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

Dear Friends,Today, on my 74th birthday, I have pleasure in sending you the
first issue of Vol. X of our Newsletter to usher in 2004. I am of course
delighted to hear from any of you with any comments you would like to
share. Do contact me at: jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Thought for the month:
“The pursuit of history requires of its practitioners that vital
minimum of ascetic self-discipline that enables a person to do such
things as abandon wishful thinking, assimilate bad news, and discard
pleasing interpretations that cannot passs elementary tests of evidence
and logic. . . .Genuine historical scholarship is painstaking: it builds
detail upon detail, avoiding casual inference and thin deduction. This is
the difference between real history and politically or religiously
motivated propaganda.”

Contents:

1) Book reviews

a) M.F. Coady, biography of Fr. A.Delp
b) ed. G.Besier, Zwischen nationaler Revolution und militarischer Aggression
c) H.Schmidt, Hilde Schneider – biography

2) Journal articles:

a) Herderkorrespondenz 57 (2003) no 8: K-J. Hummel, Catholic research today – continued.
b) D.Goodhew, The rise of C.I.C.C.U.
c) A.Chandler, Quest for historical D.Bonhoeffer

1a) With Bound Hands: A Jesuit in Nazi Germany. The Life and
Selected Prison Letters of Alfred Delp. By Mary Frances Coady.
(Chicago: Loyola Press. 2003. Pp. xv + 239. Paperback $13.95.)

Well known in Germany, where numerous streets and schools bear his
name, the German Jesuit, Alfred Delp, is known in the
English-speaking world chiefly through Thomas Merton’s edition of
Delp’s Prison Meditations, published in 1963, now largely forgotten.
Delp was born in 1907 to an unmarried Catholic mother and a
Protestant father (they married shortly thereafter). He was raised as a
Protestant, receiving Lutheran confirmation in 1921. After a quarrel
with his Lutheran pastor, the headstrong teenager sought refuge with
the local Catholic priest, who prepared Delp for first communion and
confirmation in the Catholic Church. He entered a minor seminary the
year following and, at age eighteen, the Society of Jesus.

Delp’s fierce independence, his overdeveloped critical faculties, and
his indifference to the opinions and feelings of others soon caused
difficulties with peers and superiors. Following ordination to the
priesthood in 1937, Delp received permission from his superiors to
pursue a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Munich. When the
Nazi authorities refused him admission, Delp was assigned to the
editorial staff of the respected Jesuit monthly Stimmen der Zeit. In
April 1941 the Nazis suppressed the journal, and Delp moved to a
suburban parish where, among his other activities, he became “an
address” for Jews fleeing on the underground route to Switzerland.
In 1942 Delp was recruited into the “Kreisau Circle” organized by the
Protestant Count Helmuth von Moltke. This was a group of German
intellectuals who met secretly, mostly at the Moltke estate in East
Prussia, to discuss plans for a “better Germany” following Hitler’s
removal or defeat. Delp was valued for his expertise in the areas of
labor and social justice. This activity was to prove his undoing.
In January 1944 von Moltke was arrested and sent to a concentration
camp. A week after the July 20, 1944, unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s
life by the Catholic army officer Claus von Stauffenberg, Delp (who
had met with Stauffenberg shortly before but knew nothing of the plot)
was arrested at his parish near Munich. The ostensible reason was his
supposed knowledge of Stauffenberg’s plans. “The actual reason,” Delp
would write from prison following his death sentence, “was that I
happened to be, and chose to remain, a Jesuit.” This was a reference to
the Nazis’ offer to spare his life if he would renounce his Jesuit vows.
Delp was hanged at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin on February 2, 1945.

Coady’s account of Delp’s life is straightforward. It is enriched by
many of the letters he wrote, with manacled hands (hence the book’s
title), during his six months’ imprisonment. These show him
alternating between hope and despair, while clinging always to his
unflinching faith. In addition to his difficulties from the Nazis, Delp
suffered from his Jesuit Provincial’s refusal to permit him to take final
vows. He was considered, Coady writes, “too independent, tending to
act without proper permission,” with “an extravagant manner” which
gave “the impression of unseemly worldliness.” Delp was overjoyed,
therefore, to receive on December 8, 1944, a visit from a Jesuit brother
authorized to receive his final vows in prison.

One of his most poignant prison letters, written January 23, 1945, to the
newborn son of close friends in Munich, contains the spiritual fruit of
his terrible six-month ordeal: “Only in adoration, in love, in living
according to God’s order, is a person free and capable of life.” Before
his walk to the gallows, Delp told the Catholic prison chaplain: “In half
an hour I’ll know more than you do.”

His Jesuit confreres would remember him, Coady writes, “as an enfant
terrible: a maverick, and at times a Jesuit superior’s headache.” Their
concise and fitting epitaph: “He lived as a sinner and died as a martyr.”
John Jay Hughes, St. Louis.

1b) Zwischen “nationaler Revolution” und militärischer Aggression.
Transformationen in Kirche und Gesellschaft 1934-1939.
Edited by Gerhard Besier. ‘Schriften des Historischen Kollegs.
Kolloquien 48′. Munich: R.Oldenbourg Verlag. 2001.
xvii + 276 pp. ISBN 3-486-56543-5

(This review appeared in German History, Vol 21, no 3)
The prestigious Historisches Kolleg in Munich every year
invites its Research Fellows to organize a Colloquium around the
subject of their researches. So in 1998 Professor Gerhard Besier
(Heidelberg) brought together a distinguished group of international
colleagues to share their investigations on the topic of the initial stages
of the German Church Struggle between Hitler’s coming to power and
the outbreak of the second world war. These Colloquium papers are
now reprinted in full. In the meantime Besier’s own comprehensive
narrative of the years 1934-37, which is the sequel to two earlier
volumes written by the late Professor Klaus Scholder, has been
published under the title Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich. Spaltungen
und Abwehrkämpfe 1934-1937 (Berlin: Proplyläen Verlag, 2001).
Together these volumes provide us with a valuable guide to the
present state of research. Particularly helpful are those contributions
which place the German Church Struggle in the wider international
context, a perspective not hitherto treated systematically.

Over the past fifty years, the historiography of the German
Church Struggle has gone through various phases. The initial defensive
and apologetic accounts sought to portray heroically the Churches’
reactions to Nazi persecution, culminating in the outspoken resistance
of a Bishop Galen or the martyrdom of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But the
second phase was much more critical, pointing to the widespread
accommodation of the church authorities, or even support for the
Nazis’ extremist ideological goals. Now a more balanced and nuanced
approach is evident, which has the added value of adopting a
comparative dimension whereby the Nazi harassment of and the
developments within the churches are not seen in isolation. Thomas
Fandel’s study of the local area of the Palatinate, showing how both
Catholic and Protestant priests fared, is an excellent example of this
trend. Hans Mommsen and Julius Schoeps contribute thoughtful essays
on Nazism as a secular or political religion, and attribute much of its
success amongst church members to its skillful propaganda techniques
using religious vocabulary for nationalistic and racist goals.

Klaus-Michael Mallmann’s detailed analysis of the Gestapo and secret
police intelligence services , and their policies towards the churches,
confirms the picture, both of intense competency conflicts within the
Nazi hierarchy, as well as of the escalating radicalization of Nazi
policy. The resulting inconsistencies, when for instance Pastor Martin
Niemöller was sent to a concentration camp, but Bishop Galen
remained free, only added to the confused picture of the German
Church Struggle prevailing abroad.

Both Andrew Chandler on British Church attitudes towards
Nazism and Ingun Montgomery on the Swedish reactions point out the
many conflicting and ambivalent stands, affecting church members in
these countries, even those most closely involved, like Bishop George
Bell of Chichester. Sympathy for fellow Protestants, outrage at Nazi
violence, belated but insufficient assistance to the Nazis’ victims, and
fervent longings to do all they could to prevent another war,
characterized these responses between appeasement and condemnation.
So too in North America, the initial pacifist and pro-German mood of
the early 1930s was eventually replaced by a reluctant awareness of
Nazi intolerance and racial persecution. This ‘metanoia’ did much to
justify the post-1939 readiness to take up arms again in order to combat
the evils of Nazi domination. So too the essays describing the
churches’ reactions in France, Austria and Czechoslovakia add
valuable new material to the wider picture.

But as Gerhard Besier pertinently points out, the crucial factors
were the German churches’ own willingness to accommodate the Nazi
regime and to applaud its amazing successes between the so-called
‘National Revolution’ of 1933 and the outbreak of deliberate military
aggression in 1939. The German church leaders’ nationalist
sympathies and their desire to retain their positions as members of the
establishment prevented them from facing the realities of the Nazi
ambitions. For these reasons no coherent or compelling Christian
resistance to Nazism was ever developed. The central issue of how
Christian churches can deal with totalitarian regimes still remains
unresolved. But this volume gives us an excellent case study of the
problems and issues involved. The German Church Struggle was
indeed exemplary of the churches’ dilemmas in many societies during
the twentieth century. We can confidently say, however, that no
comparable situation has been so fully or comprehensively researched
as Germany’s. This volume adds yet again to the large corpus of
historiography on this topic, bringing with it significant findings from
new points of view.
JSC

1c) Hartmut Schmidt, Zwischen Riga und Locarno. Bericht über Hilde
Schneider, Christin jüdischer Herkunft, Diakonisse, Ghetto- und KZ
Häftling, Gefängnispfarrerin. Berlin: Wichern Verlag 2001. 298 pp.
ISBN 3-88981-127-2

There has recently been a surge of interest in the German
Evangelical Church about the careers of those pioneer women who, in
the course of the last century, resolutely sought to obtain the
qualifications and status of professional clergy. For decades their
progress was blocked by the male-dominated ecclesiastical
bureaucracies. Only in the last few years have women gained senior
positions in the various provincial churches.

This process, of course also happened in other countries. But in
Germany, the period of Nazi rule had a particularly deleterious impact.
The Nazi Party was well known for its antipathy to professional
women. But, even more fatefully, the Nazi supporters in the
Evangelical Church, known as the ‘German Christians’, pursued their
own vision of anti-feminism by propagating their ideas of a ‘manly’
church devoted to national and military goals, in which women’s roles
were clearly subordinate. No less traumatic was the fate of the small
number of Christians converted from Judaism, who were often
abandoned by their fellow Christians to the full horrors of Nazi
persecution.

Such was the situation of Hilde Schneider, who is apparently
now in her late ‘eighties, and whose remarkable reminiscences have
been ably written and researched by Hartmut Schmidt, a senior member
of the Evangelical Church’s press service. His achievement is to bring
to our attention the story of this lengthy and often painful odyssey by a
bravely courageous but self-effacing woman in her struggle to become
a pastor for the sake of the neediest of her sisters.

Although both her parents had much earlier been converted and
joined the Evangelical Church, Hilde was treated by the Nazis as
“fully” Jewish. Her early upbringing and her training as a nursing
sister in the largest Evangelical Church hospital in Hannover counted
for nothing. After the November 1938 pogrom, all the hospital director
could do was to advise her to emigrate as quickly as possible. The lack
of sympathy for her plight even amongst the sisterhood was notable.
The outbreak of war, however, put an end to her hopes for
escape. When the Nazi net closed tighter in 1941, Hilde was deported,
along with 1000 Jews from Hannover, to the specially created ghetto
for German Jews in the slums of Riga. Only 40 were to survive.
Hartmut Schmidt’s reconstruction of the cruelties and sadism of the
oppressors, as of the humiliations, degradations and sufferings of the
ghetto’s inmates, is both painful and shocking, even though soberly
recalled. He has skilfully and convincingly interwoven Hilde’s own
memories of this appalling experience with surviving documents of the
Riga and Latvian Holocaust.

Hilde’s survival was only accidental. But throughout she was
able to keep her Bible, from which she drew consolation, especially
from the psalms. For years afterwards, however, her health remained
damaged.

In 1945 she finally got back to Hannover, resolved that she must
put her personal sufferings at the service of others, by becoming a
pastor for women prisoners. Hartmut Schmidt notes very clearly the
obstacles she and other women would-be pastors faced at that time. It
took her years to get the necessary training and experience, very often
over the dismissive attitudes of church officials. Finally in 1959 she
obtained the post she most desired in the women’s prison in Frankfurt
and served fourteeen years until her retirement. Her sincere dedication
to Christ, her instinctive sympathy for women in trouble and her
readiness to stand by them in their suffering, are here well described.
The title of the book comes from the depth of her own
sufferings in Riga to the joyous openness she shared in Locarno at an
ecumenical guesthouse, supported by the World Council of Churches.
But only at the end of her career has she found a diligent and
supportive biographer and has been able to overcome the barrier of
silence imposed after the war by the reluctance of so many Germans to
acknowledge what crimes were committed in their name. Hilde
Schneider’s witness throughout is both instructive and inspiring, and
we must be grateful to Hartmut Schmidt for his enlightening
commentary.
JSC

2a) The German Catholic Church’s researches: Nazi dictatorship and
the Second World War – Part II, translated by Olav Zachau

The debate over the Catholics’ relationship to the Jews during the Third
Reich is closely linked to the controversy over Pope Pius XII. The
shining picture of this pope’s conduct during the Third Reich painted by
Christians and Jews alike was turned completely upside down by
Hochhuth in 1963. On the stage, Pius XII turned into a Nazi
collaborator. The two positions could not have been more
contradictory, and both views continue to find supporters.

The scope of judgements ranges from “Hitler’s Pope” (John Cornwell,
1999) to “Il Papa degli Ebrei” (“The Pope of the Jews”, Andrea
Tornielli, 2001). The discussion seemed to have bogged down into a
ritualized exchange of the same tired arguments. The examination of
the role of the Vatican in the Second World War has increasingly
narrowed to the relationship between the church and the Jews and in
turn, turned this debate into a stalemate.

New insights may be gained by expanding the perspective beyond the
personality of Pope Pius XII through international comparisons. This
means looking at the conduct of the Church and its representatives at
all levels of the hierarchy as well as reconsidering the standard of
values according to which the Pope should be measured. Was he, above
all, the protector of the Catholics all over the world? Was he a diplomat
acting on the same level as the governments of other states or was he
even the personified conscience of this world? The answer to these
questions and the question of how Pius’ positioned himself within this
spectrum will produce quite different judgements and interpretations.
The answer to these questions, however, can only be found by way of
interdisciplinary and international cooperation. It is, first and foremost,
absolutely essential to work with church historians who have the
necessary theological knowledge to understand these internal debates.

It is equally necessary to broaden the perspective towards a
international, or at least a European, perspective, which is only possible
by working with historians from abroad.

The question of the perspectives and weak spots of the research on
Catholicism 1933-1945 leads directly to the question of the sources
available and the overall conditions in the archives.

Since February 2003 new archival material from the Vatican has
opened far reaching new possibilities, and large scale work on them has
already begun. Files from the Vatican’s State secretary, the nunciatures
of Munich and Berlin, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith are now available for the years until 1939 and allow new insights
into the much debated relationship between the Catholic church and
Nazi Germany. The papers of Cardinal Faulhaber, which have been
prepared to an exemplary standard, were made available in Munich a
year ago, and in Rome the analysis of the influential and controversial
Austrian Bishop Alois Hudal has begun. Even if this work will not
revolutionize previous results, new source material may
yield findings that will further clarify the internal process of decision
making, the working process and internal connections; older
conclusions will be confirmed or explained in more detail. Surprises,
however, cannot be ruled out, by any means. Nuncio Cesare Orsenigo,
for instance, always seemed to be a weak figure, who was not recalled
apparently only because that the Vatican was afraid it would not be
allowed to appoint a successor. In the nunciature’s reports, he appears
as a reflective, clear-sighted analyst with surprisingly sound political
judgement.

The files from the reign of Pius XII (1939-1958), however, are still
unavailable. The newly available files only tell us about Eugenio
Pacelli, who was to become Pius XII, as nuncio in Munich and Berlin,
and as State Secretary. A further opening of the archives, propably in
2006, is not only desirable from a scholarly point of view, but also
regarding the transparancy in dealing with the history of the church.
The public still thinks that those who hide something have reasons for
doing so.

Even a full opening of all archives will not be able to silence
conscious ignorance and prejudice. Critics will still bring forward the
accusation that the files have been previously purged, which could
hardly be disproved. Still, science must do its duty and make it possible
that all who want to know better can know better.

The wish for free access to more archival material is a legitimate one.
However, the research deficits until now are not only due to the
problematic situation in the Vatican archives. First, materials on the
Catholic church are to be found not only in the Vatican. Numerous
American, European and Israeli archives contain materials that could
shed light on the role of the Pope during the Second World War and the
Holocaust from several perspectives. In particular, archives in East and
Southeast Europe have not been used to the fullest extent.

Since the 1960s, there had been an important exception concerning
the Vatican’s documents for the period of the Second World War. Pope
Paul VI. authorized the publication of the momentous, because
unprecedented, 11 volumes of the edition “Actes et documents du Saint
Siège relatifs a la Seconde Guerre mondiale”. The first appeared in
1965. This series contains a representative selection of documents from
the time of the Second World War, as edited by four Jesuit priests who
had been given access to the files. These volumes have now
been supplemented by the comprehensive editions of other
documentary sources that have been published by the Commission for
Contemporary History in Germany since the 1960s.

The abundance of information on various aspects of Catholic life in
Germany and the relationship of the German bishops to the Vatican
seems, however, to have had a rather intimidating than encouraging
effect. Apart from sheer volume of the material, language barriers have
until now prevented these materials from being better received. Large
parts of the “Actes et documents” are in Italian ( the working language
of the Curia), as well as numerous documents in English, French, and
Latin, and therefore present difficulties to scholars who only function
in German.

Language barriers have also been the main obstacle for greater
international cooperation in research on Catholicism. Many recent
publications, especially on the American market, have ignored the
German literature and present results as new that have been available in
German for some years. On the other hand, even German standard
works have not been translated into English. The paradoxical result,
e.g. in the case of the controversy over the treaty between the German
Reich and the Vatican (Reichskonkordat) (Scholder/Repgen) is that
American scholars draw a different conclusion than the Germans, in
part because Klaus Scholder’s contributions were translated into
English, while those of Konrad Repgen’s were not. It is imperative to
fill this deficit.

Since the summer of 2000, having been provoked by Klaus Bednarz’s
research on the use of forced labour in Catholic institutions during the
Third Reich, which left much to be desired, scholars in all German
dioceses have begun delving into this history of forced labour for the
church at the request of the German Bishops’ Conference (Deutsche
Bischofskonferenz). And they have discovered a number of other
unresolved questions relating to the history of the two major Christian
churches during the war. One of these questions involves the use of
church facilities by the Nazi state; this question is directly connected to
the problem of moral judgement and reparations payments to the
victims. Research into the history of the Churches during the second
half of “these twelve years” has begun and will be a focus not only of
future research on Catholicism but also of studies that cut across
denominational boundaries.

The debate on forced labour, for which scholars of German
Catholicism were so unprepared, makes clear that they will not only
have the task of carrying out their long-term research on church history,
but also of dealing with more immediate and pressing issues that will
arise. They have to ask themselves whether more “time bombs” are
ticking like the forced labour question, how they could disarm them in
advance, and they have to develop strategies of communicating to the
public and of limiting the damages, in case one of these bombs does
explode.
K-J.Hummel, Bonn

b) D. Goodhew, The Rise of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian
Union, 1910-71 in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol 54, no 1,
Jan. 2003, pp.62ff. Fifty years ago when I was a student in

Cambridge, the religious scene was preoccupied by the rivalry between
the Student Christian Movement and the C.I.C.C.U. The former was
liberal, ecumenical and open to new ideas; the latter was conservative,
evangelical and rigorous in its doctrinaire stance. The competition for
the souls and minds of the undergraduates was intense, and is now
brought to life in this excellently researched article by David Goodhew.
He rightly makes the point that C.I.C.C.U.’s strength was its adherence
to a fixed evangelical line, which could be traced back to the Clapham
Sect, Wilberforce, and Rev. Charles Simeon. In the post-1945 period
they had the advantage of attracting a host of excellent speakers, such
as John Stott, and held missions led by Billy Graham. They were far
better organised than other student societies, and so had a greater
impact, as they still do.

c) A Chandler, A quest for the historical Dietrich Bonhoeffer in
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol 54, no 1, January 2003, p.89-96.

This sprightly account of the present state of the Bonhoeffer legacy
shows that very solid memorials of this young German theologian now
exist. On the one hand, his statue is placed on the portal of Westminster
Abbey in London, as one of the 20th century martyrs; on the other
hand, the publication of his Werke is now complete in seventeen
volumes, luckily finished shortly before the death of his most noted
champion, Eberhard Bethge. (The English translation, which has now
seven volumes in print, continues, and will presumably eventually be
complete.) Chandler rightly points out that Bonhoeffer’s appeal was
in part due to his provocative remarks in the paper-back edition of
Letters and Papers from Prison, and in part from the fact that he was
murdered by the Nazis at the very end of the war. He also shows that
some exaggerated claims made about his role in the Church Struggle or
the German Resistance Movement need to be modified, but that
shouldn’t distract from the important insights he gave us, especially in
the field of ethics.

With all my good wishes for the start of the New Year. I trust you all
had a blessed Christmas holiday.

John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Friends,
“I have often times and many ways looked into the state of
earthly kingdoms, generally the whole world over (as fare as it may yet
be knowen to Christian men commonly) being a studie of no great
difficultie, but rather a purpose somewhat answerable to a perfect
Cosmographer, to find himself Cosmolities, a citizen and member of
the whole and only one mysticall citie universall, and so consequently
to meditate on the Cosmopoliticall government thereof, under the King
almightie.”
Edgar, King of the Saxons. circa A.D. 973

With this issue, we come to the completion of Volume IX. I had no
idea when I began this venture that it would be feasible to continue for
so long. The only reason for doing so has been the encouragement
which you, the readers, have given me to do so. My thanks to all of
you in so many different parts of the world. May I once again repeat
my invitation to send me any comments, criticisms or suggestions – or
better still offers to review books for our list members. I very much
hope in 2004 to hear from many of you via my personal e-mail address
= jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Please remember NOT to use the above kirzeit-l return address

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) ed.D. Dietrich, Christian responses to the Holocaust
b) ed. K. Koschorke, Transcontinental Links

2) Journal articles:

a) Herder Korrespondenz, 57 (2003) no. 8, Hummel, Catholic research today (1st part)
b) Ben-Sasson, Warsaw Ghetto

List of books reviewed in 2003
1a) ed. Donald Dietrich, Christian responses to the Holocaust. Moral
and Ethical issues. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press.
2003. 217pp.

These collected papers from a Boston College conference,
written by both Jewish and Christian scholars, have been fluently
edited by Donald Dietrich. They provide a more balanced and nuanced
picture than the similar collection on this topic Betrayal, edited by
S. Heschel and R. Ericksen. The introductory essay describes the
unprecedented challenges to the churches posed by the Nazi totalitarian
regime, seductively flying the national flag, but equally determined to
suppress all opposition. There follows a series of case studies, outlining
the range of churchmen’s responses to the Nazi onslaught, including
the persecution of the Jews. These varied from willing accommodation
to Hitler’s charisma on the part of idealistic priests, indulging their
wishful thinking about restoring a godly autocracy in Germany, to
eventual outright resistance by the more pugnacious defenders of the
churches’ autonomy.

We are given valuable biographical sketches of some
lesser-known figures, showing how these men and women maneuvered
between loyalty to the nation and the churches’ ethical positions. They
draw attention to the fact that a crucial factor in the churches’ response
to the Holocaust (or lack of it) can be found in the absence of personal
contacts, let alone theological encounters, with Jews in the pre-Nazi
period.

Most thoughtful is Stephen Haynes’ analysis of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer’s attitude towards Judaism. He argues that the Nazis’
maltreatment of the Jews, particularly the Crystal Night pogrom, and
the absence of any collective church protest, was one of the main
influences for Bonhoeffer’s decision to join the covert political
resistance. On the other hand, Bonhoeffer’s eventual martyrdom
should not cover up the fact that his earlier theological opinion in 1933
followed Luther’s traditional anti-Judaic stance, which Haynes
characterizes as “Bonhoeffer’s brief role as theological bystander and
unwitting collaborator with Nazi Judenhass”. (This essay should be
compared with the evaluation given by Klemens von Klemperer in his
recent book, German Incertitudes, 1914-1945.)

Most moving is the Jewish scholar Lawrence Baron’s tribute to
the often neglected Dutch evangelist Corrie ten Boom, whose sympathy
for the Jews led to her arrest and incarceration in Ravensbrück, but
who could nevertheless find the faith to forgive her captors. Her
benevolent and continuing mission to share the love of Jesus with her
Jewish friends was a demonstration that Christian supersessionism
need not lead to antisemitism.

In 1945, the surviving German Protestant leaders issued a
number of statements to explain – and justify – their behaviour in the
previous twelve years. Matthew Hockenos’ critical analysis shows how
the conservatives tried to claim that the church had successfully
resisted the Nazi encroachments on church autonomy. At the same time
they rejected all ideas of German collective guilt, attributed Nazi
successes to the demonic forces of secularism and totalitarianism, and
appealed for sympathy from other Christians abroad. But their more
radical critics, following Karl Barth, rightly pointed to the defects of
such apologias. More far-reaching changes in the structures, as well as
the theology, of these churches were needed. Such changes were,
however, never made, and it was decades before German
Evangelicalism fully accepted the task of coming to terms with its past.
The final stimulating chapter by Fr. John Pawlikowski calls for
the development of a new moral sensitivity through symbolic
communication in sacred ritual. What kind of liturgies can evoke
constructive moral commitment, while being fully conscious of
humanity’s destructive capacities as in the Holocaust? We need new
symbols of transcendence, acknowledging our dependence on a creator
God while clearly asserting our newly realized co-creational
responsibilities. This is a task in which both Christians and Jews should
unite.
JSC

1b) ed. Klaus Koschorke, Transcontinental Links in the History of
Non-Western Christianity/Transkontinentale Beziehungen in der
Geschichte des aussereuropäischen Christentum. Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz Verlag 2002. 344pp

As is well known, the historiography of Christian missions has
undergone striking changes in recent decades. The earlier
concentration on the careers of European and North American
missionaries, or on the strategies of their respective sending boards, has
now been largely superseded by a concern to describe the missionized
peoples of the non-western world and the inculturation of the Christian
faith among the indigenous populations. But recently a group of church
historians in Munich held a conference to explore the resultant
transcontinental links forged between the different branches of these
indigenous churches in widely separated parts of the world. These
interactions, often developed independently of missionary connections,
reveal a network of polycentric patterns hitherto unknown or
underplayed. The conference papers thus provide a new and enriching
dimension to our understanding of how non-western Christianity
developed and cross-fertilized itself around the globe.

