subject anywhere. Lecturing at 8:15 in the morning, he attracted people from the town, who came to hear him before they went to work in their offices. “He speaks print-ripe,” was a frequent comment. His words could have been printed without alteration. After each lecture one wanted to go into a church to pray. The German students predicted the imminent conversion of a Protestant theology student from South Africa who was a regular hearer: “Bei Ratzinger fällt der stärkste Mann um” (“Faced with Ratzinger, the strongest man capitulates.”) The prediction was not so wide of the mark. Decades later Ratzinger’s tape recorded conversations with the German journalist, Peter Seewald, published as Salt of the Earth and God and the World, resulted in Seewald’s return to the Church. As lecturer Ratzinger spoke softly, though always audibly, reflecting his gentle personality and personal modesty. He was often seen riding around town on a bicycle, wearing a beret.

In his 1997 memoir, Milestones 1927-1977, Ratzinger writes that his appointment as archbishop of Munich in 1977 was an unwelcome interruption of his first love, theological study and teaching, and a complete surprise. Ratzinger’s four years in Munich were not especially happy. Amid the post-conciliar turmoil, he lacked the common touch. His appointment as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by Pope John Paul II in 1981 marked the first choice of a major academic theologian for that position that anyone could remember.

The choice of a papal name not used for almost a century is a declaration of independence. He does not seek to be a Pius, a John, a Paul, or a John Paul. He shares their faith. But the name Benedict says that he will be his own man. Papal conclaves choose a man, not a program. And Popes, like American Supreme Court justices, often confound the expectations of those who select them. The British historian, Paul Johnson, wrote recently: “I have covered all the conclaves held since World War II. In each case, the outcome, in terms of the pontificate which followed, has been quite different from all the predictions made at the time. I have no doubt that the same thing will happen this time, too.”

The last Pope Benedict (1914-22) was a peacemaker. Had the European powers been willing to end World War I on his terms, we would not have had the punitive Versailles treaty. And without the bitter resentments enkindled at Versailles, Hitler would have had scant appeal to his countrymen. Benedict XV was also a peacemaker within the Church, ending the hysterical reaction to modernism by saying that we needed no other label than that of “Catholic.”

The new Pope’s affinity with St. Benedict of Nursia, the founder of western monasticism, may be even more significant. Educated in aristocratic circles at Rome at the end of the fifth century, Benedict reacted against the social disorder and licentiousness of his day by retiring to a life of prayer. In so doing he launched a spiritual movement which would shape the life of western Europe for centuries. As the civilization of the ancient Roman world collapsed, it was the monks who kept alive the flames of culture and Christian faith. They did so by their cultivation of learning, but above all by their dedication to what Benedict called “the work of God”: the public prayer of the Church’s liturgy.

The liturgy has been central for Joseph Ratzinger since his birth on Good Friday 1927. He was baptized the next day in waters newly blessed at the Easter Vigil, then celebrated on Holy Saturday morning. To have been initiated into the Easter mystery at birth he has always considered a special blessing. “The more I think about it,” he writes in his memoir, “the more fitting it seems that I was baptized on Easter Eve, not Easter. We live in this world not in the full light of Easter, but journeying toward that light, full of hope. … The inexhaustible reality of Catholic liturgy has been my companion through all the stages of my life.” Despite Paul Johnson’s warning, it seems safe to expect that Pope Benedict XVI will show special interest in the enrichment and deepening of liturgical prayer desired by the Council, but not always achieved.

Addressing the cardinals the day after his election, he confessed his “sense of inadequacy and human turmoil for the responsibility entrusted to me yesterday,” but said that an “intimate recognition of a gift of divine mercy prevails in my heart in spite of everything. I consider this a grace obtained for me by my venerated predecessor, John Paul II. It seems I can feel his strong hand squeezing mine; I seem to see his smiling eyes and listen to his words, addressed to me especially at this moment: ‘Do not be afraid!'” He pledged to make reunion with other Christians, and dialogue with those of other faiths, a priority. This certainly includes the dialogue with Judaism. Media reports about Ratzinger’s “Nazi past” are absurd. The record shows a strongly anti-Nazi past, reflected in the biting satire with which he writes in his memoir of his wartime experiences as a teenager of Hitler’s “campaign of lies obvious even to the half blind.”

The memoir concludes with a reflection on his coat of arms as archbishop of Munich which is vintage Ratzinger. It contained two symbols: a scallop shell and a bear. The first is the pilgrim’s emblem, still given to pilgrims at the shrine of Compostela in northwestern Spain: a reminder, Ratzinger writes, “that we have here no lasting city” (Heb. 13:14). The shell reminds him also of St. Augustine, about whom Ratzinger wrote his doctoral dissertation. Walking along the seashore as he reflected on the mystery of the Trinity, Augustine came on a child who had dug a hole in the sand and was trying to pour the sea into it with a shell. Augustine realized that his efforts to understand the mystery of God were as futile as the child’s attempt to get the sea into the hole. “The shell reminds me of my great master Augustine, of my theological work, and of the vastness of the mystery which surpasses all our learning.” The words place Benedict XVI squarely in the classical tradition of great theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. What we can know of God remains always less than what, in this world, we can never know.

The bear comes from a legend about Munich’s first bishop, St. Korbinian. Traveling to Rome, the saint encountered a bear which attacked the horse which was carrying Korbinian’s luggage. As punishment Korbinian made the bear carry his pack to Rome. “Isn’t Korbinian’s bear, compelled against his will to carry the saint’s pack, a picture of my own life? The legend says that Korbinian set the bear free once he reached Rome. It doesn’t tell us whether the animal went to the Abruzzi mountains or returned to the Alps. Meanwhile I have carried my pack to Rome and wander for some time now through the streets of the Eternal City. When release will come I cannot know. What I do know is that I am God’s pack animal, and as such close to him.”

The passage takes on special poignancy when we know that Ratzinger several times asked Pope John Paul II to release him from his position in Rome to return to Germany and to his first love, theology. The Pope asked him to stay on. We’re both getting old, Joseph, the Pope said. But we’ll work together. Now his fellow cardinals have asked Joseph Ratzinger to continue carrying his pack, until the end.

2a) Christianity Reborn. The global expansion of Evangelicalism in the twentieth century. ed. Donald M.Lewis. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Co. 2004. 324 pp. Pbk. ISBN 0-8028-2483-8

Although six years have elapsed since the conference was held at which these papers were presented, their appearance in print is much to be welcomed. The contributors include several of the most distinguished historians of Evangelicalism in its British/North American form, and are joined by younger colleagues who provide valuable insights into its impact in different parts of the globe during the last hundred years. Don Lewis, Dean of Regent College, Vancouver, has ably edited this study, and ensured that it contains a valuable bibliography and an index, both rarities in such volumes of collected essays.

The leit-motif of these authors is first to contest the alleged decline of all religion, especially traditional Christianity, due to the forces of secularism, modernism and the dismantling of Europe’s empires. This work seeks to show, to the contrary , that Evangelical Protestantism is thriving in many parts of the world in unexpected and unprecedented ways. The opening essays by Professor Reg Ward for the eighteenth century, and Mark Noll for the nineteenth, develop the thesis that the special characteristics of the movement at that time are still effectively working today. With the impulses from German Pietism, as Prof. Ward has previously shown, Evangelicals were always deeply conscious – as John Wesley witnessed – of the world-wide dimensions of their missionary engagement.
The great burst of nineteenth century evangelical activity, with its plethora of European and American missionary societies and expatriate missionaries, was nevertheless all along committed to planting indigenous churches capable of reproducing themselves. And this, these authors claim, is just what is happening, whether in China since 1949, or in South America or Oceania today.

In the past few decades, the exponential growth of evangelical Christianity, especially in Pentecostal assemblies and other independent churches in the non-western world, has been remarkable. But it has largely escaped the notice of western scholars, partly due to the rapidity and fluidity of such growth, and partly because these new congregations are not much interested in their own history. The future, not the past, is their engrossing passion. But there also features of this expansion which must arouse concern. As Mark Noll observes, these new churches have only a slight awareness of their Reformation origins, or their theological debt to Luther, Calvin and even Wesley. For the most part, today’s evangelicals concentrate on private holiness, and leave aside wider social and political causes. So too, their relationships with secular education and its institutions are strained. Their leaders are often self-taught, relying more on the impulses of inner supernaturalism than on university-derived learning. Very often their understanding of evangelical authority is self-created. There is certainly a risk, observable in certain parts of the world, when such leaders see themselves as extraordinary channels of divine revelations, special instruments of divine healing, or uniquely inspired interpreters of God’s word.

In 1910, the pioneering Edinburgh world missionary conference expressed great hopes that the advance of Protestant Christianity, as promoted by Europeans and North Americans, would accompany the beneficial spread of education, Œprogress’ and the rise of incipient nationalisms. In the subsequent years, as Brian Stanley shows, international history took a very different turn and led to great ambivalences about each of these factors. In many cases the new churches became genuinely indigenous, but also strongly anti-colonial and anti-traditionalist. As a European-trained Kenyan church leader remarked in the 1960s, Africa was “a church without a theology, without theologians and without a theological concern”.

Philip Yuen-sung Leung’s sprightly essay paints a more optimistic picture of the church in China since 1949. He suggests a parallel to the story of Lazarus, in that Christianity in China, after a near death, has now revived and is increasingly vigorous. The early years of Communist repression were severe. Nevertheless the Christians who sympathized with Mao’s social goals ensured that Christianity was not completely rejected as the tool of Œforeign devils’. They could point out that the Three Self Patriotic Movement, which stressed self-government, self-support, and self-propagation, was not imposed by the Communist rulers, but was in fact just the kind of stance the leaders of the Church Missionary Society had promoted in the early nineteenth century.
To be sure the nationalization of all church property in China, including that so generously donated by mission supporters abroad, effectively severed all previous denominational links. The result was isolation from other Christian bodies, who frequently reacted with suspicion that the churches, especially those of the Three Self Movement, had allowed themselves to be politically subordinated to the official Religious Affairs Bureau of the Communist Party.
In turn, the reaction of the more “spiritual” pastors was to go underground with “house churches’ with a distinctly more conservative tone than that adopted by the Three Self leaders. A bitter struggle within the church ensued.
The terrible decade of the Maoist Cultural Revolution after 1966 very nearly killed off all sections of the church. The religious persecution and reality of Christian sufferings, Leung believes, was the darkest period of the Christian church’s history in China since the seventh century. However, after 1978, major political changes, even if not so acknowledged, enabled the churches to undertake a striking recuperation and rapid expansion. No reliable statistics exist for the numbers of Christians in China today, but all agree there has been record growth. Interpretations differ widely about the reasons for this spectacular development. The author calls for a cohesive, co-operative approach amongst both the urban and rural Christians to understand the complexities of the Chinese situation, and to relate the now self-governing church to its counterparts in the wider Christian world.
The veteran American missionary historian, Robert Frykenberg, surveys the troubled state of Christianity in India. Recently, foreign missionaries have been murdered, conversions prohibited, and violence practised against Christians, especially of the lower classes. This campaign has been led by the extremists of the Hindutva group, who combine nationalist fervour with a ruthless determination to protect their own social position, whenever this comes under threat from “upstart” Christians from previously subjected castes. From this perspective, the temptation to convert to any of Christianity’s many forms is a malignant polluting virus from abroad, which endangers India’s great and ancient civilization. For many Christians, however, conversion is a means of escape from social and economic bondage, especially among the dalits or untouchables. There is a centuries-old tradition of Christianity offering such a refuge. But just because of this background the Christian minority remains marginalized.
Nevertheless, due in part to globalization, Pentecostal associations are experiencing rapid growth in India. The emphasis on holiness and healing would appear to draw adherents, while demanding less sacrifice of indigenous identity than other branches of the church. Unfortunately there are instances where American-led impulses are importing alien perspectives and practices, which at times overwhelm local varieties and offer a watered-down gospel of little value but great advertising panache.
On the other hand, Frykenberg finds that there are also large numbers of believers and converts outside formal Christian structures. In short, the complexity of the Indian scene makes it unwise to engage in sweeping generalizations.
If India has demonstrated that the Christian evangelical input, even after centuries, remains marginal, and was successful only among former “outcasts”, the opposite was true in Oceania. In the South Seas, the Protestant missionaries, at the end of the eighteenth century, adopted the model tried out by the Anglo-Saxon church a thousand years earlier. They sought first to convert the chiefs of the various island groups. Their success in persuading these leaders of the virtues of a universal faith suitable for their post-contact needs, meant that whole island clusters converted en masse. Much of Polynesia adopted Methodism; in Melanesia, the Anglicans were predominant; while in the French colonies so were the Roman Catholics. But these were communal churches, still tied to the traditional social patterns. Only the South Seas Evangelical Mission concentrated on individual conversions, and was often spurned. Only in recent years, as Allan Davidson describes, has the monopoly of these older missions been challenged by smaller splinter groups with strong outside backing, a more global approach and up-to-date technology. Here too the rapid diversification of social patterns has disrupted the traditional Christian Œestablishment’ even if it is only a hundred or so years old. The conservative village traditions are giving way to new and radical individual experiences.
Completing this global survey, the third and fourth sections of the book include an analysis of the missionary situation in West Africa by Jehu Hanciles, of the indigenous churches in south Africa by Marinus Daneel, and a thought-provoking exploration of Pentecostalism in Latin America by Paul Freston. He points out the highly complex, fluid, schismatic and disparate nature of the various forms of Pentecostalism, and therefore asks is Latin American Pentecostalism really Protestant? Part of the problem arises from the lack of thorough encounter between scholars and the adherents of most of these highly sectarian communities. Most are not susceptible to study along western academic lines, but Freston attempts to grasp some of the nuances through a social-anthropological approach. There are, for example, enormous difficulties in trying to establish reliable figures for the growth of Pentecostalism in Latin America in recent years, though all observers agree that it has been phenomenal.
Most of its adherents would explain this factor as being the result of God’s guidance, as a movement of the Holy Spirit, which is immune to, and does not need, explanations drawn from other eras or communities. So too, the various suggested theories for this apparent and often amazing growth, such as Pentecostalism’s appeal to the dispossessed, are often reductionist in origin, or even Marxist.
True, in such societies as Brazil, Pentecostalism is clearly the religion of the poor, and even more so of the less educated. But in other areas, the political value of a mobilized religious community has been recognized, so that a deliberate opposition has sprung up, both to traditional Catholicism and to socialist-influenced parties. Often the debate over the reasons for Pentecostalism’s success go beyond an academic discussion and become a weapon for religious, political or even commercial polemics. In the eyes of Catholic antagonists, this success can only be attributed to external interference, prompted by politically motivated American money. But the evidence on the ground suggests indigenous factors were more important.
Equally controversial is the question of Pentecostalism’s development over the past decades. Obviously Protestantism as a whole, and Pentecostalism in particular, was imported. But it has succeeded in adapting itself rapidly and in a wide variety of forms to local conditions. Indeed Freston quotes one source as saying “Judging from where the churches were growing rapidly, it seemed as though the recipe for success was for missionaries to leave”. This verdict only confirms the lesson learnt from China. Overall, however, Freston agrees with David Martin, a senior British observer and scholar, in suggesting that: “The optimum chances for Protestantism exist where the church has been drastically weakened, and yet the culture has remained pervasively religious, as in Brazil, Chile and Guatemala”.
But what kind of church emerges? Here too the theories differ widely. In one view, Pentecostalism in Latin America now owes little to its European origins, of which the practitioners have no consciousness. Rather it is now a redeployment of rural Catholicism without priests, syncretic, corporatist and politically passive. But certainly all would agree that Pentecostalism is the first totally autonomous mass popular religion in this continent. Its free range of theological and liturgical possibilities offers great scope for all sections of the community, and does not seek to impose either a unified structure or a dogmatically fixed belief system. And although its leaders make bad collaborators with each other, but good entrepreneurs, their reliance on divine inspiration and intervention has clearly led to successive and successful waves of institution building regardless of the different political and social structures in the various parts of Latin America.
In conclusion, David Martin points out how much Evangelicalism has benefited from the expansion of modern communications. Yet, local cultures and attachments still affect the process of globalization, resulting in a plethora of Protestantisms, some more, some less recognizable and aware of their European roots. The world scene is therefore highly complex, but overall, Martin notes, evangelicalism is undergoing a particular form of global transition, characterized by a fusion of popular and populist religion, which rejects the sponsorship of outside missionary bodies from a now discredited European Christendom. Instead it promotes a vibrant self-conscious faith, framed in a Christian format and brought to life by indigenous carriers. This is a future of faith, hope and promise – the key characteristics of true Evangelicalism.

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3a) J.T-H.Lee, Watchman Nee and the Little Flock Movement in Maoist China in Church History, Vol. 74, no 1, March 2005, pp.68-96

Wachman Nee (1903-72) was an independent Protestant evangelist who built up a conservative following, known as the Little Flock, which refused to accept the imposed leadership of the Communist dictatorship after 1949, and suffered the consequences.

Lee’s insightful article explains the tribulations experienced by this sect in trying to avoid Maoist political control, and to keep its distance from the more collaborationist Three Self Patriotic Movement, which still continues today. The latter accepted the need to obey the government’s edicts in order to pursue its main goal, which was to strike free from control by foreign missionaries, and to propagate a self-governing, self-financing and self-propagating Chinese model church. Nee’s Little Flock was no less dedicated to Chinese autonomy, but with his firm belief in the empowerment of the laity, refused any “guidance” from outside authority. Consequently Nee’s attempts to recruit those congregations whose foreign leadership has been expelled soon ran into difficulties. In 1956 Nee was denounced as a reactionary and died in a labour camp in 1972. Nevertheless the Little Flock survived, and demonstrated the failure of the Maoist state to exercise absolute control in the religious sphere.

b) Grant W.Grams, Sankt Raphaels Verein and German Catholic Emigration to Canada in Catholic Historical Review, Vol 91, no. 1, January 2005, pp. 83 -104.

Grams teaches in Alberta and has here searched the records both in Germany and Canada for the inter-war period in order to evaluate the successes or otherwise of this German Catholic emigration agency. Actually, the Canadian government only allowed ex-enemy Germans to immigrate in 1924, but thereafter, aided and abetted by the Canadian Pacific Railway, a considerable number of Germans interested in resettling in Canada used the services of this agency. The motivation was purely humanitarian, but at times met with pressures, both political and commercial, to promote or hinder this movement of people. After the Nazis came to power, this “loss” of valuable members of the Volksgemeinschaft was vocally opposed, and Canada increasingly tightened its regulations against any newcomers except farmers. It is a pity that the records do not allow us to see how many “non-Aryan” Catholics were helped to come to Canada, but in any case the Verein was eventually forcibly dissolved, and after 1939 emigration to Canada was impossible.

(Next month’s issue is being edited for us by Matthew Hockenos, of Skidmore College, New York. Once again I am most grateful for his help).

With best wishes
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Newsletter — April 2005— Vol. XI, no. 3

Dear Friends,

It is surely appropriate that this issue of our Newsletter be devoted to the memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was murdered sixty years ago, on April 9th 1945, in Flossenbürg concentration camp in southern Germany. Germany has produced a large number of distinguished, world-famous theologians. In the early years of the twentieth century, Adolf von Harnack was widely seen as the most notable German scholar of his day; in the mid-century Karl Barth dominated the Protestant theological scene; but in the final years both have been overtaken by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose reputation and legacy are engaging, not just his own countrymen and denominational brethren, but ever wider circles in various Christian communities. He is unique in being recognized not just for his life and thought, but also for his death. In July 1998, his statue was one of 10 unveiled by the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the presence of the Queen, on the front portico of Westminster Abbey, in London, commemorating the Christian martyrs of the twentieth century.

The evidence for Bonhoeffer’s far-reaching impact, both spiritual and theological, is to be found in the number of books which have appeared over the years. A few of the more recent ones are reviewed below. But it may be claimed that his world-wide fame and teachings, and his radical rethinking of Christian obedience, continue to provoke and stimulate thoughtful reflection in a “world come of age”. That is his true legacy.

Contents:

1) Book reviews

a) Slane, Bonhoeffer as Martyr
b) Hauerwas, Performing the Faith
c) Haynes The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon

2) Journal articles:

a) Hernandez, Russian village bells
b) Sack, Frank Buchman and college religion

3) Conference announcement – April 15 -16th.

1) Craig J.Slane, Bonhoeffer as Martyr. Social Responsibility and modern Christian commitment. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2004. ISBN 1-58743-074-6. 256 pp.
Craig Slane’s study of Bonhoeffer as martyr is clearly the product of extensive research and meditation, some of which took place in Bonhoeffer’s former home, now a museum and retreat centre for the diocese of Berlin. His achievement is two-fold: first, he analyses the current thinking about Christian martyrdom; and second, he sheds new light on Bonhoeffer’s spiritual pilgrimage in order to show the continuities and congruities in both his life and death. He brings together for an English-speaking readership many of Bonhoeffer’s perceptive theological insights, with which we are already familiar, but which are here linked in a convincing and often challenging pattern.

Today, we have perhaps forgotten that sixty years ago, at the time of his execution by the Nazis, Bonhoeffer was considered a criminal, to be shunned by the majority of his fellow churchmen in Germany. In the eyes of many, he had deserved his fate by participating in the plot to assassinate Hitler. He was branded as a political traitor, not esteemed as a Christian martyr. The remarkable change in his reputation is, of course, due to the untiring efforts of his friend and biographer, Eberhard Bethge, but also because events have proved him right. But Craig Slane looks more closely to show how the concept of martyrdom has also changed. Today it no longer excludes those whose witness took the form of political activity, and is no longer limited to those who died openly professing the truths of the Christian gospel. He argues that, in the broadest sense, martyrdom has always been political. Furthermore, an especially prominent feature of contemporary martyrs is their calculated solidarity with all the victims of human injustice. Those prepared to suffer and die in the interests of their fellow men and women are in fact living out the imitatio Christi. They recognize that Christ’s death on the cross was the supreme act of reconciliation. And so a martyr, baptized into the structure of Christ’s death and resurrection, may become an instrument by which God communicates his abiding commitment to mend the creation.

Slane spells out the significant characteristics of a modern martyr, and suggests that Bonhoeffer very consciously adapted his witness accordingly. His Finkenwalde community, for example, was deliberately structured to fit a pre-Constantinian pattern in which discipleship and martyrdom were closely connected. Here was a minority group which professed the claims of Christ to its age at great cost, and on the margins of public life, given the situation to which the Confessing Church in the 1930s and 1940s was reduced.

This was the place where Bonhoeffer wrote what is perhaps his most popular and influential book The Cost of Discipleship. The German title Nachfolge had clear martyrological overtones from past history upon which Bonhoeffer now built. But he recognized that, in such a situation, communion and community between the brethren was a vital prerequisite for the tasks ahead. Martyrdom, if this was to be their destiny, was not just a solitary act, but an example of the cost of discipleship borne by all the committed community. So, where outsiders saw the Finkenwalde experiment as a kind of pietistic escapism, Bonhoeffer knew it to be a preparation for self-sacrificing witness and if necessary death.

The title martyr cannot of course be conferred on the living, nor should the living seek to join its ranks. But a martyr’s death is not just accidental. Rather it holds the power to summarize the martyr’s entire existence in a way ordinary deaths do not. So this becomes a signal of resonance between the faith of the living and the faith of the dead.

Slane seeks to show that Bonhoeffer’s pilgrimage from 1931 onwards, when he became “converted” by studying the deeper meaning of the Sermon on the Mount, was really his deliberately chosen course towards death. Indeed Bonhoeffer’s desire to follow in Jesus’ footsteps increasingly led to his recognition that the Christian life has to include the practice of death, particularly the death to human selfishness and sin.

In this sense, Bonhoeffer affirmed, the encounter with Jesus is fundamentally different from that with Goethe or Socrates. Jesus lives. He cannot be avoided. But his redemptive power is found through his suffering and death. Christ allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross. And man is challenged to participate in these sufferings at the hands of a godless world. Indeed it is just this participation in the suffering and death of God in the life of the world that makes a Christian what he is.

Contrary to the ancient martyrs, whose deaths were often public spectacles, on the morning of Bonhoeffer’s hanging there were scarcely any witnesses. The final stages of his life were spent in the high secrecy of political conspiracy, with no opportunity to confess the faith openly. But, through the lens of martyrdom, his unadorned death, freely and voluntarily accepted, can be seen as the “coming out”, the proclamation of his faith in the political sphere.
It is only in recent years that Bonhoeffer has been legally acquitted of the crimes for which he was condemned, or publicly admired for attempting the violent overthrow of the nation’s ruler.

At the time, few of his fellow churchmen supported him, or even recognized the moral ambiguity through which he struggled to find justification. But this did not deter Bonhoeffer from his chosen course of discipleship. The final months of his imprisonment were brutal and degrading. Yet, as the Letters and Papers from Prison show, he gained in certainty the assuredness of God’s nearness. Indeed as his final letters affirm, he believed himself surrounded by the powers of good. He learnt to face death because he experienced dying daily with Jesus Christ. “Christ in us gives us over to death so that he can live in us. Physical death in the true sense does not become the end, but the consummation of life with Jesus Christ.”

And his final recorded words were: “Das ist das Ende – für mich der Beginn des Lebens” (This is the end – but for me the beginning of life). It was a confident assertion of the Christian belief in resurrection.

For this reason, as Slane justly comments, “more than a witness to the transcendent Christ, and more than an earthly referent to the divine reality, the martyr’s ordeal becomes a concrete instance of God’s suffering presence in and to the world.”

In the midst of the twentieth century, tortured by genocide, military violence, ideological fanaticism and sheer hatred for humanity, Bonhoeffer is a witness to God’s love, to justice, and to hope. He fulfilled the martyr’s key role by living and dying as the embodiment of these values.

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b) Stanley Hauerwas, Performing the Faith Bonhoeffer and the practice of nonviolence, Grand Rapids, Mich: Brazos Press 2004
ISBN 1-58743-076-2 252 pp.

Stanley Hauerwas is a well-known advocate for Christian pacifism, and has contributed two chapters on Bonhoeffer’s political theology in his latest collected essays, Performing the Faith. Like many others he seeks to explain how Bonhoeffer’s early commitment to Christian pacifism can be reconciled with his later decision to participate in the plot to kill Hitler. The stages of this transition cannot now be determined with certainty, but Hauerwas is convinced that both stances were part of his dedication to a Christian discipleship, which could stand out against the brutal powers of the world and their attempt to make history without God.

This oppositional stance was clearly influenced by Karl Barth’s theology and hence can be seen early on in Bonhoeffer’s thought. Despite his training in the very best school of liberal Protestantism, he rejected the kind of adaptations and compromises with the world so frequently advocated by these scholars. Instead, Bonhoeffer asserted, the mission of the Church should not be to justify Christianity in this present age, but rather to justify the present age before the Christian message.

So, in his Letters and Papers from Prison, he opposes all those who try to argue for a “God of the gaps”, providing an explanation beyond what secular reason can supply. At the same time, he opposed those pietists who called on God as a kind of therapeutic device when secular medicine failed. Instead, he proclaimed, God reigns, in life, in death, in politics, in society – in short, everywhere. The Church’s task is to proclaim this fact unequivocally, and not allow itself to be rendered irrelevant on the margins of society.

Nationalism, and its attendant evil of militarism, was defended by some Lutherans as part of an inalienable “order of creation”. But Bonhoeffer posits a more dynamic image of the “orders of preservation”, which required the church to adopt a determined policy of challenging any state power which threatened to overstep the ethical bounds of justice and peace.

Yet he is also clear that all practical actions taken by the individual Christian, or the sanctified Church, stand under the judgment of God and call for a vivid awareness of sin and the need for repentance. Hence any open-ended call for “democracy” or “freedom” forgets the fact that such forces can easily lead men to the depths of slavery, because of its deification of human effort. God is relegated to the sidelines, and there are no barriers to nihilism. Too often the Church has allowed itself to be pushed out of politics, or has relied solely on its privileged position in a Constantine-era situation. But in a post-Constantinian world, the Church has to strive to earn or regain its own visibility, based on the power of Jesus’ teachings.

Hauerwas rightly points out that Bonhoeffer was a relentless critic of any way of life that substituted agreeableness for truthfulness. This was the weakness of the ecumenical movement, which Bonhoeffer at first championed. But the unwillingness of the Geneva-based officers to cut their ties with the official Reich Church, controlled by the Deutsche Christen, and the refusal to recognize the Confessing Church as the only true witness to Christ in Germany, disillusioned him. He came to see that more extreme measures were required to prevent the overthrow of Christian civilization. Toleration in his eyes could lead to compromise, and hence to the abandonment of truth.

Most of his contemporaries did not want such honesty. Nor could they accept the view which Bonhoeffer had expressed already in 1934: “the time is very near when we shall have to decide between National Socialism and Christianity. It may be fearfully hard and difficult for us all, but we must get right to the root of things with open Christian speaking and no diplomacy. In prayer together we will find the way”. Failure to do this could only lead to equivocation or cynicism. Hence the failure of the Church to oppose Hitler was the failure of Christians to speak the truth to one another and to the world.

In the politically frenzied world created by the Nazis, the Church’s role was to speak the truth in political witness. “The commandments of God indicate the limits which dare not be transgressed, if Christ is Lord. And the Church is to remind the world of these limits”. And the same would apply to the new order to be created once the war was over. Bonhoeffer was to sketch out in very general terms in his Ethics how this task should be fulfilled. In Hauerwas’ view, this was possibly Bonhoeffer’s most significant witness. If the Church does not preach the gospel truthfully, but instead is ready to accommodate itself to every so-called “progressive trend”, then we are all condemned to see our Christian civilization destroyed. Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom is the clearest witness to his determination not to let this happen.

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c) Stephen R.Haynes, The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon. Portraits of a Protestant Saint. Minneapolis: Fortress press 2004. 280 pp
ISBN 0-8006-3652-X

In this the sixtieth anniversary year of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s death, the wealth of “Bonhoefferiana” continues to grow at an astonishing rate, not only within the ranks of professional scholars but also, and just as powerfully, within a more popularist corpus of novels, plays, films and websites. It is to Haynes’ great credit that his latest offering provides a thorough overview of both the academic and popular representations of Bonhoeffer that have shaped the German theologian’s reception in the six decades since his execution.

Haynes’ book has, at its core, a readily-identifiable objective: to demonstrate that, irrespective of technical definitions, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life, work and death – his vita, in fact – enables him, in death, to function as a saint. Moreover, this distinctive appellation is the key to rightly understanding his other functions of seer, prophet, apostle, cultic-figure and bridge (pp.xi-xii). Working from Lawrence Cunningham’s ‘The Meaning of Saints’, Haynes seeks to show that the normative Catholic constraints on the definition of sainthood do not ultimately preclude Bonhoeffer from being received in popular religious consciousness as a de facto, if not de jure, saint.

In much the same way, argues Haynes, Yad Vashem’s strict criteria for the bestowal of the title of ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ does not, in the end, disenfranchise Bonhoeffer from that distinction in the wider religious imagination. Just as fictional works such as ‘Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace’ (2001), ‘Saints and Villains’ (1998), and ‘The Cup of Wrath’ (1992) assert Bonhoeffer’s rigorous defense of the Jews as the primary reason for his execution, Richard Rubenstein has similarly suggested that Yad Vashem’s imprimatur is not ultimately necessary for the ajudication of Bonhoeffer as a ‘Righteous Gentile’ (pp.114-116, 119). While both Bonhoeffer’s sainthood and his ‘gentile righteousness’ may remain contested issues, Haynes does show well that institutional endorsement is not, in a postmodern and essentially de-institutionalized (Protestant) world, the final arbiter of popular religious reception.

These conclusions at which Haynes arrives are founded upon a broader gloss of liberal and evangelical assessments of Bonhoeffer within the book’s earlier chapters. Bonhoeffer, as read by Haynes, has been variously adopted as the champion of radical ‘death-of-God’ theology ( JAT Robinson, Gabriel Vahanian, Harvey Cox), liberal theology (Larry Rasmussen, Geffrey Kelly) and conservative evangelical theology (Georg Huntermann, David Gushee and, somewhat incredibly, James Dobson).

These chapters are, to my mind, simultaneously the book’s strength and weakness. At one level, Haynes ably demonstrates the malleability of the Bonhoeffer legacy into any number of pre-determined paradigms; by its very nature as fragmented and incomplete, Bonhoeffer’s life and witness is susceptible to being hijacked by causes and movements, which are often at odds with one another. That Bonhoeffer has been press-ganged into advocacy of the pro-life movement, Vietnam veterans, and the anti- Iraq War protest, and that he has been characterized as both the arch-enemy and the purest example of both liberalism and evangelicalism is a sobering reminder of the fluidity of subjective reception and indeed the persuasivity of popular consciousness.

On the other hand, it is slightly disconcerting that Haynes lets the respective interpreters of Bonhoeffer speak for themselves with little critical assessment from him. Most notably absent is any thorough engagement with Bonhoeffer by Haynes himself. It would be unduly harsh to labour this point, as clearly Haynes’ intent is not to add yet another layer of Bonhoeffer-analysis to an already-weighty corpus, but rather to scan the existing and competing assessments of him. Nonetheless, there are times when the exhaustive ‘literature review’ produced by Haynes would benefit from a greater level of Haynes’ own critique on the basis of his own reading of Bonhoeffer’s vita.

A final, smaller, complaint is that, with the exception of the first two chapters in which European, Asian and Latin American interpreters are mentioned, Haynes’ interpretive view is primarily North Americo-centric. It is, to a significant extent, a survey of Bonhoeffer’s reception within the USA. While this is undoubtedly a legitimate endeavour, there remains scope for further exploration of the ways in which Bonhoeffer has been received (or not) elsewhere in the world. Haynes indeed notes that the 4- yearly International Bonhoeffer Congresses now draw delegates from all corners of the
world (p.166). Inclusion of the insights from these more liminal receptors would not only be immensely insightful but would also reflect the genuinely ecumenical and international outlook espoused so clearly by Bonhoeffer himself.

These slight criticisms aside, though, Stephen Haynes has presented a timely and provocative assessment of the current state of Bonhoeffer-studies. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, ‘The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon’ is sure -and deserves – to become a vitally important text in the coming phases of Bonhoeffer- research.

Mark R. Lindsay, Melbourne, presently Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations, Cambridge.

2a) Richard L.Hernandez, Sacred Sound and sacred substance: church bells and the auditory culture of Russian villages druing the Bolshevik ŒVelikii Perelom’ in American Historical Review, Vo. 109, no. 5 (December 2004) p. 475ff

During the Communist government’s massive attempts in 1928-1932 to propagandize and enforce the “great turn” in rural Russia away from old beliefs and habits, in order to introduce the new socialist system, church bells frequently came to play a role as symbols of peasant resistance. Richard Hernandez shows how the village bells reinforced traditional religious identity in practice over and against Bolshevik idolatry. Despite vigorous efforts made by various party organizations to confiscate, suppress and destroy all bells, the backlash was significant, and led to violent confrontations, even riots. In some cases, the Red Army had to be called in. These incidents served to show the mingling of sacred and secular causes in the struggle against the entire Bolshevik project.

b) Daniel Sack, Men want something real: Frank Buchman and Anglo-American College Religion in the 1920s in Journal of Religious History, Vol. 28, no. 3, Oct. 2004 pp. 260ff

Frank Buchman was a Lutheran evangelist and sometime YMCA secretary in Pennsylvania who in the 1920s repackaged evangelical Christianity for British and American elite universities, creating a religious message tailor-made for a community of young men. Stressing a personal experience of God, Buchman’s message owed much to the kind of evangelical exhortation found in Keswick.

He reached out to “key men”, or elite members of the university, and later the wider society, especially the wealthy, offering help to sustain their personal morality through group meetings and dedication. The religious group experience, especially the importance of repentance and the cultivation of love, rather than the adherence to, or propagation of, theological doctrines, became the hallmark of Buchmanism, later to be “re-christened” as Moral Re-Armament.
Sack shows that this creed appealed to men, and sought to avert what many evangelicals thought was the regrettable “feminization” of Christianity. Concentrating on undergraduate heroes, especially champion athletes, Buchman propounded an evangelism suitable for the leaders of the post-1918 world’s commercial and scientific age. But by concentrating on a narrow personal morality – and often only on questions of sex – Buchman avoided any wider challenge to the existing social order. In Britain his Oxford Groups propagated these views through very popular house-parties, often held in lavish country mansions. The aim was to evangelize from the top downwards. Certainly these cells seemed to fill a social and spiritual need, challenging the conformist and cultural Christianity of the day with a more intense and masculine spirituality.

Sack’s account focusses mainly on the American scene, and notes that probably Buchman’s most enduring legacy is Alcoholics Anonymous, whose techniques are directly derived from the Oxford Group’s evangelical methods.

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3) A commemorative conference to mark the 6oth anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s death is to be held on April 15-16th at St John’s College Ministry Centre, Morpeth, New South Wales, Australia. The principal speakers will be Dr Maurice Schild, Adelaide and Prof John Moses, Armidale, NSW.
Contact: stephen.moore@ozemail.net au

Best wishes to you all,
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

As we all pray for the recovery of Pope John Paul II, this issue is appropriately concerned with the affairs of the Catholic Church of yester year.
May you all have a happy and blessed Easter.
Contents

1) Book Reviews

a) Ruff, Catholic Youth in post-war Germany
b) Tischner, Catholic Church in East Germany
c) Harold Tittmann, Jr., Inside the Vatican

2) Journal articles a) Sack, Frank Buchman’s evangelism
3) Conference report: AHA, Seattle Jan. 2005

a) German Catholics and Spain
b) Pope Pius XII’s defenders

1) Mark E. Ruff, The Wayward Flock. Catholic Youth in postwar West Germany, 1945-1965 Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press 2005. 284 pp ISBN0-8078-2914-5

Mark Ruff, who now teaches at St Louis University in Missouri, is one of the younger North American historians currently studying the recent history of the German churches. He rightly recognizes that the time has come to move on from the well-trodden battlegrounds of the Third Reich. So his examination of German Catholicism in the postwar period is doubly significant: first, because he brings to the English-speaking readership this newly researched tranche of German Catholic church history, and second, because he departs from the traditional approach of an institutional history, usually apologetic in its perspective. Instead he adopts a critical stance towards the planning and execution of the Church’s youth work, which does not hestitate to show up the weaknesses of this often mistaken ecclesiastical strategy. His basic question is: why did the long-established institutions of the Catholic milieu, in what was to become the new state of West Germany, lose the support of so many young men and women? Why did these youth groups prove to be so wayward in their fading allegiance, after so many generations of ardent and loyal support to this particular subculture?