The first group of papers discusses how ethnic diasporas
worked as networks for the dissemination of Christianity. The best
known example is the enforced transfer of Africans to America in the
slave trade. What is not well known is that many of these slaves were
already Christian and took their African version with them. Equally
significant was the reverse process at the end of the eighteenth century,
when first Sierra Leone, and later Liberia, saw the transfer of
Christianity back to Africa with the returning freed slaves. To these
families, Africa became the biblically-promised land, especially in the
ranks of the evangelical revivalists. The resulting founding of a large
number of independent African churches, and their consequent success,
has largely contributed to making Africa now one of the citadels of
modern Christianity.

In the same way, the expansion of the Korean churches through
the diaspora of Korean migrants in Hawaii, California, Mexico, Siberia
and China, has been largely unrecorded, and is here explored in outline.
So too, the transfer of Indian Christianity to South Africa, Fiji,
Tanzania, Trinidad, Mauritius and Uganda, as a result of indentured
labour schemes, is an interesting story, which brings out the dilemmas
and opportunities of such long-distance transfers. No less significant is
the impact of the revival of indigenous Christian communities which
existed before the white missionaries arrived, such as the Ethiopian
Church or the Thomas Church in India. These are now often celebrated
as having made a truly indigenous contribution to their respective
anti-colonialist and nationalist movements, and their examples are
often admired across the continents.

This kind of comparative history seeks to do more than merely
add to the total range of third world studies, by providing a church
history of Botswana, Bolivia or Bali. Rather it tries to understand how
the planting and expansion of Christian churches in the non-western
world took place with all the features of adaptation, acculturation and
indigenization through these various transcontinental linkages. This is a
bold and highly interesting experiment, which breaks new ground.
Most of the papers are in English, and the German ones have an
English summary. They all have ample footnotes, but alas! there is no
index.

One of the problems involved in such analyses is that of
definitions. Was the Christianity first planted in the Congo at the end of
the 15th century, then transplanted to America in the 16th and 17th,
and returned to Africa in the 19th, recognizably the same? Or has the
transmutation and adaptation of such linkages only produced new
entities as the result of syncretisms which may or may not be genuinely
Christian? Or is the term Christianity to be defined so inclusively that
even rastafarianism, as the West Indian offshoot of an African
Christianity, should be acknowledged? And what about the perennial
thorny issue of polygamy, as a legitimate form of Christian family life?

But equally remarkable are the similarities and continuities
carried across the oceans from one indigenous society to another. In
many of the diaspora communities, traditional homeland Christianity
served to reinforce and revalidate their sense of ethnic and religious
identity, as well as to develop “survival strategies” in their new
surroundings. At the same time, Christianity’s messianic message
frequently became the focus for the political aspirations of numerous
diaspora communities in exploited circumstances, such as the Indians
in South Africa or the Koreans in Hawaii or California. Such
movements were largely self-generating and often opposed by local
(white) Christian leaders. But in turn these churches provided the
impetus for reform in the homeland, as is shown in the career of
Syngman Rhee, the guiding light of his church in exile in America for
many years, then leader of the struggle against Japanese imperialism,
and later President of a liberated Korea.

The chapter by the editor, Klaus Koschorke, on the Edinburgh
World Missionary Conference of 1910, makes clear the paradox
involved here. Christianity is a missionary religion, universal in scope,
and successful in overcoming the limits of geography, race and class.
Nevertheless, its very success in the Third World stimulated local
movements revolting against the paternalism and control of the
European missionaries, and in turn having a wider political impact
against colonial rule altogether. Edinburgh marked the
acknowledgment of the just demands of the “younger churches”, even
though they were scarcely represented. The next conference in 1938
was, by contrast, overwhelmingly non-western in character. While
grateful for their origins, these younger churches were determined now
to control their own destinies. And in the years after 1945, they
increasingly did so. Institutions such as the International Missionary
Council or the World Council of Churches were to become dominated
by non-western Christians, liberated from the constraints of European
denominationalism, and often interacting with each other in
constructive ways. The ideal of self-governing, self-supporting and
self-propagating churches, whether in mid-19th century Africa or
mid-20th century China, did not advocate isolation but rather global
collaboration on the basis of equality. This is how the Christian
missionary commitment is being best understood at the beginning of
the 21st century.

The evidence provided in these essays of the variety of
non-western Christian experience shows the need for fuller treatments
of these as-yet-unexplored case studies. It is to be hoped that younger
scholars from Asia, Africa and Latin America will follow up these
leads. In particular, the wide-ranging issues of inculturation and
indigenization, the liberation from European models, the development
of international connections, and the opportunities of both
denominational and inter-faith ecumenism, should surely take a high
priority. The examples offered in this volume deserve close study, and
if possible replication and addition in the future. The multicultural
polycentric Christian Gospel is now being propagated in a vast plurality
of cultures, languages and competing ideologies. Church historians
have a gigantic task ahead of them to keep abreast and to record what
is currently taking place within the whole Christian community.
JSC

2) Journal articles:

a) Herderkorrespondenz 57 (2003), no. 8 K-J.Hummel, Facts –
Interpretations – Questions: Where is research in Catholicism heading?
(This translated article has kindly been made available to us by the
Catholic Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Bonn. The text and the
German original can be found under
http://www.kfzg.de/Aktuelles/aktuelles.html.

We reprint two extracts, one this month, and one in the next issue)
German research on Catholicism at the moment finds itself in
an exciting, but partly unclear, phase of transition, characterized by
strongly differing demands from scholarship, the politicized world of
the historical profession (Geschichtspolitik) and the media. A recent
conference organized by the Commission for Contemporary History
(Kommission für Zeitgeschichte) and the Catholic Academy in Bavaria
(Katholische Akademie in Bayern) offered the opportunity to take stock
critically and discuss important new perspectives.

Hans Günter Hockerts’ formulation of the scholarly basis was
unambiguous and unchallenged, but was nonetheless surprising for
some people: “Religion is relevant.” 20 years ago sceptics were still
dominating the scene. The godfathers of social history
(Gesellschaftsgeschichte) such as Hans Ulrich Wehler, who were
following Max Weber in being “religiously unmusical” (“religiös
unmusikalisch”), confirmed each other in the misconception that since
the Enlightenment, religion had become increasingly irrelevant in
society, and could be suitably acknowledged in ironic half sentences. It
was the generation of their disciples, however, who re-discovered
religion as a central “focus of socialization” (“Vergesellschaftungskern”).

They were especially interested in the
Catholic milieu that provided essential structural shaping at any rate for
about one third of German society from the middle of the 19th century
to the Second Vatican Council. Modern cultural history approached
religion by way of the key categories of “meaning” (“Sinn”) and
“design” (“Bedeutung”). “Religion is a prototypical product of
meaning and design. That goes for religious norms and doctrines in the
sense of central systems of interpretation as well as for individual
religiousness, i.e. the dimension of experiencing meaning and design.”

This situation could lead to a productive interdisciplinary co-operation
in modern research on Catholicism. In Germany, however, in contrast
to France, for example, this will only be likely on a limited scale.
While some secular disciplines have begun to undertake research on
Catholicism, the church historians of the Catholic and Protestant
faculties have seemed to turn to other fields of studies and ignore
contemporary religious history.

There is, moreover, a dilemma which poses great difficulties for the
historical profession. This is caused by the appearance of a number of
highly politicized and polemical interpretations of recent history,
including church history. For example, we can cite John Cornwell’s
“Hitler’s Pope”, or Daniel J. Goldhagen’s accusatory work “A Moral
reckoning. The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its
Unfulfilled Duty of Repair”. Whereas German scholarly research on
Catholicism can pride itself upon a wealth of detailed studies and
overviews, the deplorable fact remains that success increasingly
depends upon viewing and sales figures rather than the quality of the
scholarship and of the scholarly conclusions. Goldhagen’s book has
been unanimously condemned as not being up to scholarly standards,
and Cornwell’s dismissed as a journalistic work. But the public
generously overlooked the unusual quantity of mistakes of Cornwell’s
and Goldhagen’s works. In all likelihood, this leniency will persist as
long as the authors, who confidently undercut existing scholarly
standards, continue to write what the public wants to read.
For researchers in contemporary history, this new trend spells an
unusual challenge. If the public’s ideas about history are more
dependent on a fictional text than on the results of decades of
meticulous scholarly research, the historical profession obviously has a
problem in communicating its findings to a larger audience which no
amount of scolding the media will solve. It must find a way to
popularize its findings in a society dominated by the mass media, while
not falsifying complex matters because of the need to simplify. Only in
rare cases are scholars up to this challenge of reducing complicated
results to the size of a soundbite.

The 40-year old history of Hochhuth’s “The Deputy” (“Der
Stellvertreter”) is a perfect example of the fruitless efforts of scholars
to regain the initiative in formulating an effective answer to moral
charges through scholarly editions and learned treatises. The
discussions about forced labour in Catholic institutions during the Nazi
period, or about Catholic alleged involvement with the notorious East
German secret police – the “Stasi” – are but the latest examples of this.
Historians of Catholicism have taken up the gauntlet, because there is
no alternative. Contemporary history is inevitably conflict-ridden
history.

Today, interpreters are needed to make the findings of research
accessible to a wider public. Historical awareness is not even primarily
being shaped by historians, but rather by the manifold manifestations of
“infotainment”. If scholars are to measure their results against the
public’s widely held historical notions and to correct them, if
necessary, they must co-operate with the media that have direct access
to the public and can convey those corrections.

It is not only scholars who should influence the media, however; the
media can also give new momentum to knowledge and scholarly
investigation. During the debate on reparations for forced labour
imported from abroad by the Nazis to work in war-time industries, for
instance, the TV magazine “Monitor” on 20th July 2000, suddenly
charged the Catholic church with having profited from this forced
labour as well. Prior to this broadcast, the issue of forced labour
working for the church had not been dealt with by either Catholic
researchers or other historians who had been working on foreign
labour. Therefore the accusations caught Catholic researchers totally
off guard and made it obvious that, in spite of an abundance of
scholarly literature, the question of how the Church and Catholics fared
in the Third Reich had not yet been fully researched.

The question of the relationship between political Catholicism in
Germany and modern democracy (with the example of the Center Party
1930-1933) was the immediate cause for the foundation, in the early
1960s, of the “Commission for Contemporary History at the Catholic
Academy in Bavaria” (“Kommission für Zeitgeschichte bei der
Katholischen Akademie in Bayern”). Hochhuth’s provocative play
occurred subsequently. The initiators were the director of the academy,
later Secretary to the Conference of the German Bishops, Prälat Karl
Forster, and two young historians, 35 year old Rudolf Morsey and 40
year old Konrad Repgen. The Munich conference of 2003 was held in
honour of these two distinguished scholars. It was, however, more than
a satisfying retrospective on an impressive life’s work. It served as a
forum to consider the challenges posed by both the politicized
historical profession and the media, to assess the results and omissions
of current research and, finally, to point the way to future topics and
fields of research.
(to be continued).
Karl-Josef Hummel is Director of the Research Department of the
Kommission fur Zeitgeschichte.

b) Yad Vashem Studies, 31, 2003.

Havi Ben-Sasson contributes a remarkable article to this latest volume
of the Yad Vashem Studies on “Christians in the Ghetto: All Saints and
the Holy Virgin Mary Churches, and the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto”.
This describes the fate of the group of Christian Jews who were
incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto after the Nazi conquest of Poland.
The author makes clear that this small minority of Christians in a larger
minority of Jews were doubly discriminated against. Many of them
had left the Jewish community earlier, were relatively wealthy, and
looked to the Catholic Church to give them support. Interestingly, two
Catholic parishes functioned during the period before the ghetto
inhabitants, both Christian and Jewish, were deported. Unfortunately
relations between the two groups were strained, with faults on both
sides. Despite the paucity of surviving sources, this essay shed light on
this dark chapter of recent Polish church history.
JSC

May I send you all my very best wishes for the Christmas season, and
wish you every success in your endeavours during 2004.
John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

In Thanksgiving for our Blessings at this Christmas tide
Oculi omnium in te sperant Domine,
et tu das illis escam in tempore opportuno:
aperis manum tuam et imples omne animal benedictione.
Et mihi sitienti et mihi esurienti deese poteris?
Venite sitientes, venite esurientes,
comedite panem meum et bibite vinum
quod miserim vobis.
O nos felices filii, O nos beati,
qui ad mensam patris coelestis
tam amanter invitamur.
Ibi panis angelorum copiose fangitur
Ibi vinum electorum copiose bibitur
O nos felices, O nos beati.

List of books reviewed in 2003:

• Alvarez, David, Espionage in the Vatican July
• Breward, Ian, A history of the churches in Australasia August
• Brouwer, Ruth, Modern women modernizing men September
• Brown Callum, The death of Christian Britain July
  Dam, Harmjan, Der Weltbund für Freundschaftsarbeit der Kirchen
  November
• Denzler, Georg, Widerstand ist nicht das richtige Wort:
  Katholische Priester, Bischöfe und Theologen im
  Dritten Reich September
• Dietrich, Donald ed., Christian responses to the Holocaust December
• Emilsen S. & W., Mapping the Landscape: Essays on Australian and
  New Zealand Christianity August
• Feldkamp, Michael, Goldhagens unwillige Kirche August
• Gallo, Patrick, For Love and Country. The Italian Resistance October
• Goldhagen, Daniel A moral reckoning. The role of the Catholic
  Church in the Holocaust and the unfulfilled duty of repair March
• Griech-Pollele, Beth, Bishop von Galen: German Catholicism and
  National Socialism February
• Hesse, Hans ed., Persecution and Resistance of Jehovah’s Witnesses
  during the Nazi regime October
• Jenkins, Julian, Christian Pacifism confronts German nationalism
  November
• Kirby, Dianne ed, Religion and the Cold War September
• Koschorke, K, Transcontinental Links December
• Kreutzer, Heike, Das Reichskirchenministerium im Gefüge
  der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft July
• McNally, Vincent, The Lord’s Distant Vinyard: The Oblates
  in British Columbia January
• Moltman-Wendel, Elisabeth, Autobiography January
• Perica, Vjekoslav, Balkan Idols. Religion, nationalism and
  the Yugoslav states October
• Rutherdale, Myra, Women and the White Man’s God: Gender,
  race in the Canadian mission field August
• Steigmann-Gall, Richard, The Holy Reich September
• Voigt, Klaus, Villa Emma: jüdische Kinder auf der Flucht February
• Wood, David, Poet, priest and prophet -Bishop J.V.Taylor March
• Woolner, D and Kurial, R, FDR, the Vatican and the Roman
  Catholic Church in America, 1933-1945 October

Dear Friends,

November is the time when German Protestants hold their
annual services of Prayer and Repentance, coinciding with the 65th
anniversary of the notorious Crystal Night pogrom, as well as the
85th anniversary of the end of the First World War. Herewith an
appropriate comment by the Jewish poet Gerty Spies:

“Was ist des Unschuldigen Schuld –
Wo beginnt sie?
wo er gelassen, mit hängenden Armen,
schulterzuckend daneben steht,
den Mantel zuknöpft,
die Zigarette anzündet
und spricht:
Da kann man nichts machen . . .
Seht, da beginnt des Unschuldigen Schuld

Translation for North Americans: “NIMBY” – or – “I couldn’t care
less”.

Contents:

1) International Bonhoeffer Congress
2) Christian Pacifism: a review article

1) The IX International Bonhoeffer Congress will be held on June
6-11, 2004, at the Casa La Salle (Christian Brothers’ Conference
Centre) on the Via Aurelia, Rome, Italy. Organized by the English
Language Section of the International Bonhoeffer Society, the
conference theme is: “Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Christian
Humanism”. A website has been created for further information,
registration and contact persons:
www.bonhoeffercongress.org

Conference sub-themes include: “Christianity and Humanism, past
and present”, “Bonhoeffer, Catholicism and Catholic Humanism”,
“Ethics, Responsibility and Christian Humanism”, and “Judaism and
Humanism”. The conference will be structrured around plenary
sessions, seminars and special events in Rome. For immediate
information contact one of the conference co-chairs, Dr Michael
Lukens at michael.lukens@snc.edu or Rev. John Matthews at
jwmatt@aol.com

2) Christian Pacifism in the early twentieth century

a) Julian Jenkins, Christian Pacifism confronts German Nationalism
– The Ecumenical Movement and the Cause of Peace in Germany,
1914-1933. Lewiston, N.Y./Kingston, Ont./Lampeter: Edwin Mellen
Press 2002. 494 pp ISBN 0-7734-7137-5

b) Harmjan Dam, Der Weltbund für Freundschaftsarbeit der
Kirchen, 1914-1948. Eine ökumenische Friedensorganisation.
Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Otto Lembeck. 476 pp. ISBN
3-87476-379-X

Throughout the twentieth century, Christian pacifism was a
lost cause. During all the years from the British conquest of the
Boers in South Africa to the American onslaught against
Afghanistan or Iraq, the religious establishments of the major
western churches approved the use of military force as a means of
settling international disputes, encouraged their members to take up
arms, and even supported the use of weapons of mass destruction.
Their theologically-based justifications were drawn from a
traditional armoury of arguments supporting a “Just War”. Not even
the frightful excesses of the atomic or hydrogen bombs, and the
certainty of resulting genocide, could make more than a temporary
impact on the upholders of Christian militarism.

Christian pacifists by contrast upheld a spiritual view of
peace which only a few church members were prepared to adopt,
and lost out to the rival claims of national security for the allegiance
of most Christians. As a result, the cause has been discredited and
dismissed as the product of sentimental or unrealistic enthusiasts
indulging themselves in vain utopian dreams. The record of their
activities has also been largely ignored by the historians of the major
denominations who have no incentive to question the militaristic
stances adopted by their leaders, and who are still not prepared to
acknowledge the theological validity of the Christian pacifists’
pleadings.

For this reason, it has been left up to two younger scholars,
one from Australia and one from the Netherlands, working
independently of each other, to produce these new and scholarly
accounts of the valiant, if ineffective, efforts of the Christian peace
movement in the first half of the twentieth century. Both books are
the product of careful and insightful research, giving a valuably
fresh perspective on this neglected subject.

Julian Jenkins’ study of Christian pacifism in Germany in
this period is an important book which most capably introduces
English-speaking readers to this topic. Christian pacifism was a
voice in the wilderness at a time when Germany’s militant
aggressions plunged the world twice into a terrible abyss and
inflicted death on millions of innocent victims. The scandal is that
the overwhelming majority of Christians in Germany approved such
actions. Only a tiny minority were opposed, and of these only a
handful did so for Christian pacifist reasons. The most prominent
of these men was a now largely unknown pastor, Friedrich
Siegmund-Schultze, who vigorously championed the cause until he
was effectively silenced after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.
Jenkins’ detailed description of his early career is drawn from the
voluminous records Siegmund-Schultze collected over sixty years of
public life, and provides a excellent case study of the hopes and
disappointments of the followers of the Christian pacifist
movement.

Jenkins begins by outlining the kind of theological-political
views held by the majority of German Protestant churchmen in the
period after 1900, and the reasons for their support of Germany’s
extreme nationalism and aggression. He also gives a notable picture
of the whole ecumenical movement and its frustrated efforts to build
a world of justice and peace. But central to his argument is the
incompatible positions and rival worldviews of the liberal western
churches on the one hand, and the conservative German Lutheran
tradition on the other. In Jenkins’ view, this polarization was a
crucial factor in the failure of Christian peace movement during the
brief intermission of the 1920s. He thus adds significantly to our
knowledge of the history of this period by pointing to the intrepid, if
unsuccessful, efforts to direct German Protestantism away from its
introverted and militaristic heritage, and by demonstrating that the
cause of peace had its upholders, even in those traumatic years.

In analyzing why so many German churchmen in 1914
eagerly supported the pursuit of war, Jenkins follows the arguments
of the noted Hamburg historian, Fritz Fischer. Fischer drew a sharp
dividing line between the German ideological stance and the
western European religious tradition. The former was based on
Luther, Ranke and Hegel, with its exaltation of the authority of the
state, the ever-growing readiness to identify the nation-state with a
divine mission to expand German culture, and the subordination of
the individual to these goals. By contrast, the more democratic
individualistic Protestantism of Britain, France and the United States
owed more to Calvinism, and saw the duty of the church more often
in the role of resisting the misuse of state authority. The divergence
between these views was clearly marked in the churches’ respective
responses to the challenge of war in 1914 and indeed continued to
affect the attitudes and relationships throughout the interwar period.

Only a tiny minority of German Protestants, mainly those
who had earlier established friendly relations with some British
churchmen, shared the western views and were ready to oppose their
colleagues’ bellicose glorification of the German nation. German
Christian pacifism was therefore a cause adopted only by a few
valiant mavericks, who had to struggle hard against the mainstream.
At the same time, they themselves were not immune to the claims of
loyalty to their nation, especially in wartime. It took great courage –
or in some cases recklessness – to adopt such a stance.
Siegmund-Schultze’s career exemplified exactly this dilemma, as is
ably shown in Jenkins’ analysis of the tensions and passions
experienced by the advocates of the German peace movement
before and after the first world war.

Harmjan Dam’s chief emphasis is on the rise and fall of the
main institution created by churchmen to promote the cause of
peace, the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship
through the Churches. This now long forgotten experiment is often
deliberately ignored even by historians of the Ecumenical
Movement. And given the disdain with which the leading German
Protestants treated this organization, it is hardly surprising that this
is the first comprehensive account of its activities to appear in
German, or that it was written by a Dutchman.

In Dam’s view, in the first decade of the century, the desire
to mobilize the churches internationally for the cause of peace was a
bold and forward-looking initiative. The impetus was derived from
the optimistic thinking of the pre-1914 period, especially amongst
the politically liberal wing of Protestantism, promoted by the
advocates of the Social Gospel, as well as by the sponsors of the
international missionary movement. Dam recognizes that the
creation and fostering of the World Alliance was due to the
remarkable talents of a limited number of charismatic individuals,
whose contributions are here sketched vividly and percipiently. He
rightly points out that virtually everyone involved later in the whole
ecumenical movement came to it though their initial contacts in the
World Alliance.

The founder was the Canadian-born, J.Allen Baker, a liberal
Member of Parliament in Britain, and a leading Quaker. He fully
supported the view that the Christian power of love should be
deployed throughout the world to overcome systemic evils such as
war. The Christian churches should therefore play an active role in
resolving international disputes, and should act together in this
endeavour. Siegmund-Schultze was Baker’s most ardent disciple in
this cause, and was therefore deputed to organize the World
Alliance’s founding conference on the shores of Lake Constance.
Fatefully the date was set for 1 August 1914.

The resulting crisis for these lovers of peace as the guns of
August began to explode was predictable, and is excellently
described by both authors. Fervent earnest prayer was shown to be
not enough. But the flame was lit. And in 1919, after the traumatic
tragedies of the first world war, the idea was taken up again in new
hope.

The post-war revulsion against the militarism, pointless
slaughter, and mindless patriotism of the jingoists, all added to the
World Alliance’s initial success. In the 1920s it became the largest
and most popular institution for mobilizing churchmen of many
nations to work for peace and reconciliation.

Unfortunately the country where the World Alliance was
least successful was Germany. The majority of the Protestant clergy
and laity continued to uphold the militaristic and nationalistic views
expressed in their Kriegstheologie, refused to recognize any need for
repentance, lamented the fact that they had not been granted the
victory for which they had prayed so ardently, were appalled by the
forced abdication of the Kaiser and fervently championed his return,
poured scorn on the newly-established parliamentary democracy and
on the so-called “November criminals” of the Socialist-led
Republic, and above all were unanimously opposed to the
“vindictive and oppressive” Treaty of Versailles. Even staunch
supporters of the World Alliance were convinced that this
“infamous Diktat” had attacked Germany’s national honour and
stolen her territory in a conspiracy to humiliate and destroy the
German nation. In such an atmosphere as this, the soft liberal
admonitions for peace and reconciliation as advocated by the World
Alliance had little chance of success. In fact, as Jenkins points out,
the collapse of Imperial Germany, the defeat of World War I, and
the end of Prussian autocracy paradoxically did not lead German
Protestants to any political or theological metanoia, but rather
confirmed their ideological presuppositions and underlined their
prejudices against internationalism, pacifism and Social Democracy.

Both authors skillfully make this clear, using the plethora of
documentary sources and marshaling the evidence in a manner
highly critical of this regrettable German theological tradition. They
show how even dedicated pacifists, such as Siegmund-Schultze,
suffered from an extreme clash of loyalties. These men wanted to
uphold Germany’s national cause, and indeed sought to persuade
their friends abroad of the calamity caused by the Versailles Treaty;
but at the same time they tried to persuade their constituents at
home that another and a very different Germany was desirable.
They were widely accused at home of being traitors to the nation,
and suspect abroad as coming from the pariah nation, Germany. As
Jenkins notes, “unwilling to renounce their national identity or their
commitment to internationalism, the champions of the peace
movement of the churches in Germany were caught on the horns of
an unsolvable dilemma” (p.324).

Nevertheless, by the end of the 1920s, the pacifist cause had
achieved some successes. It is the strength of Harmjan Dam’s book
that he describes in detail the rapid development of the World
Alliance and its various activities, including the debates at its major
conferences. By the end of the decade the World Alliance had 34
national councils and numerous local branches undertaking
activities to advance the cause of peace. The popularity of its
meetings, the eminence of its speakers, and the nobility of the ideals
expressed, seemed to herald the success of its endeavours. At the
same time, the signing of the Locarno Treaty in 1925, and of the
Briand-Kellogg Pact in 1928, seemed to create a new climate in
favour of peace, strengthened by such secular phenomena as
Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front which made a
great impact. .

Dam thus complements Jenkins’ findings, which are more
focused on Germany, and puts them in their wider setting. He shows
how the leaders sought to turn the World Alliance into the spiritual
arm of the League of Nations, not realizing that it suffered from the
same defects as this wider organization. To be sure, the World
Alliance undertook thorough studies of such topics as disarmament
or the European minorities question. Its regional meetings were
particularly helpful, as Dam describes, in finding solutions to the
abrasive problems of religious minorities in the new European
states. Its meetings were filled with inspiring rhetoric and its
resolutions outlined ideal conditions to these thorny issues. The high
point came in 1928 when the World Alliance Conference in Prague
was judged a huge success. But, as Dam shows very well, it had no
executive powers, and since it lacked any firmly-established
political base, it had in fact very little political influence and its
wide-ranging but usually vaguely general resolutions were ignored.

Both authors note that the World Alliance’s impact was
dependent on a mood of international optimism. The person of
Woodrow Wilson and the establishment of the League of Nations
gave some hope that their vision of a world order based on moral
principles was more than an utopia. But the death of Stresemann in
1929, and the onset of the Great Depression, worsened the situation.
Increasingly the political classes in Germany looked for more
effective, or extreme, solutions, both left and right. Nightly battles
began on the streets of Berlin between Communist and Nazi gangs.

The Protestant leaders increasingly looked for an authoritarian
leader who would restore Germany’s national greatness and
security, and only too readily found one in Adolf Hitler. When he
came to power in January 1933, the majority of German churchmen
welcomed him with enthusiasm. The hopes of the World Alliance’s
supporters in Germany were shown to be hopelessly unrealistic.
Siegmund-Schultze, for one, soon recognized the ominous
dangers of Hitler’s dictatorship. Only six months later, he was
expelled from the country by the Gestapo, and as a direct result the
work of the World Alliance in Germany collapsed. The Nazis’
propaganda machine campaigned strongly against all such
phenomena as pacifism or internationalism, as part of an alleged
Jewish-Marxist conspiracy to undermine German strength. Severe
measures were taken to intimidate any supporters of these ideas, and
also to eliminate all pacifist groups or organizations. At the same
time, the Nazis made no secret of their intent once again to use
military force to restore Germany’s world position. In the face of
such a threat, Christian pacifism was shown to be ineffective and
irresolute. As Jenkins rightly notes, the illusion that the world
would be governed by the high ideals of Christian peacemakers was
“shattered by the crunch of marching feet and the sound of fascist
slogans, by a political ideology that was neither liberal nor
international, neither Christian nor rational” (p.192).

The failure of Christian pacifism, as both authors
acknowledge, cannot be solely ascribed to the resurgence of German
nationalism and militaristic aggression. The internal faults of the
peace movement in style, ideology and organization were clear
enough to make it the target of constant criticism throughout these
years. As Winston Churchill caustically noted: “The pacifist cause
was marked by a delight in smooth sounding platitudes, a refusal to
face unpleasant facts, a desire for popularity irrespective of the vital
interests of the state, a genuine love of peace and a pathetic belief
that love can be its sole foundation”. Such an indictment certainly
applied to the World Alliance.

But as Jenkins pointedly argues, the most significant fault
lay in the unwillingness of Germany’s educated and established
classes to accept the consequences of the nation’s defeat in 1918.
Most of the German churchmen who took part in World Alliance’s
activities, or those of other branches of the ecumenical movement,
did so, not because they believed in its idealistic ideology, but
because they were given a platform where they could voice their
opposition to the Treaty of Versailles and their desire to see
Germany’s greatness restored. After Hitler came to power, they
found a more forceful advocate of these views. Even those
Protestants who opposed Nazism, and who after 1934 formed the
Confessing Church, led by Pastor Martin Niemöller, focused their
opposition on resisting the Nazis’ attempts to encroach on the
church’s autonomy. They fully supported Hitler’s foreign and
military policies.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was briefly one of the World
Alliance’s Youth Secretaries, also shared in this ambivalence.
Before 1933 he was completely convinced of the pacifist cause and
expressed his admiration for Gandhi’s advocacy of non-violence.
But after the Nazis came to power, Bonhoeffer altered his stance,
and eventually accepted the need to use force to overthrow Hitler’s
dictatorship, if necessary by assassination.

Jenkins sees the unwillingness of German churchmen,
particularly the Protestants, to support the aims of the Christian
peace movement as part of the fateful developments in the political
and intellectual climate of those years. Their refusal to accept the
verdict of 1918, the systematic rejection and undermining of the
nascent democracy of the Weimar Republic, the scepticism about
the League of Nations, the support given to the parties of the
extreme right, and the failure to counteract the racial ideology of
Nazi antisemitism, were all key factors which assisted Hitler’s rise
to power. In the face of such intransigent attitudes, the Christian
peacemakers’ unfocussed and often sentimental attachment to
patchwork attempts to improve the world’s condition were
increasingly irrelevant and inadequate.

The later chapters in Dam’s book, describing the rapid
decline of the World Alliance after 1933, its inactivity and
irrelevance during the second world war, and its final demise
thereafter, make for sad reading. They reveal how unrealistic had
been the hope that the course of international politics could be
altered through the fervent proclamation of Christian principles by
dedicated and committed pacifists. But Dam puts particular stress
on the failing s of the Alliance’s organization. Its founders, such as
Baker and Siegmund-Schultze, had been pioneering individuals,
acting independently and free from ecclesiastical control. They
sought to be the universal conscience of the world, arousing public
opinion to bring about their desired reforms, especially the
renunciation of war. But while they were right in recognizing that,
after the churches’ disastrous blessing of the guns in the first world
war, the credibility of Christianity was at stake, their remedy was
woefully inadequate. By the 1930s, as the clouds of war gathered
over Europe, the prophetic voices of individual peace advocates
were increasingly disregarded.

This situation heightened the tensions within the World
Alliance. On the one hand, the advocates of the Ecumenical
Movement believed in the need to promote closer international
friendship of and through the churches. A common stance was
required to meet the escalating political dangers. A tighter
relationship with the official churches could bring about joint and
more effective efforts of all the Christian organizations. On the
other hand, other leaders of the World Alliance were reluctant to
sacrifice their freedom of spontaneous proclamation to the
inevitable compromises of church bureaucracies. They could
foresee that, in any such merger, their particular witness to seek
peace could be watered down. Instead, the World Alliance should
seek closer relationship with non-church peace movements, as
happened in France.

Uncertain which way to proceed, and without forceful
leadership, the World Alliance dithered, and was effectively
bypassed by more far-sighted individuals in the ecumenical ranks,
especially J.H.Oldham, who undertook to be the main architect of a
new proposal to bind the churches’ international organizations
together. In fact, in the late 1930s, the initiative passed to the Life
and Work Movement and to Faith and Order, both of which held
major conferences in 1937. As a result, guided by Oldham, they
resolved to combine forces to establish a World Council of
Churches (in process of formation). In 1938 they appointed as its
first General Secretary, a young Dutchman, Visser Œt Hooft, of
Calvinist background and a follower of Karl Barth. Visser Œt Hooft,
who was much more of a General than a Secretary, had little use for
either the liberal theology or the public pronouncements of his
predecessors in the World Alliance, and resented the unwanted
advice they poured upon him as to how they had conducted affairs
earlier. The older generation, in turn, resented being excluded,
after all their years of devoted service to the cause. As
Siegmund-Schultze lamented at the end of 1938: “The past year has
been a torture for me. . . .After all the mistakes of the last year, I
have not much hope for the World Alliance. I do my duty as the
soldier of an army which is soon to die”.

In 1939, when Germany once again plunged the world into
war, the World Alliance could find no credible basis for any peace
initiative. It had failed to follow the advice of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
to rethink its theology and abandon the “social gospel” approach,
which downplayed theological considerations in favour the practical
tasks of peacemaking as the spiritual arm of the League of Nations.
But when this stance was clearly unavailing, the World Alliance had
no alternative strategy to fall back on. Its subsequent paralysis and
inactivity during the war stood in contrast to Visser Œt Hooft’s
energetic measures to keep the members of the World Council
informed and in touch across the warring lines, to take whatever
relief steps were feasible, for example, for refugees, and to begin the
task of planning for a post-war world settlement, in which the
churches should play a constructive role. Above all, he was
responsible for refashioning the theological approach adopted by the
international church bodies.

In 1945, the American branch of the World Alliance, which
had all along heavily subsidized its world-wide activities, decided
that the best way of advancing the cause of peace was to open up the
membership to all religions, not just the Christian churches. But in
Europe, only one national council supported this idea. So many of
the former supporters had either died or been lost because of the
war, and without any alternative sources of funding, it became clear
that there was no more impetus to seek a new beginning as in 1919.
By 1947 the World Alliance dissolved itself.

In 1948, the World Council of Churches held its first and
founding Assembly in Amsterdam. But after the horrendous
experiences of the second world war, it was notable that there was
very much less emphasis on the tasks of promoting peace. In fact,
the onset of the Cold War seemed to render the kind of interwar
peace rhetoric even more insubstantial and unrealistic.
In the World Council’s headquarters in Geneva there hangs a
diagram, depicting the organization’s history as a river, a confluence
of original streams with various significant places and dates
attached. The intent is to give the impression of an ongoing
dynamic body, like a river ever flowing and increasing. But it is
notable that the World Alliance is not mentioned at all. Dam’s
study is clearly designed to remedy this omission, and to pay tribute
to the pioneering and prophetic work of so many dedicated
individuals. In his view, the founding of the World Council of
Churches in its initial form was not an inevitable process but was
influenced far more by personalities than has been acknowledged.
Sufficient justice needs to be given to the existing complications,
contradictions and alternatives which eventually led to the World
Alliance’s demise.

Both these books deserve a wide audience among English
and German readers since they provide authoritative accounts of the
courageous, if flawed, efforts of the Christian peace makers of the
early twentieth century.

John S.Conway
jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

“Nothing is more unfair than to judge the men of the
past by the ideas of the present. Whatever may be said of morality,
political wisdom is certainly ambulatory. . . It behoves wise statesmen
to consider how their policy will appear to imaginations aglow with
excitement and rhetoric.”
D.A.Winstanley, Lord Chatham and the Whig opposition.

Contents:

1) Book reviews

a) H.Hesse ed, Persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses
b) ed Woolner, Kurial, FDR, the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church, 1933-1945
c) Gallo, For Love and Country: The Italian Resistance

2) Journal articles:

a) Moses, Australian Anglicans in the first world war
b ) Fletcher, Anglicanism and National Identity in Australia since 1962
c) Koch and Falcke, Coming to terms with German guilt

3) Book notes: Hermann Rauschning, ed. Hensel and Nordblom

1) Book reviews

1a) Hans Hesse ed., Persecution and Resistance of Jehovah’s
Witnesses during the Nazi Regime 1933-1945. Bremen: Edition
Temmen 2001. 405 pp ISBN 3-86108-750-2.

This review is re-printed from Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 14,
2001/2

The story of the persecution of the Jehovah’s Witnesses under
Nazi rule was little known by historians some twenty years or so ago.
Even among Jehovah’s Witnesses themselves, whilst stories of bravery
under harassment and torture were recounted, there was little
systematic analysis of what had happened and how it had happened.
Witnesses had a very clear theological understanding about why it had
happened but had no evidence that either scholars or the general public
would be interested in their story. Not until professional researchers
began to document and legitimate the experience of non-Jewish victims
of the Third Reich, did the Witness record come into its own.
This book is a landmark in the study of the persecution of the
Jehovah’s Witnesses by the Nazis. It is comprised of an eclectic
collection of essays which add to our understanding both of the details
of individuals” lives and of the complex issues surrounding the whole
area. It makes use of a considerable range of documents not published
before and offers both case studies and a series of broader and
thoughtful analyses.

The authors are all experts, in one way or another, in this field.
They are a mixture of Jehovah’s Witnesses and non-Witnesses. In this
the book is unique. The preface is written by Michael Berenbaum, a
distinguished voice in the study of the Holocaust and a former Director
of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
The translation is by the late and deeply respected scholar Sybil Milton,
once Senior Historian at the Museum, who also offers two important
essays as a contribution to the book. There are important essays by
other leaders in this field of study and essays by Witnessses who are
workers and researchers for the Watch Tower Society.

Although the emphasis is on the experience of this one group of
people, there is an understanding throughout and a respect for the wider
picture. The story, valuable and important in its own right, needs to be
seen in the context of the horrors of the Holocaust. As Jolene Chu,
author of one of the essays reminds us, “it is a sad and sobering fact
that the Nazi regime executed a brilliant and ruthless war against the
Jews and nearly won”. Michael Berenbaum, in his preface, sets the
context clearly: “Jews were victimized not for what they did but for
who they were. They were targeted for destruction because of what
their grandparents were”. Jewish people in the Third Reich, as we
know, had no choice.

Jehovah’s Witnesses had come to Germany from America in
the 1890s and by the time of the Nazi seizure of power had some
25,000 members in Germany. They had already met some harassment
under Weimar from the SA and other emerging Nazi gangs. From
1933 to the end of the war, the Witnesses found themselves thrown into
a violent and pitched battle with the Nazi authorities, during which
some of the children were taken away to be educated in Nazi homes
and a large number of members of the group were imprisoned and
tortured. Many lost their lives.

The conflict was one of ideologies. The Witnesses had a clear
view of History and their sacred role in it. As a result of these beliefs,
and in spite of the fact that within the limits that their faith allows they
were law-abiding citizens, conflict with the new state was rapid and
brutal.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses were different to other categories of
what the Nazis identified as “enemies of the state”. They were targeted
and persecuted because of their beliefs and the consequences of their
beliefs. Witnesses refused to give the Hitler salute because their
religious beliefs taught them that such a salutation was due only to their
God. Because of their view of history and their role in it as “witnesses”
to their God, they refused similarly to enlist or to bear arms. Equally,
they disobeyed the injunction to cease their missionary work and they
continued to hold their religious meetings. The beliefs and practices
which stimulated the Nazi persecution were also at the heart of the
Jehovah’s Witness resistance.

Resistance, as we know, was both rare and dangerous. If we
look at the behaviour of other minority Christian and secular groups in
the Third Reich, we see, on the whole, a process of compromise,
assimilation or denial. Some members of small religious groups hailed
Hitler as the Messiah and others expunged from their liturgy all
references to anything “Jewish”. Thus hymns and liturgies were
amended to omit the words ‘sabbath” or Jerusalem”. Others were
prepared to hand over to the Nazis the names of any of their members
who had Jewish blood. Many very small groups simply went
underground or ceased their activities.

In the distribution of their literature and in door-to-door
missionary work, the Witnesses, however, offered a real and visible
challenge. Whether at large or in prison or camps, the majority of
Witnesses simply refused to give to the state what they knew belonged
only to God. No compromise, no changing words or re-interpreting,
just a simple standing firm to what they had been taught and believed
as individuals and as families. This was no orchestrated mass
resistance movement; this was a set of individuals, linked by their
beliefs, who refused to bow the knee.

The persecution that followed was relentless. Witnesses found
themselves in prisons and camps all over the Reich. Some of their
stories are told in this book. Margaret Buber, herself an inmate, told us
first of the women Witnesses in Ravensbrück; here their story is retold,
together with the story of women Witnesses in Moringen. We read the
letters of Hans Gartner, set alongside the picture of him as a young man
alongside his four sisters. Hans served sentences in prison and in
Dachau and Mauthausen. His letters are concerned with the welfare of
his wife and children and we follow through these simple earnest
letters, following his fate until we learn that on April 26,1940, he died
in Dachau aged 33. Shortly before his death, close to starvation,
Gartner begged an SS officer for a piece of bread and had in response a
finger cut off.

The Witness story is important in its own right. It is also
important to the continuing and necessary process of studying the
complexity of the dreadful tapestry of horrors that was woven by the
Nazis. There is now an insurmountable degree of evidence to testify to
the courage and steadfastness of numbers of Jehovah’s Witnesses: men,
women and children. These essays offer more detailed case studies of
the lives of Witness prisoners in the camps, wearing with pride their
purple triangle.

As a (non-Witness) scholar of this period, there are of course
some areas I would like to have seen covered here but which are not.
There are some which I would not have included. I wonder, for
example, about the wisdom of including under this title an essay on the
current situation for Witnesses in Germany. I would like to have seen a
different structure in which the historical framework was laid down
more overtly at the outset. All these comments are, however, a measure
of my engagement with the book. Here is the work of a very particular
group of specialists, with a deep understanding of the faith that forged
this resistance. Historians of religion welcomed the publication of this
book in German in 1998. It has been well used by scholars and by
students. This English version is very much to be welcomed. There is a
great deal of interest in this subject. The work and the sources now
become available to a very wide range of scholars in England and
North America. It will also be of interest to the general reader for it is
both scholarly and accessible.

Christine King, Vice-Chancellor, University of Staffordshire, Stafford,
U.K.

b) ed. D.B.Woolner and R.G.Kurial, FDR, the Vatican, and the Roman
Catholic Church in America, 1933-1945. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan 2003. 295 pp. ISBN 1-4039-6168-9

In reviewing this volume of collected papers from a major
international conference, held five years ago at Franklin Roosevelt’s
home, and now Presidential Archive and Library, at Hyde Park, New
York, I must beg your indulgence, since I was one of the participants.
My contribution on Myron Taylor’s war-time mission to the Vatican is
however likely to be superseded by the thorough research of Alexander
Schoerner, as outlined earlier in our July Newsletter. Some other
contributors, such as Michael Phayer, David Alvarez and Peter Kent –
all list members – have in the meanwhile published more substantial
monographs on their respective topics. But this volume brings the
differing points of view together in an attractive, scholarly and readable
form.

F.D.R. was an unfervent Episcopalian, i.e. Anglican, whose
acute political senses taught him the importance of maintaining good
relations with the Roman Catholic hierarchy, including the Pope. In
the opening chapter, Michael Barone surveys the relationship between
this patrician Protestant president and the largely Catholic and urban
voters who provided his political power base, first in New York and
then nationally. Roosevelt’s success, he believes, lay in his
inclusiveness, his warm and humorous optimism and above all his
resolve to take energetic measures to overcome the economic disasters
of the Great Depression. In addition he openly distanced himself from
the kind of Protestant bigotry which in 1928 had so fatally destroyed
the candidacy of his rival, the Catholic New York slum kid, Al Smith.
Catholics of a reformist trend, such as the supporters of the Catholic
Worker, were also attracted by Roosevelt’s social reform mentality.
The only exception was the outspoken, provocative and wholly biased
Fr. Coughlin of Michigan, who proved to be an unwelcome thorn in
Roosevelt’s side.

Readers of this Newsletter will probably be most interested in
the chapters dealing with Roosevelt’s international involvement,
especially with the Vatican. Already in 1937, FDR was concerned
about the looming danger of war, the likely effects on the United
States, and the need to promote the cause of peace. Having served
under Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt had learnt at first hand the
disadvantages of placing too much faith in the League of Nations, but
also of ignoring the potential influence of the Vatican. Pius XII, too, as
Cardinal Secretary of State, had earlier seen the need for good
relations, had come to the USA, and had visited Roosevelt’s home for
just this purpose in 1937. The difficulty lay in the fact that no structure
was in place for diplomatic exchanges, as Congress had closed down
its Vatican embassy several decades earlier for financial reasons.
Given the anti-Catholic sentiment in many Protestant communities,
especially in the south, Roosevelt could not risk asking for its
restoration.

But with the outbreak of war in Europe, Roosevelt felt impelled
to establish contact with the Pope, using the means of a Personal
Representative who would not need Senate approval. The Vatican
signaled immediate agreement. Myron Taylor, a prominent business
man was then appointed and at once set off for Rome. Pius was greatly
relieved to have this support from Roosevelt at a time when his
diplomatic efforts to preserve peace had so signally failed. He very
much hoped that together they could persuade the warring parties to
accept a mediated peace, and that Roosevelt would understand and
support the Pope’s strict impartiality. But it was not to be.

In fact, after Pearl Harbour, Roosevelt and the State Department
became as insistent as others that the Pope should abandon his neutral
stance and join in condemnation of the Axis. Inevitably there was a
cooling of the relationship, especially after the Germans surrounded
and nearly occupied the Vatican in 1943-44. Not until Rome was
liberated could Myron Taylor hasten back to find the Pope now
concerned about the growing menace of the Russian military advance
and the dire needs of the Italian people for relief supplies.

In his chapter, Michael Phayer is highly critical of Pius XII for
his failure to protest sufficiently against the Nazis” crimes, especially
the atrocities of the Holocaust. This was due, he claims, to the
misplaced emphases in the Pope’s mind, when saving the architecture
of Rome was given top priority. By contrast, Peter Kent is also critical
of the Pope, but for protesting too much about the dangerous
encroachments of Soviet Communism. The inflexibility of the Papal
war-aims and the refusal to consider compromises, lest these be seen as
a retraction of earlier denunciations, is seen by Kent as too high a price
to pay. Certainly from 1943 onwards, American policy diverged from
the Vatican’s. Pius regarded the demand for unconditional surrender as
“idiotic”, and was equally appalled by the concessions made at Yalta
and Potsdam. Kent’s later book expands this indictment by suggesting
that the Papal rigidity, though welcomed by many Poles, left the
bishops in eastern Europe with little or no room for manoeuvre. But by
1948, American policy towards Stalin and Communism had changed
dramatically. The Vatican and the State Department supported each
other closely during the crucial elections in Italy in that year.
But even so, there were still strong feelings in the United States
against too close a collaboration with the Vatican, as could be seen in
the unprecedented uproar in 1951 when Truman tried to appoint a
popular General, Mark Clark, as Ambassador to the Holy See. Volumes
of mail from outraged Protestants poured in, and forced Truman to
back down, as Michael Carter relates in his chapter.

In the absence of a regular diplomatic establishment,
maintaining a harmonious relationship fell on the Apostolic Delegate,
Amleto Cicognani, whose 25 years of service in Washington are
excellently described by Fr. Robert Trisco. This is clearly a synopsis of
a much longer work which we may hope Fr. Trisco will soon complete.
So too, David Alvarez’s short chapter is a prelude for his recent book,
Espionage in the Vatican (reviewed here in the July Newsletter). He
summarizes the American contribution to such operations as adding
“little but misdirection, confusion and uncertainty to American policy
toward the Vatican”. Presumably things have improved since then.
The two editors, David Woolner and Richard Kurial, are
respectively Director of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute,
and the Dean of Arts at the University of Prince Edward Island. So this
is a valuable piece of international collaboration, which raises
significant historical issues, but avoids religious or political polemic.
As such it usefully complements the earlier studies by Flynn and
Fogarty, and can be highly recommended to students at all levels.
JSC

c) P.Gallo, For Love and Country. The Italian Resistance. Lanham,
Maryland,: University of America Press. 2003 362 pp
ISBN 0-7618-249-0

Professor Patrick Gallo, who teaches at New York University,
has written a useful narrative account of the resistance movement in
Italy in the final stages of the second world war. He adopts a lively
style, including material from interviews with several surviving
participants amongst the resistance fighters during those dramatic days
in Rome and its surroundings. Given the nature of their underground
activities, it is inevitable that little documentary evidence exists, but
Gallo has skillfully exploited a large number of secondary sources in
various languages. It is a pity, however, that the book is marred by
numerous printing errors.

Following the overthrow of Mussolini, and the occupation of
Italy by the German army in September 1943, there were in fact three
wars going on concurrently. First, the struggle to fight the Germans
and their Fascist allies; second, the struggle to see who would emerge
to hold the reins of power in a future Italy; and third, the class struggle
when left-wing elements believed the time had come to implement a
full social revolution and to abolish the past altogether. The
intricacies, rivalries and overlapping of these various factions
inevitably makes for a complex picture. And Gallo’s narrative jumps
rather awkwardly from event to event, perhaps reflecting the confusion
that prevailed. He evokes very well, however, the dangers and miseries
which engulfed Rome during the nine months of German occupation.

His stance is naturally sympathetic to the Italian partisans
whose bravery in urban street attacks on the German occupiers resulted
in unprecedented and horrible reprisals. Here Gallo goes over the same
ground as Robert Katz and others, but corrects numerous details. He
also has a more sympathetic approach to the Vatican, whose members
he believes should also be seen as part of the resistance. He
appreciates the political dilemmas of the Pope, and praises the church’s
humanitarian efforts to assist the victims of Nazi and Fascist
repression. Thus he disagrees with those who believe that Pope Pius
XII could and should have effectively prevented either the deportation
of the Roman Jews in October 1943, or the terrible mass murders in the
Ardeatine Caves in the following spring. Both episodes are here well
described from the victims” point of view.

Gallo is more critical of the Allies for their military mistakes,
such as the failure to move quickly from the Anzio beachhead to
liberate Rome. Likewise he deplores Churchill’s readiness to try and
prop up the Italian monarchy, and his support for outdated right-wing
politicians. Most critically of all he attacks the Germans, whose
ruthless atrocities inflicted on both civilian and military elements were
compounded by their attitude of arrogant superiority towards the
population as a whole. His final chapter, dealing with the post-war
trials of these criminals, expresses his view that more severe sentences
should have been imposed.

Above all, Gallo seeks to uphold the reputation of the freedom
fighters, some 63,000 of whom lost their lives. The memorial
subsequently built over the site of the Ardeatine massacres succinctly
expresses Gallo’s sympathies:

We have been massacred here because we fought against
tyranny and against the foreign enemy for the independence of
our country. Our dream was that of a free, righteous, and
democratic Italy. May our sacrifice and our blood be the seed
of it and a warning for the coming generations.
JSC

2) Journal articles:

a) John Moses, Australian Anglican Leaders and
the Great War 1914-1918: The “Prussian Menace”, Conscription and
National Solidarity, in The Journal of Religious History, Sydney, Vol
25, No.3, October 2001.

The existing studies of the behaviour of the Australian churches
during the First World War fail to evaluate adequately their perception
of the war, in particular that of the Anglican hierarchy. The latter were
the leaders of the then largest denomination in Australia and they were
in general highly educated and well informed about the causes of the
war and in particular about Prussian-German political culture, hence
German war aims. Failure to take this into account results in a flawed
assessment of the Anglican Church’s stance on recruitment and
conscription, and their cultivation of a concept of national
“brotherhood”. The essay takes issue with the view held by some
historians that Australian Anglicanism uniformly pursued a pro-British
agenda at the expense of a pro-Australian agenda during the 1914-18
war.

b) B. Fletcher, Anglicanism and National Identity in Australia since
1962 in The Journal of Religious History, Sydney, Vol 25, no.3,
October 2001.