His answers seek to depict the effects of increased leisure, liberty and consumerism amongst young people, as well as the often heated debates among church leaders as to how best youth could be retained and retrained to uphold the kind of conservative values so successfully being exemplified in the nation’s political arena. In this way Ruff’s study of the erosion of the Catholic milieu and its changing environment adds a valuable corrective to many of the secular histories which see the 1950s as a glorious success story for conservative restorationism.

Empirically this study looks at the re-establishment and the subsequent decline of the numerous Catholic youth organizations, which rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the Nazi Third Reich. The objective was to rebuild the network of associations which had served and protected German Catholics through the long years of minority status, social ostracism and state persecution. But in the post-1945 situation, Catholics were no longer in the minority, no longer subject to repressive restrictions, and had a dominant position in the West German political arena. Despite the boastful assertion that Catholicism had triumphed over National Socialism, and the implication that its value system would now come to refashion the social and political climate, in fact there were soon to be major difficulties, particularly relating to young people and to youth work.

In the first place, the loss during the war of an entire cohort of youth leaders, lay and clerical, delivered a blow to youth work from which it never fully recovered. Then the postwar mood was far more sceptical and critical than before. Concerned Catholics were, as Ruff rightly remarks, haunted by the Church’s easy capitulation to the Nazis in 1933 and by the failure of their institutions to confront or hold in check the Nazi colossus. Furthermore, the youth themselves were deeply affected by seeing their elder brothers and sisters seduced, coerced, propagandized, recruited and finally marched to their deaths in the service of a criminally-flawed ideology. They had a strong sense of betrayal, and were resolved not to be caught again. In the ruins of so many bombed-out cities, idealism, even in a Catholic garb, found few takers. Ohne mich was their watchword.

It is not surprising therefore that the plans of the Catholic leaders to rebuild a large-scale Catholic youth organizational structure, which would help to rebuild German society with Christian values and traditions, soon ran into difficulties. Its elitism, hierarchical patterns and belief in discipline and obedience were all to be rejected by the postwar youth as unwanted reminders of the discredited past. Ruff is suitably critical of the outdated preference for uniforms, banners and marches, all signs of an authoritarian approach to youth work.

Equally unsuccessful were the attempts to revive the activities and associations for young women, based on the highly traditional models of preparing them to be helpmeets for men and mothers of the next generation. Modesty, humility and chastity were no longer the preferred values of the postwar female cohort. After their regimentation by the Nazi female leaders, after the ruinous bombing of their homes, and the often traumatic readjustments when their men returned from the war, these young women sought new horizons. As a result the Catholic Church was forced to relinquish its carefully delineated conceptions of gender, its “feminine” forms of piety, and its insistence on unfailing obedience to church authority. Instead the youth sought new freedoms in enjoying mass culture, often imported from America, in film, jazz and hit songs. These activities were individualistic, and unconnected to any larger religious or political purposes. Together with the rapid expansion of leisure activities, and a flourishing economic revival, German young people were able to have fun on their own terms as part of a new youth culture.

Religious and social conservatives naturally deplored such developments. Some wanted to go back to the good old days of a closed Catholic milieu. But the more progressive were also obliged to see that by opening up their activities to new patterns, their religious message and opportunity became diluted. Young people too often simply disregarded church teachings, and, in so doing, ultimately eroded the authority of the church altogether. Where parish clergy were left to organize youth activities, they found themselves outmoded by the professional resources of the secular world. The church could no longer provide, even in rural areas, the kind of fare to be found in cinemas, dance-halls or shopping malls. Television was to cement the demise of any number of youth groups.

Once young people began to choose for themselves, and to determine their own futures, they were no longer willing to commit to those religious activites and professions that required the greatest degree of dedication and sacrifice. The number of candidates for the priesthood sank rapidly. Monasteries and convents lacked recruits. Instead, all too often, young Catholics, like young Protestants, opted for a cafeteria style of religious belief, choosing only those elements which suited their new-found and freer lifestyles.

Ruff describes all these developments without recrimination or lamentation. His material is drawn principally from the diocesan archives of Cologne and Würzburg, the one mainly industrial, the other mainly rural. But in both the erosion of the Catholic milieu took place relentlessly. The struggles of the older generation of youth leaders to stem the tide seemed to be counter-productive, and often induced infighting which wasted far too much energy. The basic question of how such a traditional church, which for so long had been on the defensive, could adjust to the demands of the modern world, remained unresolved. It was to require the even greater upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s before German Catholicism was obliged to discard the mental attitudes of earlier years, and to seek to create new communities and forms of identity capable of meeting the challenges of a new and forceful culture of consumerism

Ruff’s elegant and well-researched narrative carries conviction. His arguments could, conceivably, have been strengthened by some references to the very similar developments in the Protestant, and even in the socialist, milieux. And, at some points in his tale, it would have been desirable to build in some personal recollections of participants, who are presumably still able to recall their wayward youth. But Ruff’s service in documenting this chapter of German Catholic history is a noteworthy contribution which merits reflection in many quarters.
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b) Wolfgang Tischner, Katholische Kirche in der SBZ/DDR 1945-1951, Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B, no 90, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag 2001 ISBN 3-506-79995-9

(This review appeared earlier on H-German, and is here reprinted by kind permission of the author)

This work is the result of Wolfgang Tischner’s 1999 dissertation completed under the direction of Ulrich von Hehl. It represents an enormous amount of research and work on the relatively unexplored position of the Catholic Church in Soviet-occupied Germany during the opening phases of the Cold War. It is divided into two major sections: one dealing with the development of the Catholic Church and its offices at the close of the World War II, and a second sectiuon addressing the build-up of Catholic instiututions in Communist-controlled East Germany. Throughout the work, Tischner agues that despite each loss of political representation, German Catholics continued to maintain and even create new institutions that permitted them to foster a “Catholic” identity and culture.

Section One offers a wealth of information regarding church personalities and the interplay among the church leaders in Germany, the occupying powers and the Vatican. The dominant figure of this time period was, of course, Cardinal Konrad von Preysing of Berlin. Surveying such regions as Thuringia, Meissen, Mecklenburg, Paderborn and Breslau, Tischner highlights the problems of restructuring and rebuilding in these war-torn areas, and emphasizes the role Preysing played in each area. By June 1945, Preysing had formulated the church’s political position regarding the Soviet occupation. He admonished the clergy to act on behalf of human rights and the freedom of conscience, and urged them to support wholeheartedly a democratic form of government (p.61). By the end of the year, despite the absence of any major confrontation with the Soviet military government, the struggles that lay ahead were clear.

Towards the end of the year, the announcement from the Vatican that Pope Pius XII had elevated Preysing to become a Cardinal was a pleasing addition to his prestige in this tumultuous time. The promotion did not, however, guarantee that Preysing would have an easy time. Tischner depicts these early post-war years as filled with internal power struggles involving Preysing’s closest advisors, Heinrich Wienken, Aloysius Muench and Wilhelm Weskam, largely over how to deal with the escalating clashes between the Catholic Church, the Soviet authorities and their East German communist satraps. At the end of this early phase, Preysing’s pronouncements set the tone for many East German Catholics (p.111). This opening section represents an astounding compilation of institutional and political history in an area long neglected by many German historians.

Section two branches away from the earlier more standard political-institutional account. In this exhaustive section, Tischner argues for the creation of what he calls a Catholic “sub-society” (Subgesellschaft). Rejecting descriptives such as “milieu”, the author devotes close to four hundred pages to explain how Catholicism not only survived the communist years but emerged alive and well after the regime’s fall in 1989. In order to prove his argument, Tischner leaves high political approaches behind, and instead examines various institutions that were protected or preserved by German Catholics with each challenge to their political rights. He examines the role of Catholic newspapers. radio programs and other publications. In addition, he analyses the humanitarian work of the Catholic social assistance organization, Caritas, and the impact of Catholic social services such as hospitals and orphanages in the GDR. So too he explores the work of kindergartens, after-school programs, extracurricular religious instruction, and the youth programs designed to combat Communist-led youth groups. All of these sections are meant to show how Catholics still managed to retain their religious identity in what had become an officially “atheist” state.

One missing element which might have strengthened his arguments would be an examination of Alltagsgeschichte. Tischner’s work is invaluable in describing the position of Catholic institutions in a Soviet-dominated government, but there is little or no coverage of the life of rank and file Catholics in the GDR.

Tischner shows convincingly that German Catholics were able to form an independent “sub-society” in the GDR by 1951. It would be very interestung to have a sequel describing the tougher years ahead when the communist regimne cemented its hold. Nevertheless, this work remains a valuable contribution to the study of Catholic institutions under hostile governments.
Beth Griech-Polelle, Bowling Green State Universityc) Harold Tittmann, Inside the Vatican of Pius XII. The memoir of a American Diplomat during World War II, New York: Image 2004. 224 pp.

(This review appeared in the November 2004 issue of First Things, and is here reprinted by kind permission of the authors. Slightly abbreviated.)
Critics of Pius XII have long claimed that the Allies were bitterly frustrated by the pontiff’s official neutrality during World War II. Among the evidence for this they cite some of the official dispatches of Harold H.Tittmann, Jr., who from 1940 to 1946 was chief assistant to Myron Taylor, Franklin Roosevelt’s personal representative to the Vatican. In works from Saul Friedlander’s 1966 Pius XII and the Third Reich to John Cornwell’s 1999 Hitler’s Pope, the occasional criticisms expressed in Tittmann’s dispatches have been quoted against Pius. Now we have the dispassionate postwar reflections of Tittmann himself, which paint a very different picture.

Although Tittmann lived until 1980, he rarely spoke about Pius XII. Instead, he quietly worked on his memoirs, which his son, Harold III, (who lived with his father in the Vatican during the German occupation of Rome) has now edited and published under the title Inside the Vatican of Pius XII. Given Tittmann’s importance in the debate about the papacy during the war, these memoirs may be the most important document to be published on Pius XII in over twenty years. And they prove to be, far from an indictment, an overwhelming defence of the Pope and the Catholic Church. . . .

There are at least half a dozen major revelations in this memoir. Perhaps the most interesting comes when Tittmann relates his discussions with Joseph Mueller, the anti-Nazi Bavarian lawyer who served as a middle-man between Pius and the German resistance. “Dr Mueller said that during the war his anti-Nazi organization in Germany had always been very insistent that the Pope should refrain from making any public statement singling out the Nazis and specifically condemning them and had recommended that the Pope’s remarks should be confined to generalities only”, Tittmann writes.

To have this testimony from a leading member of the anti-Nazi resistance means that Pius XII’s conduct during the war was not due solely to his personal instincts but also to the explicit advice of the anti-Nazi resistance.

Other revelations include the Vatican’s maintenance of “special accounts in New York banks” operated by Archbishop Spellman, as well as a “personal and secret account” for Pius XII (“about which Spellman knew nothing”), which the Pope “used exclusively for charitable purposes” during the war. Pius revealed the accounts to Tittmann in a “strictly confidential” meeting, after Roosevelt issued an executive order freezing American assets of hostile European countries. How much of this money was distributed to those persecuted by the Nazis is unknown, but Tittmann at least strengthens the testimony of Fr. Robert Leiber, Pius’ longtime aide, who told Look magazine in 1966: “The Pope sided very unequivocally with the Jews at the time. He spent his entire private fortune on their behalf”

Tittman provides, as well, new details of the Vatican’ anxiety over written documents that might expose the Pope’s anti-Nazi activities and collaboration with the Allies. “It was only rarely that records were kept by the Vatican officials of conversations the Pope had with his intimate collaborators or even with important visitors from the outside, such as ministers, ambassadors, or private individuals offering information or suggestions”, Tittmann writes. When the German occupation of Rome began on Septemeber 10, 1943, Nazi surveillance increased dramatically, and Pius’ secretary of state, Cardinal Maglione, quickly recommended that any compromising documents be destroyed. Tittmann notes: “At a meeting on September 14, the Allied diplomats decided to follow the cardinal’s advice by destroying all documents that might possibly be of use to the enemy. Osborne [British minister to the Holy See] and I had already finished our burning, and the others completed theirs without exception by September 23, when I reported to the State Department” As a result, even the many official diplomatic documents which survive the war years represent only a fraction of Pius XII’s activities. . .

Discussing the charge that Pius went easy on Nazism because of his fears of Soviet communism, Tittmann insists that the Pope “detested the Nazi ideology and everything it stood for,” and he describes in fresh detail Pius’ intervention for an extension of America’s lease-lend policy to Russia, persuading the American Catholic hierarchy to soften its stand against the Soviet Union in order to serve a greater, and more immediate, cause – the defeat of Nazi Gemany. “Thus Pius XII himself had joined the President,” Tittmann says, “in admitting that Hitlerism was an enemy of the Church more dangerous than Stalinism and that the only way to overcome the former was an Allied victory, even if this meant assistance from Soviet Russia”.

Although a strong admirer of President Roosevelt, Tittmann does not flinch from criticizing the Allies’ carpet-bombing of Italian cities and religious institutions (including the attack on Castel Gandolfo, where the Pope was sheltering thousands of refugees).

Tittmann also reveals how Roosevelt, anxious to secure American Catholic support for the lend-lease program for Russia and eager for the Pope to intervene for him with the American bishops, wrote Pius a letter claiming that “churches in Russia are open” – and asserting his putative belief that there was “a real possibility that Russia may, as a result of the present conflict, recognize freedom of religion” Obviously embarrassed by this, Tittmann quotes another State Department official who had been stationed in Moscow as saying “he could not understand how such a letter as the President’s could ever have been written in the first place in view of all the contrary information that was on file in the State Department”

Critics oftren charge Pius with refusing to speak out against the Third Reich publicly and explicitly. Besides being inaccurate – the Vatican had excoriated Nazism long before Hitler came to power – the criticism is simplistic. As Tittmann points out, soon after World War II began, Pius XII authorized Vatican Radio to specifically condemn Nazi war crimes in Poland, naming the Nazis as the perpetrators, and Catholics and Jews as their victims. “However,” writes Tittmann, “the Polish bishops hastened to notify the Vatican that after each broadcast had come over the air, the various local populations suffered Œterrible’ reprisals. The thought that there were those paying with their lives for the information publicized by Vatican Radio made the continuation of these broadcasts impossible” Pius XII had tried the route of “explicit” condemnation – and it failed.

Toward the end of 1942, when reports of Nazi atrocities were increasing, Allied diplomats asked Pius to brand the Nazis by name. Despite his concern for ongoing reprisals, which had wrought havoc the previous July in Holland, Pius agreed – on condition that he name the Soviets and condemn their war crimes as well; he reasoned that as a universal pope, he could not condemn one totalitarian regime and wholly refrain from mentioning another whose principles were strikingly similar. But when the Allies learnt that Pius XII intended to include the Soviet Union in his condemnation, they dropped their request immediately, lest Stalin become enraged.

Tittmann concedes that the Pope had the better of the argument: “It was difficult for us to argue these points effectively with the Pope and in the end we were obliged to resign ourselves to the failure of our attempts” The debate may have been unnecessary, for as Pius himself told Tittmann shortly before his 1942 Christmas address, “I have already stated in three consecutive Christmas broadcasts that antireligious, totalitarian principles are iniquitous. These are the principles of the Nazis as any child can see”

As to whether there would have been fewer victims had Pius been more outspoken, Tittmann says: “There can be no final answer. Personally, I cannot help but feel that the Holy Father chose the better part by not speaking out and thereby saved many lives. Who can say what the Nazis would have done in their ruthless furor had they been further inflamed by public denunciations coming from the Holy See? It should also be remembered that the Nazi authorities were gradually realizing that they were destined to lose the war and the psychological effect of such blighted hopes could easily have caused to react even more violently to outside pressure. To the wealth of information in the archives on similar situations garrnered by the Vatican over the centuries, and to the help of expert historians using these archives, Pope Pius XII was able to add his unusual personal knowledge of the Nazi and German character. There was much inside information available to the Pontiff from such sources. Who could have been more qualified than this Pope to decide under the circumstances?”
Tittmann’s final assessment of Pius is persuasive and, indeed, moving. “With his diplomatic background, he was inclined to see both sides of a question, and this may have given others the impression that he was sometimes timid and reluctant to make decisions, especially in foreign affairs. In reality this was not the case. He was, in fact, decisive . . . I do not for a moment overlook his great spiritual qualities. Whether near him or away from him, one was always conscious of them. To me, he was definitely a spiritual man . . .Very possibly the future will rate him a saint”

William Doino Jr. and Joseph Bottum

2) Conference Report: Catholicism and Antisemitism in the shadow of National Socialism

a) The Spanish Civil War and the “Judeo-Bolshevik Conspiracy
Beth Griech-Polelle, Bowling Green State University, Ohio

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the conflict was quickly presented to the world as one of Christianity against Communism. The Vatican, horrified by the anti-clerical excesses of the Republicans, took this line, while Hitler justified his support of Franco’s Nationalists as being Germany’s contribution to destroy the danger of Bolshevism. But at this very moment, the Nazis were implementing their own anticlerical, and especially anti-Catholic, measures at home. The German Catholic bishops thought they should demonstrate their national loyalties by endorsing Hitler’s stance on Spain. Such support against Bolshevism, they optimistically hoped, would result in a slackening of Nazi persecution. Beth Griech-Polelle cites the vehement anti-Communist speeches of Bishop Galen, and Cardinal Faulhaber’s meeting with Hitler in November 1936 as evidence of how the Catholic bishops provided legitimacy to the Nazi campaign against the “Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy”. She regards this as a capitulation to the Nazis’ machinations. Of course Hitler never fulfilled his side of the bargain. In 1939 Galen publicly rejoiced in Franco’s victory over Bolshevism. But only a few months later, Hitler signed a Non-Aggression Pact with the Bolshevik leaders, thus embarrassing and compromising the German Catholic leaders, and revealing their naivety.

b) Jacques Kornberg, Pope Pius XII’s defenders

Jacques Kornberg’s contribution to the continuing debate over the war-time policies of Pope Pius XII takes the form of an excellent analysis of the main – but still largely unread – documentary source, the eleven volumes of Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la deuxieme guerre mondiale, published during the 1960s and 1970s in answer to the criticisms launched by Rolf Hochhuth. Kornberg rightly points out that the documents do not support some of the more exaggerated claims put forward by Pius’ defenders with regard to the alleged rescue of Jews from the Nazis. Instead the evidence shows, he says, that the Vatican’s priorities were continually more limited to a defence of the institutional forms and the sacramental witness of the Church. But Kornberg ignores the clear theme running thoughout these volumes that Pius’ international policy was directed towards the restoration of peace. His aim was to preserve the Vatican’s impartiality so that he could act as a mediator. To be sure, this attempt was repudiated by both sides. By 1943 Pius was obliged to recognize his failure. But so long as he clung to this hope, he was inhibited from a stronger stance of protest on behalf of wider humanitarian goals, such as by denouncing the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews. Above all, these volumes demonstrate the notable and distressing diminution of the Papacy’s moral influence during the war years. As Kornberg suggests, the Church’s emphasis on the primacy of the sacraments was not a heroic or prophetic stance. But it reflected the priority of those traumatic disillusioned times. It is certainly true that more could have been done; it is not true that nothing was done.

Next month’s issue will be dedicated to the memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, murdered sixty years ago, on April 9th 1945.

With best wishes
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

We learn with regret of the death in Calgary on December 28th of our colleague and list-member, Frank Eyck (1921-2004).

Born in Berlin, he was forced by the Nazis to flee to England as a teenager, and subsequently went to St Paul’s School in London. Briefly interned as an “enemy alien” in 1940, he then joined the British army and served until 1946. After obtaining his B.A. in 1949 he worked for the BBC foreign service, but later on went to the University of Exeter to teach Modern European History. While there he wrote a political biography of the Prince Consort. In 1968 he moved to the University of Calgary, and took up his “inheritance” as a German historian from his famous father Erich. In the same year he published his pioneering work on “The Frankfurt Parliament, 1848-1849”. On the basis of meticulous research, and with a precise statistical breakdown of the 48ers, he disputed Disraeli’s derisive claim that it had been a “professors’ parliament”. In 1982 he wrote a sympathetic biography of his mentor and family benefactor “G.P.Gooch: A study in History and Politics”. After half a century of struggling with his heritage, both national and religious, Frank produced a monumental tome on “Religion and Politics in Germany: From the Beginnings to the French Revolution”. Therein he tried to come to grips with the troubled relationship that defined much of modern German history. In many ways it was his legacy to German historiography.
Contents:

1) Book reviews a) M Hockenos, A Church Divided
2) Book chapters

a) Religion in China Today
b) Christianity in China
c) Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust

3) Journal articles

a) M.Greschat, Martin Niemöller’s activities after 1945.
b) M.Höhle, 13 August 1961 and the churches
c) A.Chandler, Bishop Bell and the German Resistance

1a) Matthew D. Hockenos, A Church Divided. German Protestants confront the Nazi Past. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2004. 269 pp. ISBN 0-253-34448-4

Coping with the Nazi past has been a preoccupation for Germans for the past sixty years. For those institutions, particularly the major churches, which saw themselves as the moral guardians of the nation, this task has been both continuous and bafflingly difficult. Admitting guilt for supporting so enthusiastically a regime which turned out to be criminally and deliberately genocidal presented major psychological hurdles for the majority of the population. The resulting malaise presented the churches with enormous problems throughout the early years of reconstruction after 1945.

Matthew Hockenos, who teaches at Skidmore College in New York State, has written an excellently researched study of the German Evangelical Churches in the immediate postwar years between 1945 and 1950. He gives a masterly account of the often strident controversies which raged, particularly in the hierarchy of the Protestant churches, over how to understand the Nazi past and the churches’ role during that fateful era. For this reason, he can rightly entitle his book “A Church Divided”. He shows, on the one hand, why and how so many conservative Lutherans were unwilling to examine their own political and theological presuppositions. On the other hand, he also describes the steps taken by reformers to create a new and more ecumenically sensitive climate, which in later years was to prove successful in overcoming the church’s divisions.

Hockenos’ first-rate use of the archival records is supplemented by a notable command of the secondary literature.

His illustrations and appendices are particularly apposite. And his skillful presentation of these often very Germanic issues for his English-speaking audience brings up to date the 1973 account by Frederic Spotts, The Church and Politics in Germany.

In 1945 Germany lay physically ruined and morally humiliated. The sense of loss through the damage and destruction of virtually all the major cities was compounded by the disasters of national defeat. The overthrow of a regime which the majority of Germans had supported left the population bereft of any comfort.

Fears for the future only added to the guilt for the past. As the only surviving institutions, the churches became a place of refuge, providing relief to the people’s bodies and souls in their unprecedented plight. The burdens placed on the clergy were therefore demanding and complex. Hockenos’ approach is both sober and sceptical. He sees clearly enough the difficulties of the Protestant clergy when faced with the tactics of self-pity and evasion adopted by their parishioners, and carefully analyses the strength and weaknesses of the responses they formulated. Coming to terms with their own record was only part of their wider responsibilities in supplying answers, particularly to the painful questions: why did this happen? What are we to do now?

. In 1945 the disappearance or dismissal of those church officials who had been ardently pro-Nazi left the way open for the surviving leaders of the Confessing Church to take charge, who had all along resisted the Nazification of the church’s doctrines and practices. But they were well aware that more was needed than just a change of church bureaucrats. The catastrophe of the hour demanded a re-examination of the whole Lutheran theological and political tradition, especially of its long-held mentality of loyalty to the state.

In fact, as Hockenos ably shows, the divisions within the church arose between those who looked for a return to Lutheran religious orthodoxy and traditional political obedience to the national state, and those who campaigned for a complete reconstruction of the church’s structures and social attitudes, based on a much more radical theology. This division, in brief, can be said to have been fostered by the alternative priorities each group put forward. To the more conservative, the pastoral needs of their congregations seemed to require the church to play the role of comforter, advocate and defender against all outside dangers. To the more radical, the church was now called to a prophetic witness, especially political, and to chart a new course of Christian discipleship for the future.

The champion of this latter cause was Pastor Martin Niemöller, the former U-Boat captain and survivor of seven years in concentration camps. He drew his inspiration from the Swiss-German theologian, Karl Barth, whose stinging criticisms of his more conservative colleagues for their capitulation to Nazism and nationalism, had made him many enemies. The Barthians, as they were called, called their brethren to account, and relentlessly attacked the evasions and theological subterfuge which soon enough began to be adopted to deal with the what became known as Œdie Schuldfrage’. The resulting failure to agree on the legacy of the past was the principal cause of the church being divided. Hockenos is to be congratulated on showing not only how these churchmen addressed this legacy, but also why they addressed it as they did.

In so doing, he disputes the widely-held view that post-1945 Germans were too exhausted or demoralized to face the question of their recent past. Instead he gives us a thorough analysis of the often heated debates within the Evangelical Church, culminating in the notable declarations of 1950 on the most sensitive issue of all, the lamentable heritage of Christian antisemitism.

But the division equally arose over the future policies of the church. To the surprise of most conservative nationalists in the parishes, they found that, in the summer of 1945, their conquerors, with their military administrators, proved sympathetic to the churches. They offered the churches help in rebuilding, and encouraged their pastoral work for the needy, the sick and the refugees. They furthermore made it clear that the churches were free to decide their own future, provided that they resolutely cleansed their own ranks of Nazi sympathizers. At two major conferences in 1945, at Treysa and Stuttgart, the surviving leaders sought to achieve a consensus of unity and to lay out a practical course of starting again. But the future could not be planned without dealing with the unresolved past. Hockenos quite rightly points out how nearly the whole attempt failed for this reason.

Hockenos recognizes that these clergymen all shared a theological perspective on the world and its affairs. His description of events therefore rightly gives us the gist of the theological arguments deployed – in contrast to Frederic Spotts’ previous survey which avoided theology entirely. He shows very well how both the conservatives and the reformers could make use of the considerable theological resources of their Lutheran heritage to justify their respective positions. But, nevertheless, the issues to be faced were highly political in their consequences.

The reformers, led by Niemöller, and backed by Barth, wanted to rebuild a church totally independent of the state. Instead, such a church should be a prophetic scourge of all power structures, and the chastiser of any misuse of state power. They preferred a congregational church polity, the abolition of all hierarchical structures and a voluntary church membership. It was to be a “Living Church”, instead of the Erastian establishment of the past. Only thus could the church become a powerful voice for peace and justice, steadfastly repenting of its past nationalism and its too close association with state power. The lesson of the Nazi years demanded a suitably penitent stance for the future.

This programme, militantly proclaimed, was strongly opposed by the majority of church members. They much preferred to embrace self-exculpating versions of events, whereby the church had been victimized by the Nazis, and now again by the Allied military governments. They rallied around those leaders who saw themselves as upholding the true German national spirit. The Nazi excesses were excused as the work of a handful of brown-shirted fanatics, diabolically misled. The encroachments of the foreign conquerors should be repelled by the resurgence of loyalty to the nation. Examination of past errors, let alone sackcloth and ashes, was distinctly unpopular.

The clash between these contentious and seemingly irreconcilable views was only averted by the eirenic plea for unity expressed by the senior bishop, Wurm of Württemberg. He took the lead in 1945, chaired the early meetings, and sought a compromise position which would include as many church members as possible. Largely at his instigation, the existing church regional structures and polity were retained. Former Nazis, unless very prominent in their attacks on church doctrine, were allowed to return to their parishes. The church was called to act as the people’s advocate towards the occupying powers, to resist all ideas of German collective guilt, and to cherish a sense of national identity again.

Yes, at the same time, Wurm recognized that Niemöller and his followers had to be listened to. Repentance for the mistakes of the past was obligatory. A new beginning, and a new relationship with churches abroad, was now a paramount necessity. Self-congratulation for their own survival, or attempts to turn the clock back had to be resolutely opposed.

The result of this pressure could be seen in the notable Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945, which tackled this highly contentious topic in very general terms, but also promised to take up the church’s God-given commission with renewed dedication.

Hockenos ably outlines the various arguments the church leaders put forward to defend these positions. Many of them were self-serving, some were vague and mystical, all were opportunistic, in the sense that they were designed to give theological justification to the respective plans for the church’s future. But, as Hockenos laudably points out, by the light of later judgment, all fell short by avoiding any precise admission of the church’s most glaring omission, its failure to stand by the Nazis’ chief victims, the Jews.

The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, for instance, made no specific mention of the Jews. It is clear that, in the immediate post-war years, the church’s preoccupation with its own plight took precedence over any thorough theological reflection. This was in fact a widespread phenomenon and not confined to the German Protestants alone. It was only in later years that the mood began to change.

By the end of 1945 the conservatives in the churches had begun to rally. They loudly voiced the general feeling that Germany was being maltreated by its conquerors, resisted the Allies’ compulsory de-Nazification programme, and lamented the imposition of alien ideologies, i.e. western democracy or eastern communism. Bishop Wurm even publicly accused the Allies of seeking to destroy the German “race” by starving them with inadequate rations. Self-pity became far more prevalent than any sense of repentance. Conservative churchmen became adept at balancing Germany’s own destruction and losses against the suffering inflicted on others. While the Nazi crimes were admitted, these could be blamed on the small number of gangsters who had seized power. The church was seen as non-involved and hence blameless.

Hockenos’ narrative of these developments is exemplary. His analysis of the theological issues is sophisticated. His sympathies clearly lie with the reformers, but here he follows every English-speaking writer on German church affairs. Most notably he breaks new ground in describing how the churches dealt with the Jewish question. His final two chapters outline the initial and tentative steps taken by the reformers to come to terms with the realization of how much Christian anti-judaic traditions had led to the endorsement of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, and had precluded any open resistance to the Nazis’ crimes.

This painful reassessment began when a group of former Confessing Church leaders, some of whom had been in concentration camps alongside Jews, recognized the need for a fundamental transformation of the church’s relationship to Jews and its understanding of Judaism. This process was slow and reluctant – in Hockenos’ view, much too slow. But it was no easy task to overcome the deep-seated legacy of popular anti-Judaism, combined with an antisemitism which continued even after the horrors of the Nazi-inflicted atrocities became known. Only when the prevalent myths of Christian triumphalism and supersessionism were abandoned was the way open for a new beginning.

This movement was at first the work of only a handful of Protestant clergymen, none of them well known. Their superiors argued that there were other more pressing priorities. Some of the advocates were drawn from the missionary movement. They were appalled by the sufferings the Jews had experienced, so now argued that the church must redouble its attempts to show love to the survivors. But, too often, this meant a redoubled effort to convert Jews to Christianity, since this was the greatest gift such missionaries could confer. Needless to say, none of these ardent souls ever asked the surviving Jews if such missionary proselytizing was their desired form of reparation. And even those Jews who had voluntarily or earlier joined the church often felt forsaken by the wider church community. Antisemitic stereotypes still remained prevalent in many church circles.

Only slowly did the realization sink in that the “Jewish question” could not be solved by Jewish missions. Much more crucial was the founding of the State of Israel in May 1948. Led by Karl Barth, Protestants were now adjured to see this as a sign that God had remained faithful to His chosen people. At the same time, Christians should acknowledge their indebtedness to their elders in faith, and join in thanks for the gift of the Jewish scriptures. The fateful “teaching of contempt” was to be replaced by feelings of respect.

No less striking was the emergence of a new mood, at least in West Germany, where Protestants took the lead in seeking opportunities to meet in dialogue with Jewish representatives, such Rabbi Leo Baeck. A new approach based on humility and reverence was to be encouraged. The result was the notable statement issued at the 1950 Synod, when the German Evangelical Church for the first time explicitly admitted its guilt towards the Jews. It was the initial opening of a new chapter, which in the intervening years has gained a wide theological consensus.

Hockenos concludes with the thought that the divisions caused by the rival doctrines and policies of conservatives and reformers are still with us. “Although the conservative legacy survived into the post-war period and dominated church affairs in the decades to follow, the alternative vision of the church as the conscience of the people and champion of a new political ethic challenged the majority view and continues to influence a minority within the Protestant Church today” (p. 177).

This is an authoritative account which combines both theological insight and political judgment. Hockenos’ shrewd and often critical analysis of the character of the main actors and their ecclesiastical and political choices carries weight. It is much to be hoped that his study will soon appear in a German translation.
JSC
2a) ed. Daniel Overmyer, Religion in China Today, Cambridge University Press 2003.
This excellent collection of articles by China specialists seeks to describe the present state of religious life in today’s China, and has been put together by scholars from the University of British Columbia. The editor’s introduction shows that, contrary to Communist theory, religious life in China has not withered away, but is very much flourishing in a variety of guises. The consequent struggle for authority in the Marxist-ruled state is here explored in depth by Pitman Potter, who demonstrates the ambiguity of the current regime towards religious groups, still seeking to control their activities, while claiming to encourage a “more tolerant management of religious organizations”. Daniel Bays, now of Calvin College, Michigan, contributes a notable essay on the current resurgence of Chinese Protestant Christianity. On any given Sunday, he holds, there are more Protestants in church in China than in all of Europe. Richard Madsen, of San Diego, provides a counterpart essay on the mixed results of the Catholic revival during the reform era. The bibliographical aids are particularly helpful. This valuable overview concentrates on the present situation, but often enough refers to the past. In one sense, this collection supersedes the following work:

2b) ed. Daniel Bays, Christianity in China, Stanford U.P. 1996
Included in this useful survey is a fine article by Tim Brook on “Toward Independence: Christianity in China under the Japanese Occupation, 1937-1945.” This outlines the impact particularly on the Western- based missions of the Japanese attempt to control the Chinese society and economy in pursuit of their imperial goals. Brook shows that the aim of many Chinese Christians to achieve independence and union were greatly assisted by the enforced retreat of the foreign missionaries. To be sure the Japanese occupation power promoted the Chinese Church’s independence for its own reasons, but the net result was to encourage the mood which resulted in the 3 self patriotic movement of later years. The dilemmas of the Christian Chinese leaders, caught between the need to accommodate themselves to the new ruling power, to ward off the suspicions of their fellow countrymen who had fled to the Chinese-controlled parts of the country, and to still maintain some contact with their former supporters in the mission boards, are here well demonstrated. But Brook suggests that the strategies worked out during this period were to be significant when the even greater onslaught of the Communist revolution took place a few years later.
2b) eds. Konrad Kwiet and Jürgen Matthäus, Contemporary Responses to the Holocaust, Westport, Conn: Praeger 2004
Perhaps I may be allowed to mention an essay of my own included in this book: J.S.Conway, “Changes in Christian-Jewish relations since the Holocaust”. This outlines the virtually revolutionary changes brought about in the major Christian communities of western Christendom by the advent of the state of Israel and by the reflections on the Holocaust. The theological changes prompted by the latter have been enormously complicated by the political impact of the former, as this essay seeks to show. But the sad history of the church’s long involvement with theological anti-Judaic prejudice has now been replaced by a much more eirenic stance in both the Roman Catholic and Protestant communities. The current teachings will now, it is to be hoped, become irreversible.
3a) M.Greschat, Der ist ein Feind dieses Staates!’ Martin Niemöllers Aktivitäten in der Anfangsjahren der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, Vol. 114 (2003), no.3,pp. 333-56.

At the end of 1951, in the midst of the Cold War, the German public was shocked to read the news that Pastor Martin Niemöller, the former U-Boat captain, former concentration camp inmate, and now Church President = Bishop of the Protestant Church in Hessen-Nassau was about to pay a fraternal visit to the Soviet Union. Ostensibly his purpose was to meet with representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church. But, in view of his erratic political stances, his activities were a cause of alarm among many of Germany’s conservative leaders, who suspected more sinister motives.

Niemöller had survived the war by a hair’s breadth, and saw his post-war mission at first to call for repentance and reconciliation. But the onset of the Cold War, the creation of the West German Bundesrepublik under the Catholic leader Konrad Adenauer, and the consequent division of the country between the rival alliances, made these goals highly debatable. Niemöller became the champion of having a disarmed, demilitarized but still united country, freed from the control of either Washington or Moscow. Not surprisingly this goal was regarded with grave suspicion by all those who distrusted such far-flung idealism.
Martin Greschat\s article is a masterly summary of the various responses Niemöller’s activities evoked, though he doesn’t quote Adenauer’s reported outburst, following the English king Henry II: “Who will rid us of this turbulent priest?”

In fact Niemöller’s politics were often naive and always moral. His motif: “What would Jesus say to this?” was hardly adequate to the complexity of the issues to be faced. So Greschat’s sympathy is limited with this attractive, often heroic, but always challenging, leader of German Protestantism. His accurate assessment of Niemöller’s inspiring but sometimes wrong-headed vision is a most welcome addition to the post-1945 history of the German churches.

3b) Michael Höhle, Der 13 August 1961 und die Kirchen in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, Vol 114 (2003), no 3, pp. 364-83.

The building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 saw not only the physical division of the city, but also the enforced separation of the ecclesiastical authorities. Both Catholics and Protestants had attempted up to then to hold together both parts of Berlin in a wider national framework. Höhle describes how the GDR regime deliberately and skillfully pursued its plan of weakening the churches and of obliging their eastern members to play a subordinate role under the Communist leadership. He illustrates the subsequent dilemmas confronting particularly the Roman Catholic Church in Berlin.

3c) A.Chandler, Bishop Bell and the other Germany during the second world war in Humanitas, Vol. 6 no. 1, Oct. 2004, p.3 -30.

Bishop Bell’s heroic but often unpopular support of the anti-Nazi resistance movement in Germany is here analyzed by a leading scholar of the Anglican Church’s political role in the last century. Bell was essentially a liberal and ecumenical church leader, who sought to promote reconciliation and peace between the former enemies. But his eyes about the Nazi regime were opened by his contacts in the international Life and Work movement and by such representatives of the Confessing Church as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His support of Neville Chamberlain “appeasement policy”, however, led to his being shunned once war broke out. Churchill and his government never had any sympathy with the view that there were “good” Germans ready to make peace. Bell’s argument that these men should be given some indication of British support fell on completely deaf ears. And his subsequent criticism of the British demand for unconditional surrender, and the blanket condemnation of all Germans, was equally ineffective. The anti-German propaganda, associated with Lord Vansittart, was sweeping away what little sympathy remained for Bell’s point of view. He remained convinced, however, that the conspirators, who failed in July 1944 to overthrow Hitler and his regime, might have succeeded better if they had been encouraged from abroad. Chandler is doubtful, but praises Bell’s efforts to try and bring a Christian moral perspective to the conduct of politics in a world of hatred, conflict and destruction.
Best wishes
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

Today I am celebrating my 75th birthday, and the beginning of Volume XI of this Newsletter. Both events astonish me, and no doubt you too! But having survived so far, I can only pray to be given strength to go on for a while yet. Certainly, I am equally astonished and delighted by the number, range and quality of books on contemporary church history which continue to appear – and hence require notice. This revival of interest in church history in general, and our period in particular, is of course to be greeted with pleasure by all who believe that the Christian faith and its history can and must be presented to the world as the on-going process of God’s good providence. I can only hope that my small efforts to this end have met with your approval, as is indicated by the fact that our mailing list continues to grow! Your support over the years has been an enormous encouragement to me. So the New Year affords an opportunity to send you all my very warm thanks in gratitude for your support, and also to send greetings and best wishes for your respective endeavours in the coming months. I am always glad to hear from you with your comments, so long as you send them to me at the address below.
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca
Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) Katharina Staritz: Dokumentation Vol. 1

b) D.Palm, Evangelische Kirchentage.

2) Book chapter: H.Lehmann, Religious Socialism, Peace and Pacifism.

3) The situation in the Ukraine, December 2004.

List of books reviewed in 2004
1a) Katherina Staritz 1903-1953, mit einem Exkurs Elisabeth Schmitz Dokumentation Band 1: 1903-1942, eds. Hannelore Erhart, Ilse Meseberg-Haubold, Dietgard Meyer. Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlagshaus. 2nd edition 2002. ISBN 3-7887-1682-7

Katherina Staritz was one of the first women to become an ordained minister of the German Evangelical Church. In this role she was to become one of the few heroines of this church during the Holocaust. But she has largely been forgotten, even by those who followed in her pioneering footsteps. It is safe to say that abroad she is completely unknown. So it is particularly welcome that three of her friends – perhaps disciples – have undertaken this excellent and careful documentary compilation of her letters and papers, along with an illuminating introduction to her career. The difficulties she faced in pursuing her goal to become a theologian, her courageous engagement on behalf of the victims of Nazi persecution, and her sufferings at the hands of the Gestapo, are the main themes of this preliminary first volume, which takes her story up to the time of her imprisonment in Ravensbrück, the notorious concentration camp for women. This documentary collection provides a fascinating view of the Church Struggle and its consequences as seen through the eyes of this sensitive and dedicated woman.

Katherina Staritz lived most of her life in Breslau in Silesia, and began her studies after the end of the first world war. It was a time of great confusion and intellectual turmoil, with so many of the pre-war certainties overthrown and discredited. Her desire was to seek for answers in the study of theology, but her father saw no career prospects for a woman in that field, so encouraged her to study Arts with a view to teaching. But she persevered and eventually switched faculties and obtained her theological degree.

She was encouraged in this course by a family friend, Professor Hans von Soden, who later became Dean of the Theological Faculty at Marburg. Katherina’s correspondence with him over the span of twenty years is, in fact, the main source used in this book. He saved her letters, and after his death in 1945, they were all returned to her. Unfortunately his letters to her seem to have been lost when she was forced to flee Breslau on the approach of the Red Army in 1945. But her attractive openness in discussing with her mentor in respectful tones the theological issues in which she was involved give an illuminating picture of some of the main currents of debate within the Protestant churches of the time.
Hans von Soden was a systematic theologian with a liberal slant. But both politically and in church politics he was conservative. Hence he early on attacked the Nazi Party for its radicalism and saw to it that Marburg was not infiltrated by pro-Nazi theologians of the “German Christian” sort. In fact, with the help of Rudolf Bultmann, Marburg became one of the fortresses of the Confessing Church, and Katherina Staritz one of the loyal following of this school.

In the early 1930s, her letters to von Soden tell of her struggles to gain recognition of her gifts and training. To be sure, since 1927, the Evangelical Church had issued regulations for the employment of theologically qualified women, but only in subordinate positions. They did not enjoy the right to be fully ordained, were subject to the supervision of a male pastor, and most shocking of all, were obliged to abandon their careers upon marriage. (To be fair, this same highly discriminatory regulation was applied to women teachers in British universities until the 1950s!) The best these women could expect was the title of “Vikarin”, clearly to distinguish them from “Herr Pastor”.

As a result, Katherina was employed in Breslau, on a city-wide basis, to minister mainly to women and children, to preach only occasionally, and not to celebrate the sacraments. Her success was such that in 1938 she was rewarded with “tenure”, though still at lower rates of pay than her male counterparts.

Largely because she was assigned to what were considered fringe tasks, she became involved with ministering to the Protestants of Jewish origin, whose plight in the late 1930s became of increasing concern to the Confessing Church. The Confessing Church had all along refused to accept the Nazis’ blanket condemnation of all Jews, whether converted or not. Instead, they recognized that baptism brought any converts into the Christian fold, and therefore they must be unequivocally supported. The November 1938 pogrom, commonly known as the Crystal Night onslaught, was thus a major challenge, and created a dangerous rift in Protestant ranks. Thanks to the initiative of Pastor Heinrich Grüber in Berlin, Katherina Staritz was put in charge of the Breslau branch of his “Büro”, established to assist such victims. Their main effort before 1939 was to advise those seeking to emigrate, but also to deal with the traumatic situations of those with no prospect of leaving the country.

For those who, like Katherina, sought to help, as her letters make clear, the frustration and sense of powerlessness resulting from the Gestapo’s increasingly repressive measures, imposed an ever-growing psychological strain. Moreover it became more and more obvious that helping the Nazis’ Jewish victims was personally dangerous. In December 1940 Pastor Grüber was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. With emigration banned from the summer of 1941, and with no public means of rallying support, the aid workers were silenced, dispirited, and distraught.
The crisis for Katherina Staritz came in September 1941 when the Gestapo announced its nation-wide decree that all Jews must wear a visible yellow star on their clothing. This was intended to bring about the further isolation and separation of persons of Jewish origin from the rest of the population, and indeed achieved this end. But, for those Christian Jews who were already in a threatened minority situation, this edict meant the probable loss of one of the few sources of comfort and consolation they still had. Many expressed fears of the physical dangers they now would be subject to if they appeared at the church services they had frequented, often for years.

Katherina Staritz was well aware of this predicament and resolved to take action. She therefore, with the backing of her immediate superior, but without consulting any higher ecclesiastical authority, sent round a circular to all the clergy of Breslau city, which stated:

“It is the Christian duty of the parishes not to exclude anyone wearing the Jewish star from their worship services. These persons have the same right to be at home in the church as any other parishioner and are in special need of the comfort of God’s word. The danger exists that some not truly Christian elements may be led astray, so that the Christian honour of the church might be sullied by un-Christian behaviour, Instead parishioners should be reminded to behave pastorally, see Luke 10: 25-37, Matthew 25:40, and Zechariah 7:9-10. Practically, I ask you to consider whether or not, church officials, vergers, sidesmen etc, could be instructed to act in an especially pastoral manner to these members of the parish, now so singled out, and when necessary to provide special seats for them. Perhaps some reserved seats could be set aside, but not as a form of bench for the poor only, but rather to prevent them from being rejected or expelled by any un-Christian elements. In order to ensure that no unevangelical discrimination creeps in, it would be desirable for true and loyal parishioners, who know what the church really stands for, or hold official positions, to also sit next to those who are obliged to wear the Jewish star. Perhaps also such persons could be escorted to church services, since several have told me that they are not sure if they dare to come to church”.

Within a few days, this text had fallen into the hands of the Gestapo – probably leaked by one of the pro-Nazi pastors, and the skies fell in on the unfortunate Vikarin. Her office was raided by the Gestapo and all remaining copies of her circular were confiscated. She was then summoned to meet the Church President = Bishop, and told that she was immediately suspended from duty. When she protested that she was only carrying out her pastoral responsibilities, for which she had been ordained, she was publicly rebuked and let fall by her ecclesiastical superiors up to the national level.
Even in her own parish church, the church committee led by some laymen passed a resolution demanding that no one wearing the Jewish star should be allowed on the premises, thus making impossible the counseling services she had provided. When the four pastors united to protest, they were overruled. And the highest church authority announced that from henceforth “baptised ‘non-aryans’ had to remain away from the church life of German parishes, and would have to make their own arrangements for separate worship and pastoral services”. This betrayal of the Christian cause marks the nadir of the church’s capitulation to Nazi pressures in Silesia.

Worse was to follow The Gestapo passed this circular on to the Reich Propaganda Ministry, under Goebbels, where it was seen as a most useful piece of evidence for proving the churches’ perfidious undermining of the National Socialist ideology. Consequently a virulent attack was launched in the Nazi media on Katherina Staritz as a prize example of the national treachery to be expected from such church members. She was denounced for her sabotage of the war effort at the very moment when Germany’s destiny was being decided. As a result, in March 1942, she was arrested and taken off to Ravensbrück.

Her subsequent fate will be described in Volume 2, due out later this year. JSC

1b) Dirk Palm. “Wir Sind doch Brueder”: Der Evangelische Kirchentag und die Deutsche Frage, 1949-1961. Arbeiten zur Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte. Goettingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2002. 360 pp. Table, notes, bibliography, index. Euro 49.00 (cloth), ISBN 3-525-55736-1.
(This review appeared first on H-German on November 7th 2004)

Anyone who has experienced a German Kirchentag (church gathering) is aware that there is really no analogy in religiously-heterogeneous American society; even an English translation of the term is difficult. At the Dresden Kirchentag held under the big-tent theme of “Dare to Trust” in July 1983, this reviewer witnessed how East German Protestant laity posed explosive political issues such as peace and militarization, ecology and human rights, pressing church leaders and the SED regime to respond even as both church and state preferred to shield the Luther-year celebration from the rising tide of social dissent. Until the candlelight marches in the final days of the GDR, such massive gatherings of several hundred thousand people were impossible in any other context than a Kirchentag closing service. This carnival of Kirchentag–Bible studies and political discussion, grassroots organizing and event management, high level negotiations between church and state juxtaposed with spontaneous demonstrations and surveillance by the Stasi–is the object of Dirk Palm’s in-depth and well-researched study. Even though Palm focuses on the early postwar years, the mix of motives among leaders and laity, the partisan interest and politicization by the media, the changing international context characterized the institution Kirchentag in its formative years as well.

Palm’s main goal is to describe and interpret the founding of the Kirchentag in its heyday as an all-German movement after World War II. His chronology ends in 1961, when the Berlin Wall and GDR policy precluded the possibility of such mass meetings. The author provides rich biographical description of the individuals who were instrumental in this movement, in particular Reinold Thadden-Trieglaff, long-time chair of the German Evangelical Kirchentag organization. In the process, the author develops a three-fold typology of conceptions which informed the motives of the various actors and provide the basis for the political tension and compromises which proved necessary to mount such large public events in the context of the widening division of Germany. Thadden-Trieglaff’s vision of “popular mission” and rechristianization after the Nazi era clashed with that of those, such as the founder of the Evangelical Academy, Eberhard Mueller, and Bishop Hans Lilje of Hannover, who conceived of its function in terms of an “academic-problem oriented conception,” a forum for dialogue among elites (p. 304). Still others, such as Berlin Bishop Otto Dibelius and Hessen-Nassau Church President Martin Niemoeller, emphasized a “political-symbolic function” in their conception of the Kirchentag.

The study reflects extensive use of archival sources, including not only GDR sources (SED, state, and CDU-East), but also church archives of the EKD/Kirchentag and important regional churches and official West German sources found in the Federal Archives in Koblenz. Palm augments this with extensive analysis of media coverage of the Kirchentage in order to determine their public resonance. Finally, he uses personal papers and interviews on a limited basis. Palm is thereby able to develop greater insight into the motives and interactions of the multiplicity of actors involved.
Palm investigates the process whereby the fundamentally religious goal of the Kirchentag was altered as a result of the founders’ efforts to institutionalize this new organization, requiring political, logistical and financial support from a host of actors which were largely pursuing their own non-religious interests. For example, to mount all-German Kirchentage the leaders had to navigate the shifting sands of the two German states which were seeking to use the Kirchentag to delay FRG rearmament and integration into the West (in the case of the GDR, CDU-East, and Niemoeller) and to delegitimize the GDR by giving vent to popular dissent (in the case of the FRG, CDU-West and Dibelius). By exploring the agenda and debate at the Kirchentage, Palm demonstrates the effect of the widening political division on the substance of the Kirchentage. Issues such as rearmament and educational discrimination in the East gave way to more focus on issues relevant to the respective part of Germany, such as Mitbestimmung in the West and political activity in the East. Palm demonstrates clearly how shifts in the general East-West climate directly affected the Kirchentage: holding them in Berlin and Leipzig in 1951 and 1954 represented GDR forebearance in the face of Soviet initiatives, whereas rejection of plans for Thuringia and Berlin in 1957 and 1961 reflected the new-found self-assurance of the GDR, in particular Ulbricht’s hard-line wing of the SED.
Other fronts that Palm explores and documents include that between the FRG government under Adenauer and the Kirchentag. Adenauer supported the Kirchentag as a means of developing greater support for the CDU among Protestants and of putting the GDR on the defensive. The Catholic competition with the Protestants also factored into the Kirchentag’s efforts. For its part, the Kirchentag leaders needed the financial support and participation of FRG leaders to make the institution viable as well as gain visibility in German society.
On the internal church side, this study reveals fault lines not obvious to the outsider, but crucial to an understanding of this institution. For example, the split between conservatives and leftists among Protestants manifested itself in the diplomacy involved in planning the Kirchentage and in the debates themselves. In scheduling speakers, Heinemann had to be balanced by Gerstenmaier, Niemoeller by Dibelius.In addition, Palm nicely plumbs the nuances of church support for the Kirchentag. On the one hand, it represented a means of outreach to laity and social relevance. On the other hand, it engendered suspicion in the institutional/clerical church, which often contended that it alone embodied ecclesiastical authority. The largely-successful efforts of the Kirchentag to gain financial support from the FRG and the United States, and from business sponsors provided greater autonomy from the institutional church, even at the expense of increased political dependence.

Ultimately, however, Palm’s purpose in exploring these internal factions is to explain how the Kirchentag sought to establish itself as an element of civil society in an increasingly asymmetrical East-West context. After its hopes to deter West German integration into the West were dashed, the GDR’s efforts to limit the church to the cultic sphere would necessarily target the all-German public forum, Kirchentag (pp. 254-255). Not surprisingly the proposals for parallel Kirchentage in East and West in the late 1950s presaged the split in the Kirchentage movement itself and foreshadowed the 1969 split in the EKD. Dresden 1983 showed that despite the rupture in all-German institutions, the element of civil society did not die out: the reopening of the German question in the 1980s would lend new “political-symbolic significance” to the Kirchentage in both East and West.
Robert F.Goeckel, State University of New York, Geneseo

2) Book chapter, H.Lehmann, “Religious Socialism, Peace and Pacifism” in eds. R.Chickering and Stig Foerster, The Shadows of Total War, Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, and Cambridge University Press, 2003 ISBN 0 521 81236 4

Hartmut Lehman’s short account of Paul Tillich’s spiritual and political pilgrimage is very welcome. Had he been an English clergyman, his theological development and subscription to radical left-wing politics, including pacifism, would not have been remarkable. But, in the German Evangelical Church, it was indeed notable, if only because so few others joined him in his search for Christian alternatives to war, nationalism and capitalism. Equally notable is the fact that, with the rise of Hitler and his expulsion from Germany, Tillich began to lose that sense of idealism and eventually, in trying to persuade his American audiences, argued that the responsible use of military power was necessary to regain and safeguard world peace. At the same time, he denounced the sacralization of the nation, which had been the downfall of so many German Protestants. He saw his mission to teach the German people that there were higher values than the nation.

Of course, the same course was followed by some others, notably Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Unfortunately Lehmann doesn’t go into the similarities of these two theologians’ pilgrimage, nor the reasons why other pacifists, especially Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, possibly German Protestantism’s most notable pacifist in the 1920s, did not adopt the same path. But Lehmann correctly notes that Tillich’s resolute refusal to compromise with Nazi totalitarianism earned him a moral authority which resulted in his being received with honour in his native country in the 1950s. JSC

3. On December 6th (Feast of St Nicholas), the German Evangelical Church’s News Service carried the following item about relief efforts in the Ukraine:

“Kiew verwandelt sich in eine Festung” – Deutscher Auslandspfarrer schreibt aus der Ukraine.
Seine Kirche sei voll von erschoepften Menschen, erklaerte Pfarrer Peter Sachi Ende November am Telefon. Er hatte es eilig, wollte sich wieder um die Leute kuemmern. Sachi ist Pfarrer der Deutschen Evangelischen Gemeinde St. Katharina in Kiew. In den Unruhen nach den ukrainischen Praesidentschaftswahlen bemuehe sich die Kirchengemeinde Herberge und Schutzraum zu sein, so der Pfarrer in einem offenen Brief nach Deutschland. Der Kirchenvorstand, der Wachdienst, Gemeindeangehoerige und er als Seelsorger sorgten nach Kraeften dafuer, die taeglichen Gottesdienste und Veranstaltungen aufrecht zu erhalten. Die Unterstuetzung aus Deutschland, Briefe, Anrufe sei dabei sehr wichtig. “Denn wir haben auch Angst, wir sind muede, die Nerven sind duenner geworden.” Die Kirche sei eine “Herberge am Weg”. Hier koennten die Menschen durchatmen, ausruhen, Kerzen entzuenden und beten. Sachi berichtete von gegenseitigem “Hoeren und Verstehenlernen”.

I trust you all enjoyed a restful and pleasant Christmas, and take this opportunity to wish all the best for the New Year
John Conway
jconway@inyterchange.ubc.ca

List of books reviewed in 2004:

Barrasch-Rubinstein,E Reading Hochuth’s The Deputy November Besier, G. ed, Zwischen nationaler Revolution und militarischer Aggression January Benz, W. Uberleben im Drittten Reich October Braaten C and Jensen R. Jews and Christians June Coady. M.F. biography of Fr Alfred Delp January Fennell, N. The Russians on Athos May Gilbert, M. The Righteous October Goodman, P. Hitler and the Vatican July/August Greschat, M. Evangelische Christenheit February Hein,M. Die saechsiche Landeskirche nach 1945 May Holtschneider, H. German Protestants and the Holocaust September Klempa, L. and Doran, R. Certain women amazed us March Kohlbrugge,H. Mein unberechenbares Leben November Krell,M. Intersecting pathways: Jewish and Christians theologians June
Krieg, R. Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany December Linn, Ruth Escaping Auschwitz November Napolitano, M Il papa che salvo gli ebrei July/August Nehring, A. Orientalismus und Mission May Ostmeyer, I. Evangelische Kirche und Juden in der DDR September Roseman, M. The Past in Hiding April Schmidt, H. Hilde Schneider January Weitensteiner, H. Catholic parishes in Frankfurt October Williams,A. Holy Spy May Zasloff, T. A Rescuer’s Story (Vichy France) March Ziefle, H. One woman against the Reich September

Dear Friends,
A Prayer for the Christmas Season

Living God,
Through your incarnation you fill us with new hope.
which we have known in word and sacrament,
in the life of the church,
and in the witness of saints and martyrs
May the power of your love,
continue your saving work among us,
and bring us to the joy you promise for all your holy creation.

Contents:

1) Book Reviews: a) Krieg, Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany
2) H-German debate: The Rosenstrasse film
3) Journal articles:

a) Lawson, The Anglican Understanding of Nazism
b) Ederer, Propaganda wars
c) articles in Religion,State and Society, June 2004

4) Conference report: Hastings, Munich Catholics in the 1920s
5) Book notes: Simon Phipps: A Portrait
6) Research in progress: Slater, John Nelson Darby
1a) Robert A.Krieg, Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany, New York/London: Continuum 2004. ix + 234 pp.
ISBN 0-5264-1576-8.

Professor Robert Krieg of Notre Dame University, Indiana, has given us a valuable addition to the English-language studies of German Catholicism during the Third Reich. Together with the work of some younger scholars, such as Kevin Spicer, Mark Ruff, Derek Hastings and Oded Heilbronner, we now have a much more balanced picture than in Gunter Lewy’s initial survey forty years ago. And in contrast to many of the German-language accounts, Krieg has the merit of both clarity and brevity. This will be an excellent work for undergraduates.

These studies have all begun with the inherent question: why did the Catholic Church not forestall or resist more forcefully the tide of Nazi totalitarianism? Or put more sceptically, why did the Church compromise and capitulate so fatefully to the Nazi menace?

Krieg’s answer looks carefully both at the history of the Catholic milieu, and at the theological leaders, five of whom he examines at greater length, while placing them very ably in their context. He points out that German Catholicism was in a unique situation, and, as others have already done, he stresses as major factors the lasting impact of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, and the hierarchy’s search for stability and security thereafter. At the same time, he shows that the prevailing trend in Catholic theological teaching concentrated on the somewhat abstract ideas of Thomas Aquinas, and seemed to give little guidance to the faithful for their political stance in everyday politics. Krieg could possibly have made more of the impact of the loss of the first world war, which in the 1920s disconcerted both Catholics and Protestants alike, resulting in confused and conflicting responses to the challenge of the secular world.

Three of the five theologians whom Krieg analyses, Eschweiler, Lortz and Adam, achieved later notoriety for their open support for the new Nazi regime, at least to begin with. Together with lesser-known figures whom Krieg discusses, their motives were extremely varied. In fact, as he points out, none of these men can be seen as representative of the whole Catholic milieu. Despite the prestige of these professors, their affirmations were matched by the opposing views held by their colleagues and bishops. Karl Eschweiler would seem to have been a firm authoritarian. Hitler’s leadership against modernity and especially against the Bolshevik danger was the main attraction. Joseph Lortz however had a much grander vision. He looked for the renewal of Western civilization, whereby Hitler’s political energies could be united with Catholic spirituality. Such co-operation, as Mussolini had shown, could be beneficial in rebuilding a spiritually vibrant society along organic lines. It was, as Victor Conzemius pointed out, “idealism separated from reality”.

To be fair, Lortz soon enough began to recognize that the Nazi movement contained other and more dangerous elements. His subsequent withdrawal was sufficient to enable him to resume a long and fruitful academic career after the war.

The most noteworthy of these scholars was Karl Adam, professor of systematic theology at Tübingen University, who already in the 1920s had gained a world-wide audience, and indeed may be considered one of the most creative theologians of the early twentieth century. But, in Krieg’s view, he was also most naive in his assessment of National Socialism. As a result, in 1933, he enthusiastically endorsed Hitler’s new regime, believing that here was a leader of messianic capabilities, who would rebuild the national community and revive Catholicism in the process. To his credit, he
recognized the need for a new start, and the spiritual hunger caused by the confusions and uncertainties of political affairs. He agreed with Lortz and Oswald Spengler that the West was suffering a spiritual and cultural breakdown. His answer was to reject the corrosive influences of modernity and individualism, and return to the authority of the church. Faith and culture should find a new synthesis.

Karl Adam saw himself as a mediator between the church and the Nazi state. This led him to approve the Nazis’ antisemitic policies because each nation has a duty to strengthen its racial identity. But Catholics should relate to individual Jews with justice and love. In Krieg’s view, Adam’s fault lay in not recognizing that Nazism’s goals were incompatible with Christianity, despite overlapping terminologies.
But there were others. Romano Guardini was professor of theology in Berlin until dismissed by the Nazis in 1939. He early on recognized the “barbaric” character of the movement and wrote books implicitly criticizing the Nazi manipulation of the public through their invasive propaganda. But Guardini’s upholding of Christian tradition was muted during the war and only flourished afterwards in rebuilding the Bonn republic on good Christian lines.

A lesser-known figure was the Freiburg dogmatic theologian, Engelbert Krebs, whose broader vision of the church’s mission separated him from those colleagues searching for a political leader who would somehow restore Christendom. Krebs was singular in writing and speaking in favour of Judaism, and thus challenged both the Nazis’ antisemitism and the church’s theological anti-Judaism. But he paid the price of being removed from his professorship in 1937. Like Guardini he was silenced for the rest of the Nazi era.

The variety of these theologians’ responses to the Nazi regime reflected views prevalent throughout German Catholicism. The leading bishops sought to preserve its institutional autonomy, and on the whole succeeded. The result was an absence of any strong prophetic witness on behalf of the suffering and oppressed. Catholics had not been armed by their theologians with the moral fervour or compelling arguments which would have been required for such a stance. None of the German bishops or theologians supported an overthrow of the regime, even when its tyranny became clear. But the limited ecclesiology they espoused did inoculate them against Nazi infiltration or subversion. Their passive resistance saved the pastoral life and ensured institutional survival. However, as Krieg notes, their moral authority was eroded by their silence over Nazi atrocities. Subsequent commentators have rightly criticized this model for the church, and the failure to equip the laity for a more active role in defending freedom and justice.
Krieg is ready to acknowledge the inadequacy of the Catholic ecclesiology adopted during the Nazi era, and blames the popes and theologians who suppressed any more relevant stance. Indeed he goes so far as to affirm that the majority of theologians of the 1920s and 1930s failed to understand the real consequences of the first world war. Not until after the Nazi onslaught did younger theologians like Karl Rahner begin to forge a newer more appropriate response to the secular challenges of political radicalism and modernity. It was only then that the lessons of the church’s struggles with Hitler were learnt.

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2) H-German debate: Rosenstrasse

The recently released film Rosenstrasse, made by the veteran German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotha, describes the events which took place in early 1943 in a shabby back street in east Berlin. The Gestapo summoned to a dilapidated Jewish community centre there nearly two thousand Jewish men, who had not been included in the earlier round-ups and deportations to death camps. They and their wives, most of whom were not Jewish, were of course terrified. But on this occasion, these wives, partners in what the Nazis called “Mischehen” (mixed marriages), took action to protest their husbands’ detention. For several days they organized a clamorous stand-off outside the building, even though the guards were armed and menacing. At the end of a week, the husbands were released and sent home.

This film is based largely on the book by Nathan Stoltzfus of Florida State University, – Resistance of the Heart. Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse protest in Nazi Germany (1996). His interpretation makes a heroic tale out of these womens’ defiance of the mobilized might of the Gestapo. He claims that this singular demonstration of public protest on behalf of the victimized Jews was a success in preventing the Nazis from sending these men to their deaths in Auschwitz. The Nazi hierarchy was forced to recognize the likely consequences if they violated the feelings of the majority of non-Jews, especially those with connections to the Christian churches. The courage of these valiant, but mostly unknown, women is therefore to be celebrated and honoured. The Rosenstrasse protest could have set an precedent if only its message could have been heard and the example followed elsewhere.
This interpretation has however been challenged by a noted German historian, Wolf Gruner, most recently on H-German, 14 September 2004. In Gruner’s opinion, there was never any question of this particular group of Jewish partners in these “mixed marriages” being deported. Heroic as the women’s’ behaviour undoubtedly was, it should not be seen as a victory for popular protest, let alone a sign that the Nazi totalitarian grip could be successfully challenged.

Gruner bases his case on a close reading of numerous Gestapo documents. For example, he quotes a circular from the Reichssicherheitshauptamt issued on 20 February 1943, i.e. a few days before these men were ordered to appear in the Rosenstrasse, which specifically excluded Jews living in mixed marriages from any further deportation measures. The same exemption was ordered a month earlier in January by Eichmann personally for Jews in France. To be sure, these moves were all part of a monstrous and grandiose campaign to get rid of all other Jews as soon as possible.
Gruner pertinently points out that, had the Gestapo really intended to deport these men, they would have been told to report to some much less accessible railway station – as had happened to earlier contingents of such victims. Nor would some have been released even before the women mounted their watchful protest. Gruner suggests that this group of men was called in for more pragmatic reasons. The Gestapo wanted to find out which of them could be employed to fill the vacancies in various institutions and firms, left open by the deportation of the “full Jews”. These men were repeatedly interrogated about their qualifications, especially if they were fitted to work, for example, in a Jewish hospital. In the end, some 200 were told to report for employment as replacements for “full Jews” ruthlessly deported to Theresienstadt in mid-March.

At the same time the Gestapo could do a double-check on these men’s actual marital status and weed out impostors.
Far from the Rosenstrasse episode leading to any amelioration in Nazi policy, the evidence is that the ferocity of their antisemitic campaign was stepped up. Rumours had been circulating that the Nazi leaders planned to pass a law compulsorily “divorcing” all Jews from their non-Jewish spouses – hence enabling their deportation without repercussions in the civilian population. Not surprisingly this proposal aroused vigorous opposition amongst the churches. Cardinal Bertram, the Presiding Catholic bishop, made it clear to the government in November 1942 that any such move would endanger the whole structure of matrimony and the family, and would be morally disastrous. Millions of Germans would be involved – and that was certainly a factor the Nazis did not want to risk at that juncture of the war. The measure was not implemented, but the threat remained.

One of the most determined activists for justice for the oppressed Jews , not only for those converted to Christianity, was Margarethe Sommer, who worked for the Catholic Bishop of Berlin, von Preysing. She has rightly earned a place of honour in the tributes paid to her later, most recently by Michael Phayer. She resolutely compiled information about the Nazis’ attacks on the Jews, and regularly sought to get Cardinal Bertram’s intervention on their behalf. Equally regularly, the Cardinal refused, and in the end forbade her to visit him in Breslau with her importunate petitions.
In the case of the earlier deportations, Margarethe Sommer had diligently prepared lists of the Catholic families affected, organized local parish workers to visit where possible, and if needed helped to make preparations and packing for those who would not likely return. So she was ready to do the same for those summoned to the Rosenstrasse. On 2 March she again traveled to Breslau to call for energetic steps to be taken. She asked for a national declaration by the Catholic bishops to be issued on the following Sunday, 7 March, and recommended that the Pope be requested to send out a pastoral letter over the Vatican radio.

Despite the fact that her advice was not adopted by her superiors in the Catholic hierarchy, she could still draw the conclusion that the vigorous protests that were made, not only by the wives on the spot, but also by their supporters elsewhere, were effective in securing these men’s release. She recorded this opinion in a memorandum to the German bishops in August 1943, later published in the large-scale documentation of the German Catholic bishops’ papers, produced in the 1980s.

Another valiant fighter in the same cause was Gertrud Luckner of Freiburg, whose tireless efforts on behalf of Catholic Jewish families led her to travel across Germany contacting, warning, encouraging, inspiring, sympathizing and helping where she could. But she too was chased down by the Gestapo and shortly after the Rosenstrasse incident was sent to Ravensbrück where she remained until 1945. But her hope that her fate and that of those she sought to protect would arouse the general Catholic population to make vigorous and vocal protests against their rulers’ injustices was to be disappointed. For the majority of German Catholics, including their Presiding Bishop, the Jews lay outside their circle of obligation. The churches’ record of lack of support for the persecuted Jews remains a shocking and regrettable failure.

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3) Journal articles:

a) Tom Lawson’s article on “The Anglican Understanding of Nazism 1933-1945: Placing the Church of England’s Response to the Holocaust in Context” in Twentieth Century British History, Vol 14, No.2, 2003, pp.112-37 deals in fact only with the leading personalities of the Church of England. The rest of the world-wide Anglican communion is ignored. And Lawson’s purpose is more narrowly to take issue with the generally favourable opinion expressed by such reputable historians as Sir Ian Kershaw, Richard Gutteridge, Andrew Chandler, R.C.D.Jasper and Marcus Braybrooke, as to the extent to which the Church of England was aware of and took steps to protest the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
He claims instead that these church leaders failed to recognize the centrality of the Nazis’ campaign to eradicate Judaism, and so interpreted its antisemitic atrocities as significant only as a sign of its totalitarian character. He seeks to explain this failure as resulting from both theological and social factors, even though some of these would seem to be mutually exclusive.

Lawson knows well enough, and has researched thoroughly enough, to realize that the Church of England contained – and contains – a very broad range of opinions which make his generalizations suspect. Nevertheless he asserts that the Church of England’s response to Nazism was far too churchly, arousing sympathy for all those persecuted by the Nazis, to be sure, but stressing particularly such well-known church cases as Pastor Martin Niemöller. These were all seen as the victims of totalitarianism. After 1939, the war was to be waged to overcome this ideological and political threat to Christian civilization. Such an interpretation, he claims, obscured the Nazi persecution of the Jews, which could not be interpreted with any consistency of purpose as important for its own sake.

Thus he ignores the fact that the only two public letters of protest which the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lang, wrote about internal German affairs between 1933 and Sept 1939 were not about the Christians or the Socialists or pacifists, but the Jews. And here he did not mean ‘Non-Aryan Christians’ but Jews altogether. So too Lawson is led to downplay the notable proclamations by Lang’s successor, Archbishop William Temple, and by the united bishops of England and Wales, who in January 1943 published a collective statement of protest at both the Nazi persecution of the Jews, and at their government’s refusal to accommodate more refugees.

Lawson is led on to suggest that these utterances made only a superficial change in Anglican attitudes. The British government’s refusal to listen led to an abandonment of church protests, and so, Lawson asserts, to a lack of lasting understanding of the real nature of Nazism.
Indeed, he believes, these church leaders were increasingly preoccupied with the need for post-war reconstruction, including the “re-Christianization of Europe”, in order to guard against the rebirth of Nazism. In his view, such a post-war world would not have been one in which a Jew could safely be a Jew.

Tom Lawson evidently belongs to that group of historians – especially Holocaust historians – who are busy rewriting history as it should have happened. By indulging their wishful thinking in large measure, they can impose their own interpretation on what was said and done, or not said and done, and thus chide their elders severely for their presumed failures. At the same time, there is considerable grinding of axes, when politically-loaded points are scored which can be useful in more current controversies.

The result is that a distorted view of the actual past is presented. Those of us who can recall the circumstances of that time can only deplore the misreading of people’s attitudes and arguments. In fact, the whole story of British attitudes towards Nazism, and church attitudes in particular, is much more complex than Lawson suggests. His one-sided approach may stir up debate, but it should be seen as a provocative rather than as a definitive contribution.

b) M.F.Ederer, Propaganda wars: Stimmen der Zeit and the Nazis, 1933-1935 in Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 90 no. 3, (2004) pp. 456-72.
Ederer examines how the prominent Jesuit journal Stimmen der Zeit reacted to, or mostly against, the new Nazi regime in its early years. The editors were careful not to engage in open polemics, since they were certainly aware of the Nazis’ open antipathy. But in more subtle ways, they conducted a campaign to keep Catholic ideas unspotted from Nazi associations, and in particular to oppose any form of syncretism. The issues of the journal in these early years reflect a growing alarm at the Nazis’ anti-clerical and indeed anti-Christian, let alone anti-Jewish, policies. Rosenberg’s myths were especially attacked. Ederer follows the evolution of these ideas through the three years under his microscope.

c) Two notable articles in the recent issue of Religion, State and Society, Vol. 32 no.2, June 2004
Serge Flere, Slovenia. Not a perfect religious market, pp 151-7.

Christian Romocea, Reconciliation in the ethnic conflict in Transylvania. Theological, Political and Social Aspects, pp 159-76.

4) German Studies Association Conference report:

D.Hastings, Nursemaid or Nemesis: The Catholic-Nazi Relationship revisited.

Derek Hastings seeks to show the extent to which Catholicism in Munich can be said to have acted as a sort of “nursemaid” to the early Nazi movement, helping it to attain an important degree of viability in its earliest and most vulnerable years. Contrary to the view taken by many scholars that the early Nazi movement comprised either outright opponents of Christianity, lapsed Catholics, or bemused Protestants, Hastings shows that a number of Catholics, even priests, gave hearty support to the fledgling political party. One prominent Bavarian politician wrote to Cardinal Faulhaber in October 1923 to lament that “even Catholic priests are being caught up with National Socialist ideas and are allowing themselves to be misused as Nazi agitators”. Some of them, like the Abbot Schachleiter, quite willingly gave their services to the new movement. It was he who conducted a funeral mass for the Nazi thug and terrorist Albert Schlageter, whose brutal exploits were framed as the embodiment of a heroic Catholic-Nazi synthesis. Many young Munich Catholics, including Heinrich Himmler, were “literally transported by Schachleiter into a holy rapture”.

However, in the following year, most of these converts were lost after a wave of anti-Catholic venom was launched by the völkisch activists led by Erich Ludendorff and his wife Mathilde. Relationships were never the same again, though many Catholics still deluded themselves that agreement was possible and so eagerly supported the 1933 Concordat. And the readiness of so many Catholics during the whole Nazi era to believe they could be both good Catholics and good Nazis owes something to this initial period when Munich Catholics acted as the “nursemaid” of the Party.
(precis by JSC)

5) Book Notes:

Simon Phipps: A Portrait, ed. David Machin, London: Continuum 2003 ISBN 0-8264-7138-2 144pp.

Bishops and biographies belong together, especially if they were bland, blameless and boring. How to steer between open hagiography or critical assessment is the issue in most such episcopal obituaries. This tribute to Simon Phipps, Bishop of Lincoln 1974-1986, certainly leans more towards the former formula, but is of help in depicting an Anglican leader who responded effectively, and not at all boringly, to the challenges of his office. Particularly Phipps was known to have given leadership on social issues, as an industrial chaplain in Coventry, where his left-wing politics were appropriately relevant. It was therefore paradoxical that he should then have served as bishop in two rural dioceses, first in Horsham in Sussex, and then in Lincoln, still a largely agricultural county, full of ancient churches but few parishioners. This ministry called out all his pastoral skills, first deployed as Chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge. In the words of one contributor, Simon Phipps was a gracious and courteous God-fearing radical. The sketches in this small book bring the various chapters of his career to life with affection, but also lead on to consideration of the wider task of how to exercise episcopal leadership in the late twentieth century.

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6) Research in progress:

Jonathan Slater, University of Toronto, writes:

The area of interest for my doctoral dissertation is the reconstruction of Christian understandings of God, Christ and Salvation in nineteenth-century England. I plan to focus on F.D.Maurice, Thomas Erskine and John Nelson Darby. Darby was a prolific writer whose influence upon nineteenth and twentieth century religion extends far beyond the exclusive sect that still claims to hold to his teachings. If, as some argue, Maurice and Erskine represent the birth of certain trends in liberal theology, Darby lays claim to representing the birth of the most significant trend in conservative theology, i.e. dispensationalism. Darby’s novel proposal regarding divine providence, the relationship between Israel and the Church, and, in particular, his apocalyptic eschatology, has had a significantly formative influence upon the development of conservative theology in North America. At the centre of this relationship was a debate concerning the suffering humanity of Christ, a topic which would reappear in numerous forms throughout Darby’s writings.

Darby’s understanding of the suffering Christ provides a point of comparison with Maurice and Erskine, as an example of a significantly different response to a common historical and cultural context. I am especially interested in how these men reacted to the growing historical understanding associated with German biblical criticism and the search for a historical Jesus on the one hand, and the increased appeal to experience and feeling associated with nineteenth century Romanticism and the post-Kantian turn to the subject on the other.

Best wishes to you all,
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

Contents:

1) Book reviews

a) Kohlbrugge, Mein unberechenbares Leben
b) B-Rubinstein, Reading Hochhuth’s The Deputy
c) Linn, Escaping Auschwitz

2) Journal articles

a) Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte
b) Zucotti, Pius XII and rescue of Jews
c) Sun, Catholic workers in the Weimar Republic.