This paper examines the way in which the Anglican church in
Australia adapted itself to the social and cultural changes after 1962. In
that year the church gained a new constitution and a new freedom to
become more Australian. It also began to reposition itself on such
matters as race, multiculturalism and gender. By so doing it
incorporated the wider changes in Australian life into its institutional
structures and practices. Women and indigenous people came to play a
more important role. The author contends that this stance has
strengthened the church’s position in national life.

c) Two parallel articles in Evangelische Theologie, 2002, no.3 deal
with the issue of coming to terms with German guilt in the post-war
period. D.Koch covers the West German scene, outlining six stages by
which the churches and the wider public tried to cope with the rival
pressures of acknowledging the extent of the crimes committed in the
name of Germany, or of defending themselves by self-justifying
arguments. Even today, there is a reluctance to accept the full extent of
personal or national responsibility, and a danger that such tactics can
lead to further guilt-ridden situations. For his part Heiko Falcke, who
was one of the leading critics of the former communist regime in East
Germany, examines how the state’s manipulation of the term
“antifascism” sought to argue that the GDR and its citizens were
absolved from all Nazi crimes, which were “inherited” only by the
West Germans. Even the persecution of the Jews was downplayed by
the communist leadership, and therefore was never taken up
sufficiently by the churches. But a notable witness was performed by
the church youth group “Aktion Sühnezeichen” in concrete acts of
reconciliation to the Nazis” victims. Falcke too ends by warning that
dealing with the guilt of the past does not absolve the church from
facing the risk of incurring as much or even greater guilt in the future.

3) Book notes:

Hermann Rauschning. Materialien und Beiträge zu
einer politischen Biographie. ed. J.Hensel and Pia Nordblom. Warsaw:
Brostiana 2002. 180 pp.

This excellent collection of papers from an international group
of scholars raises anew the question of the controversial figure of
Hermann Rauschning, the one-time Nazi President of the Senate in
Danzig, who later defected from the Nazi cause, and then wrote the
best-selling exposé, Hitler speaks. The editors” contention is that
Rauschning has been badly served in post-1945 German historiography,
where he is made out to be either a traitor, an unrepentant conservative,
or a pure opportunist. The most interesting essay is by Anthony Carty
of Britain’s University of Derby who discusses Rauschning’s ideas in
his 1937 book The Revolution of Nihilism, a devastating critique of
Nazi radicalism from the pont of view of a German conservative
Catholic. Rauschning was alas! ignored at the time by his fellow
countrymen, but received a much greater audience when his more
famous, but often disputed, book on Hitler appeared just as war broke
out. Carty rightly stresses the fact that the Nazis” nihilistic radicalism
inevitably led with ever greater impetus to the chimera of world
domination and/or extermination of Germany’s enemies. Hitler was
thus more than a megalomanic dictator, but rather a purveyor of the
kind of nihilism brought on by the destruction of Christian moral
values in the first world war and after. It was a pity that, as a source of
direct quotations of Hitler’s own opinions, Rauschning has been heftily
disputed and discredited. But si non e vero, e ben trovato. This small
book will undoubtedly help those able to follow the German debate to
restore Rauschning to his due position as a valuable contemporary
observer of the crisis unfolding around him.

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

Dear Friends,
Contents:

1) Book reviews

a) Steigman-Gall, The Holy Reich
b) Kirby, Religion and the Cold War
c) Brouwer, Modern Women modernizing men
d) Denzler, Widerstand ist nicht das richtige Wort

2) Journal articles: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte
3) Book notes: Davis, A long walk to church; Muller, C. de Foucauld
1) Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich. Nazi Conceptions of
Christianity, 1919-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003 xvi + 294pp ISBN
0-521-82371-4.

(This review appeared first on H-German on June 6th 2003)

Richard Steigmann-Gall’s lively and sometimes provocative
study of the relationship between Nazism and Christianity breaks new
ground. He takes issue with those, like your reviewer, who argue that
Nazism and Christianity were incompatible, both in theory and practice.
Instead he examines more closely the areas of overlap and the
consequent ambiguities in the minds of many leading Nazis. He rejects
the view that, when Nazi orators before 1933 made frequent use of a
Christian vocabulary, this was purely a tactical device to gain votes.
Later on, such deceptive religiosity would be discarded because no
longer needed. Instead he shows how extensively there was a consistent
appreciation of Christianity as a religious system in the Nazi ranks,
including several members of its hierarchy.

Similarly he disputes the claim that those Christians who flocked
to the Nazi cause were shallow-minded opportunists, jumping on a
popular political bandwagon. Instead he argues that the stressful
conditions of a defeated Germany led many sincere Christians,
particularly Protestants, to regard the Nazi cause as theologically
justified, as well as politically appropriate.

Nazism idealized, even idolized, the German nation and Volk.
Steigmann-Gall shows how this tendency was already present in the
newly-created Bismarckian Reich, and was much fostered by the
Protestant clergy. Their war theology in 1914
asserted divine approval of Germany’s cause and called down damnation
on her enemies.

After her defeat in 1918, the clergy provided the spiritual climate for an
apocalyptic view of Germany’s destiny, valiantly guarding itself against
the onslaughts of the evils of Marxism, Judaism, Bolshevism and
materialism. Such dualistic thinking both ran parallel to and nurtured
the extremism of the radical political groups of the 1920s, out of which
Nazism emerged as the most successful.

Nazism’s most notorious characteristic was its antisemitism.
Many observers have claimed that the Holocaust was the culmination of
centuries of Christian intolerance and persecution. Churchmen, for
their part, have sought to draw a line between earlier Christian
theological anti-Judaism and the far more virulent Nazi racial
antisemitism.But Steigmann-Gall, following Uriel Tal, shows how easily both
Catholic and Protestant Germans could merge their religious antipathies
with the Nazis’ political campaign. On the other side, he shows how
many Nazis believed in the religious basis of their hatred of Jews, who
formed a negative point of reference for an ideology of national-religious
integration. Luther’s stance against the Jews could thus be supported,
for more than merely tactical reasons. And Hitler’s support of “positive
Christianity” was an attempt to overcome confessional differences in
order to concentrate Christian forces against their arch-enemy, the Jew.
To be sure many leading Nazis were anti-clerical. But this venom was
principally directed against those priests and pastors who put their
institutional loyalties ahead of their national ones. This did not prevent
these Nazis from believing that their movement was in some sense
Christian.

It was on this basis that such Nazis as Gauleiter Wilhelm Kube,
the Bavarian Minister of Education, Hans Schemm, or the Prussian
Minister of Justice, Hanns Kerrl, who later became Reich Minister of
Ecclesiastical Affairs, could seek an alliance with those elements in the
churches, especially Protestants, who supported the Nazis’ authoritarian,
anti-Marxist and antisemitic policies. This was not, Steigmann-Gall
believes, a mere opportunistic relationship on either side. Both believed
they were adopting a genuinely Christian stance, “following a call to
faith from God, which we hear in our Volk movement” (p. 73).

Following this interpretation, Steigmann-Gall finds that even
those Nazis most hostile to the churches could still have an ambivalent
relationship to Christianity. Alfred Rosenberg, for example, in his book
The Myth of the Twentieth Century made numerous positive references
to Christ as a fighter and antisemite, and was even warmer in praise of
the noted mediaeval mystic Meister Eckhart. If the Church could be
purged of its Jewish and Roman accretions, Rosenberg could look
forward to a Nordic-western soul faith which would reincarnate a purer
Christianity. In this he was only adopting the ideas of at least one
extreme wing of “German Christian” Protestantism.

Certainly, these “paganists” as Steigmann-Gall calls them,
exercised little control over Nazi policy. Hitler stoutly and consistently
rejected any talk of an ersatz religion based on German myths or
culminating in Valhalla. The “positive Christianity” of such leaders as
Goering continued to stress the advantages of a national
non-denominational Christianity in such areas as education or social
welfare. And even strident anti-clericals such as Goebbels or Streicher
supported the idea of an Aryan Christianity as an admirable moral
system. The fact that the churches were the only major institutions
which did not suffer Gleichschaltung shows, in Steigmann-Gall’s view
“the fundamentally positive attitude of the Nazi state toward at least the
Protestant Church as a whole”. For this reason, in 1934, Hitler refused to
back the radicals, and in 1935 appointed an old crony and primitive
Protestant, Hanns Kerrl to be Minister of Church Affairs. The kind of
Christianity Kerrl affirmed was proclaimed in his speeches:
Adolf Hitler has hammered the faith and fact of Jesus into the
hearts of the German Volk. . . . True Christianity and National
Socialism are identical.

But Kerrl was appointed to co-ordinate the rival Protestant factions and
he failed. Thereupon, Steigmann-Gall notes, Hitler turned against the
churches and abandoned institutional Protestantism once and for all.

But even so, according to one source, he still adhered to his original
ideas and was of the opinion that “Church and Christianity are not
identical” (p.188).

The differences between this interpretation and those put forward
earlier are really only of degree and timing. Steigmann-Gall agrees that
from 1937 onwards, Nazi policy toward the churches became much
more hostile. The influence of such notable anti-clericals as Bormann
and Heydrich grew exponentially and was restrained only by the need for
war-time compromises. On the other hand, Steigmann-Gall argues
persuasively that the Nazi Party’s 1924 program and Hitler’s
policy-making speeches of the early years were not just politically
motivated or deceptive in intent. He agrees with the view taken by
Hitler’s fellow-countryman, the Austrian theologian Friedrich Heer, and
considers them to be a sincere appreciation of Christianity as a value
system to be upheld. Yet he does not really want to admit that this Nazi
Christianity was eviscerated of all the most essential orthodox dogmas.
What remained was the vaguest impression combined with anti-Jewish
prejudice. Only a few radicals on the extreme wing of liberal
Protestantism would recognize such a mish-mash as true Christianity.
Steigmann-Gall is perfectly right to point out that there was never
any consensus among the leading Nazis about the relationship between
the Party and Christianity. As Baldur von Shirach later commented: “Of
all the leading men in the Party whom I knew, everyone interpreted the
party program differently. . . Rosenberg mystically, Goering and some
others in a certain sense Christian” (p.232). Ambiguities and
contradictions were numerous. 1) Over the years hostility grew even
when there remained a lingering desire to uphold an ongoing Christian
element, combining antisemitism and nationalism in some kind of
positive assessment.

Steigmann-Gall’s achievement is to have fully explored the
extensive records of the Nazi era to illustrate these often conflicting
conceptions of Christianity, and to assemble the evidence in a carefully
weighed evaluation. He makes an almost convincing case. But his final
view that post-1945 ideological imperatives meant that Nazism had to be
depicted as an evil and unchristian empire seems overdrawn. Yet he is
undeniably right to point out how much Nazism owed to German
Christian, especially Protestant, concepts, and how much support it
gained from a majority of Christians in Germany. That is certainly a
sobering lesson to be drawn from this interesting and well-reasoned
account.

1) As an example of the differences between Nazi leaders, the
following anecdote is recorded: On meeting Kerrl shortly after his
appointment as Church Minister, Heinrich Himmler told him: “I
thought you were only acting piously hitherto, but now I see you
actually are pious. I shall treat you badly in future”. When the
astonished Kerrl asked why, the Reichsführer SS answered: “Well, in
your view, the worse you are handled here below, the better marks
you will receive later”.
JSC

1b) Ed. Diane Kirby, Religion and the Cold War. Basingstoke,U.K.:
Palgrave-MacMillan. 2003. 245pp. ISBN 0-333-99398-5

This collection of conference papers came about through the
initiative of the editor, Diane Kirby. She realized that the time had come
for church historians to move forward in time from their intense
preoccupation with the events of the Second World War. She therefore
convened an international group of scholars from Britain, Germany,
Canada and the USA to examine the use and misuse of religion during
the political struggle commonly known as the Cold War. Some of these
pieces have already appeared in print, such as Peter Kent’s fine study of
Pope Pius XII’s lonely Cold War, or Matthew Hockenos’ examination of
the post-1945 German Evangelical Church, which is due out shortly
from the Indiana University Press.

Together these essays present several versions of how the power
of religion was harnessed to the policy goals of various states. In
particular, the need for North American and western European leaders to
forge a religiously-justified, but militarily armed, coalition against the
Soviet Union is extensively described. Frank Coppa begins by showing
that the Vatican’s long-standing hostility towards Communism was not
allayed by the war-time association with the west against Nazism. He
contends that Pius was right to criticize Roosevelt and Churchill for their
optimistic assumption that Stalin would be ready to co-operate in a new
era of peace and collaboration. Given the revolutionary and
anti-Christian record of the Communist Party, and its zeal in 1945 in
seizing control of all of eastern Europe, such fears of Soviet expansion
were certainly justified.

Peter Kent similarly shows that Pius XII was the first to mobilize
concern about the Communist threat in Italy, and to seek American aid
in repelling it. This was the period when the Vatican’s aims most closely
coincided with those of the United States. In effect, as he points out,
Pius’ readiness to co-operate with the United States meant the
abandonment of Vatican neutrality, and opened the way for charges that
the Pope was descending into the political arena. Kent is also critical of
Pius’ rigid ideological hostility, because this placed the Catholic bishops
in the Soviet-controlled areas in an embattled situation and prevented
any more workable compromises. He implies that Soviet repression was
due to the Vatican’s implacable opposition, but the evidence is surely
debatable. Only after the death of Stalin did Pius begin to urge the need
for some accommodation in order to facilitate the church’s pastoral
tasks. This prepared the way for a new approach in the 1960s.

In her own essay, Diane Kirby demonstrates how President
Truman sought to mobilize his countrymen by showing that the conflict
with the Soviet Union was a particular sort of Christian enterprise.
Opposition to the “evil empire” of communism was the moral
component, matching the military determination, both designed to
protect the west against the atheistic godless Marxist creed. The change
in Truman’s stance from his earlier willingness to co-operate with Stalin
cannot however be attributed to pressure from the Vatican, though he
undoubtedly came to see that the Vatican could be a useful ally,
especially in Italy. However, the American hopes that Catholic influence
in eastern Europe could be mobilized for some sort of resistance
movement were not to be realized. So too Truman’s plans for a similar
recruitment of Protestants through the newly-formed World Council of
Churches met with even greater scepticism. Truman’s simplistic
anti-communist moralism was rejected. Nevertheless, when the World
Council held its Second Assembly in the United States in 1954,
President Eisenhower himself opened the session, clearly linking politics
and religion. The latter remained a strategic weapon in the Cold War
arena, and was to re-appear thirty years later under Pope John Paul II.
Matthew Hockenos contributes a lively and insightful analysis of
the German Evangelical Church after 1945, as it tried ˆ often reluctantly
– to come to terms with its lack-lustre record during the Nazi period.
John Pollard examines the political factors at play in Italy, and notes that
while the Vatican readily opposed communism, the church leadership
was also somewhat dubious about the Christian Democratic Party. Many
would have preferred a more authoritarian regime, or at least one more
susceptible to clerical control.

Equally interesting is the short paper by Anna Dickinson on the
Russian Orthodox Church. She points out that the war saved this church
from virtual extinction. But the price of its revival was subordination to
the policies of the regime. Its dependence ruled out the possibility of
independent action. The Church was useful in strengthening Soviet
control over such areas as the re-conquered Ukraine, where the
ambitions of Roman Catholics had to be thwarted. This aim, she claims,
was more important than establishing the Russian Orthodox Church’s
presence abroad in such bodies as the World Council of Churches. But
this also was a strategy agreed between the Church and the Soviet State.
In effect, until 1960, the war-time gains made by the Church remained
intact.

George Egerton breaks new ground with his interesting
assessment of the influence of religious ideas on Canadian politics in the
post-war period. The Canadian churches provided religious justification
for Canada’s war effort in 1939 and again in the Korean War. But at the
same time a more liberal shift took place with the support given to the
plan to give human rights an enhanced legal and constitutional status, as
in the UN’s 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. However, the initially
guarded attitude of the Canadian Liberal Government, the opposition of
conservative churchmen and the outbreak of the Korean War, all
combined to delay implementation of such a Bill of Rights for another
decade.

Ian Jones, by contrast, looks at the responses to the Cold War
amongst local clergy in Britain. Did they share the leaders’ need to
mobilize Christian opposition to the dangers of communism? On the
whole yes, but largely to contrast the laxity of Christian discipleship with
the resolute dedication and commitment of Communists. In fact both
were to suffer from the increasing materialism and individualism of the
subsequent decades.

Two interesting epilogues are provided by Hartmut Lehmann’s
account of the changes in the status of Martin Luther in the
communist-controlled German Democratic Republic, and by Tony
Shaw’s account of how religious propaganda was used in Cold War
film-making in the United States in the 1950s. These round out a
helpful compendium of articles whose coherence and interlocking views
provide an excellent starting point for further research ahead.
JSC

1c) Ruth C.Brouwer, Modern women modernizing men. The changing
missions of three professional women in Asia and Africa, 1902-69.
Vancouver: U.B.C. Press 2003
198 pp. Paper $29.95 ISBN 0-7748-0953-1

The first half of the twentieth century saw challenging
developments in the Christian missionary endeavour throughout the
world. Imperialism was almost everywhere abandoned. Paternalism and
racial superiority were relegated to the past. Preaching the gospel
dogmatically gave way to practical Christian witness of service.
Overseas mission boards transformed themselves into partnerships.
Younger churches were born. And, in the era of interest to Ruth
Brouwer, gender roles were overthrown in favour of professional
ministry, particularly by women, no longer content to be regarded merely
as helpmeets of missionary men.

Ruth Brouwer, who teaches at King’s College, University of
Western Ontario, exemplifies these trends through the lives of three
Canadian women missionaries in India, Korea and Africa. Largely
because the missionary history has also developed in recent decades, it
is no longer fashionable to write the kind of hagiographic biography of
missionaries so popular in earlier years. Instead the trend is to devote
attention to the culture of the recipients. So while Brouwer’s splendidly
researched study of these women runs counter to today’s trend, it is
nevertheless a significant rescuing of the achievements of three notable
Canadian pioneers who embarked on ambitious schemes to enhance
Christian medical and educational services in their respective areas of
the world. In particular, they were engaged as professionals in training,
or as her title indicates, in modernizing men.

Dr. Choné Oliver was the first to go out in 1902 from rural
Ontario to rural Rajputana in the hinterland of central India. After many
years in this isolation, Oliver recognized the need to abandon the former
attitude whereby medical services were used to open doors for the
preaching of Christianity, and evangelism was given priority on the local
level. Instead Oliver emerged as one of the champions of justifying the
ministry of healing in its own right, following the example of Jesus
himself. But such a witness of Christian service could not afford to be
second-rate. Only the best would do. In the 1920s the Indian provincial
governments began to improve the quality of their medical services.
Oliver and her colleagues in the newly-founded Christian Medical
Association of India therefore launched a vigorous campaign for having
well-trained Christian doctors, both men and women, to provide the kind
of health and healing so obviously needed. In this way, they believed,
Christian missions could overcome the stigma, not only of being
foreign, but also being sub-standard.

Oliver’s career thus led her to become the secretary and
promoter of the CMAI, and in particular a fervent advocate of having an
all-Indian Christian Union Medical College to serve the needs of
post-colonial India. The model already existed in China, where John
D.Rockefeller had provided the funds for the Peking Union Medical
College. (Missions in China always had priority, both in supporters’
interest and in funding). But, in the case of India, this scheme came at a
bad moment. At the end of the 1920s, the Great Depression choked off
donations. The mission boards in Britain and the USA were
discouraging. And while the Indian princes and maharajahs had money,
none was prepared to put up the millions of rupees necessary for such an
ambitious scheme. Oliver worked tirelessly with her male colleagues to
keep the idea going. On a smaller scale, plans were made at the end of
the 1930s to upgrade the Christian Missionary Medical School for
Women at Vellore, founded by the redoubtable and charismatic woman
director Ida Scudder. But Scudder and her American backers wanted to
keep their hospital for women alone. It was only later, after Oliver had
retired that Vellore developed to become the world-famous medical
centre of subsequent years. Her contribution to this institution is
therefore only now getting its due recognition.

Florence Murray’s experience in Korea in the years after the first
world war ran on similar lines. She too sought to enhance the medical
services and facilities of the Presbyterian Mission. She too was unwilling
to be confined to the traditional women’s sphere in missionary medicine.
Integration, rather than gender separation, was, for her, the way forward
professionally. She saw the need to have the best possible training in
western methods for Korean young women and men. She was obliged,
however, to recognize that, for most women, marriage was all-important
and would bring an end to any career. So she concentrated on the more
efficacious training of men, who could be expected to serve for a
life-time. Perhaps she underestimated the kind of reaction her insistence
on being a “hard taskmaster” would have on young interns, conscious of
their superiority as men. Culture tensions were inevitable. But as time
went on, she demonstrated a growing willingness to learn from and with
her male associates. In any case her authority as hospital superintendent
came to be shared, mainly for political reasons. Japanese antagonism
against western missionaries was increasing. After Pearl Harbour,
Murray was allowed to keep working until compulsorily repatriated in
exchange for some Japanese in America.

As soon as she could after the war was over, Murray returned to
Korea, but not to the same hospital which was now under communist
control. In Seoul she was able to link up with many exiles from the
north, and still championed the kind of medical standards she had striven
for in earlier years. She was particularly helpful in persuading funding
agencies at home to provide scholarships for young Korean doctors,
many of whom she had taught in the first place. Even after retirement in
1961 she stayed on in Korea to work at a small leprosy hospital.
Throughout her life her dedication as a medical missionary was both
evident and inspiring.

Margaret Wrong was the daughter of a distinguished professor of
history at the University of Toronto, and her career was closely linked to
the new ecumenical Christian movement. After the first world war she
helped to organize the European Student Relief programme of the World
Student Christian Federation, and then was invited to undertake a new
venture by the International Missionary Council. This was to establish an
International Committee on Christian literature for Africa, a liberal
gesture recognizing the need to promote not just literacy programmes
throughout the continent, but also to encourage the publication of young
African authors in their own as well as colonial languages. Margaret
Wrong became the catalyst for such endeavours, working out of London,
but frequently touring parts of Africa to prod both government and
missionary boards to see the needs for the future, and to promote local
talent. Almost inevitably such opportunities were only for men. But she
also fostered the kinds of writing on domestic subjects which would help
ordinary women. Her work matched directly the new-found interests of
the colonial governments in establishing educational programmes as part
of the effort to “prepare” Africans for eventual self-government. At the
same time her influence helped the missions to evolve beyond the
traditional paternalism, even though many expatriate missionaries came
to deplore what they saw as the excessive anti-colonialism of their
pupils.

For women, possibly, the most useful help came with adult
literacy movements. Margaret Wrong did much to facilitate the
publication of such materials. But above all she promoted the closest
collaboration with Africans in defining what was needed and getting
them to write suitable text books. Almost inevitably such writers were
men.

As Ruth Brouwer correctly notes, the careers of these three
women reflected new patterns in the inter-war missionary movement.
On the one hand, they faced and partook of increasingly secular
tendencies in the West, and on the other responded to the goal of the
modernizing and nationalizing elites of the colonized and missionized
societies. She could have made the point that all three owed much to the
influence of the notable ecumenical statesman John R. Mott, who
inspired so many young women and men, especially Canadian, to offer
their services to foreign peoples and to devote their lives in the task of
evangelizing the world in their generation. They also represented a new
stage in western feminism. They were able to play expansive roles
because of their pride in being professionals, but at the same time
modernizers confident that their skills were the needed ones for the
mainly male recipients.

Of course, in later years, these goals have been questioned. The
missionary era is effectively over. But the humanitarianism and
international vision of these women of faith, sustained by their belief in
the social relevance of Christianity, should not be forgotten. They stood
in and developed a great tradition of service overseas, and indeed handed
it on to a host of secular voluntary agencies, especially here in Canada.
We are indebted to Ruth Brouwer for her helpful and sympathetic
account, placing these women’s notable contributions in their historical
setting.
JSC

d) Georg Denzler, Widerstand ist nicht das richtige Wort. Katholische
Priester, Bischoefe und Theologen im Dritten Reich. Zurich: Pendo
Verlag. 2003. ISBN 3-85842-479-X

Fifty years ago, a German Protestant theologian characterized the
churches’ stance towards Nazism as one of “reluctant resistance”. But
Georg Denzler has a harsher verdict for the Catholics. Their attitude was
neither active reistance, nor even passive opposition. At best, it was a
partly dissenting behaviour. Resistance is therefore not the right word,
even though propagated ever since 1945 by all the official organs of the
German Catholic church. In this new series of essays, several of which
were broadcast on Bavarian radio, Denzler, who taught at Bamberg
University, recapitulates the views already advanced in earlier books.

He is highly critical of all the prevarications, delusions and hypocrisies
which have led so many Catholics to evade coming to terms with their
Nazi past, just as he is equally appalled by the illusions, nationalism and
obedience to usurped authority, which characterized the Catholic church
during the Nazi years. As a resolute historian, Denzler has investigated
all the relevant sources carefully but sceptically, and is well aware of the
pitfalls and temptations, as well as the persecutions suffered by Catholics
at the Nazi hands. Above all, he is familiar with the vast extent of
Catholic publications and speeches, from which he draws appropriate
quotations to prove his points. His criticisms of the hierarchy’s timidity
and lack of unity in face of Hitler’s assault are therefore well founded,
and indeed have been frequently expressed before. He similarly has
little time for the apologetic tone of the “official” historiography, which
has been very productive ever since Rolf Hochuth’s attacks of the 1960s,
but which has continued to stress the Catholic Church’s “Resistance” to
Nazi encroachments.

To show that this is not enough, Denzler gives some fine insights
into Catholic behaviour, both pro- and anti-Nazi, including some excellent
short portraits of Catholics, some of whom are virtually unknown. For
example, he draws attention to such theologians as Anton Stonner, one
of the now ignored sympathisers with Nazism, or, on the other side,
Chaplain Joseph Rossaint and Fr Franz Reinisch who was executed for
refusing to serve in the Geman military because of his political
opposition to the demon Hitler. The short memoir of Georg Moenius is a
model of its kind. Neither he, nor such Nazi activists as Fr. Josef Roth
and the former priest Albert Hartl, are commemorated today, except by
such maverick historians as Denzler. But their services, for or against
the Nazi state, need to be remembered. And that is Denzler’s merit.
The book ends with a short but scathing review of Daniel
Goldhagen’s latest publication on the church and the Holocaust. Denzler
rightly acccuses Goldhagen of failing to do his historical homework, and
instead of relying on secondary polemical sources for his diatribe. In
fact, he has found a very appropriate quotation from Goldhagen’s own
work to describe this latest effusion: “This is an artifical construction of
half-truths in the service of an ideology. And it is so full of extraordinary
factual mistakes that it amounts to a pattern of falsehoods and
distortions.”
JSC

2) Journal articles:

The latest issue of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte Vol.15, (2002) no.2, has
no less than three articles in it by list-members: Beth Griech-Pollele
summarizes the contents of her recently-published biography of Cardinal
Galen, omitting the overly moralistic inferences but stressing his role as
an ardent anti-Communist. Susanne Brown-Fleming gives us the paper
about Cardinal Muench which she delivered at last year’s German
Studies Association meeting, as briefly mentioned in last December’s
issue of this Newsletter.