3) Kirchliche Tourismus: Montgomery, The Last Heathen in Melanesia
1a) Hebe Kohlbrugge, Zweimal zwei ist fünf. Mein unberechenbares Leben seit 1914. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2003. ISBN 3-374-02051-6 380pp. Eur.12.80

Hebe Kohlbrugge is clearly one of those indomitable Dutchwomen whose staunch Calvinist background makes it impossible for her to tolerate injustice or compromise with evil. Equally clearly these glimpses of her life story can’t do justice to her vibrant personality, but they do illustrate her resolute commitment to her faith in a succession of conflictual situations.

As a student in the 1930s she was sent to Berlin to learn household management and there sat in on Martin Niemöller’s bible classes and later assisted Günther Harder, one of the champions of the Confessing Church. Here she learnt about the evils of Nazism at first hand, and the need for the church to stand fast in Christian witness.

Returning to Holland, she hoped to study theology with Karl Barth in Basle. But the outbreak of war and the later
German occupation of her homeland instead drew her into a variety of perilous resistance activities. She even managed to undertake a highly dangerous journey to Switzerland, where she took messages from the Dutch church leaders to the officers of the World Council of Churches and other ecumenical bodies in Geneva. But for this and other acts of defiance, she was arrested and deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where her fellow Dutchwoman Corrie ten Boom was already incarcerated.

After the war, she was equally determined to play her part in reconstruction efforts, and served the Dutch Reformed Church in a number of enterprising activities in witness of reconciliation, peace and justice. In the 1950s she was mainly involved in establishing links to fellow Christians in East Germany, but later took on wider assignments in Mississippi, Soweto and Israel. One of the agencies she got involved with was the Christian Peace Conference, organized in Prague by the Czech Professor Hromadka. This attempt to build Christian bridges across the Iron Curtain was a brave endeavour but too full of wishful thinking to succeed. In any case, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 broke Hromadka’s heart and destroyed what little credibility the Conference had left. As one of the survivors, her report is interesting on this ill-fated undertaking and the failure of its peace moves. It showed her the limits of Christian idealism in a world of ruthless power politics and official hypocrisy.

Nevertheless Hebe Kohlbrugge’s commitment to finding ways to express her Christian political witness kept her going. Numerous visits to Germany, Czechoslovakia and other eastern European countries, as a Dutch guest, gave her the opportunity to see the dangers of compromise with the Communist state, but also to support the church in pursuit of its and her nobler aims. She helped to organize student exchanges, seminars and house groups, even in illegal circumstances, in order to keep the lines of Christian communication open. Her reports on the tyrannical surveillance and the nerve-wracking oppression of dissident churches by the Communist authorities in Roumania and Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s are a valuable witness to the conditions then prevailing.

Naturally she rejoiced to be present in November 1989 to bring ecumenical greetings to the East German and Czech churches in the aftermath of the downfall of the Communist system. And she was delighted when in 1990 she was awarded an honourary degree from the Charles University in Prague, acknowledging her services in promoting international friendship and intellectual dialogue between East and West.
Hebe Kohlbrugge stands in a long and honourable tradition of Protestant social activists, whose determination to follow the faith’s commands leads to speaking the truth uncompromisingly and unflinchingly. Her witness, against both Nazism and Communism, will be an encouragement to her successors along the on-going path of Christian discipleship in the coming century.
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1b) Emanuela Barrasch-Rubinstein, The Devil, the Saints, and the Church. Reading Hochhuth’s The Deputy.
New York etc: Peter Lang 2003 xi,124 pp ISBN 0-8204-6358-2 U.S. $53.95

Forty years ago, Rolf Hochhuth, a young Swiss-German author, wrote his play Der Stellvertreter (in English The Deputy or The Representative). It caused tremendous controversy because of the defamatory depiction of Pope Pius XII, whose cynical indifference to and silence about the fate of the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust was caustically attacked. The dramatic confrontation between the frigid ecclesiastical statesman and a young idealist Jesuit priest was one of the highlights of the play. So too was the depiction of the sinister German medical doctor, Mengele, responsible for horrendous cruelties and mass death in Auschwitz.

Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein’s short book successfully analyses the character of the play and Hochhuth’s reasons for making use of this form. She points out that it appeared twenty years after the events it sought to portray, at a time when the Nazi atrocities had been extensively researched, and one of the perpetrators, Adolf Eichmann, had just been on trial in Israel. Hochhuth was not old enough to have been involved himself in these events in all their complexity, but young enough to want to find some idealistic explanation. Like many of the survivors, he engaged in the wishful thinking that some more positive response to the Nazi crimes could have saved many more lives or even prevented the Holocaust from happening. Pope Pius XII became a scapegoat, who could be blamed for his refusal to take a more forceful, and therefore more appropriate, stand.
But Hochhuth’s awareness that the conventional explanations for the Holocaust, based on political, military or social factors, were inadequate led him to recast the narrative as a mediaeval morality play. He placed the well-known historical events within a transcendental framework in a cosmic conflict between Good and Evil. The overtones of Goethe are obvious. Auschwitz is represented as the Kingdom of Evil where all the moral traditions and restrictions of Christian civilisation have been overthrown. Here Dr Mengele operates as the devil incarnate, and the young Jesuit who identifies with the Jewish victims and is prepared to share their fate in Auschwitz, is portrayed as a saint. So too, as a saintly figure, we have a Protestant SS officer, Kurt Gerstein, who seeks to prevent further loss of life by informing his church superiors of what is happening, and indirectly loses his life as a result. By contrast, Pope Pius XII’s cold-hearted selfishness represents the defeat of the church at the hands of evil and hence the victory of death and destruction. God fails in his ancient battle with the devil.

In recent decades, the moral issues raise by Hochhuth have not gone away. No more satisfactory explanation of the Holocaust’s extreme destructiveness has emerged. The renewed debate about Pius XII’s actions or inactions has once more stirred up controversy about the role of the church. The distortions of wishful thinking about what might have happened, if only . . . . have again become apparent. But Hochhuth’s attempt to portray the historical record in a transcendental dimension as part of a continuing spiritual conflict has remained a one-time occurrence. It stemmed from the ambivalences of the 1960s which saw both imaginative schemes for reforming the Christian church and at the same time theologians proclaiming that “God is dead”.

It was to Hochhuth’s credit that he was the first to challenge the comfortable amnesia of received orthodoxy about the Nazis’ crimes, as well as pointing an accusatory finger at Pius XII and the Vatican for their policies during the second world war. The impact of the play was such that it popularized a pejorative view of the pope which has been widely prevalent ever since. Despite all the conscientious attempts by historians to correct the errors in history contained in the play, its success rested on compelling the audiences to face the moral issues presented.
We are indebted to Ms Barasch-Rubinstein for this insightful, if belated, anaysis of this unique literary-political experiment.

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1c) Ruth Linn, Escaping Auschwitz. A culture of forgetting. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 2004. 154pp. ISBN 0-8014-4130-7
(The following is not a book about ecclesiastical history, but its relevance to the subject of the previous review is obvious, and so I believe it will be of interest to many of our list-members.)

Sixty years ago, in April 1944, Fred Wetzler and Rudi Vrba escaped from Auschwitz. They were two of the only five Jews who succeeded in doing so and survived. A few days later they managed to cross the border to their homeland, Slovakia, and quickly contacted representatives of the Jewish Council. Their dramatic feat was made all the significant by the momentous information they brought with them, comprising details of the mass murder procedures in Auschwitz, the record of numerous transports arriving from countries all over German-held Europe, sketches of the annihilation facilities, and an overall estimate of the total number of Jews murdered in the gas chambers during the previous two years. Their eye-witness account, they insisted, should be shared at once with the Jews of Hungary, for whose arrival in the camp and subsequent murder, preparations were being actively speeded up. But in fact, this information, later referred to as the Vrba-Wetzler Report or the Auschwitz Protocols, never reached its intended audience. A month later, nearly half a million Jews were deported to their deaths. None of them knew what was in store for them. As a result, Vrba and Wetzler concluded that their information had been suppressed. Vrba, for one, remains convinced that if the intended victims had been warned, they would have resisted or hid or fled. The tragedy of the Hungarian Jewry would have taken a very different course.

Ruth Linn, now Dean of the Faculty of Education at Haifa University, had never heard of Vrba’s exploits. Despite the centrality of Holocaust remembrance in Israel’s national consciousness, she only learnt about this escape while viewing Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah. Several years later, however, she had an opportunity to meet Vrba personally and to read his autobiographical memoirs, written in English in 1963. This made her all the more curious as to why, fifty years after the Holocaust, the unique actions and memories of these Auschwitz escapees had remained completely unfamiliar to the average Hebrew reader.

It was only when she realized that the silence about Vrba’s life and writings was no accident that her curiosity turned to dismay and then to indignation. She made it her mission to break a thirty-five year silence by encouraging the publication of a Hebrew version of Vrba’s autobiography, and to urge Haifa University to grant him an honorary degree. These endeavors were opposed by Israeli scholars. But with this short book, she now seeks to restore Vrba’s name by probing the mystery of his disappearance not only from Auschwitz but from the Israeli textbooks and the Israeli Holocaust narrative.

This is not, as she admits, a balanced account. But her succinct and hard-hitting chapters seek to trace how Israeli historians have conspired to remove these participants from the Holocaust story by misnaming, misreporting, miscrediting and misrepresenting the secretive tale of their escape from Auschwitz.

The reason is simple. Vrba’s belief was and is that the information about Auschwitz was suppressed in order that leading members of the Slovakian and Hungarian Jewish Councils, could do a deal with Eichmann and his henchmen. In return for their silence, these men purchased survival for themselves, their relatives, a coterie of Zionists, and a number of wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs. In June 1944 these fortunate individuals boarded a train which eventually carried them to freedom in Switzerland. Many went on, subsequently, to hold prominent positions in the newly-established state of Israel. They were also responsible for the formulation of the heroic myth of Zionist resistance and rescue from their Nazi persecutors. Official Israeli historiography had no place for alternative interpretations of what had happened in Hungary, or for any analysis of the role of the Judenrat and their collaboration with the Nazis.

Ruth Linn incisively analyses how unwelcome critics, such as Vrba, have been silenced, and how the process of repressing, denying, or avoiding the charges they make has been put in place.

In the first place, the escapees from Auschwitz were reduced to anonymity and their names were never mentioned. As late as 1994, more than half a century after they fled from Auschwitz, Israel TV in a commemorative programme to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Holocaust did not give their true identity. To be sure, a version of their Report is displayed in the entrance hall of the Yad Vashem Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, but the names of its authors are not provided, and the Hebrew label on the wall refers only to “two young Slovak Jews”. The Report itself is not available in Hebrew to visitors, since the Museum only has a version in German or Hungarian.

Secondly, the credibility of the Report is challenged, and its factual accuracy disputed. Particularly the carefully-calculated total number of Jewish victims is considered by many Israeli historians as greatly inflated, though they have failed to provide convincing evidence of this contention.. Above all, Vrba’s legitimate questioning as to whether widespread distribution of the information about Auschwitz could have disrupted the deportations is dismissed as unrealistic. And his accusation that the Hungarian Zionist leaders’ failure to warn the Jews in the provinces made them complicit in the subsequent mass murders is dismissed as an outrageous calumny. For these reasons, energetic steps were taken for more than thirty years to prevent Vrba’s version of events from appearing in Hebrew.

Ruth Linn’s work is a long overdue act of reparation to rectify a historiographical injustice. But she also raises the wider issue of how to evaluate the rival interpretations, on the one hand of expert historians, or on the other of survivors whose testimony was derived from being eye-witnesses to the Nazis’ crimes in Auschwitz. She equally and rightly questions how the Israeli historical establishment has built up its own layers of national myths and explanations. They have succeeded in laying stress on certain events and individuals, but also have created a culture of forgetting others, like Vrba, whose witness they find not to be convenient. She seeks to pay tribute to an intrepid participant in the whole tragedy of the Hungarian Holocaust. At the same time, we can surely agree that her book is, as Professor Stephen Feinstein, Director of the Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, commented, “a first-rate treatment of a crucially important event that might be called an emerging black hole: Vrba’s escape from Auschwitz and the aftermath within the context of Holocaust history. The book is exceptionally important in its discussion of how a country can engage in critical thinking about a morally problematic past and its analysis of the political forces that try to control that past”. This still remains one of the most controversial chapters in the traumatic history of the Nazis’ war against the Jews.

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2) Journal articles: a) Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 17, no 1.

This journal, now being edited from Dresden by Prof. G.Besier, is the “founder father” of our enterprise. This latest issue is devoted to a comparative study of the national uprisings in Eastern Europe against Communist rule, namely, Berlin 1953, Budapest, 1956 and Prague 1968. Accounts, written in German, of the secular developments are matched by essays on the religious dimensions and consequences felt in and by the churches in these areas, which will be particularly illuminating for western scholars. Andrea Strubind shows that in East Germany the churches deliberately abstained from participating in the uprising, while in Hungary, as Jozsef Fuisz notes, the churches were seen as victims of Communist aggression. But in Prague, as described by Ladislav Benes, their spokesmen gave active support to the reform movement, and were consequently disciplined, but sought to preserve traditional Christian values for as long as possible. Only in the 1980s did the churches gain enough space to be able to play a more active role in combatting totalitarianism

2b) Susan Zucotti, Pope Pius XII and the Rescue of Jews in Italy: Evidence of a Papal Directive, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 18 no 2, Fall 2004. Susan Zucotti still believes, as she wrote earlier her book on the subject, that Pope Pius XII never issued directives to save Jews. She is now prepared to acknowledge that many Jews were indeed hidden and thus saved in church institutions, but affirms that this was likely due to individual initiatives. Since no piece of paper for a papal directive has been found, she concludes that none existed, even though other scholars have produced at least second-hand evidence that various priests claimed to have received such instructions

2c) Ray Sun, “Hammer Blows”: Work, the Workplace and the Culture of Masculinity among Catholic workers in the Weimar Republic in Central European History, Vol. 37 no 2, Summer 2004, p245 ff.

A stimulating examination of the Catholic propaganda towards young workers, especially in the Rhineland, following the disasters of the first world war. Finding themselves in direct competition with the Marxist parties, Catholic writers tried to adapt suitable themes for their specific audiences. The elements of struggle, strength and physical achievement were common to both groups, but Sun shows how Catholic writers gave a deliberate Christian slant to this literature. He quotes a number of poems, posters and songs used for this purpose.

3) Kirchliche Tourismus

C .Montgomery, The Last Heathen. Ghosts and Ancestors in Melanesia. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre 2004. $24.95 CAN.

The Vancouver writer Charles Montgomery’s great-grandfather was a missionary bishop. Over a hundred years ago he was sent out to Melanesia, a corner of the south-west Pacific Ocean, encompassing the area now known as the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. He was due to carry on the work of his predecessor, Bishop Patteson, who had been brutally murdered by the pagan inhabitants of a remote corral-reefed island. When the news of the Bishop’s martyrdom reached England, it resulted in a wave of support for the Melanesian Mission, and a demand that the British Navy intervene. Both actions were seen as part of the British imperial destiny to spread Christianity and civilization to the uttermost parts of the earth.

A hundred years later, Charles Montgomery shares none of these values. But the memory of an impressive family portrait, the finding of an envelope filled with sand from the beach where the bishop was killed, and his own talent for travel writing, all impelled him to seek out these far-away islands. Principally he hoped to find in Melanesia an exotic, primitive but enticing paradise, unspoiled by western commerce or religion. Where were the last heathen to be found?

This romantic image of the noble Melanesian savage was soon enough disabused. But he did find plenty of evidence of surviving traditions derived from the islanders’ ancestors, and incorporated into their “kastom” notions of tribal law, politics, magic and myth, which gave meaning to both their identity and behaviour. A century of Christian mission, to be sure, had overlaid this traditional world-view, but not entirely. Many of the islanders he met held both together, ambivalently but dualistically covering all bases.

The Christian missionaries themselves were ambivalent about such entrenched beliefs. The Anglicans, drawn from some of England’s best families and Oxford-educated, were remarkably tolerant about “kastom”. They have been described as “God’s gentlemen”. But Presbyterians, Methodists and Seventh Day Adventists took a stricter tone. All too often the result was a clash of discordant cosmologies which still remains unresolved.
Overall, Montgomery affirms, the central struggle in Melanesia is no longer the fight between Christian and pagan mythology. The Christian God has pretty well won the battle. Paganism is on its last legs. But the old way of thinking still remains and indeed flourishes within the Christian community. The rejection of sorcery and magic in favour of New Testament ways of living is far from complete.

It was basically the magic of the last heathen that Montgomery had hoped to find. But his search led to the realization that proof was not to be procured. Instead he needed to cultivate his imagination and to recognize the validity of myth. Melanesia is still filled with myths, both Christian and pagan. As one wise observer told him, miracles certainly happen, but the measure of their truth lies not in the accuracy of the event so much as in the quality of the faith they inspire.

To Montgomery, perhaps the most impressive witness to the newly-planted Christian faith was to be found among the Melanesian Brotherhood, a community of young Christian laymen, first founded some eighty years ago and still thriving.

These young Anglicans have a strong missionary impulse, are credited with the power of driving out evil spirits, and are highly regarded for their holiness So much so that their spiritual authority stands higher than any other source of moral influence.

In the last decade, the Solomon Islands have been in great need of such affective forces. The indigenous government virtually collapsed, corruption was rife, tribal rivalries between different groups of islanders produced a state of endemic civil war. But the reputation of the Melanesian Brotherhood and their efforts for disarmament and peacemaking proved to have a remarkably calming effect.

Until, that is, 2002, when a party set out for Guadacanal’s weather coast, the hangout of a particularly vicious war-lord. Seven of the Brothers were murdered there. But their martyrdom, as many Melanesian Christians now believe, was truly a witness to the power of suffering and rebirth, as testified in the New Testament. The war-lord gave himself up, the brothers collected guns from both sides, the Australians sent a peacekeeping force of efficient administrators. And Montgomery recasts the story of one of the murdered men, Brother Francis, to be the modern equivalent of Bishop Patteson’s sacrifice so long ago, to be remembered in the prayers of the Melanesians and passed down in stories told by firelight from one remote reef-protected island to the next.

As the Brotherhood’s chaplain testified, with their death the curse of violence has been lifted from the nation. And the Brotherhood itself had been allowed a glimpse through the mystery of things to the promise of the eternal. It is Montgomery’s hope that this example of transcendental love will become more powerful and more illuminating as the years go by. That is the way martyrdom works. Imagination can fill the expanse between the shores of historical fact and the truths of the soul. And this was the truth which Charles Montgomery, as a sometime unbeliever and sceptic in need of rescue, learnt on that far-away Melanesian shore.
With best wishes,
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,

It is with regret that we learn of the death on August 11th of Dr Robert Ross, formerly of the University of Minnesota, the author of the significant book “So it was true. The American Protestant Press and the Nazi Persecution of the Jews”, (1980) which ably showed that the church press in the United States had reported about these crimes very fully to a largely apathetic audience.

Contents:

1) German Studies Association Conference, Oct. 7-10th, Washington, D.C.
2) Conference Report: Imshausen, Hessen, July 2004
3) Book reviews:

a) Gilbert, The Righteous; Benz, Uberleben im Dritten Reich
b) Weitensteiner, Catholic Parishes in Frankfurt

4) Journal articles.

a) O’Sullivan, Catholic Youth
b) Greschat, Protestant theologians on the wars
c) McDaniel and Pierard, Politics of appointments in Protestant Theological Faculties: E.Geldbach
d) Schneider, Oswald Spengler reception
e) Kracht, Fritz Fischer and German Protestantism
f) Ketola, Wartime Anglican visits to Scandinavia

1) The following sessions, which may be of interest to list-members, are being offered at the G.S.A. conference on October 7th-10th:
a) Session 44: The Dissolution of the Catholic Milieu, 1870-1960 (List-members: J.Zala, R.Sun,D.Hastings, M.Ruff).
b) Session 49: Religion and Politics- Churches and Politics in Germany,East and West (Marcus Meckel)
c) Session 154: German New Testament Research and Nazism
(G.Besier, G.Lindemann).

2) Conference Report: Die Oekumene und der Widerstand gegen Diktaturen, July 16 – 18th July 2004.

In 1986 a foundation was established to honour Adam von Trott, murdered by the Nazis because of his part in the plot to assassinate Hitler. Its director is now Joachim Garstecki, and its motto is “Remember the Past, Build the Future”. It is housed in Trott’s old family home at Imshausen, near Solz not far from Fulda in the rolling hills of Hessen. It is a pleasant and poignant environment, still intimately familial, but now also given over to public dialogue, debate, study and reflection. There are bedrooms for guests, each named after particular figures known to Adam von Trott himself, a well-stocked library, an elegant meeting hall, a subterranean chapel, and beautiful grounds. Nearby, a lay religious community, cordially linked to the house but separate from the foundation itself, lives in a further complex of buildings at the foot of the nearby hill. The purpose of Imshausen seems to be to clear the decks and to allow those who come to have an opportunity to reflect again with some quality of freedom and vision.

The purpose of this year’s gathering was in part to dedicate the guest house to the memory of Willem Visser’t Hooft, the first General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, and a plaque was accordingly unveiled on one of the outer walls. Many of the ‘t Hooft family were present, as were also many of the Trott family, including Adam’s widow Clarita.

Two services took place, on the first evening in the crypt chapel, and then at the open air chapel high on the hill beside the house on the Sunday morning, this service being taken by members of the community. We were given an opportunity to support the work of the Kreisau (Kryzowa) Foundation in Silesia, the former home of Trott’s close friends Helmuth and Freya von Moltke, which seeks to build the future on the basis left by independent thinkers in Nazi Germany. Guests who remained at Imshausen for the sixtieth anniversary of the 20 July 1944 plot returned to this site to find themselves in a congregation of at least 150 local people, for whom this anniversary is a annual observance.

The first day of the conference was committed to the Ecumenical Movement and Resistance in the National Socialist era, and was chaired by Otto von der Gablentz. Konrad Raiser, now retired as one of Visser ‘t Hooft’s successors as General Secretary of the W.C.C., discussed the development of the ecumenical movement itself in the context of National Socialism and total war, tracing connecting lines between historical developments and theological perspectives (and lessons). Andrew Chandler from Birmingham outlined the reputation of Bishop George Bell of Chichester as a ‘patron’ of resistance, with particular reference to his private diplomacy with the British Foreign Office and his public discussions with the virulently anti-German Lord Vansittart. Rolf-Ulrich Kunze from Karlsruhe discussed the work of Visser ‘t Hooft himself, placing his connections with resistance in Gemany and in the Netherlands within an overarching internationalism. Bjorn Ryman from Uppsala explored, on the basis of archival sources held in Sweden, the impact of the group of theologians who worked at Sigtuna and traced their relationship with resistance outside Sweden’s own borders, in both Germany and Norway. Jurgen Zeilstra from Hilversum gave an overview of ‘European unity in ecumenical thought in the period 1937-1948’. This was followed by a detailed reflection by Andreas Schott from Hamburg on Adam von Trott’s own European thinking. In the evening, Keith Clements, General Secretary of the Conference of European Churches, from Geneva discussed the extent to which Bonhoeffer’s resistance may be understood – if at all – as an expression of his ecumenism.

On the second day the conference was chaired by Joachim Garstecki and turned towards ecumenism and ‘anderen Diktaturen’, though what was now clearly in view was the East Germany of the Cold War. Now the talks were more often given by those who had themselves participated in the drama itself, and this produced a quite different dynamic. John Arnold from Canterbury, and Paul Oestreicher (whose name it is still hard to disconnect from Coventry, but who now comes from Brighton) discussed their own experiences and perceptions of the various imperatives which had fashioned their work. Katherina Kunter from Aarhus, who is one of the most important new voices to emerge from a maturing academic commitment to the history of religion in the Cold War, introduced her own incisive perspectives on this topic, before Laurence Hogebrink from Amsterdam reflected on lessons learnt, or not learnt.

One of the attractive features of this Imshausen conference was the fact that local pople attended individual sessions and participated freeely and generously in many different ways. In an age when academics are more than ever found to be talking only to each other, this imparted not only a sense of context for those of us who had come as guests, but ensured that the affairs of the weekend lived and worked in something better than an academic parallel universe. The conference was reported at length in the pages of the local newspaper.

There are plans for the publication of all the papers in Germany, edited by Benigna von Krusenstjern of the Max Planck Institute, Göttingen. In the meanwhile, three of these contributions will be published in the next number of the journal Humanitas: the Journal of the George Bell Institute.

Andrew Chandler, Birmingham, U.K.
3a) Martin Gilbert, The Righteous. The unsung Heroes of the Holocaust. Toronto: Key Porter Books 2003 529 pp ISBN 1-55263-512-0
ed. W. Benz, Überleben im Dritten Reich, Munich: Beck Verlag 2003. 350 pp ISBN 3 406 51029 9

Sir Martin Gilbert has added to his immensely impressive list of publications with this latest popular, but well-researched, study of a rather neglected aspect of Holocaust history: how Gentiles and non-Jews saved Jews from the persecution and annihilation launched by the Nazis during the second world war. This story has already been told earlier by the Israeli Mordecai Paldiel, and, for the Christian rescuers, by David Gushee, but Gilbert’s skillful presentation will undoubtedly reach a wider audience.

This topic is controversial, since many of the Holocaust Jewish survivors are very conscious that so little was done by their non-Jewish neighbours or fellow citizens to protect them in their hour of danger. Nevertheless Gilbert is convinced that, even if such rescue efforts were far too few, they should be suitably acknowledged and gratitude expressed to the individuals who risked their own lives in such a cause.
This is the view consistently practised by the official Israeli Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, which has devoted great energies in preserving the records of such rescuers, has granted them collectively the title of “the Righteous among the Nations” or “Righteous Gentiles”, and has planted a tree with a suitably named plaque for each rescuer along the avenue leading to the museum. Gilbert’s accounts are largely drawn from Yad Vashem’s archival holdings, though supplemented by his own researches and personal interviews.

His stance towards these unsung heroes of the Holocaust is highly positive, and has thus led him to refute the sweeping generalizations of such writers as Daniel Goldhagen. In his view, given the undoubted horrors of the mass murders, every act of rescue was remarkable, and deserves to be widely known. He also seeks to use these examples as a means of fostering a warmer relationship between Jews and non-Jews.
On the other hand, while praising the courageous initiatives of these individuals, Gilbert does not seek to exonerate the major institutions, such as the Christian churches, which so dismally failed to give a lead, or to support, these singular efforts on behalf of the Nazis’ victims.
Gilbert divides his material country by country, which enables him to provide useful examples of the settings in which the Nazi anti-Jewish campaigns took place, the extent to which the national authorities abetted or resisted these plans, and the responses of the local population. Needless to say, Gilbert’s survey has to be selective. Yad Vashem has already acknowledged nearly 20,000 persons as Righteous Gentiles, but, as Gilbert makes clear, the courageous acts of many more will never be known. So he can only provide examples to show the generosity of heart which could lead to such unparalleled altruism.

There were, however, many ambivalences in such situations, which Gilbert often overlooks. The rescuers had many and mixed motives for assisting Jews. Some were born-again Christians, others were moved simply by humanitarian sympathies, others acted on the spur of the moment when they saw a need and fulfilled it. Gilbert does not attempt to produce any overarching theory, but claims that collectively their behaviour made them all heroic.

Few of these rescuers have written about their rescue activities. Most, like the Protestant parishioners in the southern French village of Le Chambon, or the Catholic nuns in Poland, regarded their behaviour as the only decent thing to do. It is only in the testimonies of the Jewish survivors that the abnormality and bravery of these individuals comes to life. Inevitably Glbert’s narratives share this viewpoint and at times become somewhat repetitious. But he is clearly aware of the danger that certain well-known rescuers, like Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg, might loom larger than life, so he balances their achievements along with similar cases, being meticulous in giving names, dates and places.

Since Gilbert was so dependent on the records assembled at Yad Vashem, it was perhaps inevitable that he accepts their criteria for who was a Righteous Gentile. Yad Vashem has never recognized the efforts of non-Jewish spouses in saving their partners, nor those of any person paid to rescue Jews, nor the work of groups or networks of rescuers. Thus individual Mother Superiors are frequently mentioned, but we hear little about the work of their nuns. Furthermore, Yad Vashem has been notably sticky about acknowledging anyone connected with the German Resistance movement as “righteous”. They refused to grant this favour to the martyred German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was certainly involved in a successful plot to smuggle 14 Jews out of Germany. As a result Gilbert makes no mention of his name.
But even with these limitations, Gilbert’s narrative account is both heart-warming and heart-rending. His detailed record of what these Righteous Gentiles achieved has to be matched with regret that not more of them were ready to act in this heroic mould. But his comprehensive selection does serve to show that, from one end of the Nazi empire to the other, Righteous Gentiles were to be found, who rejected the dominant and vicious propaganda and upheld an alternative standard of values.

Gilbert avoids analytical comparisons between the various societies in favour of concentrating on the acts of heroic individuals. But the cumulative effect and the plethora of detailed case studies he provides allows the reader to make his or her own overall conclusions. Gilbert has also found a number of illuminating photographs, and has supplied useful maps, as is his wont. The bibliography is particularly helpful.
As Gilbert states: ” Recognition and remembrance continue into the twenty-first century, even as the number of those rescued, and the number of surviving rescuers, declines”. These stories, he affirms, should not be regarded merely as footnotes to the past, but as lanterns for all humanity. Nor is this legacy to be confined just to one ethnic group. Rather, when the challenge is greatest and the dangers most pressing, each of us, Gilbert believes, has to ask: “Could I have acted like this, in the circumstances would I have tried to, would I have wanted to?”
A similar theme runs throughout the collection of essays edited by the Director of Berlin’s Centre for Antisemitism Research, Wolfgang Benz. Most of the stories relating to how survivors managed to hide from their persecutors, or were assisted to do so by “righteous Gentiles” are set in Berlin, where the largest number of German Jews found some form of refuge. The contributors also make good use of the files of the office subsequently set up in West Berlin to honour the “unsung heroes and heroines” of those days. Again even on this more limited scale, the motives of the rescuers were so varied as to defy categorization. Each individual story is a remarkable feat, and luckily even now such valiant behaviour is being recognized both in Berlin and in Jerusalem. Remarkably, no mention is made of the now well-known but controversial protest in Berlin’s Rosenstrasse when several hundred non-Jewish wives gathered to demand the release of their husbands – the only known protest action of this kind to be successful.
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3b) Hans K.Weitensteiner, ‘Warum denn wir, immer wir . . . ? War dieser Stadt Frankfurt schuldiger als London?’
Katholische Gemeindeleben im Dritten Reich und während der ersten Nachkriegsjahre 1932-1950. Dokumente und Darstellung.
Frankfurt/Main: Haag + Herchen 2002 230 pp.

Local accounts of the struggles between the Nazis and the churches at the parish level can add useful details, even though the main outlines of the campaigns, both offensive and defensive, are well known. Most of these descriptions come from Protestant parishes, so it is a welcome addition to have this useful account of a Catholic dual-parish in a Frankfurt suburb. The priest, Fr Rudolphi, served there for more than twenty years during the whole Nazi period and beyond and most fortunately compiled a Parish Chronicle of some thousand pages in which he recorded all the main parish events, and added his own commentaries on the wider political scene, as well as some of his contemporary sermons and his personal reflections. All these were used by a school-teacher parishioner, Hans Weitensteiner, to provide an excellent portrait of this Catholic milieu.

Fr. Rudolphi was born just after the end of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, when German Catholics were fervently eager to demonstrate that they could be as loyal to the new state as their Protestant counterparts. His military service in the first world war only reinforced this ardent nationalism. Like so many others, he returned disillusioned by defeat, outraged at the iniquitous Versailles Treaty, alarmed by the dangers of Bolshevism and eager to see Germany’s reputation restored. It is not surprising that his initial reaction to the rise of Nazism was favourable.
The Catholics’ hopes that the 1933 Concordat would enhance their position in society were dashed on the rock of Nazi radicalism and intransigence. But for Fr. Rudolphi and so many of his flock, the Nazis’ true ambitions were obscured by their wishful thinking that they could simultaneously pledge support to their church and to the new political regime Only very reluctantly and very late did they realize the incompatibility of these divergent loyalties.

Fr. Rudolphi was an assiduous pastor. He had two new churches built, looked after his parishioners, especially after 1939, remained in contact with serving soldiers and evacuated families, and deplored the disasters brought on by the war’s events. His sympathies for the Frankfurt citizens bombed out in the devastating air raids were certainly genuine, and led to the frustrated question asked in the book’s title. But throughout he remained a staunch German nationalist. The sufferings of others, such as the Jews, gypsies, Poles or Russians were hardly mentioned. But the comments he jotted down of his own and his parishioners’ reactions in those traumatic years are interesting as a contemporary record.
It is noteworthy that, despite his strong nationalist feelings, Fr. Rudolphi did not succumb to the Nazi antisemitic propaganda, or allow this poison to be repeated in his parish. But there is no record of any more active measures to support the Nazis’ victims. Even after the war, he was reluctant to believe the evidence of the concentration camps, or the extent of Nazi crimes. In this he was not alone. And the Catholics’ sense of duty to support established authority prevented them from encouraging any idea of resistance to the Nazi state, even after their own first-hand evidence of the Gestapo’s ruthless high-handedness. In Weitensteiner’s view, it was just this blending of Catholic mythology and Germanic nationalist ideology which made German Catholics so susceptible to the Nazi allurements. Fr. Rudolphi, the conscientious priest and devoted nationalist, may be seen as typical. Hence the value of this memoir of his parish and his political positions.

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4a) Michael O’Sullivan, An Eroding Milieu? Catholic Youth, Church Authority and Popular Behaviour in North-West Germany during the Third Reich, 1933-1938 in Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 90. no 2, April 2004, pp.236ff.

Part of his work in progress on the Catholic response to the Nazi challenges, especially amongst youth.
b) Martin Greschat, Begleitung und Deutung der beiden Weltkriege durch evangelische Theologen in Erster Weltkrieg: Zweiter Weltkrieg. Ein Vergleich, ed. B. Thoss and H-E Volkmann, Paderborn: Schöningh 2002, pp 497-518.
Very well worth exploring these comparisons

c) C.McDaniel and R.V.Pierard, The Politics of Appointments in Protestant Theological Faculties in Germany: the case of Professor Erch Geldbach in Journal of Church and State, Vol. 46, no 1, Winter 2004 pp 55-82. An interesting analysis of the (mis)fortunes of one of our own list members at the hands of a stiff unyielding church bureaucracy in very recent years.

d) Jörg Schneider, Oswald Spengler’s ‘Der Untergang des Abendlandes’ in Journal for the History of Modern Theology, ol. 10, no 2, 2003, p.196-223.

This essay concentrates on the reception of Oswald Spengler’s book by Protestant theologians in the early 1920s, who were more susceptible to Spengler’s influence than were philosophers. Just after the first world war, for example, Werner Elert, Karl Heim and Ernst Troeltsch – not to mention Emanuel Hirsch, Friedrich Gogarten and others – had to cope with the deeply interconnected crises in faith, church, theology and nation. Spengler’s ideas of cycles in history seemed to help their understanding of Germany’s 1918 defeat, not as due to military exhaustion but to a sort of divine destiny. But it also gave hope that this destiny would help to overcome the crisis. These scholars drew on certain aspects of Spengler’s thinking to establish their theory of Christianity. However the influence of Spengler vanished soon enough. As a result the story of his reception is an example of the struggle to locate Christianity within post-first world war German society.

e) Klaus G.Kracht, Fritz Fischer und der deutsche Protestantismus in Journal for the History of Modern Theology, Vol. 10, no. 2, 2003, pp. 224-252.

The Fischer controversy of the early 1960s broke the widespread view among the German elite of their nation’s innocence for the outbreak of the first world war, and by implication their justification of the second. Instead, Fischer argued, the German leaders had actively sought opportunities to launch a crusade for imperial expansion.

As a young man, Fischer had joined the Nazi Party, but after a lengthy term of post-1945 incarceration, began his career as professor of history at Hamburg University. He was moved to oppose those who blamed the rise of Nazism on either the mob psychology of the easily moved masses, or on the spellbinding – and hence – demonized – character of the Nazi leaders and on their capacity for political manipulation.
Rather Fischer concentrated his fire on the unfortunate teachings of Lutheranism to blindly obey political authorities. This had led to the abandonment of the ideas of freedom or resistance. Only Calvinists had upheld these views. Ernst Troeltsch was the only theologian to support them after 1919. Instead a vast majority of Lutherans allowed themselves to be misled into regarding Hitler as a great leader and legitimate authority.

Fischer’s criticism of the tradional Lutheran-Protestant view of the state aroused enormous waves of opposition, but on the other hand his conclusions about the mistakes of the German leaders in 1914 received great support, especially amongst the young. His crucial point that Protestants had allowed their religious loyalties to be subordinated to their nationalist ambitions is now hardly deniable. This moral point of view was, however, largely lost to view by those who concentrated more on the details of the July crisis and its consequences.

f) Hanna-Maija Ketola, Teaching ‘Correct’ Attitudes: an Anglican emissary to Sweden and Finland in 1944 in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 55, no 1, January 2004, p. 75ff

Drawing on the journals and reports of Rev. Herbert Waddams, an ordained official of the British Ministry of Information’s Religions division, this article describes the British efforts to influence church opinion in these Scandinavian countries. Contacts with Sweden had continued throughout the war, notably through Bishop George Bell. But Finland had only just signed a peace treaty (mainly with the Soviet Union) and so Waddams was sent to try to induce ‘correct’ attitudes in future relations, especially towards Britain’s Soviet ally. The Swedes were an important link to European Lutherans and should be persuaded that Britain’s objectives in the post-war settlement would be beneficent.
Waddams’ pro-Soviet stance met with some hostility in Swedish church circles and even more in Finland. But Anglo-Scandinavian relations were a more promising field. The Finns he found to be rather parochial and narrow-minded, but the Swedes could lay a larger ecumenical role. Despite his over-optimistic assessment of Soviet religious policy, Waddams went on to become general secretary of the Church of England Council on Foreign Relations in 1945.

With best wishes to you all,
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Colleagues,
For those of you in the northern hemisphere, I trust you had a restful and
restorative summer, and are now ready to return to academic pursuits!

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) Ostmeyer, Evangelische Kirche und Juden in der DDR
b) Holtschneider, German Protestants and the Holocaust
c) Ziefle, One Woman against the Reich

2) Kirchliche Tourismus: Hale: Himmler’s Crusade
1a) (This review appeared first on H-German on June 24th 2004, and is
here reproduced by kind permission of the author.)
Irena Ostmeyer. “Zwischen Schuld und Suehne: Evangelische Kirche
und Juden in der SBZ und DDR 1945-1990”. Berlin: Institut Kirche und
Judentum, 2002. 400 pp. Bibliographical references, index. Euro 15.00 (cloth), ISBN
3-923-09575-9. Reviewed for H-German by Axel Fair-Schulz <lfair7@cogeco.ca>,
Department of History, State University of New York at Buffalo

Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” has triggered the latest incarnation
of ongoing debates around the theological and practical connections
between Christianity and Anti-Semitism. Irena Ostmeyer’s carefully
researched and well-written “Zwischen Schuld und Suehne: Evangelische
Kirche und Juden in der SBZ und DDR 1945-1990” offers a good overview
of the Protestant side of this debate within the context of former East
Germany. Her project, originally a Ph.D. dissertation at the University
of Potsdam under the supervision of Julius Schoeps (also director of the
“Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum–Europaeisch-Juedische Studien”), is a
cogent effort at reconstructing the reactions and approaches of the
mainstream Evangelical Church toward Jews and Judaism in the GDR. She
is sensitive to the obvious and more hidden dimensions of this complex
theme and takes into sober consideration the evolving views of East
German Protestantism, as well as various regional differences. Ostmeyer
includes theological, historical, as well as social features of the
relationship between Evangelical Churches and Jews in her book. Given that
reconstruction is this work’s strongest suit, Ostmeyer also offers
considerable analysis.

Further scholarship could render a more rigorously theorized synthesis,
integrating her findings into the larger body of work on the relationship
of Christianity toward Judaism and the long shadow of the Holocaust. It
might also be necessary for further scholarly efforts to integrate the
wealth of Ostmeyer’s material into the overall history of East Germany.
Ostmeyer divided her work into two major parts: the Evangelical Church’s
coming to terms with Judaism (in nine chapters) and the development of
new relationships between the Evangelical Church and the Jewish
congregations/Jews in the GDR (composed of three chapters). At the
outset, Ostmeyer provides a user-friendly overview of the scholarly
literature as well as explicating her definition of “Evangelical Church,”
composed of the eight independent regional Churches (Landeskirche
Anhalt, Evangelische Kirche in Berlin-Brandenburg, Evangelische Kirche
des Goerlitzer Kirchengebietes, Evangelische Landeskirche Greifswald,
Evangelisch-Lutherische Landeskirche Mecklenburgs, Evangelische der
Kirchenprovinz Sachsen, Evangelisch-Lutherische Landeskriche Sachsens,
as well as the Evangelische-Lutherische Kirche in Thueringen). Ostmeyer
excludes the Catholic Church because of its marginal influence in the GDR.
She also does not mention the various smaller Christian dominations, even
when they happen to be part of the general Protestant tradition. Given
how voluminous her material on the mainstream Evangelical Church is, this
choice of exclusion might be justified. Yet further research must focus
on a more comparative direction and probe whether and to what extent the
findings on the Evangelical Church are confirmed and/or complicated by
data from the other denominations

Ostmeyer’s definition of “Judaism” includes religious, cultural, and
historical features. The scope of her book focuses on Jewish life and
identity in Germany after the Shoah and founding of Israel. She has
acquired considerable expertise within Judaism and is, in her writing,
explicitly conscious of her own Christian background. Thus the concept of
a “Christian-Jewish,” rather than a “Jewish-Christian,” dialogue is not to
be understood as establishing a hierarchy. In addition, Ostmeyer also
draws attention to the relative passivity of the East German Jewish side
of the unfolding dialogue, locating the reasons for this within the small
number of Jews, their overall strong loyalty toward the “anti-Fascist”
state, the difficulties of the small Jewish congregations to accommodate
religiously very different members, fears and recollections of difficult
times (such as in the early 1950s), as well as the related wish to just be
among themselves in peace. This is augmented further by what Ostmeyer
somewhat harshly calls the “theological incompetence” on the part of the
majority of the GDR’s Jews (p. 304)\

Centering her narrative on the Evangelical perspective, Ostmeyer
identifies four major phases of Christian-Jewish interaction in the GDR.
The time period between 1945-60 is characterized by outrage toward Nazi
crimes, as well as compassion for the especially or obviously victimized
Jews. This however, went hand in hand with a stubborn refusal to accept
any tangible responsibility, particularly in the realm of theology. Yet
as time went by, this approach became increasingly nuanced. Several
voices within East German Protestantism worked toward a more critical
reflection on the relationship between Christian theology and
anti-Semitism. One such figure, Professor Heinrich Vogel, pushed for such
a re-orientation already in the spring of 1950. Nevertheless his efforts
were dwarfed because many Protestants feared that an ecclesiastical
admission of guilt would translate into demands for financial compensation
(p. 49). The major theological paradigm of the time period was still
informed by the notion that the Jews had rejected Jesus Christ and thus
would bear some measure of responsibility for their own fate. Thus, in
this mindset, Christians should try to convert Jews; this approach
essentially precluded any real dialogue based on a relationship of equals.
The author places the second phase of Christian-Jewish interaction between
1960-1961 and 1978. It is marked by a transformation of Evangelical
efforts, from the attempts to convert Jews (the so-called “Judenmission”)
to a more genuine dialogue based on mutual respect. This process was
pushed even further after 1978, impelled by the fortieth anniversary of
the events of November 9, 1938. The remembrance of “Kristallnacht”,
now seen as “Pogromnacht” (given the somewhat belittling implications of
the former term), jump-started further practical manifestations of dialogue,
commemoration, as well as theological reflections. Ostmeyer views the
last phase as being characterized not just by the Evangelical Church
admitting to human guilt but theological guilt as well, regarding
anti-Semitism and the Shoah. This phase coalesced around the
remembrances of the fiftieth anniversary of the “Pogromnacht” in 1988. It
required a new generation of theologians, Church leaders, and motivated
rank-and file membership to spur this development.

Overall Ostmeyer argues that it was not so much the Church leadership as
highly motivated individuals working for these changes. Perhaps more
detailed biographical sketches would have added to her excellent analysis.
Interestingly enough, the majority of East German Evangelical ministers,
vicars, and catechists remained uninterested in Jewish culture and
learning. Ostmeyer diagnoses the shortcomings in their theological
training, which amounted to only a very sketchy knowledge of Judaism.
Thus it was ultimately a numerically small group, within the Jewish and the
Christian communities, that actively pushed for genuine dialogue and some
measure of reconciliation.

The actions of Evangelical Christians toward developing a greater
awareness of Jewish heritage and experiences led, already in the 1950s,
toward taking better care of Jewish cemeteries, particularly the low
profile “forgotten cemeteries” not taken care off by the SED regime. This
combined with more spectacular actions, such as lobbying the Evangelical
Church on behalf of the beleaguered Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee,
led to tensions between the state and the Church. The SED regime had
planned, in 1982-83 and again in 1986, to build a highway right through
what constituted Europe’s largest Jewish grave site. The strong
opposition of the Church, among other factors, convinced the state to give
up on this design (p. 301).

Church groups that focused on Jewish matters also often lobbied on behalf
of a re-evaluation of the GDR’s hostile stance toward Israel, demanding
the establishment of diplomatic relations as well as offering an official
East German admission of guilt. This, however, collided directly with the
GDR’s claims of being the anti-fascist German state. Engaged Evangelical
Christians thus became direct competitors with the regime, frequently
pointing out its ideological blind spots.

Ostmeyer argues that in essence the East German Evangelical Church
voiced a position independent of the state’s point of view. While it seems
indeed the case, that they articulated alternatives to official GDR
positions, they also remained firmly grounded in the political,
socio-economic, and cultural orbit of their state. Thus future research
could explore in more detail the complex interconnections between the
regime’s perspective(s) and the alternative(s) offered by the Evangelical
Church.

Overall, Ostmeyer did a superb job of presenting and evaluating an
immense amount of archival material, combined with interviews and the
ever-expanding secondary literature. Her book is a very useful resource
for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars in
the field.
Axel Fair-Schulz,
Fort Erie, Ontario
1b) K. Hannah Holtschneider, German Protestants Remember the
Holocaust: Theology and the Construction of Collective Memory,
Münster: LIT Verlag, 2001

Hannah Holtschneider, a lecturer at the Centre for the Study of
Jewish-Christian Relations in Cambridge, UK, has produced with this book
a neat revision of her doctoral dissertation and, in the process, added
significantly to the ongoing debates regarding Holocaust remembrance.
Using the lens of collective memory theory as it has been applied to ‘secular’
sites of Holocaust remembrance – the Bitburg controversy, the
Historikerstreit and the Goldhagen debate – she has focused her attention on
the extent to which German Protestant theology has embraced the task of
remembering. As Holtschneider herself puts it, she seeks to explore whether
or not ‘theologies developed by the second generation of Germans after the
Holocaust facilitate the articulation of issues of Holocaust remembrance
pertaining to the third generation’ (p.9), of which she herself is part.
Holtschneider acknowledges the pioneering work of the previous
generation’s theologians. Nonetheless, she regards it as timely to review
their interpretive paradigms, especially in light of ‘social-historical
changes'(p.10) – most acutely, the reunification of Germany.
These generational differences in the processing of memory form the
explicit subject of the fifth chapter but are in fact ubiquitous themes
throughout the book, notably in Holtschneider’s choice of texts. The texts
she has chosen to consider are the 1980 Rheinischer Synodalbeschluß,
selected works by F-W Marquardt, and Britta Jüngst’s 1996 doctoral
dissertation. These particular texts date from 1980 through until the
late-1990s and thus represent both the current and previous generation of
theologians.

The first two chapters deal with the Rhineland Synod’s statement, and the
more secular debates regarding National Socialist/Holocaust memory
within German society, respectively. In both chapters, Holtschneider shows
that Jews are incorporated into German collective memory largely through
their exclusion from the narrative or by their designation as Other. The
1984 film Heimat, for example, ‘reclaim[ed] German history’ for the
Germans, but at the exclusion of Jewish voices (pp.69, 73). The Bitburg
controversy the following year universalized victimhood, by stating that
both the SS soldiers buried at Bitburg and the Jews they murdered were
victims – thus, by denying a qualitative difference, actually isolated Jewish
experience even further (p.79). Finally, the Historikerstreit and the
Goldhagen case excluded authentic Jewish remembrance by, in the first,
refusing to represent the Holocaust as such and, in the second, refusing to
grant Goldhagen the scholarly capacity to address the issues simply because
of his ethnic identification with the victims (pp.87, 96-97). Goldhagen, a
Jew, was incapacitated as a scholar of the Holocaust ‘because his heritage
[was] assumed to predetermine the conclusions he [would] draw…'(p.97).
Taken together, argues Holtschneider, these examples show that the
Holocaust ‘enter[s] German memory from the outside…’; it is remembered
as a crime committed against groups of people who were, by definition,
‘excluded from membership in German society'(p.103). The clear
implication is that they still are.

Holtschneider finds the same interpretive paradigm at work in the
Rhineland statement. While acknowledging that the statement ‘represents a
great theological achievement…[that] opened the floor for a
discussion’ (p.59), she nonetheless sees it as indicative of a hermeneutical
method within German Protestantism that typically instrumentalizes Jews.
Employing Stephen Haynes’ categories of ‘reformist’, ‘radicalist’ and
‘rejectionist’ paradigms of Christian interpretations of Jews/Israel,
Holtschneider argues that the Synodalbeschluß understands Jews merely as
‘signs’ of God’s action in history. They remain embedded within the
‘witness-people myth’, rather than being seen as a diverse and dynamic
community – real people! – in their own right. Holtschneider applauds the
Synod for emphasizing the ‘common ground between the two faiths'(p.53),
but points out that such an approach ‘identifies Jews only in religious
terms'(p.54) and thus fails to account for the variety of Jewish identities.
Moreover, it perpetuates the Christian hermeneutical principle that Jews are
rightly understood only from the perspective of their role in the drama of
salvation-history, of which Christians are (according to this principle) the
culmination. In other words, the Rhineland statement, though
well-intentioned, Christianizes the legacy of the Holocaust and reads the
future of Jewish-Christian relations as being the reintroduction of ‘the Jews’
into the essentially Christian narrative of Heilsgeschichte.

The chapter on Marquardt begins with a positive endorsement of his
contribution to Jewish-Christian dialogue. He is, argues Holtschneider, ‘the
most distinguished systematic theologian’ in Germany who has tackled this
issue, with Paul van Buren the only comparable scholar outside of Europe
(pp.105-106). When considered more closely, however, Holtschneider
argues that Marquardt perpetuates many of the hermeneutical myths about
Jews and Judaism that have long dogged Christianity.

Taking the Holocaust as his dogmatic starting point (p.105), Marquardt’s
work – a Dogmatik in Bußform – represents a significant theological
advance on the Rhineland statement. Reminiscent of Emil Fackenheim’s
concept of ‘rupture’, Marquardt regards Christian faith and theology as
essentially uncertain after the Holocaust; it is ‘questioned in an
unprecedented way'(p.109). Why this is the case is simply that, for him, the
relationship between Jews and God is paradigmatic for the history of all
humanity with God and thus foundational to Christianity. Thus, if the life of
Jewish people is endangered, so is the relationship of Christianity to
Judaism and, for that reason, to God. Consequently, Christian theology has
a future only to the extent to which ‘it recognizes a dependency…on Jews as
its presupposition'(p.111). Marquardt’s solution is, therefore, to develop an
‘Evangelical Halachah’ – a reorientation of theology from the perspective of
Jewish biblical interpretation, that is, from the perspective of the victims.
Holtschneider rightly criticizes this approach as a misappropriation of a
Jewish concept that serves both to universalize Jewish suffering – Jews do
not uniformly self-identify as ‘victims’, she says – and to Christianize
Judaism (pp.113-115). By introducing such an ontological distinction
between Jews and other people – and between the Holocaust and other
genocides – Marquardt denigrates the suffering of non-Jews and, once
again, resorts to a version of the ‘witness-people myth’.

Holtschneider is even more scathing of his use of survivor testimony. His
uncritical usage betrays an ambiguity ‘as to who Jews are…while at the
same time [he nonetheless holds] firm ideas as to what ‘Jewish
witness’constitutes'(p.131). By employing Jean Améry as his reference point
for discussing Auschwitz, Marquardt contradicts his methodological
intentions. In fact, Améry’s writing is directly opposed to what Marquardt is
trying to achieve. Why? Because Marquardt ‘derives his understanding of
the Holocaust from the writing of a Jew…who is not Jewish of his own
choice…who has been violently separated from his culture and
language…and who is not religious'(p.129). One consequence of this is that,
for Marquardt, the Holocaust becomes merely ‘a canvas which can be
inscribed with [one’s own] meaning’ (p.130). Another is that, by selectively
deciding what does or does not constitute authentic Jewish witness, his
dogmatic theology perpetuates ‘the silencing of Jewish memory'(p.131). All
in all, Marquardt’s good intentions notwithstanding, Holtschneider regards
his work as fundamentally flawed, and which at best contributes only
ambiguously to the inclusion of Jewish experience into collective German
Protestant memory.

Holtschneider’s final chapter explores Britta Jüngst’s Auf der Seite des
Todes das Leben, and immediately determines it to be a more promising
avenue for post-Holocaust Christian-Jewish relations than either of the
previous two texts. It is, she argues, ‘an important step in Christian
reflection upon Jewish-Christian relations’ (p.191), largely because it
deliberately tackles the intergenerational transmission of memory.
Jüngst does not entirely escape criticism. As a feminist theologian, she
suggests that feminist insights into the articulation of difference are
helpful in Jewish-Christian dialogue, because they aid the interpretation of the
variety of perspectives brought by the participants to the discussion
(p.175).

However, Holtschneider rightly responds that Jüngst’s paradigm is
susceptible to attack from post-structuralist feminism because it employs
the now-outdated privileging of women’s experience. Such an essentialist
concept of gender difference results in a ‘liberal pluralism’ that seeks to
integrate – that is, domesticate – the Other without changing the established
social order by which this Other was defined in the first place (p.177). In
other words, we are back to the Christianization of Jewish experience and
memory, exhibited previously in both the Rhineland statement and
Marquardt’s theology. Holtschneider is similarly critical of Jüngst’s ready
acceptance of the fundamental presupposition of post-Holocaust theology –
Christianity’s utter dependency on Jews – because it likewise betrays
Christianity’s essentially imperialist structure (p.180).

Nonetheless, Holtschneider’s overall assessment of Jüngst’s approach is
positive. Her exploration of the differences in the ways in which Holocaust
memories are transmitted by descendants of victims on the one hand, and of
victimizers on the other ‘moves Christian theological reflection onto a new
level’ (p.191). Moreover, the seriousness with which she takes these and
other (particularly generational) differences cautions her against
misappropriating Jewish tradition in the efforts to rewrite Christian
theology. In sum, Jüngst’s theology provides ‘concrete opportunities for
future growth and exploration of new areas for Christian-Jewish encounters
in Germany’ (p.191).

How then should Holtschneider’s book itself be assessed? Most obviously,
she provides a thoughtful and concise summary of three important German
Protestant contributions to Jewish-Christian dialogue after the Holocaust.
But she does much more than that. By using collective memory theory, she
highlights the deficiencies of much post-Holocaust theology that fails to
understand the mechanics of memory-transmission between generations.
Holtschneider thus orients the future of the discussion to the ways in which
the concerns of the third generation can be articulated and dialogically
incorporated. Further, by reference primarily to Stephen Haynes, she
critiques the well-intentioned but ultimately imperialist attitude of most
post-Holocaust Christian theology that still finds it hard to ‘let Jews be
Jews’, preferring instead to define Jews as a conceptual reality that exists
only in Christian terms.

The book is not, of course, without its shortcomings. Stylistically it still
reads, to my mind, too much like a dissertation, and the not-infrequent use
of ‘I’ in statements of claim suggests a slight defensiveness on
Holtschneider’s part. Structurally, the first two chapters could profitably
have been in reverse order which, while breaking the chronological
narrative, would nonetheless have provided a more thoroughly
contextualized introduction to the theological discussion. As for content, I
would argue that the chapter on Marquardt would benefit from a deeper
discussion of the many secondary critical texts. Holtschneider makes
passing reference in the footnotes to, among others, Hanna Lehming and
Susanne Hennecke but does not engage substantially with their analyses of
Marquardt. Moreover, there is no mention of Barbara Meyer, Andreas
Pangritz or Michael Wyschogrod, all of whom have written significant
studies of Marquardt. Similarly in the fourth chapter, ‘Generations of
Memory’, it was odd to find no reference to Martin Rumscheidt, a
German-Canadian theologian whose father was an employee of I.G. Farben,
visited Auschwitz in 1944 and who, in Rumscheidt’s own words ‘looked
away’. How Rumscheidt has approached the task of theological
remembrance, within this biographical context, is fascinating. A study of
his work would have added significantly to this particular chapter; instead,
his absence is a surprising and critical omission.

Overall, however, these shortcomings do not detract from the book’s utility
as an important contribution to the growing literature on third-generation
post-Holocaust theology. Indeed, Holtschneider should find herself
increasingly included on course book-lists. It is not an easy book to read,
and the language and concepts employed would put it out of reach of a
generalist audience. However, teachers of Holocaust and Religious Studies
courses could – and should – put it to great use.

Mark R. Lindsay, University of Melbourne
1c) Helmut W.Ziefle, One Woman against the Reich. Grand Rapids,
Mich: Kregel Publications 2003. 189 pp.

Professor Helmut Ziefle has written a brief memoir of his boyhood
days in Nazi Germany, with a sympathetic portrait of his mother, a devout
and dedicated member of the Württemberg Evangelical Church. Brought
up in a strongly pietistic tradition, the Ziefle family displayed both the
strengths and weaknesses of this kind of churchmanship when faced with
the challenge of Nazi political radicalism and social pressures.
On the one hand, Ziefle pays tribute his mother’s simplistic belief in
the Lord’s providence over all His faithful followers, to her strong sense of
family loyalty, and to the benefits of the daily practice of prayer and bible
reading. On the other hand these qualities were barely sufficient to meet
the constant onslaught of Nazi propaganda, or the aggressive social
pressures to give fervent support to the new regime and its Führer.
These pious church people were appalled by the rampant and noisy
anti-church and anti-semitic attitudes of many Nazi Party members,
especially in the Hitler Youth. They refused to go along with the constant
demands for vocal support of the Party’s slogans which offended their sober
orderliness drawn from their puritan background. Yet, at the same time,
they supported much of the Nazi programme to restore Germany’s place in
the world. Their resistance was therefore much more a moral than a
political one, with all the shortcomings of such a stance.

But, even as non-participants, the Ziefle family was inevitably
drawn into the Nazi net. Their two elder sons had to serve in the Nazi
army, though both survived thanks to the Lord’s providence. As little
people, with conventional beliefs on the need to obey established authority
and a naive attitude towards politics, the Ziefle family had neither the
mentality, let alone the opportunity, to engage in resistance activities. The
book’s title is therefore somewhat inflated. Maria Ziefle kept her simple
faith alive and nurtured her family’s devotion. However, her success can
hardly be described as defiance of the Reich.

What is more revealing is Ziefle’s depiction of the family as victims.
The most graphic parts of his memoir are the reconstructions of the terrible
days of aerial bombardment of his home town, the family’s flight to the
country, the subsequent American occupation and the resulting deprivations
of the post-war period. But there is a singular absence of any reflection on
the root causes of all these disasters. Victimhood is a highly convenient
alibi in later years. Even so, Ziefle’s narrative reveals, but does not take
issue with, the kind of self-pity which so many Germans demonstrated after
1945, with the obvious, if perhaps unwitting, acceptance of Nazi
propaganda stereotypes about Jews, communists and foreigners. Their
pietistic fervour may have protected the Ziefles against Nazi fanaticism.
But from his own evidence, there is little awareness, even after sixty years,
of the drawbacks of such limited political horizons, with their authoritarian
and anti-democratic overtones. Ziefle’s failure to reflect on this legacy is
unfortunate. Filial piety, like patriotism, is not enough.

JSC
2) Kirchliche Tourismus:

Christopher Hale, Himmler’s Crusade, London: Bantam Press/ Hoboken
N.Jersey: John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2003. 422 pp ISBN 0-471-26292-7
Despite its title, this book has nothing to do with ecclesiastical
history. But it was so irresistible that I take the liberty of mentioning
it. In fact it is the true story, drawn from official records and later interviews
with survivors, of the mission of five SS officers despatched by Himmler in
1938-9 to remotest Tibet. Their object was to search for the roots of the
Aryan race, but was in fact a stew of delusions, dreams and dementia.
Their sundry adventures, which mainly involved eluding the British,
deluding the Tibetans, and preluding the Nazis’ 1000-year Aryan Reich, is
racily recounted by the British author in good John Buchan-ish style. The
whole expedition and its sinister aftermath was a dastardly and chilling
undertaking, but the story is darned well told.

Best wishes
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Dear Colleagues,
Contents:

Pius XII Revisited
1) J.Bottum, Essay: The End of the Pius Wars (These extracts from Mr Bottom’s essay in First Things, April 2004 are reproduced by kind permission of the author)

2) Book reviews:

a) Peter Godman, Hitler and the Vatican
M.L.Napolitano, Il Papa che salvo gli ebrei

3) Forthcoming publications
1) Joseph Bottom: The End of the Pius Wars

The Pius War is over, more or less. There will still be a few additional volumes published here and there, another article or two from authors too slow off the mark to catch their moment. But, basically, in the great argument that has raged over the last few years about the role of Pope Pius XII during World War II, the books have all been written, the reviews are all in, and the exchanges have all simmered down. It was a long and arduous struggle, vituperative and cruel, but, in the end, the defenders of Pius XII won every major battle. Along the way, they also lost the war.
Who, even among scholars in the field, could keep up with the flood of attacks on Pius XII that began in the late 1990s? John Cornwell gave us Hitler’s Pope, and Michael Phayer followed with The Catholic Church and the Holocaust. David Kertzer brought charges against Pius XII in The Popes against the Jews, and Susan Zucotti reversed her previous scholarship to pen Under his Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy. Garry Wills used Pius as the centerpiece of his reformist Papal Sin, as did James Carroll in Constantine’s Sword. So, for that matter, did Daniel Goldhagen when he wrote what proved to be the most extended and straightforward assault on Catholicism in decades: A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. . .

The champions of Pius had their share of book-length innings as well – although, one might note, never from the same level of popular publisher as the attackers managed to find. In 1999 Pierre Blet produced Pius XII and the Second World War According to the Archives of the Vatican and got Paulist Press, a small but respectable Catholic house, to publish it in America. Ronald Rychlak finished his first-rate Hitler, the War and the Pope, but this appeared in presses not quite at the level of distribution, advertising and influence enjoyed by Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin, Knopf and Viking, the large houses that issued books against Pius.
The commentator Philip Jenkins recently suggested that this disparity in publishers sends a message that the mainstream view is the guilt of Pius XII, while praise for the Pope belongs only to the cranks, nuts and sectarians. Jenkins’ suggestion is worth considering. Still, no one can say that Pius’ supporters were crushed or censored. In just six years, Margherita Marchione managed five books in praise of the Pope. [Her views were followed by Ralph McInerny. Justus George Lawler and Jose Sanchez].

But it was primarily in book reviews and responses that the defenders of Pius XII fought out the war – which is something of a problem. Every pope precipitates biographies, hagiographies and maledictions, like the dropping of the rain; it is part of the job to be much written about, and the works on Eugenio Pacelli that began when he became pope in 1939 seem innumerable.

But no supporter has yet produced a book-length biography in the wake of the recent years of extended blame. Even Rychlak’s excellent book is essentially reactive, devoting a thirty-page epilogue to a catalogue of the errors in Cornwell’s book. We have seen this pattern before. Hochhuth’s play The Deputy premiered in Berlin in 1963, and its picture of a greedy pope, concerned only about Vatican finances and silent about the Holocaust, immediately caused a firestorm of comment from the intellectual world. Everyone who was anyone felt compelled to weigh in. Hochhuth himself faded away when he tried to extend his censure to Winston Churchill, which led to a lost libel suit. . . .

Even without Hochhuth, the wide discussion about Pius XII he initiated in 1963 went on for several years. . . . The brouhaha also prompted the Vatican to begin releasing material from Pius’ pontificate, which appeared from 1965 to 1981 as the eleven-volume series Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale. In part by relying on these new documents, but even more by simply gathering their forces and investigating each of the incidents taken as the core of the indictment, the defenders gradually tamped down The Deputy’s claims about Pius XII and the Holocaust. Pope John Paul II was a consistent advocate for his predecessor, and even once-popular notions about Pius – that he was, for instance, the great reactionary opponent against whom Vatican II turned – gradually seemed to lose steam by the late 1970s and early 80s. It took more than a decade, but the reactive reviewers appeared to carry the day, and the popular magazine press and major book publishers lost interest.. . .

Most sceptical observers were unprepared when the criticism began again in the late 1990s. To journalists and
cultural commentators, Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope seemed almost to come out of nowhere in 1999, and it received almost entirely ecstatic reviews when it first appeared. . . . Time was needed for scholars to gin up the machine again, double-check the claims in Hitler’s Pope, and publish the reviews. Some of the results proved deeply embarrassing for Cornwell, particularly the falsity of his boast that he had spent „months on end” in the archives, when he visited the Vatican for only three weeks and didn’t go to the archives every day of that. The Italian letter from Pacelli that Cornwell placed at the center of his book as evidence of deep anti-Semitism had been, he claimed, waiting secretly „like a time bomb” until he did his research. In fact, it had been published in 1992 in a book by Emma Fattorini, who – an actual Italian, not working on a partisan translation – thought it meant very little. By the time all this came out, however, Hitler’s Pope had ridden out its time on the best-seller list.
Pius’ supporters were better prepared for Susan Zuccotti, and still better prepared for Garry Wills, and David Kertzer, and
James Carroll, and, particularly, Daniel Goldhagen, who was especially harried in late 2002. By then, the whole thing had turned into a giant game of „Whack the Mole”, with dozens of reviewers ready to smash their mallets down on the next author to stick up his head.. . .
Just as The Deputy moved the archivists in Rome to release Actes et Documents over the next sixteen years, so the current
Pius War has prompted an accelerated – by glacial Vatican norms – opening of a few new archives from the pontificate of Pius XI (1922-1939), whom Pacelli served as the Vatican’s secretary of state. Along with an Italian Jesuit named Giovanni Sale (who has been writing a torrent of articles for the Roman Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica), Peter Godman in his Hitler and the Vatican is among the first scholars to have used the new documents. And although he looked at only a handful – the title of his book is considerably overblown – he seems to have done so in a relatively reasonable and balanced way, particularly given the standard set by Cornwell and Goldhagen. . . .
In the public mind at the present moment, there is almost nothing bad you can’t say about Pius XII. The Vatican may end up declaring him a saint – the slow process of canonization has been winding its way through the Roman curia since the mid-1960s – but the general public has gradually been persuaded that Pius ranks somewhere among the greatest villains ever to walk the earth. . . .

The point is that there is simply no depravity one can put past the man. He suppressed the anti-Nazi encyclical that Pius XI on his deathbed begged him to release. He was deeply implicated in the Germans’ massacre of 335 Italians in the Ardeatine Caves. He expressly permitted, even encouraged, the S.S. to round up Rome’s Jews in 1943. At the root of all this lies the fact that Pius XII was, fundamentally, a follower of Hitler, a genocidal hater of the Jews in his heart and in his mind, and once we recognize him as a Nazi who somehow escaped punishment at the Nuremberg trials, we can see the origin of all the rest. He was Hitler’s Pope, etc.etc. . . . . In a 1997 essay, the widely published Richard L. Rubenstein concluded, „during World War II Pope Pius XII and the vast majority of European Christian leaders regarded the elimination of the Jews as no less beneficial than the destruction of Bolshevism.”

All of these claims are mistaken, of course – and more than mistaken: demonstrably and obviously untrue, outrages upon history and fellow feeling for the humanity of previous generations. But none of them are merely the lurid fantasies of conspiracy-mongers huddled together in paranoia on their Internet lists. Every one of these assertions has been made in recent years by books and articles published with mainstream and popular American publishers. And when we draw from them their general
conclusion – when we reach the point at which Rubenstein, for example, has arrived – then discourse is over. Research into primary sources, argument about interpretation, the scholar’s task of weighing historical circumstances: all of this is quibbling, an attempt to be fair to monstrosity, and by such fairness to condone, excuse, and participate in it. . . .

It was here that the Pius War was lost – and lost for what I believe will be at least a generation – despite the victories of the reviewers. . . . I am convinced that we will not achieve anything resembling historical accuracy until all present views have been cleared away – and thus, that the job for every honest writer who takes up the topic now is to correct the slander of Pius XII. A good example was set by Rabbi David Dalin, in an essay which was published in the Weekly Standard in February 2001. Dalin concluded that that Pius XII deserves recognition among Jews as a Righteous Gentile who saved hundreds of thousands of lives during the Holocaust. The reaction. . . was brutal, and the Weekly Standard found itself leading the parade only in the sense that a man running for his life leads the mob pursuing him. . . . The center-left New Republic immediately commissioned Daniel Goldhagen to interrupt the book he was writing and savage Pius XII instead – which he did in what is said to be the longest essay ever published in the magazine’s pages. The neo-conservative Commentary was so rankled that it did what it would not have done in nearly any other circumstance: it published a long rebuke of the Weekly Standard by a leftist author who had already made many of the same complaints in an article for Christian Century. . .

The attempt to sift through the endless stream of books about Pius XII in recent years was actually carried out by indefatigable reviewers in dozens of magazines and journals, responding to the texts one by one. The controversy also motivated additional research, and new material now seems to arrive every week. As far as I can tell, all this recent information tells in favor of Pius XII. A recently discovered 1923 letter to the Vatican from Eugenio Pacelli, then nuncio to Germany, for instance, denounces Hitler’s putsch and warns against his anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. A document from April 1933, just months after Hitler obtained power, reveals how Pacelli (then secretary of state) ordered the new German nuncio, Cesare Orsenigo, to protest Nazi actions. Meanwhile, newly examined diplomatic documents show that in 1937 Cardinal Pacelli warned A. W. Klieforth, the American consul to Berlin, that Hitler was „an untrustworthy scoundrel and fundamentally wicked person” to quote Klieforth, who also wrote that Pacelli „did not believe Hitler capable of moderation, and . . . fully supported the German bishops in their anti-Nazi stand”. This was matched with the discovery of Pacelli’s anti-Nazi report, written the following year for President Roosevelt and filed with Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, which declared that the Church regarded compromise with the Third Reich as „out of the question”. Archives from American espionage agencies have recently confirmed Pius XII’s active involvement in plots to overthrow Hitler. A pair of newly found letters, written in 1940 on the letterhead of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, give Pius XII’s orders that financial assistance be sent to Campagna for the explicit purpose of assisting interned Jews suffering from Mussolini’s racial policies. And the Israeli government has finally released Adolf Eichmann’s diaries, portions of which confirm the Vatican’s obstruction of the Nazis’ roundup of Rome’s Jews. There’s more, a regular flow of new material: intercepts of Nazi communications released from the United States’ National Archives include such passages as”Vatican has apparently for a long time been assisting many Jews to escape”; in a Nazi dispatch from Rome to Berlin on October 26, 1943, ten days after the Germany’s Roman roundup. New oral testimony from such Catholic rescuers as Monsignor John Patrick Carroll-Abbing, Sister Mathilda Spielmann, Father Giacomo Martegani, and Don Aldo Brunacci insists that Pius XII gave them explicit orders and direct assistance to help persecuted Jews in Italy. The posthumous publication this year of Harold Tittmann’s memoir, Inside the Vatican of Pius XII, is particularly interesting, for in it the American diplomat reveals, for the first time, that Pius XII’s wartime conduct drew upon advice from the German resistance. Out of all this, one might begin to build a new case for Pius XII. My own sense is that the anti-Pius books are coming to an end. . . .

What we really need now is a new biography of Pius XII during those years: a nonreactive account of his life and times, a book driven not by the reviewer’s instinct to answer charges but by the biographer’s impulse to tell an accurate story. Before that can be done well, I think, the archives of Pius XII’s pontificate will probably have to be fully catalogued and opened. Documents released here and there are useful, but useful is a dangerous word in this context, for the use is always in building an argument: a laying out of evidence to make or rebut a charge, rather than a knowledge of the Pope’s day-to-day actions. The Vatican has already begun to open some archives earlier than scheduled under the various time-locks, and it promises to open more. In the meantime, the reviewers’ contributions remain. But the reviewers’ dilemma remains as well: They won the battles, but how are they going to win the war?

Joseph Bottum, Arts editor of the Weekly Standard, poetry editor of First Things, and co-editor of The Pius War, an anthology of reviews forthcoming from Lexington Books.
2) Book reviews:

Peter Godman, Hitler and the Vatican. Inside the Secret Archives that Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church. New York: Free Press 2004. 285 pp. ISBN 0-7432-4597-0.

Matteo Napolitano and Andrea Tornielli, Il Papa che salvo gli ebrei. Dagli archivi segreti del Vaticano tutta la verita su Pio XII.
Casale Monferrato: Editizioni Piemma 2004. 202 pp.

Both of these new books may be described – to use Bottum’s phrase quoted aove – as post-war. Neither is likely to change the opinions of either the defenders or the critics of the man destined to become Pope Pius XII. But these authors’ contribution is to be the first to use some of the latest tranche of documents now made available for public scrutiny by the Vatican archives. These consist of only a part of the documentation for the reign of Pope Pius XI, (1922-1939), i.e. while Eugenio Pacelli was serving as Cardinal Secretary of State, and only those papers which deal with Germany. This move was undoubtedly due to the pressures put on the Vatican archivists after the failure, three years ago, of the ill-planned Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission. [See this Newsletter, Vol. VII, no 9 – September 2001]

Both books cover the same ground, namely the initial stages of the Vatican’s responses after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in January 1933, but do not extend their accounts to tackle the much more controversial period after 1939 when Pacelli was elected Pope and the Second World War broke out. Godman’s narrative has the merit of avoiding the kind of accusatory finger-pointing which marred several earlier works in English, and similarly does not indulge in the kind of wishful thinking which claims that history would have been so very different if only . . . .
Godman teaches at the University of Rome, while Napolitano does the same at the University of Urbino, and is here assisted by an experienced Italian journalist. These latter pair are more defensive, seeking to offset the torrent of aspersions, legends, accusations or downright lies which they, rightly, believe have distorted the picture of the Vatican’s pre-1939 diplomacy.

But in their haste to make use of the few, hitherto unseen documents from these new files, both authors fail to mention that, for the period of Pius XI’s reign, much is already known.The origins of the 1933 Concordat has been fully explored. The major documents subsequently sent from the Vatican to the German government, protesting against the breaches of this Concordat, were all published in Germany thirty years ago. And the background to the Papal Encyclical „Mit brennender Sorge” of March 1937 is also well known. So it is misleading, to say the least, for Godman or his publishers to suggest that his book Reveals the New Story from Inside the Secret Archives. And Napolitano and Tornielli certainly, in their short account, do not even begin to give us tutta la verita su Pio XII.

Godman’s title is equally misleading in that we are not given any information about Hitler, or his religious policies, or even about the planning and execution of the nefarious repression and persecution which the German Catholic Church suffered in these years. His focus is solely on the Vatican and its responses to the Nazi threat. Godman sees three different ways in which the papal authories tried to meet this challenge. The first was the conclusion of the diplomatic Concordat in the sumer of 1933, which Cardinal Pacelli regarded as the successful completion of his labours over the previous decade. But the disadvantages soon became apparent when the Nazis made clear their deliberate refusal to abide by the Concordat’s terms. The second strategy – though this is an overblown term – was advocated by a maverick Austrian bishop, Hudal, then Rector of the German College in Rome. He argued for a closer association with the new German regime in a joint campaign against Bolsheviks and Jews. But he found no support from the Vatican hierarchy and even less in Berlin.

The third strategy was deliberated by the Holy Office, namely to attack the doctrinal errors of Nazi totalitarianism ideologically, as was done in the above-mentioned Encyclical in 1937. The only trouble was that the German Catholics ignored its warnings, and continued to believe that they could be good Catholics and good Nazis at the same time.