And Gerhard Besier throws light on the divisions within the Geman
Evangelical Church about the Spanish Civil War. In addition Armin
Boyens reflects briefly on the World Council of Churches’ attempts to
come to terms with the past, while Kristine Fischer-Hupe describes
post-1945 German church historiography, and the different approaches
adopted by catholics and protestants. The issue, as usual, concludes
with more than 150 pages of bibliography for church history publications
for the period September 2001 to August 2002. This is an unrivalled
service, covering all parts of the globe, and is worth the effort of
perusing the entries with care.3) Book Notes:

Nathaniel Davis, A Long Walk to Church. A contemporary history of
Russian Orthodoxy, 2nd edition. Boulder, Colorado: Westview press
2003. 368 pp.

This second edition of a highly stimulating account of the Russian
Orthodox Church revises and updates the original of 1995. Much has
happened in between, and Davis has kept his ear close to the ground,
having originally served for many years in the American Embassy in
Moscow. New trials, troubles and opportunities have occurred. The
church’s attempts to regain its hold over Russia’s national traditions can
be seen in the controversial canonization process of the last Czar,
Nicholas II. More problematic have been the attempts to ward off
competition, both from energetic protestant groups, as well as Roman
Catholic and Greek Catholic (Uniate) communities. Schisms have
occurred in the Ukraine, and the Orthodox hold over large parts of
Siberia is still tenuous. But the Church manifests a luminous faith, and
is struggling not only to open new parishes, but also to reawaken the
faith long overlaid by communist atheism. New recruits for the
priesthood and monasteries are coming forward, but still more are
needed. Institutional rebuilding and moral leadeership for the nation are
huge, as yet unsolved, tasks. Nathaniel Davis is an excellent guide.

Jean-Marie Muller, Charles de Foucauld. Frère universel or
moine-soldat? Paris: Editons la decouverte, 2002. 237 pp

Charles de Foucauld was one of the most notable figures in French
Catholic church life in the early twentieth century. His resolve to go off
to the wilderness of the Saharan desert in order to convert the tribal
natives, by whom he was later murdered, gave him a fame which could
easily lead to a belief that he deserved to be made a saint. (The
Protestant equivalent was Albert Schweitzer, also dedicating his life to
the African natives). But Jean-Marie Muller, who is an experienced
writer, and an advocate for pacifism, has now written this questioning
biography to challenge the prevailing hagiography. He points out that
Foucauld was a man of his time. He grew up in the aftermath of France’s
1870 defeat, and like many others, saw the conquest of Africa as a
partial recompense. His identification with the French colonialist and
military rulers of the Sahara, and seeming agreement with their
pacification measures, raises serious questions. So too, his stance on the
outbreak of war in 1914 saw an outburst of Germanophobia and
revanchism which would seem hardly compatible with his saintly
reputation. Muller explores the seeming contradictions between the
hermit of the desert expounding brotherly love, and the fiery Frenchman
with his militant nationalism. But he confesses he can’t provide a
complete explanation for such a paradox.

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

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Dear Friends,
An Ecumenical Gesture
It is recorded that on the painted ceiling of the Chapel
“Mater Redemptoris” in the Papal Lateran University in Rome, which
depicts the heavenly Jerusalem, we see not only several Catholic martyrs of
the twentieth century, including Edith Stein, but also the Protestant German
martyr Elisabeth von Thadden, denounced to the Gestapo and subsequently
murdered in 1943, and the Orthodox Pavel Florinskij.
Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) Breward, History of the Churches in Australasia
S. and W.Emilsen, Mapping the Landscape
b) Rutherdale, Women and the White
Man’s God
c) Feldkamp, Goldhagen’s unwillige Kirche
d) V.Perica, Balkan Idols 

 

2) Book notes: Hew Strachan, The First World War
3) Articles

a) McNutt, Adolf Schlatter and the Jews

Book Reviews:

1a) I. Breward, A History of the Churches in Australasia, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001, 474pp, $110.00 (AUS)

Ian Breward’s recent contribution to Henry and Owen Chadwick’s seminal
series, ‘Oxford History of the Christian Church’, is a masterful treatment of
a vast topic. Breward, who is Emeritus Professor of Church History in
Melbourne’s United Faculty of Theology, was given an enormous task when
commissioned to write a general history of the Churches throughout the
Australasian region, from first contact in July 1681 when the Apostolic
Prefecture of Terra Australis was established, through to the present day.
Breward was an obvious choice to be the author – he had already written the
History of Australian Churches, which was published in 1993 by Allen &
Unwin, and is without doubt the most prolific ecclesiastical historian that
the region has produced. Nonetheless, the size of the project would have
daunted a more fainthearted historian, yet there is no doubt that Breward
has succeeded in his task, and that the finished product is a fitting addition
to the Chadwicks’ series.

The scope of Breward’s work is evident when one considers the geographic
– not to say cultural – margins of the topic: New Caledonia, Melanesia, New
Zealand, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Tonga
and, of course, Australia, all fall within his view. But this is then
overlaid, by necessity, with the multi-denominational perspectives of the Anglican,
Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist-Uniting and Pentecostal Churches, as
well as the numerous indigenous variants of these that grew up in many of
the islander Churches. Breward takes his readers on a geographical and
ecclesiological journey that winds its way through denominational
sensitivities, the complexities of missionary engagement with local
populations and the vexed issue of what constitutes ‘missionary success’
amongst non-Western audiences, and the ever-present tension between
Church and State. Indeed, the prominence Breward gives to the Christian
orientation of many high profile political figures (not least among these
being the Aboriginal pioneers of reconciliation, Eddie Mabo and Pat
Dodson) is suggestive of a certain commitment to political engagement
within the Churches generally. There is also, naturally enough, a
chronological narrative within the book that negotiates the development
from missions to Churches, including the changing nature of the Churches
against the backdrop of evolving ecclesiastical structures, the evolution of
the Australasian societies themselves (as the loci of the Churches’ contexts),
wars and depressions, and the search for religious credibility in the
liberalizing sixties.

As a work of sociologically informed history, the book is invaluable, and
asks some important questions of both anthropology and missiology; why,
for example, did missions succeed so well amongst the Tahitians and Maori
(pp.38, 45-47), and yet not at all amongst Australia’s indigenous peoples
(pp.4ff)? Yet within all of this, Breward is able still to present the
Church as fundamentally a human institution, and not an anonymous bureaucratic
machine. The personal element is never far from the surface – again, not
surprising, perhaps, given that Breward is, first and foremost, a Christian
minister and only then and thereby a Church historian. In this light, there
are some intriguing personalities that Breward brings to the fore. Of
particular interest are the women, all too often ignored in the past from
broad ecclesiastical surveys. Mary MacKillop, for example, whose
commitment to the education of poor children led to the founding of the
Sisters of St. Joseph was – in spite of the not inconsiderable setback of
excommunication in 1871 – beatified in 1995 (pp.131-133). Similarly,
Caroline Chisolm exemplified the best of female lay influence, by using her
deep Catholic confession as a basis for urging better conditions for
impoverished – and often exploited – migrants (pp.70-71).

On the other hand, Breward highlights a number of rather more unsavoury
aspects of the Australasian Churches’ history. The fact, for example, that the
removal of indigenous children from their parents – a State-run program of
assimilation that was tacitly endorsed by the major denominations – did not
end, in Western Australia at least, until 1980 (p.246)! Or the fact that the
first Aboriginal Roman Catholic priest was not ordained until 1975. Or the
conflation of nationalism with religion in Fiji, when Colonel Rabuka – who
led successful military coups in that country in 1987 – decreed that
Indian-born Fijians had either to convert to Christianity or leave the
country.

Materially, therefore, the book is a mine of information that deserves a
place in every library and every bookshop. The bibliographical lists at the
book’s end are, in themselves, valuable. There are a few structural flaws, to
my mind, mainly as a result of the vastness of the topic. There are, for
example, often sudden shifts in narrative direction that tend to jar in the
reader’s mind. It can be disconcerting, for example, to read about religious
nationalism in one paragraph and then in the next to be confronted with the
challenges of feminist theology. However, such disruptions to narrative and
structural flow do not in any significant sense detract from what is
otherwise an illuminating and richly-sourced volume.

Given his recent retirement, one may suspect – but not wish! – that this will
be Breward’s last major work. If it is, he could scarcely have written a more
fitting conclusion to his career.

S. Emilsen & W.W. Emilsen (eds), Mapping the Landscape: Essays in
Australian and New Zealand Christianity. Festschrift in Honour of
Professor Ian Breward, New York: Peter Lang, 2000, 368pp, US$65.95.

Ian Breward, Emeritus Professor of Church History at Melbourne’s
Theological Hall, is undoubtedly one of Australasia’s most respected
historians, in both Church and secular circles. His teaching has been
enormously influential on generations of ministerial ordinands, his
preaching has helped innumerable parishioners, and his academic writing
has been both prolific and ground-breaking. It is somewhat disappointing,
therefore, that this Festschrift, intended as are all such volumes to be due
recognition of his sterling service, is so lacklustre in quality.
Festschrifts are often problematic affairs. One has only to think of
Bonhoeffer’s anguish at not being invited to contribute to a volume
honouring Barth on the occasion of the latter’s 50th birthday in 1936. This
volume similarly falls short, and not merely because some of Breward’s
closest fellow-scholars and friends have, like Bonhoeffer, been inexplicably
overlooked. (Where, for example, are Stewart Gill, Andrew Hamilton and
Ken Manley, all Australian Church historians of note and long-time
associates of Breward’s? Where, even, is James Packer, fellow historian of
Puritanism?).

The book itself is divided into two major sections, on Australia and New
Zealand respectively, a division which in many ways mirrors the course of
Breward’s own life. Indeed, the first major article is a short biography,
which illustrates how close Breward’s involvement in ecclesiastical and
academic spheres in both Australia and New Zealand has been. Again, the
geographical motif is reflective not only of Breward’s personal journeys but
indeed very much of his pedagogical agenda, according to which he has
viewed the mapping of contours within the Church histories of his two
countries as absolutely essential (and, more to the point, still
deficient). The structure of the book thus makes a great deal of sense.

Moreover, within both sections, there are some gems of articles that deserve wider readership.
Chris Mostert’s claim for the viability and indeed necessity of
non-contextual theology that takes the epithet ‘catholic’ seriously, is a
profound piece of writing that combines a thorough awareness of the
contemporary Australian theological scene with a deep familiarity with
Moltmann. Stuart Piggin’s contribution on the existence of a uniquely
Australian Christology demonstrates the extent to which a ‘down under’
Christ may in fact be precisely the type of messiah-figure that a suffering
world needs. And John Tonkin’s article, in which he surveys the unusually
harmonious relationship between an evangelical Cathedral Dean, a
missionary Archbishop and an Anglo-Catholic precentor in 1960s Perth,
exemplifies what good Church history is all about.

Within the New Zealand section, too, some of the contributions are worthy
of note. Graeme Ferguson reflects on the theological relevance to regional
identity of New Zealand’s heroic but fateful participation in the Gallipoli
campaign of 1915. Peter Matheson, also, gives a typically lucid account of
the evolution of theology in New Zealand, from the first days of missionary
contact with Maori, through to the responsiveness and creativity of
postmodern theology in more recent years.

Unfortunately, however, many of the other articles are less than satisfactory
for a volume that, in seeking to honour one of the brightest Church leaders
in the Australasian region, should really have set its benchmark of quality
higher. Denham Grierson’s piece, entitled ‘History as Narrative Fiction’, is a
more simplistic treatment of history’s inherent subjectivity than one would
wish to read from any decent Honours student. It adds nothing new, and
reads like those ‘introductions to postmodern history’ that were popular in
the early 1990s. Much the same thing could be said of the contributions
from Muriel Porter (‘Ian Breward: an Australasian life’), Roger Thompson
(‘Pastor Extraordinaire: A Portrait of Hector Harrison) and Allan Davidson’s
useful but straightforwardly bibliographical ‘New Zealand and Religious
Myopia’.

All of this may seem unduly harsh criticism. There is no doubt that the
intent of the volume was laudable and the justification for it beyond
question. Similarly, the fact that the editors were able to assemble a good
number of eminent Church historians from both countries testifies to
Breward’s standing. However, the reputation of Ian Breward’s own
scholarship – and indeed of the contributors – makes it all the more
surprising and disappointing that the overall quality of the book was not
consistently higher. While a number of the articles are fine pieces of work,
one is left with the unhappy impression that Breward himself deserved
better.
Mark Lindsay, Melbourne

1b) Myra Rutherdale, Women and the White Man’s God.
Gender and Race in the Canadian Mission Field.
Vancouver/Toronto: UBC Press. 2002. 224 pp. $29.95
paperback.

Myra Rutherdale’s account of missionaries in
Canada’s northern and north-west territories in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries enters new ground. Previously,
such writings were by men about men; instead she seeks to
present the women’s experience. Her interest is particularly in
women missionaries, or wives of missionaries, and in the various
accommodations they made as they encountered the strange
inhabitants, the harsh climate and the difficult living conditions
of the Canadian north.

To this end, she researched the experience of over 100
women members of the Church of England in Canada, primarily
because of the excellent state of the archives of the Dioceses of
Caledonia, the Yukon and the Arctic, as well as of the Church
Missionary Society.

This is old-style missionary history with a new twist. At
no point does Rutherdale attempt to trace the responses of the
Aboriginal people, which would have required an entirely
different approach.

Missionary expansion in the nineteenth century over
the vast unknown areas of northern and western Canada was part
and parcel of European penetration and colonization. These
English missionaries brought with them the panoply of
imperialist certainty, beneficence and racial superiority, as
exhibited throughout the British Empire.

But the actual experience of association with the
Aboriginal peoples was often in conflict with the preconceived
ideas of these strangers. So too social perceptions became altered
on the mission frontier, and gender roles changed, on what was
regarded as the northernmost outpost of the Empire. Over time
there were major changes in the way in which the religious
objectives overlapped with or conflicted with the Canadian
government’s aim of assimilating these exotic Aboriginal peoples
in a gigantic nation-building and colonialist endeavour.
Rutherdale seeks to recapture the largely overlooked role of
women in this process.

This is not an attempt to glorify or romanticize these
English or English-Canadian women for their often hard, even
heroic, lives. Rather Rutherdale reflects on the meaning of their
work and the significance of their relations with their charges.
She shows very clearly that the white women’s preconceptions
were modified or abandoned by their contacts both with the land
and the people. The result was a syncretism, blending missionary
assumptions and aboriginal insights, which eventually were to be
recognized as inherently valid. It was, Rutherdale claims, a
hybrid culture which lent complexity to the evolving missionary
experience.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the missionary task
was assumed to be man’s work. The image of a hearty masculine
outdoorsman bursting with evangelical zeal was much promoted
by the Church Missionary Society, Yet, despite early opposition,
the CMS came by the 1880s to recognize the value of women
missionaries. In fact, by the turn of the century, most Anglican
missionaries in northern Canada were women. Rutherdale
explores how this fact changed gender perceptions, as women
sought to gain credit for their contributions to the Anglican
missionary enterprise.

But white women, no less than white men, brought with
them the stereotypes of European superiority and Aboriginal
backwardness. The natives’ superstition and ignorance needed to
be replaced by the Christian gospel, while for many women
missionaries “cleanliness was next to Godliness”. Physical
squalor was often linked to spiritual or moral deficiency. All the
more need for Christian instruction.

Rutherdale is naturally critical of the imperialist
attitudes of the dominant discourse of missionary women, but
also draws attention to the increasing ambivalence expressed in
later years, which paved the way for the new relationships of
today.

Considering the limited number of missionary women
in the north, Rutherdale has compiled a remarkable treasure trove
from both public and private sources. Of course, the missionary
journals and appeals for funding, often written by or about these
women and their work, present a positive picture. But so do
private letters and journals. They depict clearly the prevailing
commitment to duty and service, and even the glamour of their
experiences. In most cases, Christianity, motherhood and
morality were inextricably mixed, as Rutherdale shows in her
various case studies.

At the same time, she places these experiences in their
wider, imperial setting, since these women’s attributes were
much the same “from Baffin’s icy margin to Afric’s sultry
shores”.

In retrospect, however, a less favourable judgment has to
be taken to the misguided policy of forcible assimilation of
aboriginal children in residential schools. Missionary women were
frequently involved in disciplinary measures, deeply and long
resented by the pupils. So too Rutherdale skirts around the
damage done by the dogmatic rigidities of these
earnest Evangelical women, whose eagerness for large-scale conversions to
their brand of English Christianity was constantly frustrated.

It took a long time for these missionaries to see that
the aboriginal people took only those elements they wanted from
Christianity and then blended them into their traditional cultures.
It took even longer to overcome the missionaries’ racialism and
paternalism or to accept aboriginal peoples as equals. In
Rutherdale’s view, “the transition from a remarkable intolerance
for things Aboriginal to one of accommodation is probably the
most interesting aspect of the history of Anglicanism in the
north”.

Certainly, she is right to suggest that the Aboriginal ministry has
been crucial to the survival of the Anglican church in northern
Canada. The verdict on its early history is still out.
Recently the Anglican Church officially decried the
misplaced benevolence of colonizers who tried too hard to
deliver the message of Christianity. But Rutherdale’s
vignettes of the lives of the women involved points to the
more fluid and conflicting dynamics between the servants
of the White Man’s God and the Aboriginal people. In fact
the relationships were often, on both sides, seen to be
helpful and creative. Her findings therefore help to
present a more positive picture of the past than has recently
been propagated in the wider Canadian society.
JSC

c) Michael F.Feldkamp, Goldhagens unwillige Kirche. Alte und neue
Fälschungen über Kirche und Papst während der NS-Herrschaft.
Munich: Olzog, 2003. 178 pp ISBN 3-7892-8127-1

Michael Feldkamp has undertaken the thankless task of refuting the
numerous falsifications of history which have appeared in a recent series of
books dealing with Pope Pius XII, the Vatican and the Catholic Church,
culminating in Daniel Goldhagen’s A Moral Reckoning. The Role of the
Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its unfulfilled Duty of Repair, which
was published at the end of 2002. Much of this genre of writing arises
from some prior political or ideological interest, which then uses, or
misuses, history for its purposes. Nevertheless, in Feldkamp’s view, if these
distortions remained uncorrected, they could come to be accepted as
accurate versions of the truth, and poison the atmosphere for years. Hence
his involvement. His qualifications to do so are based on his own
researches and his two books on the topic. He is now a research historian
employed by the German Parliament in Berlin.

Attacks on the character and policies of Pope Pius XII began already
in the war years, principally by communist authors. But the criticism
became much more vocal a few years after Pius’ death in 1958. A young
Swiss German playwright produced a striking play The Deputy, castigating
the Pope for his alleged failure to support the Jewish victims of the Nazi
Holocaust. Almost all subsequent critiques follow the same line as
Hochhuth, and there is a great deal of recapitulation, and even direct
overlap from one critical author to another. But as Feldkamp rightly points
out, lies don’t become truth just by being frequently repeated (p.24).

As a result of Hochhuth’s attack, the Vatican authorized the
publication of a lengthy series of 11 documentary volumes for the war
years, reproducing the telegrams and memoranda between the Vatican and
its various diplomatic representatives around the world. Despite this
unprecedented move, critics still demanded more. They accused the papal
authorities of suppressing or not publishing evidence which would reveal
the Vatican’s policies to be deficient. They demanded that the archives be
opened to all comers, even though the material had still to be properly
catalogued. In the 1990s these charges were again advanced, and resulted
in a new move by the Vatican, designed to be conciliatory. They appointed
a joint Catholic-Jewish Commission to look at the published volumes again,
and to see how best their findings could be more widely spread. But the
result was only to encourage renewed demands for the archives to be fully
open so that nothing could remain hidden or suppressed.

All these stages are well described by Feldkamp. Despite the
discreditable behaviour of the above-mentioned Commission, the Vatican
yielded by opening the archival holdings of part of the controversial
aspects, i.e. those covering its relations with Germany from 1922 up to
1939, when Eugenio Pacelli was first Nuncio in Germany and then Cardinal
Secretary of State. Feldkamp does not expect these papers to reveal much
that is new, though they will fill in the details of already published
accounts. But at the same time they are unlikely to put a stop to the
kind of unbridled criticisms by such authors as Goldhagen.

Feldkamp’s analysis of Goldhagen’s new book can be described as a
hatchet job. He points out the frequency with which Goldhagen indulges in
sweeping generalizations, rehearses stereotypical anti-Catholic prejudices,
relies for his information solely upon authors who agree with his thesis, and
dismisses as irrelevant evidence to the contrary. His determination to
defame Pius XII’s actual conduct of affairs, and to claim a moral superiority
for his own version of how events should have happened, is a characteristic
fault noted by others as well as Feldkamp. Numerous examples are here
provided of Goldhagen’s manipulation of facts and opinions, such as his
allegation that “Catholic antisemitism hardly differed in its demonization of
the Jews from that of the Nazis”, or his claim that the “silence” of Pius XII
was a principal cause for the mass extermination of the Jews. And
Feldkamp naturally pounces on the mistake in one of the book’s
photographs, wrongly identifying a German cardinal, which he sees a proof
of Goldhagen’s incompetence and maliciousness. In short, in Feldkamp’s
view, he is not a serious historian at all.

Nor, finally, can much be said in favour of Goldhagen’s
theologizing. His attempts, for example, to prove the constancy of
Christian antisemitism, or his demand that the Catholic Church should now
undertake a massive course of reparations, starting with the excision from
the New Testament of all antisemitic references, are hardly scholarly. For,
as Feldkamp notes, his exegetical skills are as meagre as his historical.
Equally to be regretted are Goldhagen’s denigratory comments on the more
recent developments in Christian-Jewish relations as undertaken by the
Vatican over the last forty years. The only reason for this book’s flagrant
publicity would seem to be the publisher’s belief that a polemical assault on
the Catholic Church would sell well. Luckily this seems to have been a
miscalculation ˆ to the satisfaction of such as Feldkamp, whose desire is for
an objective and accurate treatment of the subject, rather than this rehashed
and superficial account as provided by Goldhagen.
JSC

d) Perica, Vjekoslav. Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav
States, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Vjekoslav Perica’s masterfully written and extensively researched book fills
a important gap in the historical scholarship on the twentieth century
southeastern Europe. By carefully examining and defining the political role
and influence of religion, the author argues that none of the main ethnic
religions, the Serbian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic “Church of the Croat
People,” or the Yugoslav Islamic community, ever fully endorsed the idea
of multiconfessional and multiethnic Yugoslav state. For Perica Yugoslavia
did not implode and disintegrate into a bloody civil war in the early 1990s
solely because of the deep seated nationalistic intolerances or because of a
clash of civilizations. Powerful ethnoclericalism prevented full
legitimization of both the inter-war Yugoslav monarchy and of the post-war
socialist Yugoslavia. The politically active clergy fused religious
intolerance with nationalistic animosity to create “ethnic churches” in form
and nationalistic parties in substance. The clergy departed from their
original purpose and became hypernationalistic, antiliberal, and antisecular
leaders who lacked the accountability of their secular counterparts. Perica
skillfully differentiates between the idols the religious establishments
disseminated from the secular ones the socialist regime imposed and
suggests that the civil religion of Titoist “brotherhood and unity” was a far
better solution for the South Slav complex landscape: “nothing better than
Titoism has been seen in this part of the world” (226). Perica correctly
concludes that the Myth of the Three Evils of the Twentieth Century,
namely Nazism, fascism, and communism, is an imbalanced
oversimplification that could not explain the complexities of the Yugoslav
case.
J.Mocnik, Bowling Green, Ohio

2) Book notes:

Hew Strachan, The First World War. Volume 1:To arms,
Oxford University Press 2001. This vast and compendious history seeks to
present a comprehensive picture of all sides of this conflict in its
multifarious aspects.

Of interest to readers of this Newsletter will be the concluding chapter on
“The Ideas of 1914”. Here the role of the churches in assisting the
transition from a local territorial squabble to a “war to end all wars” is
mentioned. Just some quotes: “The destruction and hatred which the war
unleashed seemed, to Ernst Troeltsch, to make Christianity itself an alien
message from an alien world. . . .Church-State relations in many of the
belligerent countries were increasingly fraught. Societies had become
sufficiently secularized in their pursuit of material progress for church
leaders to be tempted to see the war’s advent as divine retribution. For
them, the war could be welcomed as a necessary and God-given process of
cleansing and rejuvenation..

Paradoxically, therefore, optimism trod hard on the heels of pessimism. The
response of many on mobilization was to turn to religion for guidance and
comfort.. . . Much of the rhetoric of holy war delivered from the pulpits of
Europe in 1914 opted to regard the war as a punishment of God’s chosen
people’s foes, . . .which, in turn led to the identification of church with
state.. . . Cardinal Mercier of Belgium, for instance, in his Christmas 1914
message told his flock that “The religion of Christ makes patriotism a law:
there is no perfect Christian who is not a perfect patriot. . . . Joan of
Arc and Martin Luther were recruited a suitable models for strengthening
nationalist sentiments amongst Christians. . . . In Germany, the fusion of
Evangelicalism and propaganda. . .helped redefine the church’s mission in
political and cultural as well as religious terms. The result was a new
theology. The war enabled orthodox Lutherans and liberal theologians to
converge. Both saw victory as the means to the application of the kingdom
of God within an ethical community; Protestantism could be confirmed as
the religious bedrock of the German cultural state. . . . God, therefore,
became an active participant in the historical process. As the Court
Preacher Ernst Dryander said on August 4th: “We march to the fight for our
culture against unculture, for German morality against barbarity, for the
free, German, God-fearing person against the instincts of the uncontrolled
mass. . .We know we fight not only for our existence but also for the
existence of the most holy of possessions we have to perpetuate”.
It is to be hoped that Strachan, in his subsequent volumes, will take up the
question of how Europe’s churches had later to come to terms with such
disastrous pronouncements.
JSC

3) Articles:

James McNutt, Adolf Schlatter and the Jews, in German
Studies Review, Vol. XXVI, no. 2, May 2003, pp. 353 ff.
Adolf Schlatter was a very distinguished New Testament scholar in
the first thirty years of the 20th century at Tubingen University. He upheld a
conservative orthodoxy, but was also affected by the ideas of the movement
for volkisch theology. McNutt’s fine evaluation of his writings about
Judaism shows how much Schlatter could draw from the New Testament a
pejorative view of Jews, as legalistic and/or materialist opponents of the
Saviour Christ. In his opinion, a true spiritual life in Christ could
easily lend itself to the belief that the Jew was the enemy of the true German spirit.