For the record, Godman and Napolitano have salvaged a few new documents, but provide no startling revelations which could possibly support the claims of their sub-titles. Godman’s bibliography and footnotes are excellent and his prose style commendable. But his final chapter, which examines the Vatican debates, as to whether or not Hitler should be excommunicated, is a weak way of ending this brief account of the Curia’s deliberations. For their part, Napolitano and Tornielli offer repeated expressions of exasperation at the deliberate misrepresentations by the Vatican’s critics, especially the accusations that Cardinal Pacelli was anti-semitic or pro-Nazi. In this they are perfectly justified and correct. But they add nothing new to the already well-known accounts of Pacelli’s statements and attitudes on the Jewish question.
No final verdict will be possible until the papers of Pacelli’s own pontificate from 1939 onwards are released. So these preliminary accounts can do little more than set the scene. Whether or not Pacelli, as Pope, demonstrated an excess of diplomatic prudence or an excess of political cowardice still remains a debatable and unresolved question.
3) Forthcoming publications: (Contributed by William Doino)

a). The posthumous memoirs of Harold Tittmann Jr, the American Charge d’Affaires in Rome during World War II, have just been published by Doubleday (a major American publisher), under the title: Inside the Vatican of Pius XII: The Memoir of an American Diplomat During World War II, edited by his son (who was with his father during the German occupation of Rome). The book is one of the most important documents on Pius to appear in the last twenty-five years–at least since the publication of the last volume of the Holy See’s Actes et Documents of the Second World War (11 volumes, 1965-1981).Tittmann, assistant to Myron Taylor, was a first-hand witness to Pius XII’s conduct during the war–for which he expresses support, appreciation and admiration. It is a remarkable memoir, vital to the debate about Pius XII. Indeed, most of the arguments still made against Pius are analyzed and knocked down by Tittmann, one by one, in a restrained, persuasive manner. The fact that Tittmann was an Episcopalian, not Catholic, gives him added credibility– since he cannot be accused of being emotionally attached to the Church. Tittmann’s praise of Pius is striking because certain of the pope’s detractors (e.g., Saul Friedlander and John Cornwell) have quoted Tittmann’s dispatches out of context, suggesting Tittmann was frustrated by the Holy See’s wartime policy. But the memoir clarifies these dispatches, providing proper context, and makes clear that Tittmann believes that Pius XII “detested the Nazi ideology and everything it stood for” and that “the Holy Father chose the better path” and “thereby saved many lives.” (pp. 122-124).
b) Later this year, Lexington Books will publish The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII, edited by Joseph Bottum and David G. Dalin, which includes my [Doino’s] 80,000-word annotated bibliography. The entire book is close to 300 pages. Below is a link to Lexington’s website, announcing its forthcoming publication, followed by the comments of four distinguished Jewish scholars, involved in Catholic-Jewish relations.
Sincerely, William Doino Jr.

http://www.lexingtonbooks.com/Catalog/Reviews.shtml?command=Search&db=^DB/CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0739109065
“The contributors to this important volume have made judicious arguments in defense of the actions of Pope Pius XII before, during, and after the Holocaust. These arguments deserve an equally judicious hearing from non-Catholics–especially from Jews–who need to know how they are to judge this pope when they remember an unforgetable event in their own history and in the history of the West. Catholics, too, need to make equally judicious use of these arguments in their own deliberations about the possible canonization of Pius XII.”˜David Novak, University of Toronto

“Rabbi David Dalin’s omnibus review in the February 26, 2001, Weekly Standard . . .opened and changed my mind. To see it here at the center of this fine collection, buttressed by William Doino’s astonishing bibliography, is a great pleasure. David Dalin and Joseph Bottum are indeed friends of truth.”˜David Klinghoffer, author of The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism and Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History

“Stouthearted courage and vast wisdom are vital in those who come to denounce the grievous defamation of a good man. The result is The Pius War, this compelling book that deals a devastating blow to those who claim to be combating anti-Semitism yet descend into deceit, hate, and anti-Christianism. Read it and find yourself stirred to indignation at how the smear of secularism stained a righteous reputation, and be inspired by these brave authors who herein right a historic wrong. “˜Rabbi Daniel Lapin, President, Toward Tradition

“This volume provides a valuable corrective to the over the top “Pope bashing” so prevelant in politically correct academic circles.
Taken as a whole the contributors’ critique of the recent attacks on Pope Pius X11’s conduct during the World War 11 offers a compelling case for the defense. The annotated bibliography of the dispute is an indespensible vade mecum for future scholars.”˜Marshall Breger , Catholic University of America

With very best wishes for the summer holidays
Sincerely,
John S. Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Colleagues,

John Conway is on holiday this month, so he has asked me to
assist with the June 2004 Newsletter. I am very happy to do so,
and therefore take the opportunity to send you two book reviews
on the topic of contemporary Christian-Jewish relations. I should
be glad to have any comments you may care to send me to the
following address: mhockeno@skidmore.edu 16Sincerely,
Matthew Hockenos, Dept. of History, Skidmore College,
Saratoga Springs, New York, US

Contents:

Book Reviews

1) Marc A. Krell, Intersecting Pathways: Modern Jewish
Theologians in Conversation with Christianity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
2) Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jensen, Jews and Christians:
People of God (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans
Publishing, 2003).

1) Krell, Intersecting Pathways

Marc Krell’s Intersecting Pathways: Modern Jewish Theologians
in Conversation with Christianity (2003) is an insightful and
timely contribution to the growing number of studies on the
contemporary Jewish-Christian encounter. Krell analyzes the
theologies of four twentieth-century Jewish thinkers: Franz
Rosenzweig (1886-1929), Hans Joachim Schoeps (1909-1980),
Richard Rubenstein (1924-), and Irving Greenberg (1933-), and
concludes that each of these theologians developed his (Jewish)
theology in continuous conflict and conversation with Christian
thought and culture. “Ultimately, the works of these four
Jewish-Christian interlopers demonstrate that modern Jewish
identity is predicated in some way upon its ambivalent encounter
with Christianity” (11). Yet their willingness to reconstruct
Jewish identity and to reformulate Jewish theology through a
dialogue with Christianity did not resulted in a dilution of Jewish
identity. Rather, Krell argues, these four theologians continually
reestablish Jewish uniqueness through cultural and theological
interaction at the boundaries between Christianity and Judaism.
Krell’s methodology is that of cultural studies and his book
liberally employs the terminology and jargon of this field.

Theology for Krell is a cultural activity in that it is constructed in
the context of continuous socio-cultural interaction and power
dynamics. “Instead of being an indisputable and normative
discourse,” Krell writes, ” theology is socially and historically
conditioned just like all other human activities” (4). He believes
that the ongoing construction of modern Jewish identities is
generated by a unique dialectic between Judaism and Christianity
in which Jews define themselves through a simultaneous
attraction and repulsion to the dominant Christian culture. The
identity construction of both Christians and Jews by
twentieth-century theologians has involved the displacing and
realigning of borders traditionally associated with Jewish and
Christian identities. While acknowledging that the boundaries
between Judaism and Christianity are more defined today than in
late antiquity, Krell maintains that Rosenzweig, Schoeps,
Rubenstein, and Greenberg engaged in a theological discourse
with their Christian counterparts that blurred long-established
boundaries between Judaism and Christianity.

Of the four theologians Krell examines, Franz Rosenzweig was
the only one whose theology was developed in its entirety before
Hitler came to power and thus does not struggle at least to the
same degree as Rubenstein and Greenberg — with Christian
antisemitism. Rosenzweig was attracted to Christianity early in
his life in part because he viewed Judaism as an anachronistic set
of rituals and in part because he believed that the Christian
notion of divine revelation could provide him with a living
relationship to God. Although he nearly converted in 1913, he
decided to remain a Jew and went on to develop a theology that
reflected his love-hate relationship with Christianity.

Just as the Reformed Swiss theologian Karl Barth and some of
his colleagues were critical of the secularization and historicism
of Christianity in the early twentieth century, so too was
Rosenzweig a critic of similar trends by liberal Jews. Before the
outbreak of the First World War Rosenzweig began to stress the
uniqueness of the Jews because they stood apart from world
history as God’s chosen people. The eternal, transcendental,
metahistorical, and divine predisposition of Israel became a
constitutive element in his theology. A second and
complementary element in Rosenzweig’s theology was the
crucial role of the Church in spreading the Word of God to the
pagan community. According to Krell, “Rosenzweig describes
the Jews as depending on Christians to eternalize or redeem the
world through proselytization” (33). Although Rosenzweig
acknowledges that Christians have an important role to play in
this-worldly redemption, he is also critical of the Christian claim
that their revelation is complete and that the Jews should join
them in recognizing the revelation of God in Christ the Messiah.

For this reason Rosenzweig does not leave the responsibility of
addressing the unredeemed world to Christians alone. Through
prayer, suffering, and ethical behavior, he contends, Jews can
also participate in bringing about redemption without following
Christ.

The complementary role that Christians and Jews play in
Rosenzweig’s theology does not, as some have argued, result in a
“two-covenant theology,” whereby Jews and Christians
acknowledge their connectedness but maintain their distinctive
covenants. Krell argues that Rosenzweig never pushes his
theology to this point. For Rosenzweig, Christian and Jewish
identities were constructed through “a judgment against the
other” (15). Krell writes, “Rosenzweig clearly illustrated the
dialectic between attraction and repulsion by Jews and Christians
for each other when admitting that there is a ëformal relation’
between Judaism and Christianity while also maintaining that
there is no ëliving relation’ between Jewish and Christian
theologies. [Rosenzweig] portrayed Judaism and Christianity as
being intimately bound together by God, while at the same time
claiming that God ëhas set enmity between the two for all time'”
(36). In short, Jews, not Christians, possess divine truth, and it is
the Christians’ role to recognize this and attest to it. According
to Krell, Rosenzweig neither crosses the boundary between
Judaism and Christianity nor does he reaffirm the existing
boundaries but rather “realigns those that are already shifting”
(41).

Hans Joachim Schoeps, on the other hand, does more than realign
the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity, he develops a
hybrid theology that both Jews and Christians have sharply
criticized. Perhaps even more than Schoeps’s amalgamation of
Jewish and Christian thought, it was his admiration for Prussian
politics and culture that earned him the wrath of many of his
Jewish colleagues. In 1933 he founded the Deutscher Vortrupp
(German Vanguard) to promote Prussian-German patriotism and
to work toward a Jewish-Nazi political rapprochement. Despite
Nazi antisemitism Schoeps remained steadfastly committed to
serving Germany as a Jew. “My own position concerning the
German fatherland remains unchanged,” he wrote after the Nazis
came to power. “I have no other fatherland than the one which is
called Germany; and I cannot serve it in any other meaningful
way than that as a full Jew . . . .”[1] The Nazis, of course, were
not interested in Schoeps’s love for the fatherland. Schoeps was
forced to flee to Sweden in 1938 after the Nazis had refused an
offer by members of his Vortrupp to serve in the German Army
in 1935 and had arrested Schoeps in 1936. Although the Nazis
had killed his parents in concentration camps, he returned to
Germany in 1946, accepted an appointment at the University of
Erlangen in 1947, and called for a return of the Prussian
monarchy. Until his death in 1980

Schoeps was dogged by Jewish critics, some of whom accused him of being a Nazi and others of being Protestant.
It is true that Schoeps’s theology drew more heavily on Protestant
and Lutheran beliefs than Rosenzweig’s. He even described his
own theology as a “critical-Protestant Judaism.” Karl Holl’s
interpretation of Luther and aspects of Karl Barth’s dialectical
theology were especially influential. But Krell insists that while
Schoeps borrowed from the theologies of Holl, Barth, and other
Protestants, he did so without losing his Jewish identity. Like
Rosenzweig, Schoeps believed that Jews and Christians had
distinct roles to play in the process of redemption, but unlike
Rosenzweig, he did not subordinate the role of Christians to the
role of Jews. Jews, Schoeps maintained, were as much a part of
the fallen world as Christians and each stood before God as
sinners. He also believed that both the Synagogue and the
Church had a mutual responsibility to proclaim God to their
unredeemed communities. He acknowledged Jesus as the Son of
God for Christians but countered that Jews were the sons of God.

In this direct comparison of the divinity of Christ and Israel, Krell
believes that Schoeps crossed over “the essential boundaries
constructed between Judaism and Christianity by his Jewish and
Christian contemporaries” (65). Schoeps did not, however,
abandon Judaism. He proclaimed after the war that “every Jew
today, as in the past, must reject Jesus as the Messiah of Israel. . .
. We are, however, prepared to recognize that in some way,
which we do not understand, a Messianic significance for
non-Jewish mankind is attached to the figure of [Jesus Christ].
We can go this far without transgressing against the absoluteness
of the revelation on Mount Sinai (valid only for Israel); we can
go this far and still remain wholly and authentically rooted in the
revealed truth of Judaism, which neither needs, nor is susceptible
to, any completion.”[2]

Although Schoeps was neither a Nazi nor a Protestant as his
critics had charged, he did develop a theology with many
similarities to twentieth-century conservative Lutherans, many of
whom had compromised with Nazism. In contrast to Rosenzweig
who maintained that because of Israel’s eternal status as God’s
chosen people they were independent from history, Schoeps
maintained that Jews had a crucial role to play in history. He
urged Jews to participate in the politics of the Prussian state,
which he characterized in classic Lutheran fashion as one of the
divine orders of creation. Since Schoeps believed that the
Prussian leaders represented God in this world, it followed that
Jews had a responsibility to serve Prussia for spiritual as well as
historical reasons. Although Jews and Christians both had this
responsibility, Jews had a distinct role because they possessed
sacred blood through God’s divine promise and as a result had a
“predisposition to salvation.” Although Schoeps would agree
with Rosenzweig that the Jewish people have an eternal
ahistorical status as a result of their chosenness, he differs from
Rosenzweig when he calls on Jews to consciously enter history
and thereby activate God’s promise. Krell writes, “by portraying
Judaism more as a religion than an ethnicity, Schoeps wanted to
show that Jews are members of the Prussian nation based on a
religious decision to work with the German people in the
universal process of redemption. . . . Schoeps encouraged Jews to
make a religious confession to the Prussian idea of societal order
as reflecting the order of creation” (52-3). Israel’s chosenness
gave it a special role in German history and in the process of
redemption. But it was a role that complemented the role of
Christians in a shared redemptive process.

Whereas the Holocaust seems to have had little affect on
Schoeps’s optimistic view of Jews and Christians working
together to redeem the world, the Holocaust is the central event
in Richard Rubenstein’s post-Holocaust theology. Rubenstein is
president emeritus and distinguished professor of religion at the
University of Bridgeport. He is renowned among Jewish and
Christian scholars for his controversial and thought-provoking
contributions to the Jewish-Christian dialogue and debate on the
meaning of the Holocaust for our understanding of God. In After
Auschwitz (1966) he asked: “How can Jews believe in an
omnipotent, beneficent God after Auschwitz?” He concluded
that they cannot because belief in God as the omnipotent actor in
history ultimately leads to the conclusion that the Holocaust was
part of God’s salvation plan. Krell writes, “Rubenstein would
rather interpret historical Jewish suffering culminating in the
Holocaust as tragic misfortune rather than a deserved punishment
from an autocratic God” (87).

Rubenstein reached this conclusion after reflecting on a
conversation he had had with Heinrich Gruber, a Lutheran who
had risked his life to save Jews during the Holocaust and had
worked tirelessly on behalf of Jewish-Christian reconciliation
after the war. Gruber had expressed the belief to Rubenstein that
the Holocaust was God’s way of punishing Israel for rejecting
and crucifying Christ. This interpretation of the Holocaust was
not uncommon among postwar German Lutherans and some
ultra-Orthodox Jews. The Gruber encounter prompted
Rubenstein to declare that the myths by which Christians and
Jews define themselves and one another were the root of the
problem and ultimately responsible for the Holocaust.

Rubenstein believed that the Christian myths that portrayed Jews
as Christ-killers and taught contempt for Jews created an
atmosphere in which the Nazis’ racial antisemitism found
widespread appeal. But more controversially he was also critical
of the excessively rigid expectations and punitive nature of
rabbinic Judaism. “[Rubenstein] portrayed the development of a
servile Jewish consciousness due to behavioral restraints imposed
by the Rabbis who, he argued, interpreted every misfortune as a
deserved punishment by an angry Father God” (72). Rubenstein
urged both communities to demythologize their religions in order
to open the way for a true dialogue. Both Jews and Christians
needed to rethink their images of Jews and see them as “neither
more nor less than any other men, sharing the pain, the joy, and
the fated destiny which Earth alone has meted out to all her
children.” Despite his call for the demythologization of
Christianity and Judaism, it is Krell’s contention that Rubenstein
perpetuates these myths in his critique of rabbinic Judaism.

In After Auschwitz Rubenstein proclaimed the death of the
omnipotent historical God and reconstructed the divine image as
“a God who unfolds in nature yet is ontologically distinct from
it” (86). Rubenstein stated in 1970, “I would like to offer my
own confession of faith after Auschwitz. I am a pagan. To be a
pagan means to find once again one’s roots as a child of Earth
and to see one’s own existence as wholly and totally an earthly
existence.”[3] Although Rubenstein denied the existence of a
historical God, Krell does not believe that Rubenstein separated
himself entirely from Judaism.

In Rubenstein’s post-Holocaust theology God is no longer an
omnipotent, transcendent, and punitive God but rather one who is
amoral, immanent, feminine, and transcends good and evil.
Gone is the God of biblical and rabbinic Judaism, which
Rubenstein associated with a wrathful God who judges and
punishes. Rubenstein’s post-Holocaust God of nature draws a
good deal on the Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich and
Rubenstein’s reading of the apostle Paul. Rubenstein’s theology,
according to Krell, sought to “transcend Jewish Christian
boundaries and achieve a universal oneness with all humanity in
a world immanently permeated by divinity” (100). By
deconstructing the dehumanizing myths so central to the
Jewish-Christian rivalry, Rubenstein attempted to build a
community that focused on shared human traits as opposed to
combative religions. Although Rubenstein challenged both Jews
and Christians to abandon their mutually destructive religious
myths, he employs anti-Jewish Christian myths in his critique of
rabbinic Judaism.

Irving Greenberg, like Rubenstein, believes that the Holocaust
marked a major turning point in Jewish-Christian relations. He
encourages both Jewish and Christian theologians to develop a
joint theological response to the Holocaust in conversations with
each other. In contrast to Rubenstein, whom he called an atheist,
Greenberg continues to maintain the belief, common to Jews and
Christians, that God acts in history. However, in his
groundbreaking essay, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism,
Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust” (1974), he
concluded that the covenant between God and the Jews had been
shattered in the Holocaust. God did not keep His share of the
covenant by protecting the Jews. The Holocaust then marked the
end of the covenant that had been established between God and
Israel at Sinai.

However, he interpreted the founding of the State of Israel in
1948 as a decision by the majority of Jews to voluntarily accept
the covenant again. According to Greenberg, the Jews have
responded to God’s call to take responsibility for themselves and
to actively work to prevent another Holocaust. In “Cloud of
Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” Greenberg wrote, “Israel’s faith in the
God of History demands that an unprecedented event of
destruction be matched by an unprecedented act of redemption,
and this has happened.”[4] In this act, Jews began to take control
of their own redemption and in doing so redistribute the power
relationship between Jews and Christians. Greenberg also
suggested that the Holocaust and the founding of the State of
Israel marked a shift in the locus of God’s presence to the secular
world. Greenberg referred to this as a “secular revelation” and
argued that it “shifted the balance of Jewish activity and concern
to the secular enterprises of society building, social justice, and
human politics” (111). Thus Greenberg sees the Holocaust as a
revelatory event that ushers in a new covenant and establishes a
new orientation between God and the Jews, on the one hand, and
Jews and Christians, on the other.

Greenberg’s theology offers a “new organic model” for the
post-Holocaust relationship between Jews and Christians. In
dialogue with Christian theologians A. Roy Eckardt and Paul van
Buren, Greenberg influenced them and was in turn influenced by
them. All three drew a direct connection between the Church’s
anti-Judaism and the rise of Nazi antisemitism. Rather than
combat anti-Judaism by calling for the demythologization of
Judaism and Christianity as Rubenstein did, Eckardt, van Buren,
and Greenberg interpreted the core myths in new ways. Rather
than interpret the crucifixion as a model for redemptive suffering,
they argued that after the Holocaust the cross had become a
symbol of degradation. In the wake of immeasurable suffering
Jews endured during the Nazi period Greenberg believed that the
redemptive nature of suffering had to be called into question and
he encouraged Christians to abandon their glorification of the
suffering servant model. Although Greenberg encourages a
dialogical relationship between Christians and Jews, Krell
believes he “unwittingly reversed the power relations between
Judaism and Christianity by attempting to make Christianity
more rabbinic or this-worldly after the Holocaust. Instead of
respecting the faith claims of Christianity, Greenberg appeared to
subordinate and incorporate them in a Jewish framework” (134).

It is difficult to dispute Krell’s overarching thesis that these four
theologians constructed their theologies through an unusually
high degree of debate and dialogue with Christian theologians as
well as deep reflection on the relationship between Christian and
Jewish identity. Krell, however, is not merely arguing that these
four thinkers deliberately sought to develop their theologies
through a conversation with Christianity, but rather that Jewish
theologians who seek to develop an all-encompassing theology
and who seek to formulate the basic characteristics of Jewish
identity will out of necessity come into intimate contact with
Christianity.

Endnotes

[1] Gary Lease, “Hans Joachim Schoeps,” in Yale Companion to
Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096-1996,
edited by Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997), 659.
[2] Hans Joachim Schoeps, “A Religious Bridge between Jew
and Christian: Shall We Recognize Two Covenants,”
Commentary (1950), 129, 131.
[3] Richard L. Rubenstein, “Some Perspectives on Religious
Faith after Auschwitz,” in
The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust ed. Franklin H.
Littell and Hubert G. Locke (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1974), 267.
[4] Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism,
Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust,” in Auschwitz:
Beginning of a New Era? ed. Eva Fleischner (NY: KTAV
Publishing House, 1974), 32.

2) Braaten and Jenson, Jews and Christians

Jews and Christians: People of God (2003), edited by Carl E.
Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, is a collection of eight scholarly
essays, which originated as presentations at a conference in
Minneapolis in 2001 organized by the Center for Catholic and
Evangelical Theology. For reasons of space only half of the
essays can be reviewed in detail here. In addition to the essays
by some of the most prominent Jewish and Christian scholars
engaged in the ongoing dialogue over the relationship between
Judaism and Christianity, the volume also includes a
mini-symposium on Dabru Emet (“Speak the Truth”), the historic
Jewish statement on Christians and Christianity issued in 2000
and signed by nearly 200 Jewish scholars, and a personal essay
by Reidar Dittmann in which he reflects on his experience in
Buchenwald. Although this extraordinary volume is highly
recommended for anyone familiar with the literature in this
rapidly expanding field, some of the essays are theologically
quite challenging and the collection offers neither a systematic
nor historical approach to the topic. Despite these drawbacks,
one is immediately struck by two impressions: the sophisticated
understanding that Jewish contributors have for Christianity and
Christian contributors for Judaism and the straightforwardness
and ease with which these Jewish and Christian scholars now
exchange ideas and opinions. For those who desire a more
systematic approach that emphasizes the work being done by
Jewish scholars, I would suggest Christianity in Jewish Terms
(2000) edited by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter
Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Singer. Christianity
in Jewish Terms consists of ten chapters with essays that address
key theological concepts in Judaism and Christianity, such as
commandment, worship, suffering, sin, and redemption. Each
chapter also contains responses by prominent Christian scholars.

A useful introductory chapter on “Christian-Jewish Interactions
over the Ages” by Robert Chazan sets the historical context.
Jews and Christians begins with a thoughtful essay by Robert
Jenson, the senior scholar for research at the Center for
Theological Inquiry in Princeton, which attempts to outline a new
Christian theology of Judaism. Although dramatic changes and
significant progress have taken place in Christian-Jewish
relations since the Holocaust and the founding of the State of
Israel, there is still a sense among some Christian and Jewish
scholars that Christianity urgently needs to rethink its theology of
Judaism. This volume in general and Jenson’s essay in particular
attempt to address this deficiency. For Jenson, “A Christian
theology of Judaism will be at its center an attempt to understand
Judaism’s claim and in so doing to understand its own better”
(3). But for Christians to understand Judaism’s claim is not a
simple matter. While Christian theologians have relied on the
theory of supersessionism — the claim that with the resurrection
of Jesus Christ the church has displaced or superseded Israel as
God’s covenantal partner — for their understanding of Judaism,
Jenson notes that supersessionism is increasingly out of fashion
as a result of the rethinking of Christian theology in the wake of
the Holocaust. “We see ever more clearly how Jewish the
Christian claims and fundamental patterns of understanding are,
indeed how very much the predominant gentile part of the church
is indeed grafted onto someone else’s tree.” To emphasize his
point Jenson offers the rather startling gloss on John 1:14: “The
Torah became flesh and dwelt among us” (6).

His more systematic attempt to replace the supersessionist
interpretation of Judaism involves reinterpreting the New
Testament claim that through the resurrection of Jesus God
marked him as the Messiah and the fulfillment of God’s promise
to Israel. Jenson acknowledges that “this claim can be
understood in a way that . . . takes Israel’s mission as concluded
with the life, death, and resurrection of this one Israelite” (6). In
contrast Jenson proposes that we understand the church not as the
fulfillment of the promises to Israel but as “a detour from the
expected straight path of the Lord’s intentions, a detour to
accommodate the mission to Jews and gentiles” (7). Since it is
quite clear that the resurrection of Jesus did not bring the
Kingdom of God in all its glory, it follows that the church is not
the kingdom but a detour on God’s way. Jenson then suggests
that the church may also see Judaism as a detour “taken by God
on his way to the final fulfillment” (8).

The rest of Jenson’s essay attempts to address why God would
ordain the Judaic detour alongside the Christian detour. His
answer is threefold. First, he proposes that God “wills the
Judaism of Torah-obedience as that which alone can and does
hold the lineage of Abraham and Sarah together during the time
of detour” (9). That is, if Jews had accepted Jesus as the Messiah
and had entered the church as was expected by the apostle Paul
and later Christians, it would have brought to an end a people
identified by descent from Abraham and Sarah. This could not
be the case because the promises God made to Israel, promises
not yet fulfilled, were promises based on the lineage of Abraham
and Sarah.

Jenson’s second proposal begins by observing that since the
church does not understand or adhere to God’s Law in the same
way as Orthodox Jews, Christians are not marked off as different
in the same sense as observant Jews. Should Jews join the
church and abandon their interpretation of God’s Law, the Jews
would “vanish from sight as Jews.” Thus Jenson recommends
that any Christian theology of Judaism acknowledge that God,
during the time after the resurrection of Jesus and before the final
fulfillment of his divine promise, wants a community that
appears different to the rest of the world because it studies and
obeys the Torah as Judaism does. During this time of detour “the
church is not able herself to bear such exegesis, and this is not a
failing” (11).

Jenson’s final explanation for the existence of two communities,
who simultaneously claim to be God’s chosen people awaiting
the fulfillment of God’s promises, is that God wills that “the
embodiment of the risen Christ is whole only in the form of the
church and an identifiable community of Abraham and Sarah’s
descendents” (13). The church traditionally teaches that it is the
body of the risen Jesus Christ. Jenson, however, is reminding the
church that the Word that became flesh in Jesus Christ is part of
the lineage of Abraham and Sarah. Thus: “the Torah became
flesh and dwelt among us.”

Many of the themes raised by Jenson, in particular the need to
acknowledge the distinctiveness of Judaism and Christianity
while at the same time recognizing their common roots, are also
addressed in this volume by Marvin R. Wilson in his essay “Our
Father Abraham: A Point of Theological Convergence and
Divergence for Christians and Jews.” He stresses the central role
that Abraham has played and continues to play for Christians and
Jews. Wilson, the author of a highly acclaimed text on this topic,
Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith (1989),
first establishes the importance of Abraham to both religious
traditions and then compares and contrasts Jewish and Christian
interpretations of central Abrahamic themes, including election,
covenant, and faith.

The importance of Abraham to Judaism is obvious; he is the
“first Jew,” the “founder of the faith,” and the one with whom
God enters a covenantal relationship. God continually tests
Abraham and Abraham passes all the tests. In the Torah
Abraham is referred to as a prophet, God’s friend, and God’s
servant. He is a symbol of hospitality, justice, nobility of
character, and loyalty. Wilson writes, “Judaism and the Jewish
people would not be as they are today without the revolutionary,
ground-breaking influence of father Abraham” (47).

Christians also praise Abraham and incorporate him and his
image into Christian theology. Although he is described in the
New Testament as the “founder of the church,” the “father of
all,” early Christian theology, beginning with the early Christian
controversy with Judaism, increasingly portrayed Abraham as
abandoning the Jews. Moreover, the supersessionist claim that
God cancelled his covenant with Abraham in favor of a new
covenant with the church “sought to remove [Jews] permanently
from salvation history” (51). Jews, of course, point to the eternal
covenant God established with Abraham and his descendants in
Genesis 15 and 17. God initiated the covenantal relationship
while Abraham was the passive beneficiary of God’s promise.
Wilson writes, “The unilateral, unconditional character of the
covenantal agreement assures Abraham and his posterity that
God’s relationship with his people is permanent” (54).

Circumcision was instituted in Genesis 17 as an active response
and external sign of one’s commitment to God’s covenant with
Abraham and the values and concepts associated with covenant
transcendence, redemption, and justice. Although Christians
abandoned the practice of circumcision, they did not entirely
abandon the concept. Wilson explains that Paul turned
circumcision into a metaphor or spiritual concept when he speaks
of a “circumcision of the heart.” For Paul and most Christians
this refers to the inward, faith-based commitment to Christ.
Those who put their faith in Christ are said to have been
spiritually circumcised. By abandoning the ritual practice of
circumcision — the so-called covenant of Abraham — “the church
was understood by the Jewish community to be saying that it no
longer considered itself part of traditional Judaism but rather
apart from it” (56). Nevertheless Wilson emphasizes that the
decision to establish a new covenant based on faith alone was not
a rejection of Abraham and in fact “resulted in significantly
advancing the Abrahamic promise” (56). In the end, there is
some difference in Christian and Jewish interpretations of
Abraham but ultimately both acknowledge and praise Abraham’s
eschatological role.

Richard John Neuhaus, editor-in-chief of First Things and the
president of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, also
reflects on the eschatological role of Jews in his essay on the
meaning of Jesus’s words in John 4:19-22: “for salvation is from
the Jews.” He points out that very few Christian theologians
have rigorously considered this striking statement and those who
have tend to play down its significance by interpreting it to mean
that salvation might proceed, as a point of departure, from the
Jews but the Jews are not the source of salvation.

Neuhaus, as one might expect, understands this statement
differently. For Neuhaus “salvation is from the Jews not as a
ëpoint of departure’ but as the continuing presence and promise
of a point of arrival a point of arrival that we, Christians and
Jews, together pray that we will together reach” (77). To be sure,
Neuhaus acknowledges that Christians believe that Jesus Christ is
the redeemer and that he has come and is with us now, yet he
also stresses the sense of expectation that Christians have in
common with Jews. He quotes approvingly from David Novak’s
Jewish-Christian Dialogue (1989) that, “From creation and
revelation comes our faith that God has not and will not abandon
us or the world, that the promised redemption is surely yet to
come” (76). Neuhaus would like to see the statement “salvation
is from the Jews” given a more prominent place in the
Jewish-Christian dialogue because it “nicely combines the ënow’
and ënot yet’ of life lived eschatologically” (76). Although he
does not want to collapse the distinctions between Judaism and
Christianity, he insists that the distinct traditions are reflections
of differences within a larger story. That story is the story of
witness to the one God of Israel and his one plan of salvation.
David Novak, one of the editors of Christianity in Jewish Terms
(2000) and the director of the Jewish Studies Program at the
University of Toronto, is a frequent and insightful contributor to
the discussion on the relationship between Judaism and
Christianity. In his essay in Jews and Christians, “From
Supersessionism to Parallelism in Jewish-Christian Dialogue,”
Novak argues that the rejection of Christian supersessionism and
Jewish counter-supersessionism, is a necessary precondition for a
more positive Christian theology of Judaism and a more positive
Jewish theology of Christianity. (Jewish
counter-supersessionism, according to Novak, is the Jewish claim
that the Christian denial of God’s covenant with the Jewish
people is equivalent to rejecting God.) Novak believes that this
precondition has largely been met and has finally opened the way
for Christian and Jewish theologians to talk theology with each
other without the accusations that marked the Christian-Jewish
dialogue in the past.

Novak asserts that it is in the best interest of Christians to
develop a positive theology of Judaism because they can learn
from Judaism, in particular the lesson that the Jews have survived
centuries of persecution because God does not break His
promises. For example, in certain parts of the world where
Christian spiritual and physical survival is precarious at best, an
understanding of the theological and physical struggles of the
Jews could provide a valuable example. Similarly, Novak
maintains that Jews must engage Christians theologically because
a positive theological understanding of the other’s religion
increases the possibility of effective partnerships in times of
need.

He uses the example of a small group of Canadians who are
demanding that the state make circumcision of infant boys illegal
because they believe it is a form of mutilation on an unwilling
participant. Although it is unlikely that such legislation would
ever be enacted, Novak wonders who besides Canadian Jews,
would come to the defense of the right of Jews to circumcise
their sons. Although Muslims also practice circumcision, they do
so as a cultural practice. Moreover, whereas Jews consider
circumcision to be a direct command from God and “the sign of
covenant,” Muslims do not practice a covenantal religion.
Additionally, Novak speculates, Muslims would not be
particularly supportive given the present antagonistic political
climate between Jews and Muslims. Christians, on the other
hand, are a far more likely ally because they “can fully
understand [circumcision’s] covenantal significance for Jews”
(106). Jews and Christians have something in common that Jews
and Muslims do not – the theological concepts of covenant and
election. The need for a Jewish theology of Christianity then
becomes particularly apparent when there is a need to call upon
another community that understands you and respects (even if
they disagree with) your religious practices and beliefs.
Jenson, Wilson, Neuhaus, and the other contributors to this
volume would most likely agree with Novak’s final words: “It is
best, both historically and theologically, to look upon ourselves
[Jews and Christians] as two traditions, related to the same
sources, which have developed, often in the same worldly
locations, with a striking parallelism” (112). This conclusion
represents what appears to be a growing consensus among those
who engage in the Jewish-Christian dialogue. In fact, one could
view this collection of essays as an attempt by a group of eminent
scholars to discuss a variety of these parallels.
Matthew Hockenos

Dear Friends,

A thought for the month:
“In the eyes of some commentators. the only correct view is
the view from Auschwitz. But it is in no sense to do injustice to the
millions who were murdered, and the survivors who continue to
suffer, if we describe this methodology as utterly unhistorical.
History is not a series of events laid down in advance: the fact that
they happened as they did does not mean they could not have
happened otherwise. If history is inevitable, or governed by laws – if
there are no partings of the ways and no mistaken decisions – then
what is the point of studying it?”
Irmtrud Wojak, reviewing Nicholas Berg
German History, Vol 22, no.1,2004, p.101ff

Next month’s issue is being compiled and edited by Dr Matthew
Hockenos, Skidmore College, New York. I am once again most
grateful for his help while I am on holiday in Europe. The
subsequent issue for July/August will be sent out in mid-July

Contents:

1) Book reviews

a) Williams, Holy Spy
b) Hein, Churches in Saxony 1945-49
c) Fennell, The Russians on Athos
d) Nehring, Orientalismus und Mission

2) Journal articles

a) Morris, Death of Christian Britain
b) Welinski-Kiehl, Reformation History in the GDR
c) Kenez. Hungarian Communists and Catholics.

1a) Alex Williams, Holy Spy. Student Ministry in Eastern Europe. 
Budapest: Harmat Publishing/Tain,Scotland:Christian Focus
Publication 2003. 207 pp.ISBN 963 9148 92 X / 1 85792 906 3

Twenty years before the collapse of the communist empire in
1989, a young Englishman began to tour the universities of Eastern
Europe as a member of the field staff of the International Federation
of Evangelical Students. Alex Williams’ mandate was to contact
Christian students, counsel and encourage them in their witness,
arrange camps, seminars and conferences, and act as liaison with
similar groups in other countries. Ostensibly touring Poland,
Hungary and Czechoslovakia as visitors, Alex and his Hungarian
wife exercised a peripatetic ministry with great enthusiasm and
dedication. Since none of the communist governments was in favour
of such activities, it is hardly surprising that Williams was suspected
of being engaged in espionage on behalf of some western power.
Even some of his friends thought the same. Hence the title of this
engaging book. In fact, he conducted a rather traditional itinerant
ministry along the lines of John Wesley, using a battered old English
car instead of a horse. But like Wesley, his object was to build up
the faithful in their devotion and service to Jesus Christ.

This ministry was much helped by the foresight of the then
General Secretary of I.F.E.S. who purchased a delapidated
mediaeval castle in the middle of Austria from an impoverished
nobleman. High up on the hillside above the town of Mittersill, the
Schloss has a grand panoramic view of the Alpine peaks to the
south, and fine vistas of the Pinzgau valley flowing below. It was
intended to be a meeting place where individual students from the
beleagured communist countries could come for short refresher
courses and retreats, and mix with other students, both East and
West. The Schloss still provides these same opportunities, even
though the political situation has now radically changed. Possibly
today such a centre would be more appropriately situated in the
Carpathian mountains, but the supporting churches and communities
in Eastern Europe are still too poor to launch such endeavours.
Instead, Schloss Mittersill continues, with the help of Alex Williams
and his wife amongst others, to educate younger Christians in the
paths of discipleship so that they may return to the East European
lands as church builders and planters. The emphasis continues to be
on good Bible teaching, the techniques of evangelism, and how to
write and lead Bible studies.

Williams describes the physical, political and spiritual
difficulties which so many Christians from Eastern Europe
experienced, but he also records their later testimonies to these
encounters with other Christians as being highly significant in their
subsequent careers. He was frequently thrilled by the vision and
enthusiasm of these young Christian leaders struggling against the
official doctrines of atheistic materialism. These were the rewards
of student ministry in Eastern Europe in those days.
There is of course a certain nostalgia in Williams’ memoir,
with his descriptions of the excitements and risks taken in
organizing semi-clandestine meetings under the noses of the secret
police. And there are also some characteristic Evangelical attitudes,
such as his surprise on finding that members of the Orthodox
Church were keen on studying the Bible and had a deep love of the
Lord. But throughout, his recollections reflect his warm sympathy,
his capacity for friendship, and his energetic undertakings in the
service of Jesus Christ through the establishment and
encouragement of student ministries in Eastern Europe. JSC

b) Markus Hein. _Die saechsische Landeskirche nach dem Ende des
Zweiten Weltkrieges (1945-1948). Jahrbuch fuer deutsche
Kirchengeschichte Sonderband. Leipzig: Evangelische
Verlagsanstalt, 2002. 327 pp. Documents,index. EUR 11.50 (cloth),
ISBN 3-374-01918-8.

(This review was first distributed for H-German, March 31st 2004,
H-GERMAN@H-NET.MSU.EDU and is reproduced with the
author’s permission).

This study, originally a dissertation submitted at the
University of Leipzig, takes Saxony as an example of the
organizational problems facing the Protestant Church at a regional
level in the immediate post-war period and analyzes the steps taken
there to build up a new Church structure in a situation where there
were no existing structures in May 1945. The sixteenth “brown”
Synod in Saxony had dissolved itself in 1934 and the first post-war
synod was not constituted until April 1948.

Saxony was an example of one of the provincial regions of
the Protestant Church in which _Deutsche Christen_ were in control
of the Church hierarchy from 1933. Although various challenges to
this control came from the _Bekennende Kirche_ and also from a
substantial group in the middle, by 1937 they had established their
dominance over the whole hierarchy. This meant that in 1945 the
established figures in the Church had lost all credibility or were still
in exile. Saxony was, however, in a unique position initially, since
it was the only Church area to set up three organizational structures
in 1945, in Leipzig, Zwickau and Dresden. It was also, like
Brandenburg and Thuringia, split between two occupying
powers, the Soviet Union and the United States. The Americans did
not withdraw from Zwickau and Leipzig until the last week of June
1945, thereby fulfilling the previous agreement on zone frontiers,
and allowing Soviet troops to occupy western Saxony. These
problems, combined with the logistical hurdles provided by a
transport system which had collapsed, meant that attempts to
establish any unified policy across the whole of the Saxon Church
region in this early period were impossible to realize, even leaving
aside the ideological differences between different factions
within the Church.

Hein has used a wide range of archival sources, including
some not previously available or insufficiently analyzed. He is
particularly concerned to put right the false impression given by the
edited edition by Georg Prater of the memoirs of the third Bishop of
Saxony, Hugo Hahn, on the period of the _Kirchenkampf_. The
deficiencies of this edition had first been highlighted by Wilhelm
Niemoeller’s review in 1969. Prater had, for example, completely
excluded any references to Franz Lau, who had been responsible for
the leadership of the Church in the first two years after 1945, before
Hahn returned as Bishop from exile in 1947. It is clear from
this book that the essential work to de-nazify the Church hierarchy
was done by Lau before Hahn’s return. Hein refuses to speculate
about Prater’s motivation for ignoring Lau’s role, but he uses the
unreliability of primary sources on this period to highlight the
problem of coming to an objective assessment of the measures taken
by a regional Church to overcome the mistakes of the Church
hierarchy during the Nazi period. Hein also underlines the
importance of Erich Kotte, who had belonged to
the Consistorium before 1933 and had then been a member of the
Bekennende Kirche. Hein shows that Kotte was the most important
figure in the personnel decisions made after 1945, but Lau, who was
not identified strongly with either side between 1933 and 1945,
enabled Kotte to reconcile the different factions and allow some
pastors who had supported the Church hierarchy before 1945 to be
integrated into the post-war structures. However, only one
Superintendent, Willy Gerber in Chemnitz, remained in office. Hein
leaves open the question of how many opportunists were able to stay
in post in this context, thereby inviting parallels with the post-1990
period. As a result of Lau’s role it was therefore not the Bekennende
Kirche which played the leading role in Saxony immediately after
1945, as it did in other Church regions. This was only the case after
Hahn’s return in 1947.

One area missing from the book, which I would have
expected to have been at least mentioned, concerns the fate of the
Sorbian pastors transferred from the bilingual parishes in eastern
Saxony during the Third Reich and the role played by the Church
hierarchy in those transfers. Sorbian pastors who survived the war
often had difficulties in returning immediately to their original
parishes, as they had been replaced by German pastors who were
sometimes reluctant to give up their parishes. They also faced
opposition and prejudice within the Church hierarchy to the creation
of special structures for the bilingual parishes, although after much
argument they did force the Saxon Church to set up a separate
Sorbian _Superintendentur_ in Bautzen in the late 1940s.

The main value of this book is its presentation of a large
amount of detailed information and primary documents about
different parishes and districts. In particular, Hein highlights the
differences between Zwickau, Leipzig and Dresden and the balance
that was struck between continuity and renewal in different areas.
Hein does not come to any final conclusions concerning a
judgement of this balance, but the material he presents provides the
reader with useful aids to make a judgment. Above all, he uses the
example of the Saxon Church to demonstrate the complicated nature
of the Protestant Church’s development after 1945.
P.J.Barker, University of Reading, U.K.

c) Nicholas Fennell, The Russians on Athos, Oxford, Berne etc:
Peter Lang, 2001, ISBN 3-906766-93-4, 348 pp.

For a thousand years, Mount Athos on its rocky peninsular in
the northern Aegean Sea has been the spiritual centre for the
Orthodox branches of the Christian Church. The influence of the
Holy Mountain is unquestioned; its remoteness, isolation and the
alleged saintliness of its inhabitants, where no female creature is
allowed, have been built up over the centuries. But in the nineteenth
century, the advances of travel technology made it more accessible,
and from the 1840s huge numbers of pilgrims came to call, and
some to stay. Many arrived from Russia, where the cult of the
Athonite monasteries proved very popular. The result was a vast
increase in the Russian presence. Before 1839 there had never been
significantly more than 200 Russians there. In the next seventy years
these numbers rose to about 5,000. Many were wealthy, and the
buildings they erected reflected their munificance. The inevitable
result was envy and resentment from the native Greeks, who now
began to suspect a deep imperial plot behind all this new-found
interest. The resulting controversies are the subject of this lively
study of the Holy Mountain’s affairs. They deserve notice because
of the intriguing interplay of politics, religion and nationalism on
what was supposed to be the very model of peace and sanctity
Nicholas Fennell is an English schoolmaster. But he has the
linguistic and theological qualifications to examine these matters
and does so with exemplary objectivity. He recognizes that the
potential for ethnic discord has always existed on Mount Athos. The
language and liturgical barriers did not help. The grandiose Russian
architecture with its brightly-coloured cupolas was a strong contrast
to the Greek traditional austerity. But in the late 19th century, the
wealth of the Russians was clearly used to enhance their position
which led to increasing friction with the Greek monks

These local quarrels were heightened by outside conflicts
promoted by an expanding Russian pan-Slavism and its attempts to
reverse the defeats of the Crimean War. These ambitions also led
to friction with the Greek Orthodox Church and the Patriarch in
Constantinople, as over the demand for a separate Slavic Exarchate
in Bulgaria. The Turkish rulers only encouraged this split in the
Orthodox ranks, which was soon enough reflected on Mount Athos.
In 1875 the large monastery of St. Panteleimon came under Russian
control, and subsequently large amounts of Russian money were
spent to expand it.

Thanks to skillful publicity and fund-raising, St. Panteleimon
became a source of spiritual renewal for Russia itself. Large
numbers of pilgrims, poor as well as rich, flocked to visit, especially
after the defeat of the Turks in 1877 and the visit of the Russian
Emperor himself a decade later. Many Greeks now began to fear
that Russian expansion would squeeze them out. Retaliation was
gained by freezing the status quo by which the 20 monasteries, in a
strict hierarchy, the majority of whom were Greek, were able to
prevent any major alterations.

In 1912, Mount Athos was forcibly liberated by the Greeks
from Turkish control, which led to further tensions with the Russian
monks, despite their wealth and backing from the Czarist
government. The outbreak of the first world war and the overthrow
of the Czarist regime in 1917 only made matters far worse. Contact
with Russia was cut off. No more visitors, no more novices, no
more funds. God, it was believed, was punishing the Russians for
their pride.On Mount Athos the monks suffered with dignity.
Spiritual amends had to be sought, but the remaining monks only
grew older and died off. In their new-found poverty, they were
exploited by the Greeks, and finally in 1992 the last few remaining
monks of one Russian priory were expelled.

The story of these holy monks, beset by external disasters
and internal ethnic clashes, is instructive. Too often the heat of
nationalist emotions detracted from Mount Athos’ reputation of
being a peaceful haven of Orthodox monasticism. It can only be
hoped that the evident revival of recent years will now enable the
monks to uphold their inheritance in a spirit of ecumenical
fraternity. Fennell’s balanced account will undoubtedly aid this
desirable goal.
JSC

d) Andreas Nehring, Orientalismus und Mission. Die Repräsentation
der tamilischen Gesellschaft und Religion durch Leipziger
Missionare 1840-1940. (Studies in the History of Christianity in the
non-Western world, Vol 7). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag 2003.
500pp.

The German propensity for producing large tomes of
thorough scholarship on exotic subjects has found a new recruit in
Andreas Nehring. His examination of a hundred years’ worth of
reports from Leipzig Lutheran missionaries based in the
Tamil-speaking areas of south India is a masterly piece of
scholarship, hitherto unresearched and unlikely to be revisited.
Furthermore this is no traditional approach to missionary history,
which was so largely occupied with the self-sacrificing heroism of
European missionaries, with regrettable overtones of cultural
arrogance, colonialist attitudes and theological exclusivism. Nor
does Nehring adopt the more current trend of emphasizing the local
responses to such attempted Christianization. Rather he seeks to
discover how much and how far these foreign sojourners were able
to understand and record the religious and social practices of the
majority populations amongst whom they dwelt

But, first, Nehring gives a lengthy introductory chapter on
the historiographical difficulties confronting Europeans writing
about India, and the so-called perils of “Orientalism”. Ethnographic
studies were often a means of asserting the cultural and political
superiority of India’s British rulers. Yet Nehring argues that the
Leipzig missionaries and their reports constitute a notable
difference. In the first place, as Germans, they were not part of the
Raj; secondly, they reported the views of the people they were most
closely associated with, namely the lowest castes. They were, of
course, convinced of the superiority of Christianity to Hinduism and
also of the need to overcome the caste system. Hence their approach
was fundamentally against the Brahman control of society, and
therefore against the British Raj’s tolerance of India’s injustices.
However, some of the Lutheran parishes still tolerated caste
segregation as an unavoidable survival. Furthermore, those whose
missionary strategy was aimed at the higher castes acknowledged
the need to be flexible on this matter

These differences of opinion led the Lutheran missionaries
to probe as deeply as they could into the background of Tamil
society, seeking to establish the roots of the caste system, either as a
home-grown development, or as an imposed structure forced on
Tamils by northern Hindus over the centuries. Such deliberations,
however, demanded a certain empathy, in contrast to the outright
condemnation which the majority of English-speaking missionaries
brought to their task. These Germans therefore were closer to the
rulers of the East India Company, who supported the caste system as
providing them with a ready-made hierarchical order of government.
Intense discussions ensued throughout the 19th century. Race,
language, culture, economic structures and political aspirations were
all debated as possible roots for the caste system, and hence the
most suitable platforms on which the missionary endeavour should
be built. There was plenty of room for divergent opinions, as
reflected in these Lutheran missionaries’ reports home. Nehring’s
able elucidation of these early debates shows the range of views
expressed. He also points out the relative neglect of these sources
amongst English-speaking scholars, including Indians.

The Lutheran missionaries encountered enormous
difficulties in attempting to comprehend the complexities of the
societies into which they were placed, or the underlying religious
structures of Hinduism and Buddhism they met on a daily basis. For
the most part they adopted a more positive approach than did many
of the British envoys who regarded all non-Christian religions as
“devil-worship”. But nonetheless the Germans also imported their
own presuppositions about the origins, development and character
of the strange doctrines and practices they observed.

Many of these missionaries were in fact engaged in the work
of integrating a vast collection of myths, beliefs, rituals and laws
into a coherent religion, and of shaping an amorphous heritage into
a rational faith. Others adopted the view that Indian religions were
participating in an evolutionary process, similar to that which had
happened in Europe in pre-Christian times. The raw primitive
religion of the lowest tribes, with their bloodthirsty sacrifices and
demon possessions, was being superseded by the higher forms of
Brahmanism with its elitist concepts and search for purity through
such practicres as vegetarianism.

All such endeavours by Europeans were however artificial.
In Tamil Nadu the varieties of folk religion encountered by the
missionaries were often too baffling to be systematized in this way.
Rival speculations and theories were rife as to what the true form of
Indian religion might look like. All too often these Europeans
interpreted Hinduism, both philosophcally or mystically, in their
own image. One of the most wayward interpretations, for example,
sought to prove the connection between the Indian aryan religion
and the new national spirit in Nazi Germany.

For the most part, the missionaries adopted a Protestant
interpretation of their experiences, by portraying the indigenous
faiths as being in a kind of pre-Reformation state, waiting to be
awakened by these earnest Lutherans. In expecting an eventual
fulfillment through Christianity, they were indulging in considerable
wishful thinking. But their recognition that, at least in the Tamil
area, there were other patterns than the supposedly normative form
of Brahman Hinduism, based on sanskrit literature, was an
important insight and advance.

So too their notable efforts at collation of the local
languages and literature, and their translations into comprehensible
German, were prodigious, eben if they have now been totally
forgotten. In all, as Nehring shows, the complexity of these subjects
imposed a heavy burden. Indeed this whole topic, and Nehring’s
account itself, is not for amateur Indologists. It can only be hoped
that this commendable rescue effort of past missionary scholarship,
and its attempt to understand and interpret the local religious and
social cultures of south India, will be appreciated both by
German-speaking mission historians, as well as by all scholars of
19th-century Tamil Nadu.
JSC

2) Journal articles: a) Jeremy Morris, The strange death of Christian
Britain. Another look at the secularization debate in The
Historical Journal, Vol. 46, no 4, December 2003, p.963-76.

Morris takes issue with Callum Brown’s assertion that Christianity
in Britain is dead ( see review of his book in our Newsletter, July
2003), even if this is defined only as the rejection of its traditional
moral and spiritual standpoints. Instead Morris reviews a number of
other accounts, and suggests that displacement might be a better
description “But for the time being, it is a strange sort of death that
leaves chuches still amongst the largest voluntary organizations in
the country, and Christianity still notionally the conviction of a
majority of the population. Secularization has indeed been
underway in Britain – but the final chapter has yet to be written”.

b) Robert Welinski-Kiehl, Reformation History and Political
Mythology in the German Democratic Republic, 1949-89 in
European History Quarterly, Vol 34. no 1, January 2004

This article examines how the communist rulers of the former GDR
sought to crush the Reformation into the Procrustean bed of Marxist
theory. To begin with they concentrated on such welcome radical
figures as Thomas Müntzer and the Peasants War, basing their views
on those of Engels a century earlier. Subsequently attempts were
made to depict Luther in the same framework of materialist history,
but increasingly during the ’60s and ’70s, his chief value was seen
as a national figure opposing foreign, i.e. papal domination. In 1983
the GDR officially encouraged celebrations of Luther’s 500th
anniversary, and a degree of accommodation with the churches was
reached. By contrast Müntzer was now depicted as a zealous
fanatic. By 1989 East German Marxists were focussing more and
more on the theological aspects of sixteenth-century history. Their
attempts to build such mythological histories necessarily ended in
1989 and in failure.

c) Peter Kenez, The Hungarian Communist Party and the Catholic
Church 1945-1948 in Journal of Modern History, Vol. 75, no.4
December 2003.

Kenez depicts the development of the stormy relationship between
the Hungarian Communists and the Catholic Church under Cardinal
Mindszenty in the immediate post-war years. He argues that this
confrontation was not planned in advance but grew incrementally.

Of course a highly conservative Catholic Church was bound to clash
with a political party dedicated to the eradication of feudalism.
Land reform was the first contentious issue. But already the Church
was not prepared to make any concessions. And the appointment of
Mindszenty, a junior bishop, as Primate seems to have been made by
Pius XII because of his reputation as an intransigent opponent of
Communism. Indeed he soon proved to be so. “No single
individual was such a thorn in the side of the Communist leaders as
the Cardinal”. Not for a moment was he prepared to collaborate
with Communists. His aim was to restore the monarchy, even
though this was totally unrealistic. Such a stance evoked a similar
intransigence from the Communist rank and file. Both were caught
up in the international rivalry between the Vatican and the Soviet
Union, then at its height. At the end of 1948 Mindszenty was
arrested and subjected to a show trial. Hungary had clearly now
fallen under Communist totalitarian rule. The open clash of 1956
was prefigured.

With very best wishes
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,
A reflection for Lent —

On the virtues of inter-faith dialogue:
It is neither to flatter nor to refute one another, but to help
one another; to share insight and learning, to cooperate in
academic virtues on the highest scholarly levels, and what is even
more important, to search the wilderness for well-springs of
devotion, for treasures of stillness, for the power of love and care
for man. What is urgently needed are ways of helping one
another in the terrible predicament of here and now by the
courage to believe that the word of the Lord endures for ever as
well as here and now; to cooperate in trying to bring about a
resurrection of sensitivity, a revival of conscience; to keep alive
the divine sparks in our souls, to nurture openness to the spirit of
the Psalms, reverence for the words of the prophets, and
faithfulness to the Living God. Rabbi Abraham Heschel

It is with great sadness that we learn of the death on March 22nd
of Prof. F.Burton Nelson of North Park Theological Seminary,
Chicago at the age of 79. Although he had been in poor health
recently, he had continued a full teaching load to the last – a sign
of his devotion both to his subject and his students. Burton was
one of those recruited by Franklin Littell in 1970 to launch the
Annual Scholars’ Conference on the German Church Struggle
and the Holocaust, to which he made many significant
contributions. He was considered one of the top scholars on
the life and work of German Lutheran pastor and Nazi
opponent Dietrich Bonhoeffer and was a close friend of the
Bonhoeffer family. Several years ago, together with Geffrey
Kelly, he put together a lengthy anthology of Bonhoeffer’s
seminal thought, A Testament to Freedom, which was followed
by the publication last year of an important study, again with
Geffrey Kelly, The Cost of Moral Leadership. The Spirituality of
Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was also a leading member of the
English-speaking section of the International Bonhoeffer Society,
and served as a consultant for the 90-minute film
documentary on Bonhoeffer’s life that opened in Chicago in
March last year.

Burton was blessed with a cheery and welcoming personality. He
always seemed to have time for those who came to him for
scholarly or personal advice, and his Christian witness was
admired by friends and students alike. He will be greatly missed.

Contents:
1) Conference Report – Building religious communities
2) Present situation in the Czech republic
3) Book review: Roseman, Past in Hiding
4) Journal articles:

a) Stehle, Secret Vatican documents sold to Russia
b)Wacker, Pearl Buck and the waning of the missionary impulse
c) Wang, Protestant missions to Chinese immigrants in Canada, 1885-1923.
d) Buscher, The Catholic Church and refugees

1) Conference Report:
A conference held in Chicago last October for younger German
and American scholars took up the interesting theme of “Forms
of religious communities in 19th and 20th Century Germany.”
Herewith an abbreviation of the report submitted by Daniel
Koehler.

Once viewed as casualties of modernization, religion and
religious community have, in recent years, begun to resemble less
the victim than the hydra of modern European history. Where
historians formerly emphasized the decline of adherence to
traditional beliefs and practices, recent scholarship seems to
unearth the religious (often confessional) imagination
everywhere: in political discussions and symbolism, changing
gender roles, common notions of spirituality, and certainly in
new, informal communities of worship.

Noting the ever more fluid and informal participation
during this period, the conference sought to determine whether
‘religion in modern society’ might be understood best as an
on-going process of ‘re-communalization’, whereby new
religious groups and the sentiments that unite them are formed,
cultivated and dissolved. This approach is, in part, an attempt to
find more dynamic alternatives to a secularization paradigm that
appears to offer diminishing returns for further research. By
emphasizing religious diversity over decline, the conference
offered a starting point for evaluating processes that reveal the
limitations of this much-maligned theory.

But what is a religious community? Where do the
boundaries lie? For the purposes of coherent investigation, the
conference proposed looking at the means of differentiating
members from non-members; practices that engage members in a
search for transcendence; rituals and symbols that provide the
common basis for a common experience of worship; and the
development of organizations that ground these characteristics in
institutions.

The conference looked at new religious communities in
five thematic and chronological contexts. The first examined
non-conformist movements in post-Napoleonic Europe. The
second took up the theme of the gendering of religious devotion
during the nineteenth century. The third covered the expansion
of religious options at the end of the century, pursued mainly by
those estranged from the established churches. Both Catholic
anti-clericalism, and Protestant disaffection with dogmatic and
state-run churches played a large role, but did not mean that those
affected should be seen as ‘anti-religious’, or as turning to
secular forms of enchantment. It was argued, rather, that
movements associated with atheism or iconoclasm actually
worked to uphold religious worldviews.

Such views challenged the widespread opinion as to the
influence of Nietzsche, and were critical of the substitution
model of secularization. More pervasive, perhaps was the fourth
theme of urbanization, when the very lack of opportunity for
religious contact, because of a lack of churches and pastors in
growing cities inspired new forms of religious observance less
dependent on the traditional parish in answer to a pervasive crisis
of faith.

In the fifth section, dealing with the post-1945 scene, this
crisis was obvious at the core of the noted theologian Dorothea
Soelle’s theological quest. Her attempt to close the gap between
atheism and God, and the political engagement that followed
from it, raised significant issues, such as whether secularization
is itself a product of Judeo-Christian principles; or whether
“Christian defensiveness” against elements of modernity has
played a substantive role in twentieth-century European
antisemitism. A more focussed paper on the German Catholic
Church during the 1960s attributed its decline not to the usual
suspects, but more to the collapse of the “integralist” Catholic
milieu after the war. As German Catholics were successfully
integrated into the cultural and political mainstream, its separate
structures no longer seemed relevant.

Where does this leave the concept of secularization now?
Although the conference participants had many questions, few
were prepared to relegate the notion to the dustbin of outdated
theories. But it should take account of the variety of religious
phenomena that take place outside the doors of the parish.
Furthermore, attention has to be paid to religious groups which
do not lend themselves to static narratives, and to the process by
which new communities are formed and stabilized. But all
agreed that pursuing the idea of the formation of religious
communities is a concept which deserves a more systematic and
thorough articulation.

2) The present situation in the Czech Republic.

A report from our
list-member, David Giesbrecht, recently visiting in Prague.
There are presently 10.2 million people in this country,
comprised of eight ethnic groups. Czechs are a relatively young
population with the median age being 38.4 years. They take some
pride that in recent history they have peacefully negotiated two
major political transitions: a “Velvet Revolution” ending
Communist rule in 1989; and a “Velvet Divorce” with the
partition of the country into two entities in 1993. Further in the
past decade the nation has learned with admirable dexterity to
build a market economy, run by a newly emerging set of leaders.

A Czech friend observed that upper management in business and
industry is disproportionately comprised of young leaders, since
those already at middle age have been so shaped by
authoritarianism that they find it difficult to take entrepreneurial
initiatives. Having now discovered relatively unfettered
capitalistic enterprise, Czechs are busy catching up on what has
for so long been withheld from them; and to an extent probably
doing so at the expense of spiritual reflection.

Given their turbulent history, it is not surprising that many
Czechs harbour a suspicion bordering on disdain towards the
institutional church. Two Czech writers, Petr Fiala and Jan Hanus
in a 2001 British publication, The Month, cite several studies
indicating that this nation “belongs among the least religious
countries in Europe”. In contrast to other East European
countries, occupied and controlled by the Soviet Union after
1945, Czechs exhibit “an unusually high degree of both
secularization and what can be called atheisation”. This latter
coinage is interesting, suggesting widespread denial of belief.
Several scholarly studies, indeed, indicate that 70% of Czechs
profess no religion at all. The 2002 CIA World Fact Book, on the
other hand, states that 39.8% of the population professes to be
atheist, 39.2% Roman Catholic and the rest a smattering of
Evangelical, Orthodox and that often undefined group “other”.
By contrast, 95% of Poles and 73% of Slovaks declare
themselves to be Roman Catholic.

An informative Internet document “The Czech Spiritual
Landscape in the Post-Communist Era” states that approximately
500,000 people, representing 5% of the population, attend Mass
regularly. The modern day Hussite Church, which has morphed
in several ways since its birth in the early twentieth century,
claims a membership of several hundred thousand, followed by
Lutherans with 50,000 and Orthodox with 20,000 members.
Evangelical churches (Baptist, Moravians, Brethren Church)
constitute one half of one per cent with some 50,000 members in
all. But there are reports that the Baptists are growing rapidly
and adding three new churches a year.

Within this milieu is a small Jewish community. A 1939
statistic indicted there were then 50,000 Jews living in Prague.
By the end of the war, and post-war emigration, only a few
hundred were left. Today that number is again increasing, with a
population now estimated at 7,000. Rather prominently, six
synagogues dominate the small Jewish quarter of this city,
suggesting a considerable socio-cultural if not spiritual revival.
One of these structures, the gorgeous Spanish Synagogue, also
contributes an elegant architectural monument to this already
beautiful city.

The degree to which ordinary Czechs appear to be
alienated from the church is intriguing. Some observers suggest
that the widespread religious disinterest can be attributed to the
Catholic Church itself. The nefarious martyrdom of Jan Hus on
July 6th, 1415 has not been forgotten. And the subsequent
success of the Catholics in expunging Hussitism created a lasting
rift. “It was a religious struggle between Hussites and the Roman
Catholic Church, a national struggle between Czechs and
Germans, and a social struggle between the landed and peasant
classes”. (Fiala and Hanus). Later with the conquests of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Catholic Church aligned itself
closely with the state, forming a alliance with central Europe’s
strongest power. But this affiliation led to the Czech
intelligentsia’s alienation which then declared itself openly to be
“anti-Church and anti-Catholic”. The forcible occupation of the
country by Nazi forces in 1939, and the equally oppressive
Communist takeover a decade later, hardly provided fertile
ground for the cultivation of a Christian spirituality. Increasingly
the stance of Czechs toward religion became a private matter and
not one that merited public advocacy or discussion. Indeed
some Czechs profess that they make little distinction between
Communist compulsion and Catholic coercion. Both are
therefore censured by locals.

There appears to be a widespread perception that these
entrenched anticlericalism and antichurch sentiments were
carried over even after Communism was overthrown. Indeed, it is
interesting that this decline of trust in the church seems to have
accelerated since Communism’s collapse, precisely at a time
when one might have anticipated an increased return to church
allegiance, on the grounds of its having been a focus of
opposition to Communist hegemony. According to Tomas Halik,
a philosophy professor at Charles University, the Church had a
brief opportunity to exert influence in the country following the
Velvet revolution but “failed because it was unable to hold its
ranks together and its words were not followed by sufficiently
tangible and credible actions”. In addition, the well-publicized
attempts of the Catholic Church’s leaders to regain control of its
confiscated properties seem to have engrossed all their attention.

As a result studies suggest that less than a quarter of the
population considers the Church authoritative or credible as a
source of moral guidance in political, social or family affairs.
Religious disenchantment has left its mark in another real
but perhaps less tangible way. A Czech citizen, Pavel Raus, in a
thoughtful analysis, notes that owing to a secular mindset, Czechs
rarely use religious language in ordinary discourse. For instance,
very few people will make comments about religious matters
such as prayer or faith. “Christian vocabulary is non-existent”
asserts Raus.

Several consequences flow out of such a deep spiritual
scepticism. Public interest groups which find religion irrelevant
or even offensive are putting pressure on government to limit the
influence of churches. Such negative perceptions have
undoubtedly hampered the Catholic Church’s recovery of its
property, prompting a spokesperson for the Czech Catholic
Bishops’ Conference to comment: “The resentments, prejudices
and lies they learned under Communist rule are still in the air
here”. Missionaries and Christian charities coming into this
country find it very difficult to proselytize, as for instance with
the attempts to launch a Christian radio ministry. Results in terms
of committed followers have been few. Some commentators
argue that the lack of a Christian spiritual moorage has resulted
in considerable social dysfunction, undermining especially family
stability. Compared to a group of 30 other European countries,
the divorce rate among Czechs was the third highest. So this
rather sweeping judgement would appear to have some statistical
backing. And whatever the cause, concern has been expressed
about the extent of “marital tension, economic pressure, problem
behaviour, depression and incidence of mental disorder”, which
may or may not be attributable to the evident consequences of
secularization.
David Giesbrecht, Prague

3) Mark Roseman, The past in hiding, (Penguin, 2001), xiii +
577 pp. £18.99 hb, £9.99 pb.

(This review appeared first in Humanitas, the George Bell
Institute’s international ecumenical cultural review, available
from achandler@queens.ac.uk Although not directly in our
field, Roseman gives such an excellent picture of Nazi Germany
and its victims that I include this review here for your
consideration).

In 1989 the English historian Mark Roseman received a
telephone call from the Ruhrland Museum in Essen. The museum
was beginning to put together an exhibition on life in the city
during the Second World War and had come across an article
written some five years before, by a woman who had been a
member of the Jewish community there. The author was
Marianne Ellenbogen, née Strauss, and she was now believed to
be living in Liverpool. Would Roseman be willing to read the
article and then to interview her?

Marianne Strauss had survived the war in what was
known in Germany as a ‘U Boat’. In short, she had lived secretly,
without papers and in constant danger, in the homes of
sympathizers, friends and allies in her own city and across the
country. The details of the story which Roseman now read
seemed to him so astonishing that he found himself at once
drawn into a succession of critical, even sceptical questions. The
two met soon after. This book is, in effect, the story of Roseman’s
own relationship with a woman he came to know, if briefly, at
the very end of her life. It is a work of detection inspired by the
myriad patterns and dissolving perspectives of her own memory
and the reflections of those who had known her and survived
with her. It is also the story told by the contents of a number of
heavy trunks, crammed with documents of all kinds, which were
found stowed away in her house after her death, a private archive
of extraordinary, even miraculous richness. As the author follows
a crowded path from Essen to Berlin and Düsseldorf and, after
the war, to England, he finds himself travelling across Germany
itself, but also to the United States, to Israel and even to South
America. Letters, meanwhile, pass between Canada, Australia,
the Czech Republic, France, Sweden and Poland. For in such a
way do the fragments of a single private life, caught in the vortex
of the Final Solution and the war itself, shatter again and disperse
across continents and oceans.

But then there are so many layers at work in this book,
and they interrelate so thickly – and often surprisingly. Roseman
excavates them with a dogged assiduity. In his preoccupation
with the truth of every detail there is nothing staid or hollow, for
in such things the life of Marianne Strauss – and that of a whole
people – lies. Accounts converge and diverge; holes yawn open
and then are filled, suddenly and astonishingly, with new light.
The fragility and also the power of the human memory is at once
tantalizing and painful. There is a good deal of awkwardness and
self-justification. Roseman places sources of one kind or another
alongside each other with a sharp critical eye for tensions and
contradictions, and they, in their turn, send him off in pursuit of
new forms of corroboration – sometimes official material,
sometimes new encounters.

This book brings to life, appallingly, the inexorable power
with which the policies of the National Socialist state bore down
on the private intricacies of personal life. Though they faced
threats and encroachments which grew increasingly severe and
dangerous, until 1943 Marianne Strauss’s family escaped
deportation because a number of officers in the Abwehr, the
counter-intelligence department of the German Wehrmacht,
decided to protect them. Here, though they could not have known
it, the family became a feature of a wider, ongoing contest
between the Abwehr itself, parts of which worked stubbornly to
save a number of Jewish families while pursuing their own plans
for resistance, and the Gestapo, which was doing its best to
eradicate every single German Jew. In a world of official papers
the Abwehr had the power to issue its own guarantees,
immunities, directives – but so did its critics, and still further
powers would be called upon to arbitrate between them.
Successive plans to emigrate came to nothing. Marianne’s
mother and father eventually confronted two local Gestapo
officials brandishing deportation orders at their door on 31
August 1943 (she escaped by slipping, literally, out of the door of
the house after exchanging a silent nod with her mother). They
would die several months later. Her fiancé, Ernst Krombach,
worked with a desperate courage to sustain some scheme of
orderly life under mounting pressure, even maintaining their
correspondence at risk to his life from the ghetto at Izbica before
losing his sight and disappearing to Sobibor with his parents. In
the letters which remain his own humanity acquires a luminous
worth, as he protects what he can in whatever ways are possible
to him, before he, too, is extinguished. In Marianne’s survival
rests, in a sense at least, his own too. For such letters as these
would surely otherwise have been lost in the maelstrom itself,
and yet here we have them and other relics, too: a single
photograph, an inscribed gold ring.

Once she had gone underground, Marianne Strauss was
hidden by members of a now hardly acknowledged Essen circle,
known as the Bund, the creation of two Berlin teachers, Artur and
Dore Jacobs. This was more of a circle of friends than an
organization, and one woman in it, Sonja Schreiber, took
Marianne Strauss under her wing, offering her hospitality,
sharing her food and keeping her out of trouble. Subsequently,
between October 1943 and February 1945, Marianne was
constantly in transit across Germany with a forged pass (another
gift from the Bund) travelling unobtrusively and sometimes
ingeniously. Some of her escapes were narrow indeed. The end
of the war found her in Düsseldorf, and safe.

Roseman is a modest and quiet – but determined –
presence in all this, patiently sifting and organizing his material;
confining himself to a few, sharp observations. He knows better
than to intrude, but he also knows when he is needed. A disputed
and dubious presence in the story, Christian Arras – possibly an
S.S. officer, perhaps a Wehrmacht officer – is for a while
suspended between an allegation of opportunism and the
possibility of startling altruism. For several months Arras
succeeded in bringing food parcels and letters into the Izbica
ghetto. But why? At first Roseman, too, shares the general
scepticism, but he is haunted by the sheer danger of these stealthy
enterprises. In time, Arras is vindicated; a genial, generous but
solitary figure, we glimpse him for the last time in another
source, haplessly turning up at the homes of Jewish families in
Essen, warning them of the realities of extermination, urging
them to escape, and – finding them suspicious and unmoved –
walking away from us all, shaking his head.

Roseman is never carried away by the emotional force of
what he has encountered. The book is, at every turn, a methodical
and restless pursuit of critical questions. Every participant is
placed with care in an environment of political contexts and
social currents. All the material is set down meticulously before
us and Roseman himself writes with a modest, even circumspect
style,placing himself entirely at the disposal of the subject. In
such ways is The past in hiding an eloquent exposition of the
historian’s craft. But it also offers an intricate evocation of the
human condition itself, as it emerges before our eyes on the
smallest and quietest scale, but also the greatest and the most
profound.
Andrew Chandler, Birmingham

4) Journal articles:

a) Hansjakob Stehle, Geheimes aus Bonn für
Moskau vom Vatikan in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte,
Vol 51, no.2, April 2003. 263 ff

A highly interesting article by a veteran German journalist
concerns the activities of a former Vatican official who obtained
documents from the Vatican files and sold them secretly to the
Soviet Union, having earlier been in the pay of the American
OSS. Monsignor Edoardo Prettner-Cippico had a murky career
and was even defrocked, but somehow returned to favour and
exploited his colleagues in the Vatican bureaucracy to give him
interesting material, copies of which survived in his Nachlass.
Stehle has picked out the reports sent by the Nuncio in West
Germany for the period 1966-1971, of which he prints 18.
Whether the Soviets learned much of value is doubtful, but this
publication is helpful in opening up for the general reader
documents which will probably not become generally available
in Rome for at least another 70 years.

b) G.Wacker, Pearl Buck and the waning of the missionary
impulse, Church History, Vol 72, no.4, December 2003, p.852ff
Pearl Buck was the most famous American writer about
missions in China. Grant Wacker’s able description of the
development of her ideas shows how she began with highly
traditional evangelical notions of the superiority of the
missionary and the difficulty of the task dealing with the
depravity of the heathen masses amongst whom she lived. After
the first world war, however, she moved to a much more liberal
stance, began to doubt the truth of Christian supernaturalism,
advocated a humanitarian social gospel, and took a much more
positive view of Chinese culture. Although she left China in
1934, and repudiated her own past, she remained fascinated by
China, a fact which is clearly replicated in her large output of
books and which won her the Nobel prize for literature.

c) Jiwu Wang, Organized Protestant missions to Chinese
immigrants in Canada, 1885-1923, Journal of Ecclesiastical
History, Vol. 54, no 4, October 2003, p.671 ff

This sprightly article concentrates on British Columbia,
where the majority of Chinese immigrants to Canada were
brought, mainly for building railways But from the earliest days,
the European immigrant majority was totally hostile. The
Chinese were accepted only as necessary for labouring jobs, or
later on as laundrymen or domestic servants. Despite the overt
social prejudices, Methodists, Presbyterians and Anglicans tried
to establish missions to the Chinese communities. But their
success was minimal, not so much because of the lack of
resources or Chinese-speaking evangelists, as because of the
endemic anti-Chinese sentiment. Other clergymen, for example,
led the way in promoting anti-Oriental hostility, which
culminated in the ban on Chinese immigration in 1923. Lack of
mutual trust in the missionaries, who were seen as outsiders
trying to dictate conditions for survival to the Chinese, certainly
doomed the early hopes of large-scale conversions. And even
sympathetic Protestants maintained an attitude of racial
superiority towards Asians, which, in 1942, turned into outright
hostility against the Japanese-Canadians.

d) Frank Buscher, “The Great Fear. The Catholic Church and the
anticipated radicalization of expellees and refugees in post-war
Germany” in German History, Vol 21, no.2, 2003 p.204-24.

An analysis of the records of the Archdiocese of Cologne dealing
with church attitudes and policies towards refugees and expellees
in the immediate post-war period. Follows much the same line as
Ian Connor (Ulster) in earlier articles.

With every best wish for a happy Easter,
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,
Contents

1) Film Review: Bonhoeffer

2)Book reviews

a) Zasloff, A Rescuer’s Story
b) Klempa and Doran, Certain Women amazed us

3) Book notes:

a) ed. M. Raphael, Holocaust in literature and film
b) Boehm, Germans in Rumania

4) Journal Articles

a) Geschichte und Gesellschaft, October 2003
b) Davis, Russian Orthodox Church
c) Danielson, American pacifists
d) Gregor, Remembrance in Nuremberg, 1945-56
e) Protestantism in Russia

1) Film Review:

The newly released film Bonhoeffer, produced
and narrated by the American filmmaker Martin Doblmeier,
makes excellent and extensive use of archival film footage, home
videos and hitherto rarely seen photographs to depict the story of
the short, tragic but eventful life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In
contrast to such fictionally reconstructed productions as “Agents
of Grace”, Doblmeier sticks firmly and skillfully to the
historically verified events. He thus follows in the footsteps of
the similar earlier version of Bonhoeffer’s life made by Malcolm
Muggeridge in 1974. His excerpts from newsreels go back as far
as the first world war, bring to life a number of Bonhoeffer’s
more famous contemporaries, both in the political as well as
theological spheres, and hence give an authenticity to the whole
production. While film-clips – in black and white – of such
figures as Hitler or Goebbels are well known, we are also given
here contemporary and rarely-seen images of church leaders like
Martin Niemöller and Karl Barth.