While Schlatter openly opposed the Nazi heresies of race and blood, or the
Fuhrerprinzip, his influence nonetheless was considerable in the more
pietistic circles, especially in Württemberg. McNutt could have made more
of the fact that such theologians effectively prevented the possibility of any
philosemitic attitudes arising in the German Protestant churches. They had
no prophylactics against the Nazis’ virulent antisemitic prejudices, amply
watered by suitable quotations from Luther. McNutt rightly assesses
Schlatter as an effective conduit for such inflammatory perceptions of Jews
in Germany.
JSC

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

Dear Friends,
A thought for today’s distress:

Recently a chapel in Oxford Cathedral was dedicated to Bishop George Bell
of Chichester 1929-58, who was tireless in his efforts to promote the cause
of peace, justice and ecumenical friendship. In the floor in front of
the altar, a stone slab bears a quotation from his writings:
„No nation, no church, no individual is guiltless.
Without repentance, without forgiveness,
There can be no regeneration”

Contents:

1) Book reviews:

a) C. Brown, The death of Christian Britain
b) Kreutzer, Das Reichskirchenministerium
c) Alvarez, Espionage in the Vatican

2) Book notes:

Joly, Xavier Vallat
Lepp and Nowak, Evangelische Kirche
Palm, Evangelische Kirchentag
Bergen, War and Genocide

3) Recent Articles

4) Research outline – Schoerner, The Myron Taylor Mission

5) New Religious Freedom News Service

1) Book reviews:

a) Callum G.Brown, The death of Christian Britain, London and New York:
Routledge 2001 256 pp.

The provocative title of this study by a senior scholar of Strathclyde
University in Glasgow is bound to cause great controversy, not only for his
sweeping assertions but also for his daring hypotheses. But his intention
is not epater le bourgeois with his challenging conclusion: “The culture
of Christianity has gone in the Britain of the new millennium. Britain is
showing the world how religion as we have known it can die”. Rather his
aim is to dispute the prevailing theories about the process of
secularization as they have developed and dominated discussion for over a
century. To this task he brings a striking vision based on wide research in
conditions of English and Scottish popular religion.

Secularization, as is widely believed in many quarters, began with the
Enlightenment and the growth of rationality. It sought to liberate mankind
from the churches‚ political, social and mental control, by refuting
superstition and unverifiable dogmas, by liberating morality from the
clutches of the clergy, and by offering the prospect of humanistic growth
and progress. For most of the champions of this view, this was a
teleological irreversible process – an end much to be desired.
On the other side, those who deplored what they saw as the falling away
from the faith practices of earlier generations were apt to lay the blame
on the insidious impact of modernization. In their nostalgia, they
envisaged a rural church-going Britain of villages, each with its own
historic parish church, a stable and God-fearing society. The rise of
industrialization, the building of dark satanic mills, and the consequent
evils of urbanization, are held to be the root causes of the regrettable
secularizing effects ever since.

Callum Brown disputes both these views. Instead, he contends that Britain
between 1800 and 1960 was a highly religious nation. This period can be
seen as the nation’s last puritan age, when the majority of the population
voluntarily accepted a strict Christian moral code, drawn from the
teachings of evangelicalism in both its English and Scottish varieties.
This kind of Christianity formed the identity of individual men and women
of all classes. The central chapters of this study examine the nature of
this discourse, particularly in the nineteenth century from literary
sources, and in the twentieth from oral testimonies. In sum, Callum Brown
seeks to show that the nineteenth century saw the greatest and most
successful exercise in Christian proselytizing Britain had ever seen.

De-Christianization, he claims, took place much later and much more
rapidly than previously asserted. Only in the last fifty years has this
decline in religiosity become paramount, but its impact has been far more
influential than has been acknowledged so far. Today a vast chasm
separates us from the world of the 1950s, which Callum Brown believes was
the last high point when religion mattered deeply in British society. But
it stopped mattering in the 1960s, when a sudden plunge took place,
reflected in all pertinent religious statistics. As a sociologist, Callum
Brown is at home with the use of statistics, which are fortunately here
used only sparingly, but at the same time is well aware of the pitfalls
which arise in attempting to quantify such a subjective subject as
religious loyalties and beliefs. But he is not so much interested in
charting the decline of the Christian institutions over the past fifty
years as in the significant loss of the Christian perspective, which had
formed the mental and moral world of the population in earlier centuries.

It is the disappearance in the last few decades of the Christian, and more
centrally the Evangelical, discourse which Brown sees as the crucial
turning point, after which the vast majority of Britons no longer drew
their sense of identity from this particular religious heritage.

No less challenging are the principal reasons Brown finds to be
responsible. Instead of picking on the alienation of the working classes,
or the defection of the intellectuals, Brown suggests that the crucial
factor was the breach in the relationship between women and Christian piety
in the 1960s, which caused secularization. This startling and novel
hypothesis is based on the premise that the long-standing evangelical
discourse, especially in the nineteenth century, prioritized the piety of
women, leading to the wave of feminisation of the churches, and the
attendant habits of public morality. Its success after 1800 set up the
pattern of religiosity (and respectability) for a hundred and fifty years.
But it was to be overthrown when the younger women of the decade of the
1960s repudiated this categorization of their social identity. Aided and
abetted by their partners, this was the decade when major attacks were
launched against the traditional British morality. The 1960s saw the ending
of moral censorship of literature, the legalizing of homosexuality and
abortion, the granting of easier divorce and the emergence of the women’s
liberation movements. Structural “realities” of social class eroded.
Self-evident “truths” were abandoned. Pop culture produced new “deities”.
The mass cultural discourse changed radically.

The immediate victim was Christianity, challenged most influentially by
the re-crafting of femininity. Indeed, Brown emphasizes, the central
feature was what he calls the simultaneous de-feminization of piety and the
de-pietization of femininity. Feminine rebellion against their
traditional roles gave rise not only to a wholly new consciousness of
male-female relationships but also a large-scale abandonment of the female
relationship to God. This led not just to a collision with the churches
but with Christianity as a whole. It effectively brought to an end a
whole century of endeavour by what Brown calls the salvation industry. And
it has produced a whole generation deprived of the cultural discourse which
formed the identity of their forebears. Brown does not undertake to
suggest what might replace this lost Christian heritage, but notes the
inarticulate character of the current generation’s response to “spiritual”
matters. In place of the Christian tradition we now have a pluralistic,
incoherent co-existence of multiple views, whether for better or worse.

The search for personal faith is now in the “New Age” of cults, personal
development and consumer choice. But, in Brown‚s view, the universal
world-view of Christianity which shaped so many British identities before
1950 seemed impossible to recreate. British culture is now pioneering new
discursive territory. British Christianity is effectively dead, even if the
wishful thinking of surviving church members keeps the skeleton alive for a
few more years.

Callum Brown does not attempt to put his findings in any wider context,
though many of his arguments could be applied, say, to Germany. He notes
that a discursive conflict is still underway in North America, but
completely excludes Ireland, which is certainly an exceptional case. But
questions still arise about his analysis of the British mainland scene.
First and foremost, despite his obvious acquaintance with the religious
heritage of evangelicalism, his arguments for its demise seem
short-circuited, or even one-sided. Larger trends in twentieth century
history than the status of feminine piety surely need to be considered. No
mention at all was made of the disastrous crisis of credibility caused by
the two world wars, especially the first. In the opinion of this reviewer,
the symptoms here so clearly enunciated were the fruit of a deeper
undermining of the faith content in all European Christianity, which can be
dated to 1914-1918. But it would require another book to substantiate such
a claim. In the meantime Callum Brown’s stimulating and forceful account
will provoke much debate and argument, which was presumably his purpose.
JSC

b) Heike Kreutzer, Das Reichskirchenministerium im Gefüge der
nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft. Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag. 2000
390pp. ISBN 3-7700-1610-6
(This review first appeared in German History, Vol. 20 No 3, October 2002)

The Ministry of Church Affairs established by Hitler in 1935 was a
desperate measure designed to bring the churches into line with Nazi
policies. It was doomed to failure throughout its short existence. Not
only did the churches resent the re-imposition of state control, after this
had been abolished in 1919, but even more strikingly the Nazi hierarchy was
split over the whole project, and effectively sabotaged the plans of the
one and only Minister, Hanns Kerrl.

Heike Kreutzer is the first scholar to undertake a complete research of the
records of this Ministry, which for decades were held by the authorities in
East Germany and inaccessible to most western scholars. Now that the
archives have been reunited, a full picture can be obtained. The story is
a regrettable piece of chicanery. But Kreutzer ably elucidates the main
lines of why the Ministry was established, how the hapless and outgunned
figure of Kerrl attempted to gain political momentum, and his successive
failures. She is also good at documenting the intrigues of the anti-Kerrl
factions, which carried much more weight in the notoriously feuding
structures of the Nazi government. She therefore sees the fate of this
Ministry as part of the “authoritarian anarchy” which characterized the
Nazi regime.

In 1933 Hitler hoped that the churches would enthusiastically join in his
attempt to remodel German society. But institutionally, the church
leaders clung to their autonomy, and blocked the dynamic momentum of the
Nazi ideology. In this situation, the Nazis‚ failure to develop a
coherent church policy became apparent. To be sure, its radical wing,
including Hitler, instinctively repudiated both Christianity and its
institutions. But other Nazis, like Kerrl, were still inclined to mobilize
the national sympathies of churchmen and therefore saw the usefulness of
church structures for the Party‚s goals. The initial attempt to align the
Protestant churches with the Nazi wishes, through the appointment of the
newly installed Reich Bishop, Ludwig Müller, was counter-productive. So
too the Catholics, despite the Concordat, opposed the attacks on their
milieu. Setting up this new Ministry was supposed to lead to a coherent
policy, but in fact satisfied no one.

Kerrl’s naively pietistic view that National Socialism was identical
with true Christianity, or that Jesus wasn’t really a Jew, only led to
ridicule from his more powerful rivals, Bormann, Rosenberg or Goebbels.
Indeed the latter rightly noted that “Kerrl wants to preserve the churches,
we want to liquidate them”. With colleagues such as this, it was not
surprising that Kerrl never gained weight in the Party, nor Hitler’s
backing. In any case the Ministry was too small and too new to carry
influence, despite all of Kerrl‚s bravado. Frustration and resignation
marked his period in office. Perhaps luckily, before his internal opponents
could eliminate him politically, Kerrl died in December 1941, and was given
a grandiose Nazi funeral.

Kreutzer’s last two chapters deal respectively with the policies adopted
towards the Catholic and Protestant churches, and form the meat of this
study. In 1933 Hitler signed the Concordat with the Vatican for the sake
of the international prestige involved. But Nazi radicals resented the
legal constraints on their totalitarian ambitions. The head of the Catholic
section of Kerrl’s ministry, an ex-priest Joseph Roth, whose hatred of his
former associates now led him to champion the Concordat‚s annulment,
abetted them. Despite a number of attempts, in the end Hitler, for a
variety of reasons, drew back and left the situation unresolved. So too,
Kerrl’s policy towards the Protestant churches ended in failure. His
initial display of goodwill by building a coalition of moderate elements
was undermined both by the Nazi extremists and by the suspicions of the
more stringently dogmatic Confessing Church about the Party‚s intentions.
Neither of these groups accepted Kerrl’s view that Christianity and Nazism
could be combined in harmony. Kerrl never possessed the influence or the
power to resolve this dilemma. In February 1937 his policy was openly
sabotaged when Hitler intervened to order new church elections – which in
fact never took place. By the end of the year, Hitler abandoned all
attempts to bring the churches into line, and in fact never officially met
with Kerrl again. When he died, Kerrl’s policy was in ruins.

Heike Kreutzer thus provides the archival evidence for an analysis whose
main lines were already well known. For reasons of length, she refrained
from including any documents from church archives, which would have shown
their reactions to the contradictory and convoluted policies of the Church
Ministry. But her achievement is to show clearly enough the malevolence of
the Nazis‚ attempt to impose their will on the German churches. Sad to
say, very much the same policy was adopted by the Communists in the German
Democratic Republic after 1949, with equal lack of success. But that is
another story.
J S.C.

c) David Alvarez, Spies in the Vatican. Espionage and Intrigue from
Napoleon to the Holocaust. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas.
2002. 341pp

Some years ago David Alvarez assisted Fr. Robert Graham in writing a book
on the Nazi agents who tried to infiltrate the Vatican bureaucracy at the
height of the Second World War. His researches led him on to investigate
the subject over a longer period, and to look at how the Vatican‚s
operations became an object of espionage and intrigue over the past two
centuries. At the same time, he also looks at the kind of responses the
papal officials endeavoured to put in place to thwart such unwelcome
activities, as well as to provide successive Popes with their own body of
intelligence.

Up to 1870 the Papacy exercised territorial sovereignty over large parts
of Italy. It was therefore suspect to other powers, such as France and
Austria, whose agents often successfully intercepted the Pope‚s mail or
waylaid his messengers for their own ends. When the newly established
Kingdom of Italy conquered the Papal States, the Pope refused to recognize
his defeat, and broke off relations. Consequently, the Italian
government could only resort to clandestine means of keeping tabs on this
enemy, and built up a large network of informers in the now tiny state. By
the end of the nineteenth century, the Vatican’s international standing had
sunk very low and consequently it was regarded as hardly significant by
other powers.

But, in 1914, both sides in the Great War began to recognize the potential
value of having Papal moral support. They sought to find out more about
the Vatican’s policies and priorities, sometimes legally through accredited
diplomats, sometimes illegally by reading the Papal ciphers – which alas!
were shockingly primitive. Benedict XV was the first Pope to realize that
espousing the cause of peace could enhance papal influence. His successor,
Pius XI, similarly added prestige by abandoning the Vatican’s territorial
claims and relied solely on the weapons of the spirit. But anti-clericals
continued to be hostile, suspecting that the Pope had spies in every
Catholic parish, linked in a vast international network. Alternatively they
could believe that political conspiracy was one of the sacraments of the
Catholic Church. Others were dismissive: – “how many divisions has the
Pope?”

But, in effect, by the time of the Second World War, many nations were
sufficiently concerned to try and find out what the Pope was up to. It was
not only the Nazis who kept a close watch, or deciphered the papal
dispatches. Alvarez spells out the various stratagems adopted by a number
of interested powers and has researched widely in the intelligence files in
Paris, Rome, Madrid, London and Washington. He successfully captures the
atmosphere of rumours and intrigue which prevailed at the Holy See – in
part because it was so small and intimate that foreign diplomats and
journalists had very little to do but speculate. Covert political
warfare and disinformation were common hazards. The Vatican authorities
were obliged to spend far too much of their time setting things right or
issuing denials of far-fetched allegations.

For its part, it was only after the Vatican established professional
courses for training its own diplomats that it could be in a position to
carry out its worldwide political missions with success. The future Pope
Pius XII was one of the more prominent of these first recruits. But even
when he ascended the papal throne in 1939, the Holy See’s diplomatic corps
was tiny, and not all of its appointments were a success, as
Pacelli’s successor in Berlin, Cesare Orsenigo, demonstrated.

The Vatican itself was not above covert operations designed to advance the
Catholic cause. But the clandestine moves undertaken, for example, in the
Soviet Union in the 1920s, in an attempt to ordain secret bishops, were
singularly inept and led to total failure. The more recent example of
China would seem to have fared no better. Relations with these hostile
dictatorships varied between fervent and outright denunciations on the one
hand, and attempts to work out a modus vivendi on the other. Since these
aims contradicted each other, success was very limited, as Alvarez shows.
Even after the 1929 Lateran agreements between the Vatican and Italy had
restored some normality in their relations, Mussolini’s agents still kept
the papal retinue under surveillance, mainly through junior officials or
“loyal” Catholics who could be suborned. Journalists were easily bribable
– and some of them were priests. At the same time, the Vatican’s
telephones were regularly tapped. An Italian spy was smuggled into the
Secretariat of State. After 1933, the Nazis also sought to mount their own
intelligence leads in to the Vatican, led by a renegade priest Albert
Hartl. Here Alvarez recapitulates his earlier work, covering too the
debatable moves when the Pope assisted members of the German resistance
movement by passing on – very cautiously – their messages to the British
government. These moves became known to the Nazi hierarchy, and elaborate
measures had to be taken to divert their suspicions. Alvarez most
successfully conveys the whole cloak-and-dagger atmosphere of those years.
He also does not fail to point out that the Vatican authorities were never
very security conscious, and that they had neither the resources nor the
appetite for serious counter-espionage. Despite this rather obvious fact,
many powers, including the United States, continued to believe that the
Vatican housed a treasure trove of political, economic, and military
secrets assiduously collected and transmitted to Rome by faithful Catholics
around the globe.

Alvarez thus does us a useful service in debunking most of the myths about
“papal power”, and in describing the failure of most efforts to reveal the
Vatican’s alleged “secrets”. Of course, it was not his aim to analyze the
actual policies pursued by Pope Pius XII. Instead he exposes the vast array
of misinformation invented by agents starved of real news, but busy
peddling rumours to gullible governments, trying to penetrate the closed
secretive world of the Holy See. In reality, the papal intelligence
activities were very limited, and fell far short of the fantasies of the
often hostile web-spinners. The Secretariat of State and most nunciatures
were understaffed and highly conservative in their modes of operation. The
officials were often ill informed about world affairs. The worldwide clergy
were never mobilized to provide political intelligence. The Vatican’s
communications were regularly deciphered or intercepted.

Alvarez builds a good case for minimizing the Vatican‚s intelligence
achievements in the age of the dictators. But he omits perhaps the most
inhibiting circumstance, especially towards the end of the war. This was
the sense of impending disaster, as the Europe so beloved by the Popes was
bombed to bits by weapons of mass destruction. The claustrophobia suffered
by the Vatican and its impotence to bring about a cessation of hostilities
were even more significant. Even if the Vatican had had the espionage
network its enemies assumed, these factors could not have been overcome.
Alvarez’s survey concludes with the correct observation that the Vatican
never had the resources to match the intelligence activities of other
powers. It sought to protect its interests and to project its influence as
best it could with inadequate means. This still remains the Vatican’s
unresolved dilemma.
JSC

2) Book notes:

a) Laurent Joly, Xavier Vallat. De nationalisme chretien a
l‚antisemitisme d‚Etat. Paris: Grasset 2001. 466pp

Xavier Vallat is known to history as the Commissioner General for the
Jewish Question in Marshal Petain‚s Vichy Government. He became notorious
as the architect of what his biographer calls „the most elaborate and the
severest series of regulations in Europe‰ directed against the Jews. His
antisemitism was not, however, a copy of Nazi racial hatred. Rather, it was
formed by a mixture of Catholic prejudice, anti-communism, anti-Free
Masonry, and xenophobia. The Jews, Vallat believed, incorporated these
perils and had to be kept under control. Only those Jews prepared to be
fully integrated to French national values could be exempted. As a
politician of the extreme right, a militant Catholic, and a leader of World
War veterans, Vallat welcomed the Vichy regime as a means of putting France
back on the right track. But his fanaticism proved too much and he was
dismissed in May 1942, i.e. before his successor collaborated in sending
deportation trains from Paris to Auschwitz. But Vallat certainly prepared
the way for most of the foreign Jews in France to lose their lives. Laurent
Joly seeks to explain why in this fully researched biography.
JSC

b) C.Lepp and K.Nowak eds., Evangelische Kirche im geteilten Deutschland
(1945-1989/90), Gottingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht 2001 346pp

Claudia Lepp and Kurt Nowak have edited a useful introductory survey of
the history of the German Evangelical Church between 1945 and 1989/90.
Several well-known scholars have contributed their perspectives around the
central question: can the history of this church be described as being of
one piece, or did the separate paths between the western Bonn Republic and
the German Democratic Republic mean that in fact two separate churches
existed which require different treatments. The contributors deny this, but
admit the complexity of trying to maintain a unified historiography. The
difficulties are spelt out in one of the essays, which points out that the
overthrow of the communist regime led to similar conditions as had happened
with the defeat of the Nazi regime in 1945, when the necessary purgation of
the church was accompanied with moralistic judgments, based often on highly
problematic source material. Particularly the use of the former Stasi
(secret police) materials raises major issues for historians.

c) Dirk Palm, “Wir sind doch Bruder!”. Der evangelische Kirchentag und die
deutsche Frage 1949-1961, (Arbeiten zur Kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte. Reihe
B:Darstellungen, Bd 36) Gottingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht. 2002 360 pp

The latest in the prestigious series of scholarly treatments published by
the official church history office of the German Evangelical Church deals
with the story of possibly the most successful experiment in church life
since 1945. Inspired by several notable laymen in the desolate aftermath
of the Nazi era, this plan was to organize large-scale church rallies which
would serve three purposes: first, to provide a meeting ground for the
informed laity to become better acquainted with their faith; second, a
vehicle for expressing the Church’s desire for national unity, despite the
political divisions; and thirdly, to act as a rallying ground for
Protestants to show the flag. The second of these themes is taken up by
Dirk Palm to show how these biennial rallies – which still continue –
served the purpose of holding on to the idea of German unity, even though
the politicians on both sides of the Iron Curtain made things difficult.

d) Doris L.Bergen, War and Genocide: a concise history of the Holocaust,
Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. 2002. xi+ 263 pp. ISBN
0-8476-9630-8 USD $ 24.95.

Doris Bergen is well-known to our readers as a frequent and welcome
contributor, and also as the author of the fine study of the pro-Nazi wing
in the German Evangelical Church, The Twisted Cross. She has now put us
all in debt for this introductory primer on the history of the Holocaust,
which will be particularly valuable for undergraduates, who need to study
the background and causal factors behind the launching of this most
terrible piece of mass murder. Bergen‚s achievement is to show how these
killings were related to the rest of the German war effort in its pursuit
of so-called racial purification and territorial expansion. She therefore
includes the story of the other earlier victims of Nazi ferocity, the
mentally-handicapped, the Roma or gypsies, the Polish and Soviet civilian
populations, especially intellectuals, as well as smaller groups such as
Jehovah‚s witnesses, or homosexuals. These all fall under her scrutiny as
suffering from the state-sponsored programs of violence and atrocity
function. Her chapters are in fact related to the teaching needs of
students, who will find their questions carefully addressed, along with
useful list of sources, and suggestions for further reading. Her
photographs help to focus attention to the fact that these mass murders
happened to real people. Luckily such books as this will help to ensure
that such terrifying violence is not forgotten, or regarded as merely a
long-past historical event.

3) Recent Articles

a) Gary Bullen,, Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian
Century in Journal of Church and State, Vol. 44, no.2, spring 2002.

This article outlines the debate within American Christian pacifist circles
during the 1930s, when Niebuhr increasingly took a “realistic” line, while
the editors of the Christian Century advocated abstention from war up to
the very last minute, accusing Roosevelt of war-mongering. The arguments
have hardly changed in the intervening 70 years.

b) Michael Casey, From religious Outsider to Insider. The rise and fall of
pacifism in the Churches of Christ in Journal of Church and State, Vol.
44, no.3, summer 2002.

A companion piece about this small sect in the
southern states of the USA. Originally social outcasts with strongly
apocalyptic views, they have now joined the mainstream, which their
forebears loathed. Their early primitive pacifism has been replaced by
patriotic urgings to support America’s holy wars.

c) Michael Phayer, Pius XII and the Genocides of Polish Catholics and
Polish Jews during the Second World War, in Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte,
Vol.15, 2002, no 1.

This article explains the motivations of the Vatican‚s response to the
atrocities committed in Poland by the Nazis. Although limited only to the
Catholic church, Phayer ably describes the dilemmas faced by Pope Pius XII,
as well as the demonic determination of the German attempt to root out the
church‚s place in Polish life, in conjunction with the similar
determination to exterminate the whole Jewish race. Only the failure of the
campaign against Russia forced the postponement of the forcible
extermination of the rest of the Polish population, which instead was
obliged to take up forced labour. In the aftermath, Phayer suggests that
the Vatican played down the German crimes in Poland in the interests of
post-war reconciliation and reconstruction.

4) Research project by Alexander Schoener, M.A., Catholic University of
Eichstaett, Germany Myron Taylor’s Mission to the Vatican 1940-1950

Myron C.Taylor, former Chief Executive of U.S.-Steel, and then special
envoy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Evian Conference on
Refugees in 1938, was appointed the President’s “Personal Representative”
to Pope Pius XII at Christmas time 1939. Taylor took office in January 1940
and also continued his mission under the Truman administration until he
resigned in January 1950. Taylor’s appointment was a substitute for
establishing diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Vatican,
suspended since 1867. Because of widespread anti-Catholicism in the United
States, this decision was hotly debated among the American public.
The main goal of this dissertation project will be an overall appreciation
of Taylor and his special diplomatic mission, in order to exemplify the
basic structures, problems, objectives and priorities of both the Vatican’s
and the United States‚ foreign policy and diplomacy during the Second World
War and the immediate post-war years.

First of all, the general background and the developments leading up to
Taylor’s appointment will be analyzed. Then, one has to ask what exactly
both sides expected from this mission, how these expectations changed in
the course of the years, and finally to what extent these were fulfilled.
Another crucial question will be how much importance the American
government assigned to Taylor’s reports. i.e. what their actual impact on
the formulation of the “greater lines” of U.S. foreign policy during these
years really was. The Vatican – like the other neutral states – was
widely seen as a “listening- post” at that time, also by the American
government and intelligence services. It will be interesting to see what
kind of information Taylor and his assistants passed on to their
government, especially if there were any contacts with members of the
German resistance through this channel, and also to what extent Taylor
communicated to his superiors news of the fate of the European Jews living
– and dying – under German occupation.

A comprehensive history of the Taylor mission using all available
documentary material is still a desideratum. Particularly Taylor‚s post-war
activities have hardly been analyzed up to now. Also to be explored more
fully are some important factors like Taylor‚s personality, the way he
perceived his mission, how American government and State Department
officials, as well as Vatican dignitaries and other diplomats accredited to
the Vatican judged him, his work and influence.

5) New Religious Freedom News Service

In the past few years there has been evidence that attacks against freedom
of religion have been increasing. Forum 18 News Service is a Christian web
and e-mail initiative to report on threats and actions against the
religious freedom of all people, regardless of their religious affiliation,
in an objective, truthful and timely manner.

Forum 18 is an Oslo, Norway based group committed to religious freedom for
all on the basis of Article 18 of the Declaration of Human Rights. F18News
will initially report on countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe, but will expand to cover other areas where Forum 18 considers there
is a need for good reporting and where commentary of the highest
professional standards can be provided.
Subscribe via Forum 18 http:// www.forum18.org

Best wishes for the summer holidays – for those in the northern hemisphere!
John S.Conway
Jconway@interchange.ubc.ca

Dear Colleagues,
John Conway is on holiday this month, so he has asked me
to take over this month’s Newsletter. I am very happy to do so, and
therefore take the opportunity to send you an essay on the significant topic of
Christian-Jewish relations as they developed in Germany in the immediate
postwar period. I should be glad to have any comments you may care to send
me to the following address: mhockeno@skidmore.edu
Please ensure that you do NOT press the Reply button to
this message.

Sincerely,
Matthew Hockenos, Dept. of History, Skidmore College,
Saratoga Springs, New
York, USA
The German Protestant Church and its Mission to the Jews after the
Holocaust
Matthew D. Hockenos

Since completing a book-length study on the German
Protestant churches from 1945 to 1950, I have turned my attention to the fate the
Protestant Church’s mission to the Jews (Judenmission) after the Holocaust.
How did the Holocaust and the founding of Israel three years after the end of
WWII affect the church’s long-held belief that it was the duty of Protestant
pastors and church leaders to preach the word of Jesus Christ to Jews
with the intention of converting them to Christianity? What was the nature of
the discussions and debates over the church’s theory of supersessionism?
Did Protestant pastors and laypersons, who staffed the mission offices in
German cities, change their procedures for interacting with Jews who
remained in Germany after the war?

A number of reputable scholars including Paul Aring,
Micha Brumlik, Paul van Buren, John Conway, Eva Fleischner, Wolfgang Gerlach,
Richard Gutteridge, Charlotte Klein, Heinz Kremers, Christoph M. Raisig, Rolf
Rendtorff, and Martin Stöhr have addressed one or more of these
questions in their books and articles. But my aim is to explore Protestant-Jewish
relations after the war in a wider context. On the one hand I examine the
scholarly debates within the Protestant Church and between Protestant theologians
and Jewish scholars over the missions. On the other hand, I investigate the
activities of local missionaries in German cities who sought to convert Jews
to Christianity in the postwar years. And I also seek to include some
assessment, however limited, of these endeavors from the Jewish side. My
working thesis is that although the majority of Protestant church leaders and
theologians gradually came to the conclusion that Jews did not need Jesus Christ
since God’s covenant with the Jews remained in force, there remained
and still remains a minority of church leaders and local pastors who refuse to
denounce unequivocally the practice of missionizing Jews in
Germany and continue to seek the conversion of Jews by subtler means. Although
this latter group is a minority, they are not without influence.

Below is a revised and abridged version of a paper I
presented at the German Studies Association’s San Diego meeting in October 2002.
I welcome comments and criticisms. Since this is a work-in-progress, which I
intend to expand into an article or an even longer study, I ask that you do not
quote or reproduce any portion of the text without my permission.

In April 1950, when representatives of therecently-reconstituted Evangelical
(Protestant) Church in Germany assembled from all parts
of the country in their legislative body or Synod in the Berlin suburb of
Weissensee, they officially issued what was to be a highly significant and
challenging statement on the controversial issue of the “Jewish
question.” It read as follows:

For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all (Rom. 11:32).

We believe in the Lord and Savior, who as a person came from the people of Israel.

We Confess the Church which is joined together in one body of Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians and whose peace is Jesus
Christ.

We believe God’s promise to be valid for his Chosen People even after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

We state that by omission and silence we became
implicated before the God of mercy in the outrage which has been perpetrated against
the Jews by people of our nation. We caution all Christians not to balance what has come
upon us as God’s judgment against what we have done to the Jews; for in
judgment God’s mercy searches the repentant.

We ask all Christians to dissociate themselves from all
antisemitism and earnestly to resist it, whenever it stirs again, and to
encounter Jews and Jewish Christians in a brotherly spirit.

We ask the Christian congregations to protect Jewish
graveyards within their areas if they are unprotected.
We pray to the Lord of mercy that he may bring about the
Day of Fulfillment when we will be praising the triumph of Jesus Christ
together with the saved Israel.(1)

The primary purpose of the eight-sentence statement was to
put the church on record as opposing antisemitism in postwar Germany and
to acknowledge the church’s silence during the Third Reich. But the statement
also briefly addressed the church’s theological anti-Judaism. By
declaring in the third sentence that God’s promise to the Jews remained in force
even after the crucifixion of Christ, the Berlin-Weissensee statement
rejected the centuries-old theory of supersessionism whereby the church
superseded the Jews as God’s chosen people. The notion that God had rejected
the Jewish people in favor of the church was fundamental to the philosophy
undergirding the missionary enterprise. Consequently the repudiation of
supersessionism undermined the theological foundation of the Protestant
mission to the Jews.

However, the Berlin-Weissensee statement did not
explicitly reject missionizing Jews. In fact, it concluded in traditional
Christian triumphalist language: “We pray to the Lord of mercy that
he may bring about the Day of Fulfillment (Tag der Vollendung) when we will
be praising the triumph of Jesus Christ together with the saved Israel.”
The Berlin-Weissensee statement reflects the confusion in the
church over its mission to Israel in postwar Germany. The message of the
synod was ambiguous. If the Jews were still God’s chosen people then why did
the church need to pray that Jews would recognize Jesus as the Messiah?

Missionaries in general did not read the statement as a call for them to stop their
work among Jews. In addition to the ambiguity of the statement itself, the
autonomy enjoyed by the regional churches in Germany meant that in some
churches, such as the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Bavaria, clergymen
continued to actively seek to convert Jews while other churches transformed their
missions into organizations that sought a dialogue between church and
synagogue.

As an example of those still actively seeking converts, can
be cited the Bavarian Lutheran Pastor Wilhelm Grillenberger, who in
the spring of 1951 reported on his activities over the preceding six months as
director of the Evangelical-Lutheran Mission to the Jews in Munich.(2)
His work from November 1950 to May 1951 fell into two categories: New Testament
instruction with Jews in preparation for their conversion to Protestantism and
outreach to potential Jewish converts. Grillenberger elaborated on five Jews he was instructing in
the basic tenets of Lutheranism. He spent one night a week with
55-year-old Eduard M., a survivor of Theresienstadt concentration camp, discussing
Martin Luther’s Small Catechism and preparing Eduard M. and his wife to
convert to Protestantism. He met twice a week with Judka S., a Jew
from Lodz, Poland, who had been in the Feldafing DP camp twenty miles
southwest of Munich. According to Grillenberger, the 45-year-old Judka S. was a
widower, alone in the world, suffered from stomachaches, was mistrustful of
everyone, especially other Jews from the camp, and was hoping to emigrate
soon. Judka S. had received six months of instruction in Luther’s Small
Catechism but Grillenberger believed he needed to strengthen his faith
before being baptized. Another student, 23-year-old Erich S., was the
son of a Protestant mother and Jewish father, who was now dead. “The
lessons with him are a joy,” Grillenberger reported, “because he has not received much
in the way of lessons in Judaism.” Grillenberger believed Erich S. would
need the rest of the year to study and learn about Christianity before he was
ready to convert. Another man receiving instruction was a 30-year-old
Polish Jew. Even though he intended to emigrate in four weeks, Grillenberger
lamented that he could not participate more regularly in Catechism lessons
because his job as a chauffeur for the American Joint Distribution Committee
did not allow him enough free time. Finally, Grillenberger reported that a
51-year-old half-Jew (sic) named Paul B. had registered to be baptized and
intended to live at the Jewish mission in Munich for a month to prepare for the
baptism. Paul B., Grillenberger noted, hoped to become a Lutheran pastor.

In the area of missionary outreach, Grillenberger visited
Jewish homes in the Munich area. “The discussions are open, friendly, and lead
in many cases to wonderful results,” he reported. He praised the work of the
laymen and women connected to the mission office in Munich, who also made
house visits and distributed the New Testament among Jews in the nearby
DP camps.(3) Every Thursday afternoon in the mission station Grillenberger
held a Bible study for Jews who had converted and those who were interested in
converting. He also preached “mission sermons” once or twice a month in
Lutheran churches.(4) He was particularly grateful to pastor Heinz David Leuner, a
Jew from Breslau who converted to Protestantism in 1935 and fled to Britain, for
lecturing and preaching twice in Munich during the past six months.
And finally he reported that he regularly visited the synagogue in Munich where he
made new contacts.

Grillenberger’s report was typical of missionaries who
were engaged in the everyday work of proselytizing in the late 1940s and 1950s.
The Bavarian Jewish Mission was a branch of the
Evangelical-Lutheran Central Federation for the Mission to Israel
(Evangelische-lutherische Zentralverein fuer Mission unter Israel), which was reconstituted in
October 1945 by Karl Heinrich Rengstorf (1903-92), a professor of theology in
Muenster and director of the Institutum Judaicum, originally founded by Franz
Delitzsch (1813-90), the father of the mission to Israel in Germany.(5)
Rengstorf acknowledged in 1945 that in consideration of all that had happened to Jews
during the last twelve years that it would be inappropriate to begin
immediately with traditional missionary work, defined as actively seeking out
Jews with the intent to convince them to convert to Protestantism.(6)
Instead Rengstorf recommended that the Central Federation concentrate on
studying the present situation of Jews and baptized Jews in Germany and
combating negative stereotypes of Jews. Rengstorf did not renounce the
church’s obligation to preach the gospel to Jews, he simply wanted to curtail the
conversion efforts for the time being.

Although the local branches of the Central Federation also
declared their intention to study the history of Jews and Judaism and to
combat antisemitism, the large influx of eastern European Jews into Germany in
1946 and 1947 brought about a return of traditional missionary efforts.
Many of the Jews arriving in Germany from Eastern Europe in 1945 and 1946
were fleeing Poland where pogroms and other antisemitic activities had resulted
in the deaths of hundreds of Jews.(7) Polish Jews and other Jewish
refugees housed in DP camps had no intention of remaining in Germany for an extended
period of time. Ironically, occupied Germany from 1945 to 1952
functioned as a sanctuary for Jews while they waited for the opportunity to emigrate to
Palestine/Israel, the United States, Australia, and elsewhere.

The DP camps and the temporary quarters for Jews in cities
such as Munich provided missionaries with concentrated groups of Jews
whose own faith had been weakened or challenged by their experiences over the
past twelve years. Although many Protestant pastors considered the influx of
tens of thousands of east European Jews into Germany highly regrettable, if not
objectionable, missionaries saw both an opportunity and an obligation. At
a meeting of pastors and missionaries in Nuremberg in 1946 Pastor
Wilhelm Friedrich Hopf (1910-82) described the flood of Polish Ostjuden into
Bavaria as an “inducement to steer our congregations toward a Christian
and missionary outlook on the Jewish question.”(8) According to Hopf it
was both an opportunity for the church to prove that it was not
antisemitic and an obligation to preach the good news to all men.

For missionaries the solution to the “Jewish question” or
“Jewish problem” was conversion. Although missionaries seeking to convert Jews
insist they are not antisemitic, their ultimate goal as the theologian Eva
Fleischner argues, “. . . is baptism and entrance into the Church, with the
consequent disappearance of the Jew as Jew.”(9) Whereas the Nazis had tried to
solve the Jewish question by deporting and killing Jews, postwar
missionaries sought to solve it by persuading Jews to join the Christian Church and
assimilate. Since the Nazis had closed down the missions in the late 1930s and
early 1940s maintaining that Jews as a race corroded German society,
the missionaries presented the postwar reconstitution of the missions as a
sign of the Lutheran churches‚ opposition to antisemitism and their love for the
Jews. There was no better way, missionaries contended, for the church to
express its aversion to the racial hatred of the Nazis and the continuation of
antisemitism in postwar Germany than to open their arms to Jews,
especially the demoralized and uprooted Ostjuden, by preaching the gospel to them. If
anyone needed to hear the good news that Christ had suffered and died to
take away the sins of the world, it was Jews. Not to preach to the Jews would be
antisemitic because it would indicate a racial bias against them.

Most parishioners, pastors, and church leaders accepted in
theory the philosophy underpinning the mission to the Jews in the
immediate postwar years. In reality, however, practical support was lacking.
Many devoted missionaries complained that prejudice toward Jews by
church leaders and congregations resulted in a lack of support for the missions.
For example, Pastor Theo Burgstahler (1896-1965), a missionary in Ulm
where over 10,000 Jews were housed in various camps in 1947, complained
that, “Missionaries by the thousands carry the gospel to the pagan world,” but
“Israel [i.e., the Jews in Germany] remains until today the stepchild of the
mission.”(10) According to a report submitted by pastor Hopf of the
Nuremberg mission, Bavaria was an exception. He and his colleague Martin
Wittenberg maintained that the work of the Bavarian Mission to Israel was strongly
supported by the rest of the Bavarian pastorate as well as leaders of the
Bavarian Lutheran Church. Evidence of this support was the substantial
financial contributions the Bavarian Mission received in the fall of 1946 from over
200 parsonages in response to Hopf and Wittenberg’s appeal for
contributions.(11) Perhaps the fact that tens of thousands of Jews had recently streamed
into Bavaria convinced many pastors that a “Jewish problem” still
existed and that the mission was the way to resolve it.

Hopf’s enthusiastic and optimistic assessment in his
official report notwithstanding, in private correspondence he also
frequently complained about the lack of support from church leaders.(12) Although the
official discrimination against Jews came to an end with Hitler’s
defeat, the ingrained prejudices against Jews did not disappear overnight. The
distorted image of the Jew as a black-marketeer living extravagantly on care
packets from wealthy Jews abroad while everyday German Gentiles barely
survived in bombed-out basements did not bring a flood of support for the missions.
The vast majority of Jewish refugees in Germany wanted to emigrate
and most Germans were happy to see them go. It was only the missionaries
who hoped to offer Jews a permanent home in the Evangelical Church in Germany.

These missionaries believed that they had a deeper
obligation to preach the gospel to Jews than to pagans. Even the pastors and
theologians who believed that both the continued existence of Jews in Europe after
the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel in May 1948 were signs
of the Jews‚ chosen status maintained that until Jews recognized Jesus as the
Messiah they had not fulfilled their purpose as God’s chosen people. In April
1948 in Darmstadt, the council of brethren, which consisted of churchmen
from the former Confessing Church who wanted to reform the postwar
church, had declared that “God remains true to Israel and does not abandon it,
despite its disloyalty, despite its rejection of Christ. . . . At the same time,
however, the Church is waiting for the erring children of Israel to resume the
place reserved for them by God.”(13) This type of thinking, I believe, was
more representative of the Protestant Church than the rejection of
supersessionism in the Berlin-Weissensee statement two years later.

The Darmstadt statement of 1948 and the Berlin-Weissensee statement of 1950
are often juxtaposed by theologians and historians
(including myself) for the purpose of underscoring the differences between the two.
Typically, scholars argue that the Berlin-Weissensee statement marks a major
advance over the Darmstadt statement because it rejects supersessionism
whereas the Darmstadt statement affirms it. But, in fact, the two statements have
an important underlying theme in common: they express the hope that
Jews will join the church and thereby fulfill their God-given mission. To be
sure, the Berlin-Weissensee statement is subtler and less smug: “We
pray to the Lord of mercy that he may bring about the Day of Fulfillment when
we will be praising the triumph of Jesus Christ together with the saved Israel.”

Whereas, the Darmstadt statement implores Protestant churches and
pastors to “Tell them [the Jews] that the promises of the Old Testament are
fulfilled in Jesus Christ.” As Karl Heinrich Rengstorf, the director of the
Evangelical-Lutheran Federation for the Mission to Israel, explained, the sorrow
the church felt for the Jews “springs from the knowledge that the Jews as
such, although chosen by God, have not yet come to the goal which was
appointed with their election . . . .”(14) In short, the rejection of
supersessionism alone did not mean the end of the missionary movement. Even if
directors of the missions complained that they did not receive the practical
and financial support they wanted, there is plenty of evidence before and
after Berlin-Weissensee that missions to the Jews were widely
accepted as necessary and theologically valid.

What was the Jewish response to Protestant missionaries in
the immediate postwar years? This is more difficult to determine;
although Grillenberger mentions 5 Jews who expressed interest in converting, I
have uncovered only the opinions of prominent Jews. One critic, Rabbi Steven
S. Schwarzschild (1924-89) who served as rabbi in Berlin from 1948 to 1950,
asked rhetorically in the Berlin Jewish periodical “The Way” (Der Weg),
whether Christians in Germany were in the moral position to proselytize
considering the recent “bloodbath” that took place in Christian Central
Europe.(15) He noted that since the end of the war a number of Protestant and
Catholic organizations with innocuous names had been established in Germany
professing to promote friendly relations with Jews and a deeper understanding of
Judaism.

Schwarzschild acknowledged that much could be done to
improve relations between Jews and Germans, and that genuine efforts in this
direction should be applauded. But some of these organizations he charged hid
their true intensions, i.e., to persuade Jews to convert. He found this
particularly reprehensible when these groups focused their attention on
Jews in the DP camps, Jews whose lives had been turned upside down by
over a decade of persecution. He singled out the Protestant periodical
“Judaica” and the Catholic periodical “Freiburger Rundbrief” as typical
examples of publications engaged in missionary activities under the guise of fighting
antisemitism and encouraging a dialogue between Christians and Jews.(16)

Since most German and Polish rabbis had either been
murdered by the Nazis or fled abroad, the dialogue sought by Protestant clergymen,
Schwarzschild contended, was not a dialogue between equal partners. The
Jews approached by Christians after the war were more often than not
uneducated war refugees who were intellectually unprepared to defend themselves
against the aggressive arguments of Christian pastors and theologians. Even the
Christian organizations that explicitly repudiated missionary work
and genuinely sought a dialogue with Jews, Schwarzschild accused of engaging
in a monologue ö if only because Jewish theologians were in such short supply
in Germany.(17)

Schwarzschild concluded that the first stage in the process
of reconciliation was not to aggressively promote a close friendship after
years of animosity. First a period of time needed to lapse during which Jews
and Christians lived next to each other in a peaceful and respectful manner.
Wounds needed to heal before friendship and dialogue were possible.
Rabbi Leo Baeck (1873-1956), one of two rabbis from
more than two-dozen to survive internment in Thieresenstadt
concentration/extermination camp, was subtler in his critique of the Protestant missions to the
Jews.(18) Baeck, along with Professors Martin Buber and Hans-Joachim
Schoeps, were identified by Schwarzschild as prominent German Jews who worked
with some of the Christian organizations that Schwarzschild criticized.

After his release from Thieresenstadt Baeck emigrated to England in 1945 and
returned to Germany for the first time in October 1948. During this visit he
participated in the first conference on Christian-Jewish relations organized by
the Evangelical-Lutheran Committee for Service to Israel,
whose director was Rengstorf. Baeck delivered a lecture entitled, “Judaism on
Old and New Paths,” which two years later was published in “Judaica,” a
periodical edited by Pastor Robert Brunner of the Basel mission to Israel.
Baeck argued that true Christians must recognize their Jewish roots and
contended that the Protestant Church during the Nazi era was a glaring
example of what happens when Christians forget this. He reproached Christians who
took the Holocaust as a sign of God’s rejection and damnation of the Jewish
people. In a 1954 article that appeared in a collection of essays by leading
European Christians in missionary organizations and friendship societies, Baeck
criticized the church’s tendency to approach Jews from a position of
superiority. He saw nothing inappropriate with the missionary task per se. In
fact, he argued that if Christians were indifferent it would signify “some
inner weakness and indolence or even a self-centeredness contradictory to the
religious way.”(19)But what he did not like was when the church depicted the
Jewish people as the rejected people and condescendingly offered to save
them from damnation by inviting them into the church. “There could be no greater
barrier to mutual understanding, or to even honest and heartfelt discussion,”
Baeck believed, then failing to acknowledge that the Old Testament and
Judaism did not need the New Testament or the church to complete it.

The German-Jewish scholar Hans Joachim-Schoeps
(1909-80), who spent the Second World War in Sweden and lost his parents in Nazi death
camps, returned to Germany in 1946 and took a position in the theology
department at the University of Erlangen in Bavaria. Since his own research
in the 1930s and later focused on Christian-Jewish relations, Schoeps was a
formidable Jewish voice in the postwar Christian-Jewish dialogue. Schoeps
expressed the hope that Jews and Christians would recognize the validity of
God’s revelation at both Sinai and Golgotha in his 1948 essay, “Possibilities
and Limits to Jewish-Christian Understanding.”(20) Significantly,
however, he insisted that Jews could not be expected to recognize God’s covenant
with the church as valid for themselves. “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 this man [Jesus of
Nazareth]. . . . In thus recognizing that the revelation of the church of Jesus
Christ has its sphere of validity, from which only Israel is excepted by
virtue of its direct election by the Father, I do not believe that I offend against
the Jewish tradition.”(21) In no way, Schoeps argued, did recognizing
the importance of Jesus for Christians challenge Judaism. Judaism he
insisted was not in need of completion or fulfillment.

Although he left it to Christian theologians to decide
whether or not Christians should be instructed to recognize the validity of
the covenant God made with the Jewish people, he made his own opinion
quite clear. He acknowledged that for Christians to accept the continued
validity of God’s election of Israel would require not only the abandonment
of central beliefs of the church but also its missionary enterprise. But
historical accuracy demanded, Schoeps argued, a rejection of these views.
“For the church to revise this judgment [that the Jews have been rejected by
God], which would imply abandonment by the church of its mission among the
Jews, seems more than justified by historical experience.” By “historical
experience” Schoeps meant the continued existence of the Jews despite the many
attempts to destroy them.”We must express the hope that, just as today we are
prepared to acknowledge the witness of the Church to be true, as the truth that has
been granted exclusively to the Church, so the Church may also
acknowledge our awareness of God and his covenant with us as true, as the truth which has
been granted exclusively to us . . . .”(22) In an age when fewer and
fewer Europeans, Jews and gentiles, were actively engaged in professing their
faith, Schoeps called for a mutual acknowledgement of each other’s truth.

Certainly there were Christian theologians in
Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, including Helmut Gollwitzer, Guenther Harder, and
Heinrich Vogel, who whole heartedly agreed with Schwarzschild, Baeck, and
Schoeps‚ critiques of the church’s mission to the Jews, supersessionism, and
Christian triumphalism.(23) In fact, debate raged in the church in the
1960s and 1970s over whether the church’s mission to the Jews in all forms
should be unequivocally repudiated. An important moment was the
1961 Kirchentag. But it was not until 1980 that the regional Synod of the
Evangelical Church in the Rhineland explicitly repudiated the church’s mission to
Israel. Using language very similar to that used by Schoeps in 1948,
Eberhard Bethge, the principal author of the Rhineland Synod declaration, and
the representatives of the Rhineland regional church declared, “We believe
that in their respective calling Jews and Christians are witnesses of God
before the world and before each other. Therefore we are convinced that the
church may not express its witness towards the Jewish people as it does its
mission to the peoples of the world.” In the two decades since 1980 many
of the regional churches have published similar documents repudiating the
mission to Israel.

Significantly the Bavarian Lutheran Church issued a 4-page
position paper on “Christians and Jews” in 1998 that did not explicitly reject
missionizing Jews but did call for Bavarian Lutherans to “think through anew”
the church’s mission to the Jews.(24) The glaring absence of an explicit
rejection of the mandate to witness to Jews was only partially muted by the
Bavarian Lutheran Bishop Hermann von Loewenich’s announcement that he
personally opposes missionary efforts directed at Jews.(25) And in 2000 the
EKD revisited the 1950 Berlin-Weissensee statement in a document entitled,
“Christian and Jews: A Manifesto 50 Years after the Weissensee Declaration.”
Although EKD Synod failed to reject missionizing Jews altogether, it did urge
dialogue, respect, and “a brotherly and sisterly relationship between
Christians and Jews.”(26)

Why did it take four decades in some regional churches,
even longer in others, and is still a matter of debate among some church leaders,
for German Protestants to reject the church’s mission to the Jews?
First, it is relatively easy in retrospect to see how Christian
anti-Judaism played a role in fostering and legitimizing an antisemitic milieu that
made the Holocaust possible. But in Germany and elsewhere in Europe this
was not immediately apparent in the late 1940s and 1950s. An extended period
of intense reflection was necessary before recognizing Christian
teaching, especially Christian triumphalism, as a primary culprit. Second, the
theological foundation of anti-Judaism was so deeply rooted in the
church’s doctrine and traditions that a repudiation of this theology was no small
endeavor. It meant overturning some of the most basic tenets of
Protestant Christianity, and this revision naturally met with stiff resistance at first.
Third, the founding of Israel in May 1948 had less of an impact on the
church’s attitude toward Jews and Judaism than is often argued. Although
some Protestant theologians viewed the founding of the state of Israel as a
sign of the continued choseness of the Jewish people, others
recognized the secular nature of the state. In fact, those who did not attribute a
theological meaning to the founding of Israel argued convincingly that Jews living
in Germany were, in fact, easier to reach with the gospel than Jews in Israel,
where proselytizing was condemned. Fourth, Christian guilt over
the persecution of Jews during the Third Reich led some pastors to conclude
that the church must never abandon Jews again and viewed a repudiation of the
mission to Israel as a continuation of antisemitism and an abandonment of the
Jews. And finally, the temptation to missionize the large numbers of Jewish
refugees in the immediate postwar years and again in the 1990s with the
emigration of tens of thousands of Russian Jews to Germany proved too strong
for many Protestant pastors and church leaders to resist.

Endnotes

1: The following translation is from The Theology of the
Churches and the Jewish People: Statements by the World Council of
Churches ands its Member Churches, with commentary by Allan Brockway, Paul van
Buren, Rolf Rendtorff, and Simon Schoon (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1988),
47-49.

2: Wilhelm Grillenberger, “Bericht über meine Taetigkeit
in der Münchener Judenmission vom November 1950 bis Mai 1951,” LKAN,
LKR XIV, 1608a.

3: As of 1952 there were approximately 12,000 Jews still
in DP camps in Germany. This was down from 182,000 in summer 1947.
The vast majority of Jewish DPs lived in the American zone, which included
Bavaria.

4: Hans-Siegfried Huβ collected several mission
sermons, including a few by Grillenberger, in Redet mit Jerusalem freundlich:
Predigten (Neuendettelsau: Freimund-Verlag, 1951).

5: Rengstorf et ala to Oberkirchenrat Stuttgart, 24 Oct.1945, LKAS,
A126/658.

6: See Eva Fleichner, Judaism in German Christian Theology since 1945, ATLA Monograph Series, No. 8, (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975), 139 and Heinz Kremers, Judenmission heute? Von der Judenmission zur
bruederlichen Solidaritaet und zum oekumenischen Dialog (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1979), 10-11.

7: See Angelika Koenigseder and Juliane Wetzel, Waiting
for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-World War II Germany,
translated from the German by John A. Broadwin (Evanston. IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1994), 43-53.

8: Hopf, “Niederschrift,” 23 Oct. 1946, LKAN, V. III/51,1.

9: Eva Fleischner, Judaism in German Christian Theology
since 1945, ATLA Monograph Series, No. 8, (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press,
1975), 139.

10: Theo Burgstahler in Der Freund Israels 74: 6 (Dec.
1947): 83.

11: Hopf, “Niederschrift,” LKAN, V. III/51, 1.

12: See Hopf’s correspondence with Rengstorf in LKAN,
V. III/51, 1.

13: An English translation of “Ein Wort zur Judenfrage” is
available in the World Council of Churches collection of statements, The
relationship of the Church to the Jewish People, (Geneva (1964), 48-52.

14: Karl Heinrich Rengstorf, “The Jewish Problem and the
Church’s Understanding of its Mission,” in Goete Hedenquist, ed.,
The Church and the Jewish People (London: Edinburgh House Press, 1954), 30.

15: Born in Frankfurt, Schwarzschild moved with his
family in 1939 to New York City, where he attended high school. Later, he
enrolled at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. Ordained a rabbi at Hebrew Union
College in Cincinnati in 1948, he served as a rabbi in both parts of Berlin and in
East Germany from 1948-1950 and in Fargo, North Dakota, and in Lynn,
Massachusetts, from 1950-1964. The quote is from Steven S. Schwarzschild,
“Freundschaft oder Missionarbeit?” Der Weg 47 (25 Nov. 1949): 9.

16: In a response to Schwarzschild’s article editors of the
Freiburger Rundbrief denied that they had any missionary intentions.
See Freiburger Rundbrief (April 1950), 15-17.

17: Frank Stern discusses some of these organizations in
his article, “Wider Antisemitismus-für christlich-juedische Zusammenarbeit.
Aus der Entstehungszeit der Gesellschaften und des
Koordinierungsrats,” Menora: Jahrbuch fuer deutsch-juedische Geschichte 3 (1992):
182-209.

18: Born in Lissa (now Leszno, Poland) on May 24, 1873,
Baeck studied at the Universities of Breslau and Berlin and at the Juedisch-
theologisches Seminar, Breslau and the Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des
Judentums in Berlin, receiving his doctorate in 1895 and rabbinical ordination in
1897. He served as a rabbi in Oppeln, Duesseldorf, and Berlin, as a lecturer
at the Hochschule, and from 1933 to 1942 as president of the
Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden. Deported to Theresienstadt in 1943, he
emigrated to Great Britain in 1945, and became chairman of the World Union
for Progressive Judaism and first president of the Leo Baeck Institute. He
died in London on November 1, 1956. The other Rabbi to survive
Theresienstadt was Rabbi Neuhaus of Frankfurt.

19: Leo Baeck, “Some Questions to the Christian Church
from the Jewish Point of View,” in Goete Hedenquist, ed., The Church and the
Jewish People (London: Edinburgh House Press, 1954), 108.

20: Hans Joachim Schoeps, “Moeglichkeiten und Grenzen
juedisch-christlicher
Verstaendigung,” Unterwegs 3 (1948): 4-11.

21: Schoeps, “Moeglichkeiten,” 5-6.

22: Hans Joachim Schoeps, The Jewish-Christian
Argument: A History of Theologies in Conflict, trans. David Green (London: Faber
and Faber, 1963), 167.

23: One can easily trace a similar change in perspective
toward proselytizing by Catholics in Germany in the Catholic periodical
Freiburger Rundbrief edited by Gertrud Luckner and Karl Thieme.

24: The position paper was issued at the Bavarian
Church’s November 1998 Nuremberg Synod. See, “Freiburger Rundbrief,” 6, no. 3
(1999): 191-97. For an English translation see the “Jewish-Christian Relations”
website, www.jcrelations.net.

25: Bishop Loewenich’s remarks are quoted in “Synode
aktuell” Evangelischer Presseverband fuer Bayern (24 November 1998).

26: See the “Jewish-Christian Relations” website for
English and German translations of this document.

Matthew D. Hockenosmhockeno@skidmore.edu

Dear Friends,
Contents:

1) Gerhard Besier, The German Churches 1933-2003, Part II
2) Forthcoming Catholic conference, Munich, May 22-23.
3) Book note: Weindel, Leben und Lernen hinter Stacheldraht

1) The ecclesio-political development in the Federal Republic of Germany 

The growing affinity of eastern EKD member churches with Socialism cannot
be understood without considering the analogous development in western
churches and in the ecumenical movement of Geneva.
The post-war re-structuring of the Social Democratic Party (“SPD”) and the
emergence of a new elite -a process that was basically concluded by the
Godesberg Party Program of 1959 – resulted in a fundamental consensus
between the two main parties as to the social-political significance of the
two mainline churches. From the mid-1960s onward, the Christian-Democratic
Union (“CDU”) no longer enjoyed the support of the majority of the
Protestant Church. Due to the above-mentioned change of elite, the SPD became
a “Protestant Party” (Willy Brandt), and remained so until the mid-1980s..
By the early-1990s, the Catholic Church still showed a certain affinity
with the CDU/CSU (Union of Christian Democrats and Christian Socialists).
But following the peace and ecology debates in the 1980s, parts of the
Protestant Church and the Green Party moved closer together, thus splitting
sympathies in the center-left wing. When characterizing the closeness or
distance of a church to a political party, the attitudes of church
officials are significant. But the voting habits of citizens with
denominational ties show that they did not and do not generally follow the
mental gymnastics of their bishops, church presidents, and pastors. The
growing distinctions of church milieus and the mental distance between the
leaders and the people of the church has not been without consequences.
Principally, one must note that all these socio-political
transformations hardly affected the status of Free Churches, Christian
“Special Associations,” and so-called “sects.” They remained on the social
periphery and, due to latent reservations, they had to put up with many
professional disadvantages.

From 1969, one could no longer ignore the gradual emigration of Christians
from the two mainline churches. At the same time commissioners for sect
issues of the mainline churches increased their apologetic activity against
so-called “youth cults.” Since 1969, the Protestant Church has carried out
official polls every ten years in order to record the way of thinking, the
feelings, and actions of church members. However, these churches are
experiencing the loss of members, while new religious groups and secular
providers of life-counseling services are gaining ground. The inner
emaciation of mainline churches, particularly the Protestant Church, could
force politicians to reconsider the privileged position of the churches,
even though the legal status of the churches under public law, as written
into the 1949 Constitution, is not endangered. A minority church will no
longer be able to play, as hitherto, a unique and privileged role in
shaping society. Instead it will have to gain recognition for its
arguments in pluralistic discourse with other social groups. Thereby, much
will depend on the persuasiveness of their arguments. The two smaller coalition
parties-Free Democratic Party (“FDP”) and Bündnis 90/Die
Grünen-have considerable political potential, as they speak in favor of a
clear separation of State and Church. The more external power the churches
lose due to their declining number of members, the more influence
will be gained by members of these parties and by liberal skeptics of the
National Church. The Protestant Church now attempts to counteract this
development with personal political contacts. This explains why, for
example, in 1997 Schmidt-Jortzig (FDP), then Federal Minister of Justice,
and Antje Vollmer (Bündnisgrüne), Vice-President of the Federal Parliament,
were appointed to the new Synod of the Protestant Church in Germany. It
remains to be seen whether this actually archaic technique of
diplomacy – politics by personal contacts – will lead to success.

It can be quite clearly seen how the established religious institutions
during the 19th and 20th centuries lost their power to attract people. At the
same time, the emotional power of political surrogate religions in Germany
grew. Exaggerated nationalism, undiminished personality cult (Bismarck,
Hindenburg, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin), Socialism, and National Socialism were
political movements that took over the role of religious revival and
veneration of the saints. Likewise, the peace movement of the 1980s, the
human rights movement, and the environmental movement also showed
unmistakably religious traits. The fact that the larger religious
associations curried favor with these movements, indeed sometimes claiming
to be the original creators of these ideas, does not change their position
as tolerated free-riders who were pityingly smiled at and even despised.
The inner emaciation of the Protestant church has reached an enormous
amount. In 1950, it had 43 million members, whereas now there are 26.6
million left. Berlin-Brandenburg has fewer people going to a regular
Protestant service on Sundays than people working for deaconry and church.
According to some polls, up to a third of clerics themselves do not believe
in the fundamentals of Christian belief: Holy Scripture, Jesus Christ as God’s
son, salvation. The believers perceive this inner discrepancy, feel
mystified and turn away from the church. According to a finding of the
Allensbach Opinion Research Institute, only a minority of Germans, namely
39 % have the impression that the churches seek to “convince people of
belief” at all. For a number of years, at least a third of people
interviewed in relevant opinion polls declare that they do not confide in
the churches. This is understandable when considering the churches’ history
and their not irrelevant number of political and theological odysseys. The
churches are facing the danger of demographic over-aging well above that of
the general population. All of this does not encourage good forecasts for
the German state churches. On the other hand, there is evidence that
Christian belief will survive the state-like German religious institutions,
since for years opinion pollers have been noting a development which might
be summed up as “yes to belief, no to the Church.” This could be, even in
Germany, the great moment of small Free churches and religious communities.

History of Mentalities: Problems of the Church Reunification in 1989/91

In late summer of 1989, the already unstable dictatorship of the GDR
expected some positive assertions by the Protestant church on its
relationship with the regime during the 20 years of history of the Church
Federation. Few were forthcoming. Yet, even in West Germany there were
some churchmen, such as the editor of the magazine “Young Church” (“Junge
Kirche”), who expressed their support “in principle, solidarity towards the
GDR.” Bishops and general
superintendents of churches in the GDR admonished those people attempting to
leave East Germany, to stay in the country. Although they also pointed out
the regime’s lack of preparedness to introduce reforms, yet in spite of
their critiques, the clergymen praised certain achievements of GDR
socialism, saying they were worth keeping and for which it was worth
staying in the country. The “social securing of the basic needs of life,”
“the priority of the responsibility for peace in foreign policy [of the
GDR],” “the anti-fascist commitment of our country,” and “the basic
socialist matter of concern, of sharing the toll and the fruits of work
with each other”, were among the factors selected for praise.
But, during the latter half of 1989, due to the ensuing political
development, more and more obvious tensions grew amongst the leaders of the
Conference of Church Governing Bodies in the GDR. By the beginning of 1990, the issue of
national reunification was on everyone’s mind. On the one hand, Bishop
Christoph Demke of the Province of Saxony, but also General Superintendent
Günter Krusche of Berlin, strongly rejected the idea of German
re-unification. But otherpersons, such as Bishop Leich of Thuringia,
welcomed this development. From the sequence of events during that period
we can conclude that the discussion about German unification or re-unification preceded the
discussion about re-unifying the churches, and might even be considered its
pre-condition. Among some East German clergymen, there was a clear
“rejecting attitude towards that twaddle of re-unification.” Not only those
taking a positive position towards the GDR state as Demke, but also those who massively criticized the
regime, such as Bishop Gottfried Forck of Berlin-Brandenburg, wanted to
preserve the “option for socialism.”

After Egon Krenz took Erich Honecker’s place as general secretary of the
SED on October 18, 1989, he intensified contacts with the Conference
of Governing Church Bodies and tried to find a harmonious new beginning
with them on the basis of a changed Socialism. Again, the bishops were
divided in their reaction. Whereas some put great hopes in the new policy
of dialogue, others remained sceptical. The breach of the Berlin Wall on
November 9, 1989 created a new situation in so far as it became clear that,
despite all appeals, the people were flocking to the West. On November 28,
the then West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, presented a program on the
Federal German policy, consisting of ten points, to the West German
Parliament – the aim of which was the re-unification of both countries. In
Dresden, on December 19, Chancellor Kohl and GDR Prime Minister Hans Modrow
announced a union by treaty [Vertragsgemeinschaft] of both German states
for the spring of 1990.

At the end of November 1989 the church leaders in the GDR, Christoph
Demke, Günter Krusche and Pastor Friedrich Schorlemmer signed an appeal
“For our country,” in which they demanded “a socialist alternative to the
Federal Republic.” They warned the readers that a “selling off of our
material and moral values is starting, and sooner or later the German
Democratic Republic will be taken.” Finally, they appealed to the
population: “We can still go back to our anti-fascist and humanist ideals
we once started from.”

The BEK board on “Church and Society” criticized this one-sided view of
things, but pointed to the differences in mentality which had arisen
between East and West, and advised against “precocious plan[s] and aim[s]
of a governmental unification of the Germans.” The chief administrative
officer (Konsistorialpräsident) of the Protestant church of
Berlin-Brandenburg, Manfred Stolpe, like Demke, still belonged to those who
wanted to preserve a separate GDR state. The population in general, on the
contrary, voiced more and more determined demands for joining
(anschliessen) the Federal Republic in their “Monday demonstrations”.

The expression “joining” (“Anschluss”) – in German a word with the negative
connotation of a forced political union, like the annexation of Austria by
Nazi Germany in 1938 – was first used by church-journalist Reinhard Henkys
during his key speech to the leading committees of both the EKD and the
Kirchenbund, in mid-January 1990 at Loccum monastery (close to Hanover).
What precisely was discussed during this meeting, remains a mystery. In any
case, the declaration that “both German states are growing together” and
that “the special union of the entire Protestant Christianity in Germany
should also find a suitable expression by a [united] church,” can’t have
been motivated by Henkys’s speech. This Loccum text had already been
formulated earlier “after a controversial debate, and not unanimously.” Especially
economic obligations were probably negotiated by the EKD Council and the
Eastern member churches. As a direct reaction to the Loccum declaration, an
Ecumenical Action Circle (Ökumenischer Initiativkreis) published a “Berlin
Declaration of Christians from both states” on February 9, 1990, signed
among others by Provost Heino Falcke (of Erfurt), Pastor Ulrich Duchrow (of
Heidelberg), Joachim Garstecki (of East Berlin) and Konrad Raiser (of
Bochum). This declaration opposed the “wrong signals” of Loccum, by which
were meant both the efforts to re-establish German state unity, and
to re-establish the EKD as sole Protestant umbrella organization. The
“misleading alternative of capitalism and socialism” should be “avoided”,
since the process of conciliation had shown that “neither system was able
to offer a solution to the question of survival of humanity and of the
earth”. Especially, in this situation, “the experience of the ‘church
within a socialist society’ [should] not be denied in order to get back to a
pretended ‘normal everyday life'”.

These sentences are evidence of the uneasiness among many leftist
intellectuals in East and West Germany. Both the state and the
church re-unification were not brought about as new mergers among equals,
taking into account the different developments of both German partial
states, but as a mere joining (“Anschluss”) of the Eastern part to the
heavily criticized structures existing in West Germany. By this, all
positive ideas on the achievements of East Germany cultivated up to then in
the East as well as in the West, proved to be illusions: nothing
in the state system of the GDR, nor in the East German Church Federation,
was to be preserved in the new era. The “progress” made under socialist
premises had, on the contrary, to give way to a “conservative-bourgeois
restoration”. This procedure could be interpreted as a collective humiliation,
and gave rise to a sense of polarization between Western and Eastern élites,
resulting in vehement controversies among intellectuals in both states
and church federations. Some Western sub-cultures too, saw themselves
deprived of their hopes of building a “third way” between East and West. The
east-west-antagonisms were of course also stirred up by those individuals,
whose former conspirative activities for the GDR led them to feel
rightly threatened by the re-unification process, or who had profited under
that system as highly privileged agents of the regime. Among them were
several professors of theology and personalities of the governing bodies of
the churches.

As was revealed in 1990, about 5 % of the members of the church
assemblies, administrative officers, and bishops were serving as officers
of the State Security Department in special deployment (OibE), or as
Unofficial Collaborators (IM) in different categories. Finally, the
parallel procedure of state and church “Anschluss” was bound to create the
impression that there was also an analogy between the SED state and the
East German Church Federation (BEK). Bishop Martin Kruse of West-Berlin
tried to counter this impression in the council meeting in February 1990 by
stressing that it was the SED state which had gone bankrupt, not the East
German Church Federation.

From the justifications of the Conference of Church Governing Bodies
following the Loccum Declaration, we may deduce that this Declaration was
written and published at the “suggestion” of the Western EKD-representatives.
At any rate, it was not possible to convince the new BEK-synod at the
end of February 1990 to adopt this declaration officially, although this
council was prepared to give overall support to the process of unification
of the churches.

Demke’s election as Leich’s successor, despite having been arranged long
before, now seemed to be a positive signal for those criticizing the church
re-unification. In the meetings of the KKL of end-April 1990, the
resistance grew against a simple re-integration of the Eastern member
churches in the EKD. However, the broad approval for a simple reunification
by public opinion in both the political and ecclesiastical spheres was
irresistible. After the East German Parliamentary elections
(Volkskammerwahlen) in March 1990, Demke appealed to Hans Modrow, who was
still Prime Minister in charge, to have the files of the state security
(Stasi) sealed from public view. Demke went on: “A denunciation of
individuals because of an alleged collaboration with the state security
service should,in my opinion, not be permitted.”

The imminent currency unification aggravated the economic problems of the
Eastern Church Federation and its member churches. At the end of May 1990, the
EKD committed herself to “a certain silent support”, but these
circumstances of course increased the dependence on the Western churches.
Neverthless, the Common Commission of Federation and EKD
in Iserlohn decided on unification of the churches, but was still uncertain
whether the GDR state churches should simply join the EKD, or whether a new
Federation should be built. They reckoned with a period until the end of
January 1993. Among other things, some special arrangements had to be made
for the Eastern member churches regarding the introduction of church taxes
to be collected by the state, the introduction of a religious education
curriculum for all the schools, and especially of a contract for pastoral care in the
armed forces.

Events came thick and fast now, because of the impending currency reform
due to take place on July 1st. This led the leading church lawyers to
believe they could not wait any longer for the results of the negotiations
of the Common Commission of BEK and EKD. Contrary to the ideas of some Eastern
representatives, they wanted a “unification on the basis of the
Constitution of the EKD”. An integration of the Eastern Church Federation
into the EKD seemed legally impossible. At the end of August 1990, the KKL
voted for “a quick establishment of a membership of the Eastern Federation
churches in the EKD.” At the same time, Martin Heckel, a church lawyer of
Tübingen presented his expert opinion, which favoured the absorption of the
eastern churches into the west, and the abandonment of the BEK. In
mid-September 1990, the juridical committee of the EKD synod adopted
Heckel’s expert opinion. The unification law of the EKD based on it merely
reactivated the old EKD member rights of the Eastern churches, which had
never been cancelled, but only downplayed or sidestepped by the
Constitution of the Eastern Church Federation. This procedure left the
number of members of the EKD untouched and did not require a common consent
of all EKD member churches. This law “stayed] below the level of
agreement of the EKD Constitution.” This
legal solution avoided modifications of the EKD Constitution, but on the
other hand it completed the unavoidable impression of an Anschluss – from
an extra-legal point of view – for those members of the Eastern churches,
who had been expecting a totally new Federation or at least a merger of both
Federations. The law having established the East German Church Federation
in 1969 was inconsistent to this solution and therefore ignored. These
circumstances and especially the dissolution of the East German Federation,
were bound to reinforce painful impressions, and caused resentments among
the losers, especially since in the arguments put forward by the Western
speakers, great weight was given to the argument that the 1969 settlement had been
imposed on the eastern churches leading to a “forced Church Federation”.

The last BEK synod preceding the German re-unification in September 1990
dealt, among other subjects, with the question of how far the churches in
the GDR “helped factually, and sometimes also willingly, to stabilize the
state and thus the dominating system.” From February 22 to
24, 1991 the BEK synod met – parallel to the EKD synod – one last time. The
vain attempts of Western clergymen failed to make the legalistic facts
appear less brutal through acts of appeasement. Rosemarie Cynkiewicz,
chairperson of the Eastern BEK synod, criticized the EKD for not being willing
to “use the situation as a chance for creating something new
together”; as well eight synod members voted against the BEK unification law,
and one abstained. The first general EKD synod met in June 1991 in Coburg.
after the Conference of Church Governing Bodies
had met for the last time. Due to the reservations in the Eastern part, it is
understandable that the act of unification in Coburg took place “without
major festivities, without any special expressions of gratitude.”
The next task was to consider the unification of the divided Protestant
church of Berlin-Brandenburg, where one half of the church – in West Berlin
– had been entirely separated from the other half in East Berlin for thirty
years. So too the question arose of how to repeal the division of the
Evangelical Church of the Union (EKU, the former Prussian state church),
and whether to welcome the restoration of the United Lutheran Church in
Germany (VELKD). It must be said that the leitmotif of these changes was to seek a return to the
situation existing at the end of the 1960s. (The common elaboration of a
new Constitution for the Protestant Church in Berlin-Brandenburg, completed
in 1995, changed nothing.)

Thus it can be no surprise that, despite the legally correct merger, the
existing tensions did not decrease, but even grew in some areas. The
argument on the employment status of military chaplains continued until the
EKD synod in Amberg in November 2001. Although ten years have passed in the
meantime, it remains uncertain whether the synods of the Protestant Church
in Berlin-Brandenburg or the Church Province of Saxony will accept the
arrangement for employing the circa 30 military chaplains of the Eastern
member churches as non-permanent federal civil servants. If we consider the
atmosphere in society in general, of which the churches are only a small
part, we find that the differences of mentality in East and West have
hardly diminished over the last ten years. Inner re-unification has
made little progress.

It was not only the re-unification of the churches, but the demographic and
economic changes brought about by the large numbers of people leaving the
churches, as well as the increase of the percentage of aging church
members, and a dramatic decrease of church taxes, which forced German
Protestantism to consider several reforms of structures. Since the
mid-1990s, a merger of some state churches as well as a reduction of the
traditional church “umbrella organisations” has been considered. In 2001
there had been a church tax income of 4.250 Billion Euro and a membership
of 26,601,000. But assessments say in the next generation there will be 50
% drop of the tax paying church members.
The repercussions for the legally-established church structures are bound
to be severe.

The Problem of Contemporary Church Historiography

The undeniable affinity of vast parts of German Protestantism with the
National Socialist state remains a heavy burden. For decades, church
historians and publicists have struggled to come to terms with this legacy.
As well, the undeniable fact that many churchmen in the eastern churches
collaborated with the socialist dictatorship has had catastrophic
consequences for the image of the Protestant church in Germany. That is why
the Protestant churches – by largely avoiding the problem of the State Security Department (Stasi) – try to
offer evidence that, during the period of the GDR’s existence, they were
engaged in a considerable number of opposition activities, following the
pattern established in the immediate post-1945 period. By assigning a large
number of doctoral dissertations, which are partly subsidised with church
stipends, this version can be expected to maintain the dominant position in
the historiography. On the other hand, there is no doubt that, since the
1960s, there has been a strong affinity in some sections of German
Protestantism with several socialist utopian views and that since the 1980s
– in connection with the NATO’s two-track decision – some clear
convergences with the “real existing socialism” in the GDR could be
perceived. The efforts of some Protestant historians to describe the
collapsed GDR regime as
something other than a pure totalitarian regime, must be seen against this
background too. Furthermore, by stressing the differences between the Nazi
regime and the SED regime, these authors are trying to give at least a
partial correction of the view that the
GDR was a criminal dictatorship, lacking the rule of law. But,
given the continuing separation of mentalities between east and west, it is
clear that the task of coming to terms with the churches’ experiences in
the GDR is far from complete, and will likely occupy a prominent position
in the historiography of the next few years.

In contrast to the large number of books and articles dealing with the
churches of the GDR, the historiography of the western members of the EKD
has been relatively sparser. For the immediate post-war years, we have
seen a plethora of excellent document collections and monographs. But the
years of the Bonn Republic from 1949-1989 are still largely unexplored
ground. And this, despite the fact that both the major denominations
established in the 1950s their own separate Commissions for Contemporary
Church History. Their publications, however, have chiefly concentrated on
the earlier much disputed periods of the twentieth century. Furthermore,
these endeavours are highly denominational in tone, and none of them has
sought to bring a wider ecumenical or international dimension to these
Commissions’ labours. All the more notable therefore was the initiative
taken in the late 1980s to bring together a group of scholars of various
nationalities and denominations in order to try and search for a larger
dimension in the writing of contemporary church history. The conferences of
this group have deliberately sought to relate German experiences to those
of other countries, such as Scandinavia, Poland, France and Italy. The
findings are printed in the journal Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte which can be
regarded as the premier publication in this field. Nevertheless, the
historiography of the German churches for the foreseeable future is likely
to remain, as do the ecclesiastical structures of the churches themselves,
highly denominational in character. Coming to terms with the convoluted
legacy of the recent German past still presents scholars in this field with
numerous still-to-be-fulfilled challenges. Per opera ad astra!
The author, Gerhard Besier, can be contacted at the Hannah Arendt Institut
fur Totalitarismusforschung, Technische Universitat, Dresden, Germany

2) Forthcoming Catholic conference, Munich

The Catholic Commission for Contemporary Church History together with the
Catholic Academy in Bavaria announces a conference on “Tatsachen-Deutungen
-Fragen” on Thursday and Friday, May 22nd and 23rd , which will take up
many of the the themes outlined above, and at which leading practitioners
will speak. More details can be obtained from the Commission at
www.kath-akademie-bayern.de/veranstalt/

3) Book note: Ed. Matthias Weindel, Leben und Lernen hinter Stacheldraht.
Die evangelischen Lagergemeinden und Theologischen Schulen in England,
Italien und Agypten. (Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte: Reihe A:
Quellen, Band 7) Gottingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2001. 462 pp.
As an example of the newly-published series of document collections
mentioned in the final paragraph of Gerhard Besier’s essay above, we can
cite Matthias Weindel’s excellent contribution on the steps taken to assist
the German POWs in Britain, Italy and Egypt during the period 1944-1948.
These contemporary reports, mainly by the organizers, outline the measures
taken to provide church services, pastoral care, and above all theological
training in the several hundred camps, where German Protestants were held
before being finally repatriated. The initiative came from the Swedish
pastor, Birger Forell, who inspired this excellent programme, which was
then supported by the British War Office as a part of the Re-Education
programme. These reports give a full picture of the successes and
failures of this unique experiment.
With best wishes
John Conway
Jconway@interchange.ubc.ca