Doblmeier’s narrative follows the line taken in the
magnificent biography written forty years ago by Bonhoeffer’s
closest friend Eberhard Bethge. He describes how the young man
in the 1920s, to the surprise of his rather non-religious but
distinguished liberal family, decided to study theology as a
possible clue to Germany’s ills. We see him going off to New
York in 1930, where he was greatly influenced by a fellow Swiss
student, and by the fervent devotion of the Abyssinian Baptist
Church – here very nicely depicted in ecstatic worship. He returns
to Germany fully committed to the cause of pacifism, which was
expressed most forcibly at an ecumenical conference in Denmark
in August 1934, from which remarkably enough film footage
survives. But in the subsequent years of Nazi rule, as he and his
family begin to realize the enormity of Hitler’s designs, he turns
away from pacifism to eventually join the ranks of the
conspirators against the dictator, and even to approve of the idea
of assassination of the head of state – for reasons of Christian
morality to prevent the continuation of Nazi crimes and
atrocities.

In early 1943 Bonhoeffer was arrested and put in prison
His romance with Maria von Wedemayer was thus cut short, and
his association with others connected to the July 1944 plot led to
his condemnation and eventual execution in April 1945.
Necessarily this latter period can only be reconstructed through
subsequent film shots of the places involved, but Doblmeier has
successfully built up his account to show both the courage and
the moral leadership of one who was not afraid to face to the very
tragic end the consequences of his Christian faith.
The historical footage is interspersed with short insightful
commentaries by members of Bonhoeffer’s family, including
both Eberhard Bethge and his wife Renate, as well as Maria von
Wedemayer’s sister. We are also given the views of three of
Bonhoeffer’s erstwhile pupils from the 1930s, and the pertinent
tributes of notable theologians, such as the Bishop of Berlin, and
Archbishop Tutu, as well as assessments of Bonhoeffer’s
significance in German history by historians such as Peter
Hoffmann, Victoria Barnett and your reviewer. Where these
testimonies are given in German, English subtitles are provided.
This kind of film footage is, of course, less able to convey
the development of Bonhoeffer’s theology and the genesis of the
remarkably prescient insights which he first wrote down in letters
and papers from prison, and which were to become the
foundation for much of the “liberation theology” of the post-1945
years. Nor can this media be successful in outlining what was
surely, at the time, his most significant teaching, namely his
views on suffering and discipleship, which consist in sharing the
sufferings of God in Christ in this tortured world, and thereby
finding, not release, but redemption.

But Doblmeier’s contribution is to repristinate the
historical setting and to show the course of events which led this
one faithful witness to Christ to become involved in the attempt
to free his country from the evils of Nazism. Its failure led to his
death and martyrdom in April 1945, but his legacy was
summarized in the message he sent to his friend Bishop George
Bell on the very eve of his execution: “Tell him that for me this
is the end but also the beginning – with him I believe in the
principle of our Universal Christian brotherhood which rises
above all national interests, and that our victory is certain”.
JSC

2a) Tela Zasloff, A Rescuer’s Story. Pastor Pierre-Charles
Toureille in Vichy France. Madison, Wisconsin: University of
Wisconsin Press 2003. 272 pp.

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a small holiday resort in
south-central France, whose French Huguenot Protestant
inhabitants during the Second World War turned it into a secret
sanctuary, successfully rescuing several thousands of Jewish
victims of Nazi oppression. Their story was subsequently told by
an American Jewish philosophy professor, Philip Hallie, in his
book Open Thy Mouth for the Dumb, and by Pierre Sauvage’s
brilliant film Weapons of the Spirit, both of which paid tribute to
the strengths of the Huguenot tradition of service to those in
need.

Now another American Jewish scholar, Tela Zasloff, has
given us a portrait of the French Protestant pastor, Pierre
Toureille, who also organized large-scale and clandestine rescue
missions in Vichy France, prompted by the same spirit of
humanitarian compassion derived from his Huguenot
background.

Huguenot Protestants are a small minority in France, only
slightly larger than the number of French Jews. But their
collective folk memory of the persecutions they suffered three
hundred years ago under Louis XIV has been etched into every
generation. Their congregations across the centuries have
inherited the conviction that resistance to unjust political
authority and the need to provide refuge to the oppressed is a
religious duty. So the Nazi persecution of the Jews brought forth
a collective determination to mobilize their spiritual resources
and to organize effective rescue measures.

Leadership in the Huguenot community has come from a
small number of distinguished families, and very often the
responsibility of being pastor has been handed down from father
to son for several generations. Pierre Toureille also had
numerous pastors in his background, so it was quite natural that
he should decide on this career. He brought to it a strong, a vivid
intelligence and an interest in the wider world, particularly the
Slavic peoples of eastern Europe. And it was hardly surprising
that, as a young pastor in the 1920s, he joined the World Alliance
for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches.
This ecumenical group sought to bind up the grievous wounds
caused by the First World War and to undertake a ministry of
international reconciliation. In 1930 Toureille was given the
responsibility of acting as joint Secretary for the World
Alliance’s Youth Commission, collaborating closely with his
German counterpart, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. At the time, both men
were strongly influenced by pacifist ideas and hugely admired
Mahatma Gandhi for his advocacy of non-violent resistance. But,
after the Nazis had seized power in 1933, both Toureille and
Bonhoeffer began to realize that idealistic pacifism was not
enough to combat the evils of Nazism and racism. A more active
stance was demanded.

After France’s humiliating defeat in 1940, Toureille was
appointed Chief Chaplain of Protestant refugees and internees in
France. This necessarily involved some co-operation with the
Vichy government and the French Protestant ecclesiastical
authorities. But increasingly Toureille’s indignation at the
injustices being imposed on these refugees compulsorily locked
up in internment camps across southern France led him to take a
much more confrontational stance. Furthermore he was not
willing to limit his efforts to Protestants, but extended his help to
the threatened Jews, whether converted or not. After 1942 when
the Nazi noose tightened around the refugees, especially the
foreign Jews, Toureille turned more and more to clandestine
activities designed to rescue these victims by arranging their
escape. Hiding places, new identity documents, courier sevice to
the frontiers of Switzerland or Spain, and contact with all sorts of
resistance groups, increasingly became Toureille’s pastoral
responsibility, with the consequent increase in his personal
danger. Frequently interrogated by the Vichy police and German
Gestapo agents, he nevertheless drew on his Huguenot heritage to
resist all attempts to compel his submission.

Zasloff’s skillful use of surviving records fills in the
background of Vichy France’s shameful collaboration with the
Germans, and the dilemma of the Christian churches, torn
between their loyalty to the French state, and their humanitarian
sympathies with those suffering at the Nazis’ hands. In addition,
Toureille’s widespread duties imposed a heavy burden on his
own family. Like everyone else they suffered from the appalling
food shortages and the spiritual horrors of war-time.
The summer and fall of 1942 was one of the blackest
periods of the war, when massive number of refugees were
deported from France to the death camps in eastern Europe.
Despite protests by both the Protestant and Catholic Church
leaders, the Vichy politicians capitulated to Nazi demands.
Toureille and his friends however refused to follow this craven
example. Their own tradition of solidarity with the oppressed,
their ideal of an international Christian conscience, and their
hatred of the evils of racism and tyranny, upheld their faith
throughout these dark days.

For another two years, the dilemma of weighing up the
personal risks as against the moral imperative for action
continued to plague refugee aid workers like Toureille. Had they
made the right choices? Could more have been done? How
could the evident evils of occupation and persecution by the
Germans be most effectively resisted and overthrown? For many
years afterwards, Toureille was to be haunted by a sense of
failure rather than by any satisfaction with his successful rescuing
of numerous Jewish individuals and families.

Years later, the Israeli Yad Washem Martyrs’ Memorial
honoured him by naming him a Righteous Gentile, and invited
him to plant a tree in commemoration. But Toureille himself
depreciated any recognition, convinced that he and his associates,
as in Le Chambon, had acted only as Christians should behave in
obedience to the call of his Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.
It was therefore left to Tela Zasloff’s well-researched
account to provide the wider world with a sensitive tribute to this
courageous, quirky and essentially God-driven Huguenot pastor.
JSC

2b) L.Klempa and R.Doran, Certain Women amazed us. The
Women’s Missionary Society. Their story 1864-2002.
Toronto: Women’s Missionary Society, 2002 446pp.

The Presbyterian Church of Canada may be counted as
one of the more conservative branches of the Christian
community. Not until the 1960s did its male-dominated hierarchy
agree to the ordination of women and subsequently admit women
to its governing councils. But a hundred years earlier,
Presbyterian women were already throwing themselves
energetically and devotedly into mission work on behalf of their
church. By the 1870s there were three major branches, one for
overseas missions, one for home missions, and one operating in
the Maritime provinces. Each strove to build up auxiliaries in the
local parishes, mobilizing and spending their own funds, and
determining their own policy. It took fifty years before the
church authorities persuaded them that rivalry and duplication
could be avoided by creating one combined Women’s Missionary
Society.

This book tells us of their efforts for nearly a hundred and
fifty years. To do so, the authors have used the bulky records
held in the church archives, its extensive publications, and some
personal reminiscences for the later years. From these sources we
are given a picture of the activities launched around the world,
particularly in India, China, Formosa, Korea, as well as in
remoter parts of Canada. The strength of the Women’s
Missionary Society lay in the close personal bonds, often
affection, between the local sending parishes in Canada and their
representatives in the field. In all these placements, evangelistic,
medical and teaching services were organized, and the dedicated
contributions of these women missionaries are here suitably
recorded.

The tone is predictably positive. These women’s stories
are shown to have often involved hardship, danger and shortage
of resources, but also endurance, courage and triumphant faith.
So the book emphasizes the dedication and self-sacrificing
devotion of the women missionaries and the long-lasting support
of their admirers and backers at home. In short, this is missionary
history of the old-fashioned kind, written to enhance future
efforts by praising those who have gone before in response to the
call to serve the Lord in his harvest around the world.

Sadly, these amateur writers seem not to be aware that
missionary historiography has developed in striking new
directions in recent decades. Today, the interest is on the
character and responses of the recipients of Christian
evangelism, the challenges and changes which these culture
contacts involved, and the impact on the mind-frames on both
sides. These were, however, not themes taken up in the pages of
such missionary magazines as the Presbyterian Glad Tidings,
from which these authors quote extensively. The result is that
nowadays missiography adopts a far more critical tone, often to
the dismay of the missionaries and their supporters. They often
still assume, as the editors of Glad Tidings always assumed, that
their well-meaning offering of the Gospel would be appreciated
and respected. But, as in the example shown here of the
survivors of the church-run residential schools for native
Canadians, the opposite could be true. The Women’s Missionary
Society of the Presbyterian Church too often reflected the white
man’s cultural mind-frame, and the same goes for the
hardworking authors who have detailed the Society’s notable
undertakings.

A sub-theme of the book is role played by the WMS is
seeking to achieve equality in the Presbyterian Church. Too
often it seems the male church leaders took women’s
subordination for granted, and refused to accept the notion of
partnership in leadership or decision-making. Yet., on the other
hand, when finally in the 1960s the women’s contributions were
recognized, pressure was placed on the WMS to amalgamate its
activities in the name of rationalization and economy. These
authors obviously share large doubts about the wisdom of this
move.

So too, very loyally, they downplay the shocking
disruption of the church of the 1920s, when 60% of the
Presbyterians left to join the new United Church of Canada.
Unfortunately we are not given any of the aguments expressed on
both sides at the time, let alone any theological analysis of the
reasons why the minority doggedly determined to continue in
existence, despite the crippling losses in both women- and
man-power, including whole mission fields abroad. But such an
account would require the talents of a trained
theologian-historian, and the evidence is clearly not to be found
in the WMS publications. The book closes with a chapter
questioning how the earlier spirit of dedication to missions can
be upheld in the context of the 21st Century.
JSC

3) Book notes:

a) ed. Marc Lee Raphael, The Representation of
the Holocaust in Literature and Film,The College of William and
Mary, P.O.Box 8795, Williamsburg, Virginia 23187-8795, USA
US $ 18.00

This is a useful collection of essays about a difficult theme. In
the view of its most noted practitioner, Elie Wiesel, “the
holocaust defies literature” The narrator/survivor does not
possess the language, nor his audience the imagination, to
comprehend the actual atrocities which took place. “The secret
must remain inviolate”. Nevertheless successive generations,
and not only Jews, are still trying to make sense of this
catastrophic experience, and these essays will be of help. Can
the terrifying truth about the fate of human beings in
Nazi-occupied Europe be conveyed, either in writing or still more
(less) on film, with the inevitable difficulty of this media to
create an adequate “suspension of disbelief”. How to make the
fate of individuals typify the fate of millions? And in which
language? To the dangers inherent in the incommensurability of
language, add the perils of communicating a minority’s
experience with radical evil to audiences almost entirely spared
such a history. These are the themes explored in these essays.
The discussion is certainly valuable, even if the basic dilemma is
unresolved, and probably unresolvable. Perhaps no event in the
past has been more fully documented. Yet the Holocaust does not
thereby seem more accessible to understanding. The Shoah
remains unimaginable and impenetrable. As these authors rightly
note, all attempts must be tentative, to be approached with the
greatest of care or awe or fear.
JSC

b) Johann Boehm, Die Deutschen in Rumänien und das Dritte
Reich 1933-1940, Frankfurt/Bern/New York: Peter Lang 1999
Boehm has written a trilogy about the German minority in
Rumania, of which this is the second, covering the years after
Hitler came to power. Amongst these Volksdeutsche, even those
settled in Transylvania for hundreds of years, the Nazi revolution
gave rise to enormous expectations, even that they would soon be
part of a new Grossdeutsche Reich. The deliberate and radical
politicization of the exiled community by Nazi agitators was of
course deeply disturbing to the established authorities, especially
those of the Lutheran Church, who had long played the role of
defending the interests of their people and assuring their legal
and linguistic rights against the inroads of the vibrant but often
corrupt Rumanian authorities, who themselves were intent on
nation-building of a different kind. The resultant squabbles and
tensions are here fully described, and the role of the church
analysed. Basically the Nazi demands for renewal in a völkisch
direction appealed to the younger members, while the old guard
of the church hierarchy sought to defend their positions and their
comunity’s place in the nation. But the rapidly changing political
scene throughout south-eastern Europe produced convulsive
developments, which were to boil over in the subsequent years of
the second world war.

4a) The whole of the October-December issue of Geschichte und
Gesellschaft, Vol. 29, no.4, is devoted to the topic
“Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus”. The contributions
are all summaries of the larger works of the authors, namely
Manfred Gailus, “1933 als protestantisches Erlebnis:
emphatische Selbsttransformation und Spaltung” – an analysis of
the Berlin churches and clergy in 1933, and of the factors which
produced so many “German Christians” there; Thomas Fandel,
“Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus in der Region” – the
Palatinate pastorate and the Nazi Party; Doris Bergen, “Die
Deutsche Christen: ganz normale Gläubige und eifrige
Komplizen?” – the reasons for their rise and fall; Gerhard
Lindemann, “Antijudaismus und antisemitismusin der
evangelischen Landeskirchen während der NS-Zeit” – a
description of the measures taken to exclude Jews from the
Protestant community.

b) Derek Davis, The Russian Orthodox Church and the Future of
Russia in Journal of Church and State, Vol. 44, no. 4, Autumn
2002

Derek Davis’ useful survey of the present state of
Orthodoxy in Russia examines whether the unlamented Soviet
repression is fully overcome. Only partly, he concludes.
Although the Russian Orthodox hierarchy early on staked out its
claim for leadership in the renewed nation, it is still suspect in
wide circles for its compromises and collaboration with the
former dictatorship. Nevertheless it is experiencing something of
a revival at the local level, though most Russians remain passive
believers. But the 1990 law declaring Russia to be a secular state
opened the way for the penetration of many other religious
bodies from abroad, and finally led to a restrictive decree of 1997
putting the brakes on, and favouring the Orthodox Church’s sense
of its primacy. Despite protests from the Pope and a group of US
Congress representatives, the law was passed, and the religious
freedom of minorities and foreign missions curtailed. Orthodoxy
has since taken up the unofficially acknowledged role of the state
church, evidently with President Putin’s support. Yet the
patriarch has discouraged any open political participation.
Rather the Church’s role is to seek cultural and spiritual unity –
hence the strong opposition to its rivals such as Catholics and
Protestants. Whether this stance will be enough to counter the
strongly secularist ideologies remains to be seen. In Davis’ view,
Russia needs time to see how best to treat religion and religious
institutions within an emerging democratic order.

c) Leilah Danielson, “In my extremity I turned to Gandhi”:
American Pacifists, Christianity and Gandhian non-violence in
Church History, Vol. 72, June 2003, no 2, pp 361ff. This lively
article examines the influence of Gandhi on American
Protestants. For some his message of peace and the resolution of
disputes by non-violent means was seen as a remedy for the
selfish materialism and class struggles of early 20th century
America. Gandhi was elevated to great heights. As one minister
stated: “few men in history have borne so striking a resemblance
to the Divine Galilean”. Others were more reserved, seeing in
him “a curious mixture of ancient superstition and modern
democratic aspiration”. Most American pacifists, especially the
more evangelical, nonetheless saw Gandhi in Christian terms, as
someone who had evolved beyond his oriental origins. This
saintly figure did not challenge their continuing view of the
superiority of Christianity over other religions, and his pacifist
example was held to be evidence of his, and their moral,
superiority over all war-mongers. But the pacifists’ case in the
1930s was punctured by events, and by the resolute debunking in
Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. However,
thanks to the valiant witness of A.J.Muste, and the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, Danielson believes, their influence can be seen in
the later struggle of the civil rights movements of later years.

d) Neil Gregor, “Loss, absence and remembrance in Nuremberg,
1945-56” in German History, Vol 21, no 2, 2003, p. 183-203.
“Rather than condemning the inability of West German society to
place the Holocaust in the centre of its concerns in a manner
which suits the cultural sensibilities of the post-Cold War era, we
should seek a proper historicization of the traumatic impact of
war and its aftermath in German society. To seek to persuade the
bereaved, traumatized and brutalized population who had
experienced what they had between 1941 and 1955 that their
suffering was a product of a uniquely destructive war and a
genocide for which they should regard themselves as directly
culpable was, arguably, to demand the impossible”.

e) Religion, State and Society, Vol. 31, no 4, December 2003,
has two interesting and informative articles about the revival of
Lutheranism in Russia since 1990, which make extensive claims
about the vitality and importance of this church. Mark Elliott’s
article on Orthodox-Protestant relations in the post-Soviet era in
Religion in Eastern Europe, Vol. XXIII, no 5, October 2003,
gives a critical assessment of the efforts made by Protestant,
mainly foreign, missionaries to establish relations with the
Orthodox Church, and also points to their failure to cooperate
with the indigenous Russian Protestant groups. Perry Glanzer’s
book The Quest for Russia’s Soul. Evangelicals and Moral
Education in post-Communist Russia (Baylor University Press
2002) examines the enormous push made by American
missionaries in the years 1992-1997, and its very mixed results.

With best wishes
John Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,
Since this month marks the 98th anniversary of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer’s birth, I vary our contents somewhat with a short
piece on the dilemmas of trying to translate one of his prison
poems. Do let me know if you approve this variation. My
address is jconway@interchange.ubc.ca
Contents

1) Translators’ Travails
2) Journal Update
3) Book review: Greschat, Evangelische Christenheit
4) Journal articles:

a) Rhonheimer, The Holocaust: what was not said.

1) Translators’ Travails
On December 19th 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his bleak
underground prison cell, wrote a Christmas letter to his fiancée, Maria
von Wedemeyer which included a poem called Von guten Mächten. A
few days later he repeated the poem, “which has been running through
my head in the last few days”. with a few minor changes, in a letter to
his parents. It consists of seven stanzas in rhyming couplets and iambic
pentameters, and is probably, after Christen und Heiden, the best
known of his prison poems. And indeed, because it comprises both a
statement of faith and a prayer, and is couched in a traditional
evangelical vocabulary, the poem has become widely popular in church
circles. Since his letters were carefully saved, and survived the war,
there is no question about the authenticity of the text. It has been
reproduced in numerous selections of Bonhoeffer’s works, though not
all of these have drawn attention to the immediate setting and the
desperate circumstances of impending catastrophe in the 1944
Christmas season, when it was composed.

However, in the course of being translated into English, the
poem has undergone considerable transformation. Since each edition
or selection of Bonhoeffer’s works has been made by different editors
or translators, there have now appeared a large number of differing,
variant and possibly even rival translations. Which of them should be
regarded as the most authentic? Since these various translators have
not gone on record as to the criteria they chose for their selection of
words, phrases or rhythms, the reader can only hazard a surmise. Was it
poetic style, rhythmic balance, linguistic accuracy, theological
interpretation or personal fancy which guided their choices?
Take for example, the seventh and final stanza. The original
runs as follows:

Von guten Mächten wunderbar geborgen
erwarten wir getrost, was kommen mag.
Gott ist mit uns am Abend und am Morgen
und ganz gewiss an jeden neuen Tag.

In the most recent issue of the International Bonhoeffer Society
Newsletter, number 83, Fall 2003, the text of these lines is printed on
p.9 under the title “By the Powers for Good”:

The forces for good surround us in wonder,
They firm up our courage for what comes our way,
God’s with us from dawn to the slumber of evening
The promise of love at the break of each day.

(Apparently the Editor borrowed this item for the Newsletter from the
recently published book by Elizabeth Raum, Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
called by God: a biography (New York 2002), who in turn took it
from A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings Of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, ed. G.B.Kelly and F.B.Nelson, 1991 edition, with the
translation made by Geffrey Kelly.). The rhymes of lines 2 and 4 are
clearly meant to reflect the same in the original, but the tripping use of
dactylic metre gives this version a racy almost running speed, as though
the author was on horseback. Is this a suitable rhythm for such an
affirmation at a time of terrible disaster? The second line conveys
neither the idea of waiting/awaiting or of comfort. And does not the
conscious use of poetic terms such as dawn or the slumber of evening
give a too beautified impression?

By contrast, in the early paperback editions of Letters and
Papers from Prison, where Mr Geoffrey Winthrop Young is thanked
for the translation of the poem, the tone is much more sedate and
literal. The title is here given as New Year (1945), and the text –
surely deliberately – avoids wherever possible words of more than one
syllable:

While all the powers of Good aid and attend us
boldly we’ll face the future, be what it may.
At even, and at morn, God will befriend us
and oh, most surely on each new year’s day!

The effect is however awkward, since the lines barely scan. Line 2
ends as though contrived, and line 4, with its unfortunate caesura seems
to try to reproduce the emphasis of ganz gewiss in a wholly artificial
manner. No explanation is provided why the translator has given the
poem the title of the New Year (1945) or changed the last line to fit this
attribution. Presumably this was due to the fact that Bonhoeffer was
explicitly writing a Christmas letter, though it is surely possible that his
thoughts were derived from his Advent meditations, with their moods
of penitence for the past and expectation for the future.
Interestingly, by the time the new greatly enlarged edition of
Letters and Papers from Prison was published in 1971, changes had
been made. The title is now “Powers of Good” and the second line has
been amended to read

boldly we’ll face the future, come what may

which at least fits the iambic rhythm better. The fourth line is also
changed from new year’s day to newborn day which is more literal
but again seems contrived.

The poem has also been set to music as a hymn. According to
one source, no less than 17 composers have provided a musical setting,
the most available of which is to be found in the ecumenical
hymnbook, published by the World Council of Churches, Cantate
Domino. Turning the poem into a hymn inevitably brought other
rhythmic constraints, even with the flexible tune provided by Joseph
Gelineau. The translator of the version in Cantate Domino is given as
F.Pratt Green and the date of 1972 is supplied:

By gracious powers so wonderfully shelter’d
And confidently waiting come what may
we know that God is with us night and morning
And never fails to greet us each new day

No title is attached, and for singing purposes the last verse has been
transposed to be the first, while stanzas 1 and 5 of the original poem
have been omitted. The explanation for these changes is probably that
Mr Green was attempting to stress the universal, timeless character of
the hymn, and therefore omitted the personal and new year’s
references. The result is a more sentimental and predictable version,
even if, at least in this stanza, the simplicity sticks closely to the
poem’s intent. But, as Jürgen Henkys has pointed out, the omission of
the original first stanza makes the opening of the second awkward, and
Green has cut out any reference to the Christmas season or to the
terrifying predicament in which Bonhoeffer and his closest relatives
now found themselves. This hymn version therefore too often runs the
risk of being used as a form of spiritual band-aid, a piece of pietistic
pain-reliever.

A very different version is supplied in a more recent
publication, the exchange of letters between Maria and Dietrich,
translated by John Brownjohn, with the title Love Letters from Cell 92.
Here the poem is cited in the immediate context of Dietrich’s letter to
Maria of December 19th, though without any title. “Here are another
few verses that have occurred to me in recent nights. They’re my
Christmas greeting to you, my parents, and my brothers and sisters.”
The final stanza now runs:

By kindly powers so wonderfully protected
we wait with confidence, befall what may.
We are with God at night and in the morning
and, just as certainly, on each new day.

The phrase kindly powers is repeated from the first stanza and also
from Bonhoeffer’s accompanying letter where he speaks of kindly
unseen powers preserving him, as angels do. The attractiveness of this
wording certainly outweighs the more concrete image of the forces for
good. But does it do justice to the implied contrast with the forces for
evil, which were so brutally present in Bonhoeffer’s life at that very
moment? Evidently here too the German phrase ganz gewiss has
baffled the translator, and led him to the literal but ugly and
unrhythmic alternative. And in the second line the idea of comfort is
not fully superseded by the notion of confidence. Nor is it clear why he
had to make the inversion of the third line, when Bonhoeffer clearly
and deliberately asserts that the initiative comes from God, not the
other way around.

The theological content of this stanza seems simple and clear –
the assurance of God’s continuing daily presence. It stands perhaps in
contrast to the much more intense fervour of the prayer contained in
the earlier stanzas, with their strong overtones of Jesus’ own prayer in
Gethsemane. The note of suffering is introduced already in stanza 2,
with the reference to the evil times which oppress our hearts. All the
more heartfelt then is the prayer:

Noch will das alte unsre Herzen quälen
noch drückt uns böser Tage schwere Last,
ach, Herr, gib unsern aufgescheuchten Seelen
das Heil, für das Du uns bereitet hast.

(Maria’s version has the word aufgeschreckten in line three, and
geschaffen instead of bereitet in line four.)
Since, in the hymn version, Green altered the order of the stanzas, he is
also obliged to make a major change for the first line, and therefore
provides as his translation: Yet is this heart by its old foe tormented
still evil days bring burdens hard to bear;

O give our frightened souls the sure salvation
for which, O Lord, thou taught us to prepare.

Truer to the original intent is surely the LPP translation:

The old year still torments our hearts, unhastening;
the long days of our sorrow still endure;
Father, grant to the souls thou hast been chastening
that thou has promised, the healing and the cure.

It is surely notable that Bonhoeffer inverts the usual expectation of a
joyous salvation prepared for the faithful by God, but insists instead
that God prepares the faithful for the kind of salvation to be granted to
the souls thou hast been chastening (LPP). The translators must have
struggled with the unusual German word aufgescheuchten which
surely requires a more forceful term than Brownjohn’s troubled or
Green’s frightened usage.

This leads directly to stanza 3, where the echoes of the Passion
are clearest.

Und reichst Du uns den schweren Kelch, den bittern
des Leids, gefüllt bis an den höchsten Rand,
so nehmen wir ihn dankbar ohne Zittern
aus Deiner guten und geliebten Hand.

Here Kelly gives a very literal translation which seems to catch the
atmosphere of reluctant acceptance of a tragic imminent fate:

But should you tend your cup of sorrow
To drink the bitter dregs at your command,
We accept with thanks and without trembling,
This offering from your gracious, loving hand.

But Brownjohn’s more poetic translation surely captures the nuances
and accentuates the contrast between the flinching recipient and the
gracious donor:

If thou shouldst offer us the cup of sorrow,
the bitter brimming chalice we’ll withstand
and thankfully accept it, never flinching,
from out thy righteous and beloved hand.

We can only infer how prayer- and psalm-filled was the conscience of
one who so courageously faced, in the Gestapo’s main prison, the
imminence of his own trial and execution, without flinching, and still
affirming God’s goodness. Was this not a true example of how
Christen stehen bei Gott in seinem Leiden?

And this stanza can surely be seen as recalling the notable
passage from Bonhoeffer’s letter written on July 21st, the day after the
failure of the plot, with all the consequences that he could well
envisage that the powers of evil would soon inflict.

This then leads us back to the guten Mächten. Contrary to what
the religious man expects from God – namely his own preservation
from the perils and dangers of this world – Bonhoeffer explicitly
suggests that the role of these powers of good is to enable and empower
men to share God’s suffering at the hands of a godless alien society.
The message of the poem is not therefore to promote an other-worldly
pietistic escapism, but to call men and women to participate in the
sufferings of God in the secular life. As such it reflects and repeats the
sentiments expressed in the July 21st letter:

How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray,
when we share in God’s suffering through a life of this kind? . . .
That I think is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a
man and a Christian. (LPP. 1971, p. 370)

This brief example, I believe, shows the difficulties faced by
translators seeking to remain faithful to the author’s intentions. In the
case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his rich spiritual sensibility and
adventurous hypotheses demand the utmost care in preserving the
nuances and profundity of one whose insights have made him one of
Germany’s most influential theologians of the twentieth century. We
must remain grateful to all those who have attempted such a
formidable and challenging assignment.
JSC

P.S. A review of the new documentary-biography film, Bonhoeffer,
produced by Martin Doblmeier, follows in next month’s Newsletter.

2) Journal Update.

The journal Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, edited from
Dresden by Prof. Grehard Besier, is seeking to increase its readership
amongst English-speaking church historians. To this end, the current
issue, Vol. 16., no 1, has added an Anglicized version of its title,
Contemporary Church History, has the majority of its articles in
English, and is devoted to a theme of particular interest to this
audience, namely “Christian Teachings about Jews. National
Comparisons in the shadow of the Holocaust”. These informative and
scholarly articles extend our range of knowledge about Christian
attitudes to Jews beyond the usual field of Germany. Here we are
given descriptions of the churches’ teachings in Poland, Estonia,
Denmark and even Spain and Argentina, as well as a critical view of
how both anti-judaism and racist-tinged antisemitism were to be found
in the publications of the Vatican. These percipient but also
controversial discussions add to the value of this journal which
deserves to be more widely adopted, especially in North American
universities.

3) Book reviews:

Martin Greschat. Die evangelische Christenheit und
die deutsche Geschichte nach 1945. Weichenstellungen in der
Nachkriegszeit Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. 2002. 476pp.
(This review appeared first in German History, Vol 21, no 4, 2003)

Martin Greschat is possibly now the doyen of Protestant Church
historians in Germany. His many years of teaching have been
accompanied by a notable list of publications covering the period of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But he has also been the champion
of a new style of church history writing, which seeks to get away from
the narrow blinkered concern solely with its own institutional record.
Instead Greschat has joined with others to try and overcome the highly
unfortunate division between Kirchengeschichte and Profangeschichte.
This leads to a blending of the church’s activities into the wider
political and social picture, attempting to ensure that the church’s
contribution to wider history is not overlooked in the general
historiography. This same goal is clearly evident in Greschat’s new
synthesis of the first four post-war years, 1945-1949. This masterly, if
leisurely, account successfully surveys both the chief political
developments in Germany and the Protestant Church’s reactions and
responses.

Greschat begins with an analysis of the occupation policies of
the four victorious Allies. All of them took a surprisingly positive view
of the churches, crediting them with having resisted Nazism, and
seeking to use them as a vehicle for re-educating the German people.
In the Protestant churches, a remarkable group of leaders emerged to
take advantage of this situation. Their first task was to purge the church
of the notorious pro-Nazi cadre of bishops and pastors. Instead, under
the leadership of the 77-year old Bishop Wurm of Wurttemberg, and
inspired by Pastor Martin Niemöller, the survivor of seven years in
concentration camps, these men, most of whom belonged to the
anti-Nazi Confessing Church, resolved on a new beginning. But first
they had to deal with the past. To their credit, and in contrast to the
Catholic hierarchy, they recognized the need to accept for themselves,
for the church, and for the nation, a declaration of guilt for the sins of
the Nazi era. This was issued at Stuttgart in October 1945.
Greschat gives an excellent account of the origins and the
results of this initiative, placing it in the wider context of German
society. These church leaders, as indeed their constituents, were deeply
divided by their past. A few were prepared to admit their inadequate
opposition to Nazism; others, especially in the laity, adamantly refused
to accept any notion of German collective guilt. For this reason, the
Allied-imposed denazification met with strong resistance. Niemöller’s
incessant preaching of repentance fell on deaf ears. There was
virtually no sensibility to the feelings of the Nazis’ victims. So too
there was a strong refusal to accept the verdict of the war, especially as
imposed by the Russians.

This reluctance, Greschat correctly points out, was due to the
ingrained conservative nationalism of the Protestant establishment.
Moreover they were led by a cohort of senior men, all of whom had
grown up under Kaiser Wilhelm, and had been influenced by the ideas
on nation-building, as well as antisemitism, of Adolf Stoecker.
Bishops Wurm and Dibelius of Berlin followed Stoecker in believing
that the Evangelical Church was the guardian of Germany’s identity
and morality, in a way which Roman Catholics could never be.
Consequently, they took up this cause in the name of a
“re-Christianization” of German society, which soon enough differed
from either the western model of democratic secularism or the
Communist model in the east.

In particular, the Evangelical leaders sought to preserve the
unity of the nation, and hence were opposed to the divisions within the
victorious Allies which eventually led to the country’s partition. Only
reluctantly did they accept Adenauer’s Catholic-dominated Bonn
republic, and never granted legitimacy to the Marxist-led German
Democratic Republic. For several years after 1949, their leaders such
as Niemöller and Gustav Heinemann campaigned in vain for a
neutralized but united country bridging the Iron Curtain.
Greschat also succeeds in placing the reconstruction of the
Evangelical Church’s national structures in the wider context. Here the
die-hards of Lutheran confessionalism sought to dismantle the
nineteenth century Prussian settlement and were only rebuffed by
vigorous opposition from those segments of the church who heeded
Karl Barth’s call for a more open and democratic polity. These
quarrels were backed by the conviction on both sides that God and
history backed their interpretation. Only by forcing through a pragmatic
compromise could the national church be established.
Greschat shows very clearly that the church hierarchy followed
the same ambivalent path as other leaders after 1945 with regard to the
nation’s past and future. Their conservative stances contributed to the
resulting stability of the Bonn Republic. But it was left to the next
generation to adopt new political options in the much changed
conditions of the 1960s.
JSC

4) Journal articles:

a) M.Rhonheimer, “The Holocaust: what was not
said” in First Things, November 2003.

The Nov. 2003 issue of First
Things contains an important article by the Swiss Opus Dei priest,
Martin Rhonheimer, professor of ethics and political philosophy at
Rome’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross: “The Holocaust: what
was not said” (pp. 18-27). This discusses “the astonishing fact that no
Church statement about Nazism [between 1933 and 1945] ever
mentioned Jews explicitly or defended them.” R. rejects the arguments
of critics like John Cornwell and Daniel Goldhagen as “so devoid of
historical foun-dation that they range from the absurd to the
outrageous. …The Church was indeed a powerful bulwark against Nazi
racism. Was it, however, also a bulwark against anti-Semitism?” In
addressing this question R. is conscious of a double loyalty: he is a
Catholic priest, but also a member of a three-quarters Jewish family,
pained both by unfair Jewish attacks on the Catholic Church, and
equally by a one-sided Catholic apologetic that minimizes the injustice
done by Christians to Jews in history.

Despite clear and repeated rejections of the Nazis’ insane racial
theories by Church spokesmen, the same leaders repeatedly stated that
Jews exercised a harmful influence on society; and that measures
restricting their public role were not only lawful but mandatory, always
with the proviso that Jews must not be hated, persecuted, unjustly
expropriated, or killed. Church condemnations of racism defined
anti-Semitism thus very narrowly: as hatred (and only that) of “the
people once called by God” ˆ but now suffering because of their
rejection of Christ. In a day in which the Catholic Church promoted the
idea that Jews were a harmful influence on society, the Catholic
rejections of anti-Semitism cited by Church apologists today did not
have at all the broad significance we attach to them today. “That we
read [such statements] as condemnations of anti-Semitism in any form
is an indication of the distance we have traveled since the Second
Vatican Council, and especially during the pontificate of Pope John
Paul II.”

Careful analysis of Church condemnations of racism, including the
1937 Encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, shows that they were defenses
not of Jews as such but of Church teaching, in particular Catholic
insistence that baptized Jews were no longer Jews but Christians (a
position never conceded by the Nazis). The principal author of Mit
brennender Sorge, Pius XII, confirmed on June 2, 1945, that its
purpose was the clarification of Church teaching. “Astonishingly, there
is not a single reference in this allocution, delivered a month after the
end of the war in Europe, to the slaughter of millions of Jews. Instead
the Pope, with his vision still limited to Catholics and Church concerns,
lamented the killing of thousands of priests, religious, and laypeople.”
At the same time, this “in no way diminishes the fact that many
Catholics ˆ priests, religious, laity, and above all Pius XII ˆ helped
many Jews, sometimes at the risk of the rescuers’ lives.”

“Does this make Church leaders ‘guilty’? We are not called today to
stand in judgment over the consciences of others ˆ especially when
they were subject to pressures we have never experienced.” At issue is
not the guilt of individuals but “recognition that the Catholic Church
contributed in some measure to the developments that made the
Holocaust possible.” The “official Church” was “certainly not one of
the causes of the Holocaust. And once the trains started rolling toward
Auschwitz, the Church was powerless to stop them. Yet neither can the
Church boast that it was among those who, from the start, tried to avert
Auschwitz by standing up publicly for its future victims. … The real
problem is not the Church’s relationship to National Socialism and
racism, but the Church’s relationship to the Jews. … The Catholic
Church’s undeniable hostility to National Socialism and racism cannot
be use to justify its silence about the persecution of the Jews. It is one
thing to explain this silence historically and make it understandable. It
is quite another to use such explanations for apologetic purposes.”
“Christians and Jews belong together,” R. concludes. The “purification
of memory and conscience” which the Church urges today involves
“the ability to speak openly about past failures and shortcomings. This
is true, of course, for both sides. But in view of all that Christians have
done to Jews in history, it is Christians who should take the lead in the
purification of memory and conscience.”

No summary can possibly do justice to the abundance of sources cited
by R. in support of his arguments. The article is especially noteworthy
coming, as it does, from a member of a far-right group in the Catholic
Church, whose members are not normally found among the critics of
Church authority.

NOTE: A longer German version of the article, with footnotes, is in the
new book: Andreas Laun (Hg.), Unterwegs nach Jerusalem. Die Kirche
auf der Suche nach ihren jüdischen Wurzeln (Eichstätt: Franz Sales
Verlag, 2004).
John Jay Hughes, St. Louis

With all good wishes
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca