Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter no 21 (Vol II, no 9) – September 1996

Contents

Bonhoeffer on Inter-Net

German Studies Association Conference, 1996

Article

Michael Phayer, “The German Catholic Church after the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies Fall 1996, pp. 151-65.

Book Reviews

Thomas M. Schneider, Reichsbischof Ludwig Muller: Eine Untersuchung zu Leben und Personlichkeit. Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte, Series B: Darstellungen 19, Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1993, 384 pp. reviewed by Doris Bergen

Klaus Erich Pollmann ed., Der schwierige Weg in die Nachkriegszeit. Die evangelisch-lutherische Landeskirche in Braunschweig 1945-1950. Studien zur Kirchengeschichte Niedersachsens: 34. Gottingen; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1995, 335 pp. reviewed by John Conway

Joan Marshall, A Solitary Pillar. Montreal’s Anglican Church and the Quebec Revolution. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1995. 220 pp. reviewed by John Conway

G. Passelecq and B. Suchecky, L’encyclique cachee de Pie XI. Une occasion manquee de l’eglise face a l’antisemitism, Paris: Editions La Decouverte 1995, 321 pp. reviewed by Michael Phayer

Dear Friends,

German Church leadership is once again the theme of this issue, since the plethora of books appearing on this theme seems to be continuing. However, I append a short review of a more local situation, here in Canada, where momentous political changes are also causing a critical situation for a long-established church community; and also a short note about the “missing” encyclical due to be issued by Pope Pius XI in 1939.

Bonhoeffer on Inter-Net.

The Bonhoeffer-list on Internet has now been amalgamated with one for Paul Tillich. Messages can be sent to DBPT-l@bgu.edu. Lately the in-coming mail has been desultory and not of much interest to historians. But there is also now a new Bonhoeffer Web site Home Page:
http://204.245.208.1/bonhoeff/index.htm
I would be interested to know how you find this service.

German Studies Association Conference

The 1996 meeting of the G.S.A. will be held from Oct. 10th-13th at the Red Lion Hotel, Sea-Tac Airport, Seattle, Washington, USA. Several sessions relevant to our theme of contemporary church history will be give by members of our Arbeitsgemeinschaft, viz Doris Bergen, Susannah Heschel, Bob Ericksen and Gerhard Besier. For my sins, as one of the surviving founding members of GSA, I have been dragooned into giving the Banquet speech! I look forward to seeing several of you there.

Article:

Michael Phayer, “The German Catholic Church after the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 10/2 Fall 1996, pp. 151-65. Mike Phayer describes the belated and reluctant attitude of German Catholics to realise the full extent of the Holocaust in the immediate post-war period, and then outlines the change brought about in the 1960s, not least due to the valiant efforts of Gertrud Luckner, the redoubtable editor of the very significant Freiburger Rundbriefe. Gertrud Luckner died last year, and this is a heartfelt tribute to her memory.

New Book:

Nicholas Hope, German and Scandinavian Protestantism 1700-1918 (Oxford History of the Christian Church) Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995, pp xiii,685. $120.00. (To be reviewed in German Studies Review, February 1997).

Book reviews:

Thomas M.Schneider, Reichsbischof Ludwig Muller: Eine Untersuchung zu Leben und Personlichkeit. Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte, Series B: Darstellungen 19, Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1993, 384 pp.

There is no shortage of biographies – inspirational, critical, and scholarly – of the leading figures of the Confessing Church. The same cannot be said for the German Christian movement. Among historians of the Kirchenkampf, Joachim Hossenfelder, Reinhold Krause, and Siegfried Leffler may be household names, but the details of their lives remain obscure. Thomas Schneider’s biography of Reich Bishop Ludwig Muller is an important effort to end this state of affairs by examining close-up probably the most famous German Christian of them all. His thorough research pays off, by producing a useful work which fills in some gaps and confirms much of what others have said about the Protestant church under Nazism. This is a valuable addition to the literature of the church struggle, even if it might be thought to present more than we need to know about the life of the “Reibi”, Ludwig Muller.

As the fifteen-page conclusion suggests, Schneider’s argument does not lend itself to concise synopsis. But if there is one red thread throughout, it is the view of Muller, as a man of his times, extraordinary neither in his motivations nor in his values. Ludwig Muller was shaped throughout his life, Schneider tells us, by the piety of the Erweckungsbewegung of his native Minden- Ravensberg, and his mother remained for him the model of Christian devotion. World War I was a crucial moment in his development, and in this regard, as in his fervent nationalism and ardent anti-Communism, he paralleled his subsequent antagonist, Martin Niemoller. Significantly but not surprisingly, Muller’s antisemitism also emerges as a constant factor, from his schooldays to his viciously anti-Jewish speeches in the Weimar years and his chauvinistic publications during World War II. In 1934, he coldly refused his own niece’s plea for help when her “non-aryan” husband lost his job. (p.304)

Schneider’s picture does not shock or astound, but it does offer details that show a more human side of the “Reibi”. Even as a child, Muller displayed some musical talent and distinguished himself as both a flautist and a pianist. His ambition was to be a marine officer, but in deference to the wishes of his family, he entered the ministry. Service as a naval chaplain during World War I in Turkey and subsequently as a military pastor in Konigsberg, allowed him to keep alive his fantasy of being a :fighting man:. One of the nicknames he acquired early in his career as Reich Bishop – Lugenmuller – appears to have been well deserved. Although Schneider’s tone remains scholarly throughout, he cannot refrain from showing many occasions on which Muller lied, deceived, and connived. Indeed the Reich Bishop emerges as even weaker, less principled, and more opportunistic than one might have suspected. In 1920, during the Kapp putsch, Muller tried to collaborate with left-oriented sailors who seized control of the Wilhelmshaven base (p.56). After World War II, in another volte- face, he claimed to Soviet occupation troops that he had broken with Hitler over the Fuhrer’s policy towards the Jews (p.312).

Muller’s intellectual reputation gets no boost from this biography either. Another of his nicknames – Bettknuller – suggests that his “reign” as Reich bishop included little productive activity, theological or administrative. Schneider does credit Muller with considerable strategising, much of it successful, and all of it intended to improve his own professional and personal standing. From dumping one fiancee for a wealthier woman to scheming with Goering against Niemoller, Muller never stopped wheeling and dealing. Even his death has the making of a con job. Schneider provides a careful discussion of the evidence of what killed Muller in July 1945: heart attack or suicide. His findings are inconclusive, but he seems to lean towards a s sort of combined explanation which echoes Hossenfelder’s 1956 claim: “perhaps his (Muller’s) heart was quicker than his hand” (p.314).

Schneider’s overall assessment of German Christian thought and the church struggle adds little to the accounts of Klaus Scholder, Hans- Joachim Sonne and others. The German Christian movement as a whole appears just as anti-intellectual, banal, and internally contradictory as Muller himself. Rather than analysing that banality or seeking an explanation in it for the “Reibi’s” appeal, Schneider is content to describe it, often in list-like detail, and leaves his readers to draw their own conclusions. To the extent that Schneider accounts for Muller’s successes, he attributes them to Hitler’s backing. That assumption is problematic on its own account. Many of the claims that Hitler supported Muller originated with the Reich bishop himself, a notorious liar. Moreover, even if Hitler were willing at times to intervene on Muller’s behalf, we would still need to know something about what motivated the Fuhrer, himself capable both of immense opportunism and extreme disloyalty, to take such steps. Perhaps a better key to understanding the relationship between the two “leaders” is Schneider’s own comparison of Muller to Diederich Hessling, Heinrich Mann’s Untertan (p 9). Hessling’s power did not require the direct support of his patron, the Kaiser. He needed only the blessing of a society that rewarded bullies, applauded attacks on those deemed outsiders, and surrounded its own brutality with sentimentality and cheap piety.

Doris L. Bergen, University of Notre Dame

Klaus Erich Pollmann ed., Der schwierige Weg in die Nachkriegszeit. Die evangelisch-lutherische Landeskirche in Braunschweig 1945-1950. Studien zur Kirchengeschichte Niedersachsens: 34. Gottingen; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1995, 335 pp.

This collection of essays about the denazification process in the small church of Brunswick tells much the same story as already described by Gerhard Besier for the neighbouring church in Hannover, but with a sharper, more critical tone. The same sad tale emerges of evasion, denial, prevarications and protection of establishment figures. It was difficult enough to get rid of the Nazi Landesbischof, incarcerated for two years by the Yugoslavs as a prisoner-of-war. Even more notable was the survival in office of several prominent German Christians, while the only three pastors dismissed by order of the British military government were all reinstated in their parishes shortly afterwards. The pastors’ widespread reaction to the denazification fiasco was one of outrage that they should have been so (mis)treated at all. No one expressed regret over his past support for the Nazi regime, let alone any sympathy for the Nazis’ victims. The most scandalous case involved the presiding judge of one of the Nazi special courts, responsible for at least fifty death sentences for mainly trivial crimes. This man was subsequently rehabilitated, elected to the diocesan synod in 1946, appointed by the church authorities to the Church Executive Council, and even became a member of the national General Synod in 1949. Only in the 1970s did questions begin to be asked about such compromising cases, to which the excellently researched accounts by Dr Pollmann and his associates provide dispiriting answers.

John Conway

Joan Marshall, A Solitary Pillar. Montreal’s Anglican Church and the Quebec Revolution. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1995. 220 pp

Local histories of parishes or dioceses, especially in the Anglican church, tend to become antiquarian in focus. So Joan Marshall’s insightful analysis of the contemporary Anglican diocese of Montreal, especially of five cross-section parishes, is much to be welcomed. Over the past thirty years, Montreal’s Anglicanism has suffered a drastic decline of approximately 70% of its membership, due to the general trend away from regular attendance, but also because of heavy out-migration of Anglophones from Quebec. Marshall’s study of the Anglicans’ reaction to the determined attempts by the Parti Quebecois to become “maitre chez nous” concentrates on the strategies adopted by the survivors. She examines how Anglicans have responded to the challenge to their previously dominant identity, personal and collective, and how they have sought to preserve their sense of history and shared memories, while maintaining their community structures in an increasingly minority situation. She also discusses the impact of liturgical changes on parish life, the role of women in leadership, and the character of their socio-political engagements. These congregations have made major financial sacrifices in order to maintain their churches as places of communal identity and tradition. Yet it is also notable that these predominantly English- speaking Anglicans have shown little willingness to engage in significant encounters with French-speaking or French Catholic fellow Christians. As a study of the religion-society relationship at a time of high political drama, this account has much to tell us all.

John Conway

G.Passelecq and B.Suchecky, L’encyclique cachee de Pie XI. Une occasion manquee de l’eglise face a l’antisemitism, Paris: Editions La Decouverte 1995, 321 pp.

The authors, an American Jew and a Belgian Benedictine, have done a great piece of historical sleuthing to put this book together. It shows that Pius XI (1921-1939) was extremely concerned about racism and, among other things, commissioned three Jesuits – an American, a German and a Frenchman – at the end of 1938 to write an encyclical for him that would condemn racism and antisemitism. After the manuscript was finished – humani generis – intrigue set in. For some months it was “lost” in the Vatican, probably through the machinations of a Polish and a Spanish Jesuit. By the time it arrived on the Pope’s desk, he had only a few days to live, and died at the end of February 1939. The book shows that had he lived longer, sparks would have been flying between the church and the Nazis over racism. But at the same time the authors are balanced in their judgement: the encyclical would have broken no new ground theologically concerning Jews and Christians. The new Pope, Pius XII, used part of the manuscript in his first encyclical, but left out the condemnation of racism and antisemitism. Michael Phayer, Marquette University.

With best wishes

John Conway

jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter no. 20 (Vol II no. 8) – August 1996

Contents

1. Conferences:

US Holocaust Memorial Museum on Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer

2. New Books:

Robert F. Goeckel, Die evangelische Kirche und die DDR. Konflikte, Gesprache, Vereinbarungen unter Ulbricht und Honecker. Reviewed by Prof. Gerhard Besier.

Rudolf Mau, Eingebunden in den Realsozialismus? Die evangelische Kirche als Problem der SED, and Siegfried Brauer and Clemens Vollnhals eds.,In der DDR gibt es keine Zensur. Die evangelische Verlagsanstalt und der Praxis der Druckgenehmigung 1954-1989. Reviewed by John S. Conway.

Dear Friends,

I trust you (in the northern hemisphere) are all enjoying your summer holidays. And congratulations to Mark Lindsay in Perth, Australia, on the occasion of his marriage.

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Conferences: In May, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum held a notable meeting to honour Hans v. Dohnanyi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer for their active role in the rescue of Jews and for the sacrifice of their lives in the attempt to overthrow the Nazi dictatorship. Specific mention was made of the “U 7” rescue operation of 1942, principally organised by Dohnanyi, when 14 Jews were assisted to escape to Switzerland. Two of the survivors came to attend. Mention was also pointedly made by the USHMM officials of the need for the German government to revoke the sentences of treason against these heroic resisters. (P.Hoffmann)

Also in May, in Berlin, an international conference took place to discuss The Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet State 1917- 1991, which analysed both the official Soviet policies, varying over time from strict repression to a more moderate, but deliberately subversive, attitude, as well as the controversial reactions of the R.O.Church leadership, which as in other Communist-controlled countries, varied between dissidence and seeming collaboration. In contrast to the former East Germany, access to the basic documents is strictly limited. So the problems and opportunities for research in this troubled period of the R.O.Church’s history have still a long way to go. (Robert Goeckel)

Review Article:

W.R.Ward: “Guilt and Innocence; The German Churches in the twentieth century,” Journal of Modern History, Vol 68, no 2, June 1996, pp398-426.

This is a splendidly perceptive review article, which covers a lot of ground with great insight, and constitutes the very best in interdenominational and international kirchliche Zeitgeschichte.

New books:

The post-mortem on the role of the churches in the German Democratic Republic continues unabated. The following reviews show the diverse views involved. First, we congratulate Bob Goeckel, one of our members, on having his book, The Lutheran Church and the East German State, translated, and therefore send you the review published in the Frankurter Allgemeine Zeitung on July 1st, written by another of our members, Prof. Gerhard Besier. (with apologies for the unavoidable omission of umlauts!)

Robert F.Goeckel, Die evangelische Kirche und die DDR. Konflikte, Gesprache, Vereinbarungen unter Ulbricht und Honecker, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt: Leipzig 1996, 371 Seiten, 45-DM.

1990 veroffentlichte R.F.Goeckel sein Buchmanuskript, das er noch vor der “Wende” 1989 abgeschlossen hatte. Es ist jetzt in deutscher Sprache erschienen. Obwohl der Autor inzwischen weitergeforscht und eine Reihe erganzender Aufsatze zum Gegenstand veroeffentlicht hat, fanden seine neuen Erkenntnisse noch keinen Eingang in das vorliegende Buch. Wie Stichproben ergaben, handelt es vielmehr um eine nahezu wortgetreue Uebersetzung; sogar die Zahlung der Fuessnoten hat sich nicht oder kaum veraendert. Goeckel ist dennoch der :”Ueberzeugung, dass die Ergebnisse seiner bereits etwas zurueckliegenden Untersuchung standhalten konnen”. Neben gedrucktem und zahlreichen Interviews mit kirchenleitenden Personlichkeiten konnte Goeckel durch gunstige Umstande fur sein Buch auch vertrauliche Aktenmaterial aus dem zentralen Parteiarchiv der Ost-CDU in der “Hauptstadt der DDR” einsehen. Im Vorwort der englischen Ausgabe bedankt er sich fur Rat und Hilfe von Helmut Dressler, Herbert Trebs, Wulf Trende und anderen. Heute weiss er, dass etwa Dressler und Trebs in ihrer Funktion als IM dem MfS uber ihn berichteten. Um so erstaunlicher ist es,dass Goeckel trotz der ruhrigen Handleitung linientreuer Linksprotestanten, treuer Genossen und umsichtiger “Unionsfreunde” zu einem weithin klarsichtigen Urteil gelangt ist; “Es war bekannt, dass gewisse kirchlicheAmtstrager, wie z.B. Manfred Stolpe, Horst Gienke, Eberhard Natho und Gerhard Lotz, sehr enge Kontakte zum Stasi unterhielten, obgleich ihre Verbindungen zur Stasi damals nicht so offenkuendig waren”.

Damit ruft der Wissenschaftler aus dem fernen Amerika in Erinnerung, was zumindest kirchenleitende Personlichkeiten in Ost und West schon vor dem Zusammenbruch der DDR ueber das dortige “Staat-Kirche-Verhaltnis” auf hoeher Ebene hatten wissen konnen und ubersehen wollen. Im Ton eher zurueckhaltend, in der Sache meist glasklar, werden die Prozesse wachsender Annaherung beschrieben. Allerdings geht Goeckel in seiner Analyse der Verfolgung kirchen- und staats- bzw. parteipolitischer Ziele durch die Akteure von einer Rationalitat des Handelns aus, die personenspezifische Faktoren und geheimes Rankespiel in den Hintergrund treten lasst. Personlicher Ehrgeiz als Antriebsfeder zugunsten einer bestimmten Option kommt bei ihm nicht vor, obwohl gerade die SED den eher dunklen Seiten anthropologischer Gundstrukturen besondere Aufmerksamkeit und Foerderung zuteil werden liess.

Rechtsanwalt Clemens de Maiziere und der Ost-Berliner Theologieprofessor Handfried Muller treten in Goeckels politischer Geschichte als Representanten der Trennungspartei innerhalb der Kirchen von Berlin-Brandenburg auf. Das trifft gewiss zu. Die mogliche Breite des Motivspektrums beschraenkt sich allerdings auf die Differenzierung zwischen “Linken”, “Rechten” und einer vermittelnden Position. De Maiziere und Mueller gehorten eben zu den “Linken”. Das Ausserte, was sich Goeckel leistet, sind Satze wie: “Der Staat durfte davon ausgehen, dass sich zwischen ihm und (Bischof) Schonherr ein gutes Verhaltnis entwickeln konnte, weil sein Protege Manfred Stolpe, der bereits gute Beziehungen zum Staat unterhielt, zum Leiter des Sekretariats (scil. des Kirchenbundes) gewahlt worden war”. Diese kuehle, vornehme Zuruckhaltung ist zweifellos eine Starke des Buches. Sie mindert vielleicht den schieren Selbstbehauptungswillen der ehemaligen Akteure im Raum der Kirche und erhoht womoglich deren Fahigkeit zur Selbstkritik, Auch das Erscheinen dieses ebenfalls verhaltismassig preisgunstigen Buches scheint auf eine Initiative der EKD zuruckzugehen. In seinem Vorwort dankt ihr Goeckel “fur ihre finanzielle Unterstutzung”

Gerhard Besier – Heidelberg

Rudolf Mau, Eingebunden in den Realsozialismus? Die evangelische Kirche als Problem der SED, Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1994, 259 pp.

Siegfried Brauer and Clemens Vollnhals eds.,In der DDR gibt es keine Zensur. Die evangelische Verlagsanstalt und der Praxis der Druckgenehmigung 1954-1989, Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 1995, 422 pp, 39.80 DM

Rudolf Mau has spent his career teaching in one or other of the church-run theological academies in the former G.D.R. He thus knows first-hand about all the kinds of trials and tribulations the churches faced during the forty years of Communist rule. From this vantage point he takes issue with those critics, such as the above, who in recent years have so roundly attacked the Protestant Church, or more particularly its leaders, for their tactical compromises, their collaboration with the secret police, or Stasi, and their alleged willingness to encourage a theology in sympathy with the Marxist aim for an egalitarian socialist society. Instead May seeks to show that the churches’ struggle to preserve their autonomy was a constant problem for the Communist rulers, and provides an analysis of the various methods employed to bring the churches to heel. His findings are mainly drawn from the files of the official State Secretariat for Church Affairs, which was directly responsible to the central committee of the ruling Communist Party (SED), and which, in his view, give a much clearer picture than the tendentious reports of former Stasi agents. >From the beginning there could be no doubt as to the regime’s hostility to the churches, and its determination to control all aspects of church life. The Marxists saw the GDR churches as capitalist survivals, as the defenders of “imperialism”, or as harbouring subversive elements prompted by West German “reactionaries” and eagerly seeking to overthrow the Communist victory of 1945. Even though there were times when the state seemed ready to encourage an armistice, its ultimate objectives never changed. The churches were therefore forced to be constantly on the defensive, trying to ward off both the direct attacks of the 1950s and the more subtle undermining attempts of later years. To begin with, the Communists were convinced that aggressive confrontational measures were needed to destroy the churches’ traditional position in society and to overcome the last remnants of Christianity’s “pre-scientific” ideology. When these steps evoked opposition, produced numerous “martyrs”, and were clearly counter-productive, the state was forced to see that its long- term goal of eradicating church influence altogether would have to be postponed. Instead it began to seek to sow divisions in church ranks, to place spies in all church offices, and to rely on its massive atheistical propaganda to secure ideological victory. For its part the church faced the alternative of living a persecuted catacomb existence, looking for rescue by its west German partners, or else exploring the as yet untrodden path of renouncing its privileges, accepting its minority status, but still witnessing to the relevance of the Gospel for the new GDR society. This attempt to formulate a new concept of “the church within socialism” did not please the Communist authorities who doubted its sincerity, and to the end suspected that the churches were nothing more than fifth column agents for the “NATO militarists” in the western world. Time and again, as Mau shows, the dogmatic inflexibility of the party bureaucrats made impossible any reasonable resolution of the ensuing conflicts. Since the SED refused to countenance any challenge to its exercise of power, let alone any public participation in policy formation, the churches became the only visible agencies outside the state’s direct control, and hence the one group where alternative ideologies and policies could be discussed. In the 1980s they became the central focus points for all the regime’s opponents, and, as we know, were in the forefront to bring about its eventual overthrow in 1989.

The churches could not be wiped out; but neither could they be absorbed under Communist auspices. This was the regime’s dilemma. Mau’s excellent and detailed account of the convoluted and sometimes contradictory efforts within the party bureaucracy to deal with this unwelcome situation is therefore much to be welcomed. His analysis of the evolution of the state’s mechanisms for dealing with the churches, its success in breaking the links to west German Protestantism, and its attempts to foster “progressive elements” among the pastors and laity loyal to the regime is a reliable guide to the intrigues and chicanery practised. On the other hand, Mau does not go into the even murkier depths of the controversial deals over the churches’ finances, or the conspiratorial activities of some of the chief officials. Rather he sees the main achievement to have been the churches’ steadfast refusal to accept the state’s totalitarian claims, despite the unrelenting and very costly efforts made at every stage of the GDR’s history. Critics of the churches, he believes, should concentrate rather on the undoubted fact that their resolute witness, and their readiness to proclaim the Gospel’s truth in contemporary contexts, led to the virtually complete failure of the Marxists’ overall offensive.

Forty years of incessant atheistic propaganda, to be sure, have had their effect. Church participation is at a record low. On the other hand there is no one today in the former GDR who believes that Marxism-Leninism is the preferred ideological position, or who seeks to justify the SED’s nefarious policies towards the churches. Whether the churches can regain their credibility is an open question; but Communism certainly can’t.

The same theme is also clearly shown in Brauer and Vollnhals’ depressing book, which reprints a selection of the secret “assessments” written for the Ministry of Culture about theological literature, all of which required a “Publication Permit” before appearing in print. The determination with which the regime sought to exclude anything which was likely to enhance the church’s reactionary views extended from scholarly texts down to ephemeral up-lifting pamphlets and even to church calendars. Ideological conformity demanded the excision of opinions which, even in a disguised form, attacked the regime’s policies or encouraged Christians to resist the state’s pretentions. Officially the GDR claimed that there was no censorship; in fact, over the forty years of its existence, the regime perfected the art of suppressing unwanted publications on a scale far beyond that practised by the Nazis or any of their predecessors. These “assessments” were written by a limited handful of loyal party members, some of them bureaucrats in the offices dealing with the churches, others by party-line theology professors in Leipzig and Berlin, continually on the watch for “dangerous” infiltrations of ideas opposed to the goal of realising “the atheistic character of Marxism-Leninism as the dominant ideological force in our society”. Since the origins of these “assessments” were never revealed to the publisher or to the authors, they were unable to reply, but had to accept the demands for changes, or face having their books turned down. This happened often enough, or else entailed lengthy delays before some compromise could be reached. Even the addresses and sermons of the Presiding Bishop Schonherr were delayed for two years on these grounds. While the bureaucrats objected to anything which might be interpreted as critical of the regimes’ practices, the party-line theologians took issue with any presentation of Christianity which contradicted party ideology. Even though in the 1980s the system became more relaxed, these secret critics adhered right up to 1989 to the idea that the churches were doomed to die out, and hence nothing should appear in print which suggested the contrary. As the editors point out in their useful and lengthy introduction, this continued censorship had a profoundly depressing effect on any creative scholarship. The censors’ zealotry, their familiarity with theological terminology, and their awareness of developments within the churches, made their obscurantist efficiency all the more sinister.

The lengths to which this censorship could go are clearly demonstrated in the case-studies provided, to which the editors append a short commentary on the eventual results. These detailed demands for revisions or excisions before publication could be allowed, even for books written by west German authors, undoubtedly had a disillusioning impact. But it was only a small part of the regime’s determination to impose ideological conformity. It is hardly surprising that the editors can show that these same bigoted theologians and pastors were not only being paid for their censorship efforts, but were for the most part also unofficial collaborators of the Stasi assisting in its all-pervasive surveillance activities. To be sure, after 1990, these men and women were quickly removed from the scene. But the damage they inflicted on the life of the churches, and the discredit they caused to the institutions they alleged served, remains a horrendous legacy to be resolved by the battered survivors. John S.Conway

Best wishes

John Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter no. 19 (Vol II, no. 7) – July 1996

Contents

1. Forthcoming conference: Kirkliche Zeitgeschichte

2. Works in progress

3. New Books: The Bickersteth Diaries 1914-1918, introduction by John Terraine, ed. John Bickersteth, Leo Cooper, London 1995, 332 pp. Reviewed by John S. Conway.

Dear Friends,

Despite the onset of the northern hemisphere’s summer vacations, and the delay in promised contributions (DB:NB), I am hoping to keep in touch with you all, and that you will continue to find these Newsletters of interest. I will be very glad to have your news and views to pass around.

Forthcoming conference:

Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte (Prof. Gerhard Besier, Heidelberg) in conjunction with the Bundeszentrale fuer Politische Bildung is organizing its 1996 conference to be held in Heidelberg on November 1-3. The subject will be: Civil War and Religion. The Churches’ and Denominations’ Role in Europe’s Ethnic, Economic and Political Conflicts.

Works in progress:

Mrs. Heike Kreutzer, Bonn, is writing her thesis under the direction of Prof.Anselm-Duehring (Tuebingen) on the personnel of the Reich Kirchenministerium, and making use of the remaining files which were for so long inaccessible in the G.D.R. Her main topics will concern the tactics of Hanns Kerrl and his staff, their struggles with the Nazi bureaucracy, especially the Gestapo and the Parteikanzlei, and the legal and financial policies imposed on the churches. Richard Wiggers, Georgetown U,Virginia, is working on the career of Bishop (later Cardinal) Aloisius Muench and his 1946 appointment as Papal Visitator to Germany, and examining the records in the USA, Germany and Rome in order to describe the remarkable and unprecedented experience of this hitherto unknown American bishop when he was in fact fulfilling the office of Papal Nuncio. His somewhat chequered career throws light on the difficulties he met in dealing both with the Vatican and the American occupation authorities, due certainly to his lack of diplomatic experience, and the conflicting interests of the various hierarchies involved.

Bob Ericksen and Susannah Heschel are collaborating on a book of essays dealing with Christian-Jewish relations during and after the Nazi era, which is nearing completion this summer..

Chris Clark (St Catherine’s College, Cambridge) is giving a short summer school on the career of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and hopes to publish the results in order to give a somewhat more positive appraisal of this flamboyant monarch.

Bob Goeckel, who has spent the last year in Berlin, announces the translation of his book The Lutheran Church and the East German State. He continues to work on the role of the East German CDU and its Kirchenpolitik.

Mark Lindsay (U of Western Australia, Perth) is writing his thesis on the attitude of the German Confessing Church theologians, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, towards Israel, both theologically and politically.

Kevin Spicer (Boston College) is shortly leaving for Germany to continue his research into the German Catholic Church’s response to the Third Reich, which he describes as a “selective resistance”. Richard Weikart (California State U, Stanislaus) has completed a manuscript entitled The Myth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which seeks to show that Bonhoeffer’s theology is incompatible with traditional American evangelical doctrine.

Richard Ruggle, Chaplain, Canadian Forces Base, Camp Borden, Ontario (see address above) has compiled a bibliography of items on German military chaplaincy. He would doubtless be glad to share this, and would appreciate hearing of new items to add. Ronald Webster has been given tenure and promotion at York University, Toronto. Congratulations, Ronald.

New Books:

The Bickersteth Diaries 1914-1918, introduction by John Terraine, ed. John Bickersteth, Leo Cooper, London 1995, 332 pp #21.00

As a sequel to my review of Duff Crerar’s splendid “Padres in No- man’s land”, (Newsletter no 14) I can highly recommend The Bickersteth Diaries 1914-1918. The Bickersteths were, and are, a distinguished Church of England family, liberally decorated with bishops. In 1914 five of the six sons of Canon Sam Bickersteth volunteered for military service, fully persuaded that their fervent patriotism and religion should be dedicated to the nation’s cause by joining the armies in France. Their letters to their parents at home were carefully copied, sent round to the other siblings, and then preserved along with their mother’s comments and newspaper clippings. >From the resulting eleven fat volumes, their nephew, the now retired Bishop of Bath and Wells, has distilled a selection which gives an extraordinarily vivid picture of conditions on the western front, exceptional for the graphic and detailed descriptions, and highly revealing of the changes of mood experienced by this strongly-motivated and well-educated segment of the officer corps. The bulk of the letters were written by Julian, who rushed home from Australia in order to volunteer as a padre to an infantry division, and by his younger brother Burgon, a cavalry officer, who was disillusioned to discover that the cavalry were virtually useless in the mud and shell-holes of the Flanders fields, and not enamoured to be transformed into a machine-gun trooper. Their third brother Morris was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, a tragedy which deeply affected the whole family, despite their Christian conviction that his death was a heroic sacrifice for King and Country. Both Julian and Burgon sought relief in writing extremely lengthy accounts of their lives at the front, obviously as a form of psychological antidote against the increasing ferocity of the war. Even though their letters had to be tailored to the sensitivities of their parents, and the regulations of the army’s censors, they bring out to the full the horror, futility and frustrations felt by the serving soldiers. As such, they recapitulate for the modern reader a picture which has long been familiar, but add significant details, particularly of the padres’ preoccupations, and thus are an enormously valuable contemporary witness.

Step by step as these brothers shared the lives and deaths of so many of their age-group, the clear-cut patriotism of 1914 gives way to an almost despairing war-weariness and to a realization that the sacrifices being made could never be healed. They were too clear- sighted and intelligent to allow their listeners to cling to the romantic crusading views of the early days of war-fervour, even though they still affirmed their view that good would finally prevail. In September 1916, Burgon wrote: “I think that after the war I shall write a book, and in it I shall put everything that is filthy and disgusting and revolting and degrading and terrifying about modern warfare – and hope thereby to do my bit towards preventing another”. In the same month his padre brother Julian wrote: “This war may bring out some of the good qualities in man, but the evil it does is incalculably greater. The whole thing is utterly devilish and the work of all the demons of hell. It will take generations to eradicate the evils done to civilisation by it. I feel that our whole moral outlook is being systematically lowered”.

So too, the brothers came to abandon the prevalent Germanophobia of the initial war years, when they recognised that the ordinary German soldier was undergoing the same futile sacrifices as themselves. By September 1916 Burgon was convinced that “we cannot and we shall not crush Germany; to prolong this idea is to prolong the war to no purpose”. He argues in favour of a ‘status ante bellum’ peace, since “the war has now come to be such a horrible fearful thing that one wonders whether for sheer wickedness it is not worse than the domination of the world by German ideas”. But it was not to be. For two more years the pointless daily slaughter continued, and war-weariness increased. Julian noted in June 1918: “the war becomes more terrible and soul- corroding as month succeeds month. It is now a perpetual round of dull prosaic murder, with one desire in the hearts of all – to keep alive a little longer and to see a speedy end to the business. The men don’t and won’t hate the Germans – they only hate the war, and so it goes on.”

As a padre Julian rightly and quickly recognised that the only respect the Church would gain was for the chaplains to be as closely involved with the front-line troops as possible. He was dismayed by the indifference of the much of the officer corps, and no less by the widespread ignorance of the troops who retained only the vaguest concepts of Christianity from their boyhoods. With his high-church views, Julian sought to offer a fully sacramental religion of consolation, and was indefatigable in organising ritualistic services in makeshift quarters complete with candles and altars and decorations and psalmody. But even he could not obliterate the knowledge that, for so many, these were the last rites. His time was increasingly spent on burial duties, sickenly repetitive and destructive of all his previous efforts. His caring solicitude earned him praise from those he tried to help. But his expectations that the spirit of comradeship found in the trenches, and the doubtless genuine piety of these shell-battered and frightened young men, would lead to a revival of the church after the war were to be sadly disappointed. Too many had died, and those who survived had suffered too much from the brutalizing conditions they had experienced.

Yet, notably, neither man lost his faith. In the post-war period, Julian went on to be a prominent headmaster and Burgon an influential adornment, as Warden of Hart House, of the University of Toronto, where his impact on the young men of the succeeding generation was immense. But, at the same time, when writing home, neither man faced up to the major issue for Christians – how to reconcile the incompatibility of their Christian beliefs with the appalling slaughter in which they were engaged, or the contradictions involved when both Allied and German chaplains were appealing to the same God to grant them victory over the other. In hindsight, we may claim, it was these two basic factors which most discredited Christianity for the survivors, even when they had a high respect for the padres as men. But at the time, as so many writers have recounted before, the stench of blood and the noise of guns, the bleeding bodies and the shattered limbs, the agony of wounded and dying men, were overwhelming in their impact. These diaries serve to recall the pain as well as the dedicated commitment of these two witnesses, as they sought to come to terms with the futility and sacrifices of such a war, and still bear witness to the Church they so loyally served.

John Conway

Last Reel by Andrew Parkin

Could we, for an instant, freeze the frame,
Reverse the long calamitous movie,
Our reeling past,our jabbering history,
To make the martyrs whole, unkindle flame,
And spurning every lethal bid for shame,
Undeclare the wars, undrill each army,
Unfire the guns, uncross each crimson sea,
Undo the wrongs, and then unsay the blame;
O edit out all hate to leave but love!
Could we then splice and roll the human film
Where lovers meet and trust, where laughter lives,
Where we evade the serpent, prize the dove?
There is no censor but the censure earned
From all the demon lessons left unlearned.

With very best wishes

John Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

1. Book review: Christopher M.Clark, The Politics of Conversion. Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728-1941, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1995, 340 pp. Reviewed by David Diephouse.

Vancouver, B.C.

Dear Friends,

I apologise for the delay in sending you this month’s Newsletter, due to my absence in Europe for the past three weeks. I hope to catch up to my usual schedule by next month.

New Books:

As before, there are a large number of interesting new works appearing. I hope the following reviews will be of help:

Christopher M.Clark, The Politics of Conversion. Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728-1941, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1995, 340 pp.

Chris Clark’s survey of Protestant missionary endeavours to convert the Jews of Prussia from the eighteenth century to the Nazi era is both erudite and informative. This is essentially a study in missionary attitudes and strategies, being the first to use such archives as those of the Berlin Missionary Society, which fortunately survived their confiscation by the Gestapo in 1941. The Jews themselves, or their communal responses to attempts to convert them are not elucidated. Rather Clark concentrates principally on the non-theological factors which strongly affected this enterprise throughout, and adds thereby substantially to our knowledge of the political climate of Prussian Protestantism and the intense struggles within in its ranks.

During the eighteenth century, mission to the Jews was regarded as an essential, indeed highly significant, obligation by the group of pietists based in Halle under the leadership of Francke and Spener. Their importance in the growth of the Prussian state is well- known. The support of successive Prussian monarchs, both on religious and nation-building grounds, was a vital ingredient in the promotion of their endeavours. Bolstered by chiliastic expectations of mass conversions, the pietists saw this mission as an integral responsibility for Christians, and challenged the long-held Lutheran pessimism on this subject. Spener was notable in realizing the need to make material provision for potential converts, even though this led to accusations of bribery and/or opportunism. These missionaries, however, like their monarchs, believed that the social problems caused by the vagrancy and poverty of the outcast Jews could be overcome if they were trained for useful trades along with conversion. The Church’s missionary imperative could thus be blended with the desire for social integration.

In the nineteenth century, this highly conservative social image was increasingly challenged by the growth of industry, by the spread of liberal ideas, and by the increasing self-confidence of the Jewish community. The missionaries and their aristocratic patrons were thus forced to fight on several fronts. Political emancipation of the Jews came to be an ambiguous programme, since the liberals’ support of individual rights was anathema to the authoritarian state, as can be seen in the various edicts dealing with Prussian Jews. The missionaries naturally continued to believe that conversion to the Christian basis of the state was the most effective way to resolve the “Jewish question”. But the political upheavals of 1848, the growing rationalism within the clergy’s ranks, and the quarrels brought about by the heavy-handed centralization policies of the Prussian royal governance of the churches, all induced a sense of crisis for missions to the Jews. The expectation of a religious revival which would unite all segments of the Prussian nation now became even more illusory and utopian. The rise of a new reformist Judaism, with its strong support for liberal principles, came to be regarded as a most sinister development, and as a threat not only to traditional Jewry but to the Christian state as well.

Another important handicap was the reluctance of the established church structures to participate. Many leading clergymen were suspicious both of the eschatalogical hope and the evangelical activism of the missionaries. Such endeavours were left up to the private voluntary efforts of unregulated societies. The Church itself was hesitant to be committed to the cause – if only because the results were predictably meagre and controversial, due to the Jews’ alleged obduracy. Such traditional religious aversion was only accentuated by the growing secular prejudice against Jews which affected increasing segments of the population.

After 1871, the “Jewish problem” became a central issue in the forging of German national identity. Liberals were disappointed that the Jews were not becoming fully German; conservatives that they were not becoming Christians. Neither camp envisaged a pluralistic solution, nor had they any inclination to foster ideas of philosemitism. The rise of organized antisemitism, the dramatic increase of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, and the birth of the Zionist movement necessitated a re-thinking of the missionaries’ previous strategies. Notable was the revival of academic interest in Jewish studies and Hebrew for mssionary trainees, since, as Franz Delitzsch stated, “the evangelization of Israel was their aim and the study of Judaism was the means”. But even this training did little to counteract the increasingly widespread and academically-propagated perception that the Jews were Germany’s “misfortune”. As for Zionism, while some missionaries saw this project as a desirable prerequisite for the eventual apocalypse, others more percipiently saw it as a secular movement seeking to allow Jews to escape entirely from their divinely-appointed destiny.

From their strongly conservative social perspective, missionaries deplored the spread of unbridled capitalism, which had seemingly been exploited by the Jews. They lamented the resultant corrosive effects of materialism which threatened the integrity of the Christian message and the Christian state. But, while their utterances often overlapped with those of the rising antisemitic tide, missionaries became aware that such diatribes would only make their task harder, both by increasing the general opposition to their goal of conversion, and by strengthening the defensive barriers amongst the Jewish community. Similarly they vigourously opposed the views of such writers as Wilhelm Marr, who was as anti-Christian as he was antisemitic. The missionaries were both appalled and isolated by the increasingly polemic stridency of debates over the “Jewish question”. But because they imbibed the rhetoric of Volk and Nation, and upheld their anti- modernist views of a monolithic Christian state, most missionaries remained ambiguous on the subject of antisemitism.

After 1919 the Protestant missions declined rapidly. Not only did their remedy of conversion appear more and more irrelevant, but the infiltration of voelkisch and racial ideas into the ranks of the Evangelical Church, culminating in the rise of the “German Christian” movement, led to demands for the complete cessation of Jewish missions, and indeed paved the way for their suppression by the Nazis. Only the minority Confessing Church continued to stress the Church’s obligation to offer salvation to all peoples, including the Jews, defended teaching the Old Testament, and justified baptism of sincerely-motivated Jews. But here too, Nazi propaganda had its impact. Neither the Confessing Church nor the Protestant missionary societies mobilized any protests against the Nazi crimes of the Holocaust.

Clark’s book will surely become the definitive study of this lost cause. He remains studiously neutral on the theological merits of this enterprise, but acquits the missionaries of being bigoted agents of the kind of Jew-hatred which culminated in the mass murders of the 1940s. Rather his analysis points to the complex interweaving of theological and racial-ethnic elements which characterized much of the missionary discourse. In fact, however, these men were always too strongly Prussian to be truly philosemites. The absence of any genuine sympathy for Judaism, as could be found elsewhere in Christian circles, was a notable feature of their historical development. Moreover both their eschatological perspective and their regressive social outlook effectively blocked any meaningful relationships either with Jews or more liberal Christians. This was truly a dialogue of the deaf.

John Conway

Rainer Laechele, Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Glaube. Die “Deutschen Christen” in Wuerttemberg 1925-1960. (Quellen und Forschungen zur wuerttembergischen Kirchengeschichte 12) Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1994, 319 pp. DM 44

(Reviewed more extensively in Church History, March 1996)

Rainer Laechele has produced the first detailed regional study of the German Christians to appear since the 1970s. His decision to focus on his native Wuerttemberg is as commendable as it is understandable. With its close-knit clerical caste and vibrant associational sub-cultures, the Protestant church in Wuerttemberg was one of the few major “intact” Landeskirchen of the Nazi era; local German Christians therefore operated perforce within a stable framework of well-established institutional practices and loyalties.

Laechele’s straightforward narrative demonstrates that the shape of the German Christians’ career in Wuerttemberg, from their heyday of activism at the beginning of the Third Reich to their subsequent protracted drift towards fragmentation and marginalization, owed at least as much the dynamics of local church life as to stimuli from Berlin or Thuringia. From the beginning, Laechele argues, the German Christian agenda combined two ultimately incompatible impulses, one rooted in politics and the other in missions. For political activists the paramount aim was to capture the church for the “national revolution”; for the missionary faction it was to reclaim the nation for the church. Attempts to force a full-fledged ecclesiastical Gleichschaltung a la Prussia served primarily to demonstrate how ill attuned political activists were to the actual pulsebeat of parish life. The result was a mass exodus of early supporters and, for those who remained, a choice between re-accommodation in some fashion to traditional church norms or withdrawal into the sectarian confines of a self-proclaimed but effectively apolitical “national church”. Thanks to a cadre of leaders such as the charismatic Stuttgart preacher Georg Schneider, the latter option proved surprisingly durable; splinter groups of German Christians managed to survive well into the Adenauer era.

One of Laechele’s most striking findings is that none of the social historian’s conventional markers, be it age, family background, or even Nazi party membership, reliably distinguishes German Christians from their fellow Protestants. In fact, as his account implies, the Wuerttemberg “church struggle” after 1933 revolved primarily around issues of church order. What set German Christians apart was not so much who they were or what they believed as the fact that their church-political practice threatened established authority structures and flouted time-honoured rules of clerical procedure. Significantly, the major mark of differentiation that Laechele succeeds in identifying – Georg Schneider constitutes a notable case in point – is that German Christian clergy were less likely than their mainstream colleagues to have come to ordination by way of the time-honoured Wuerttemberg system of preparatory seminaries and the Tuebingen Stift, suggesting that the individuals in question may have been marginally less influenced than the majority by traditional forms of occupational socialization.

While Laechele clearly abhors the theological and political commitments of his subjects, he refuses to demonize them as “heretics or fascists” (p.4), pointing out that in many respects they were unexceptional indeed. His account thereby calls attention to strengths as well as weaknesses in the Volkskirche tradition; on the one hand a healthy measure of pastoral flexibility, on the other a lack of clear theological definition and a dangerous susceptibility to the idolatry of state and nation. In presenting the German Christian project as a case of Protestant syncretism that both antedates and considerably outlived the Third Reich, Laechele reinforces many of the findings of fellow Arbeitsgemeinschaftler Doris Bergen in her recent study of the movement as a whole (Reviewed in Newsletter #15). The two books in fact complement each other nicely – and their conclusions resonate well beyond the narrow confines of Kirchenkampf historiography.

David Diephouse.

With every best wish

John Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway,Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter no 17 (Vol II, no 5) – May 1996

Contents

Vancouver B.C.

Dear Friends,

1) Eastern Germany

John Burgess: After the Wall: The Church in Eastern Germany. This five-page reportage drawn on John’s personal impressions of his visits to the former DDR describes the attitudes of church people during the past six years since re-unification. It is available on E-mail from him at: JOHN_BURGESS.parti@ecunet.org

2) Austria

Harry Ritter, Western Washington State University kindly contributed the following:

“Readers of this Newsletter may be interested in a recent article on ‘Austria and the Ghost of the New Europe’ by Tony Judt which appeared in the “New York Review of Books”, Feb. 15th 1996, pp 22-5. Judt is a historian of contemporary France, but is currently working on book about Europe as a whole since 1945. This article about Austria is especially well-informed. It places the parliamentary elections of December 17, 1995 in historical context, including the recent rise of Joerg Haider and the Austrian Freedom Party. Particularly interesting are Judt’s remarks on the impact of the end of the Cold War on Austrian identity, and on similarities between developments in Austrian public life, on the one hand, and events in Italy, some of the countries of the former communist eastern Europe, and (especially) France on the other. Judt begins his article with the remark that “It has been a long time since Austria mattered much for anyone who doesn’t live there” – which was precisely the prospect which fuelled support for the Anschluss in the 1920s and 1930s. He ends the essay by concluding that Austria is today, in fact, a metaphor for contemporary European insecurities as a whole: ‘For Austria is a shrunken land with a confused identity, overshadowed by its heritage and fearful for its future, reluctant to abandon real social gains but convinced it can no longer afford them, happy at the end of the division of Europe but worried by the loss of its role in that division. But is this not also in varying measure the condition not just of France, but also of Italy, of Britain and other countries besides?’

Of further interest with regard to Austria is Ernst Hanisch’s imposing _Oesterreichische Geschichte 1890-1990. Der lange Schatten des Staates_, Vienna: Ueberreuter 1994, 599pp. This exceptionally judicious, balanced overview of the past century of Austrian history may well become the standard general history of contemporary Austria. Written by a product of the Catholic political tradition, it is noteworthy for its self-critical and even- handed account of the role of the Church in twentieth century Austria, from late imperial times down to the present.”

3) Southern Germany

Book review:

Bernhard Lehmann, Katholische Kirche und Besatzungsmacht in Bayern 1945-1949 im Spiegel der OMGUS- Akten (Miscellanea Bavarica Monacensis Bd 153), Neue Schriftenreihe des Stadtarchivs Munchen 1994, 453 pp. DM 32.80 (This review will appear in Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte)

Bernhard Lehmann’s well-organized and, luckily for us, much abbreviated doctoral thesis draws attention to the paradoxical situation for researchers working on the history of post-1945 Catholicism in Germany. The records of the short-lived American Military Government (OMGUS) were all shipped back to Washington, have largely been made available to the public, and have been extensively filmed by German historical institutes. By contrast, no access has been given to the files of the Bavarian Catholic dioceses since January 1946, except of the documentary volumes excellently prepared by the late Fr. Ludwig Volk,SJ. However, as Lehmann’s comprehensive bibliography shows, much has been written on this topic already. The main lines are therefore well known. Lehmann’s contribution, despite its lack of either a name or subject index, is a well-balanced survey, which ably steers a course between too much denominational loyalty or too much sycophancy towards the American conquerors. Instead, with the advantage of hindsight, he is rightly critical of both the Catholic episcopate and the U.S. military government authorities.

Despite more than two years’ planning, the Americans in 1945 had no agreed policy towards the German population. Some, like Morgenthau, argued for a punitive peace and adopted the idea of the collective guilt of all Germans; others saw the opportunity to introduce far-reaching, left-leaning and in their eyes overdue reforms. On the other side, the military leaders, like Lucius Clay, sought to disengage themselves as quickly as possible from civilian governmental responsibilities, while the local level officers were pre-occupied with the immediate function of providing food and shelter for the millions of ordinary Germans. Since this task could only be fulfilled with German co-operation, the Military Government turned for guidance to the churches, who enjoyed the reputation of being the only anti-Nazi organization still intact.

For their part, the Church leaders naturally supported the latter policy, and played a considerable role in suggesting nominees for the new administration. In so doing, they clearly favoured conservative upholders of the pre-Nazi era. were averse to approving any known “leftists” and overlooked, in the interests of efficiency, the Nazi sympathies of many of the leading members of their communities. Led by the eminent Cardinal Faulhaber, who had been Archbishop of Munich for nearly thirty years, the Catholic bishops at first favoured an authoritarian “non-political” government, in which, as in 1918-19, the churches would be the symbol of continuity and moral authority. Faulhaber was aware of the danger of the Catholics playing too active a political role, but instead sought to create conditions favourable to the “re- Christianisation” of a country misled by the allurements of Nazi pagan and secularist ambitions.

This stance, however, soon ran into difficulties with OMGUS, which led to confrontation in place of co-operation. Particularly regrettable were the church leaders’ readiness to condone both individual Nazis’ behaviour, their opposition to any notion of collective guilt, their portrayal of themselves solely as the victims of Nazi aggression and their support of the popular amnesia towards the crimes committed against the Jews or in the occupied countries.. Above all, the alleged reactionary views of the bishops, who opposed the American plans for a democratic re-organisation of society, led to a marked weakening of church influence after the initial few months. OMGUS saw the church, with its triumphalist attitude, as being too often concerned solely with preserving its privileges, such as the maintenance of the Reich Concordat of 1933, the separate denominational school system, the control over youth work, or the restitution of Nazi-seized property. Admittedly, OMGUS was grateful for the splendid work of church welfare agencies, such as Caritas, but remained suspicious of supposed political intentions behind such activities. Equally, the Americans’ desire to see a renovated church was thwarted by their directive for “non-interference” with the church’s internal affairs, and by their own tradition of the separation of church and state. Furthermore OMGUS suffered from the very rapid turnover of its personnel, from demobilisation, or sheer incompetence of its lower-level staff, ignorant of the language and indifferent to the people they were supposed to rule. Despite its generally positive attitude towards the churches, OMGUS’ Religious Affairs branch was one of the more neglected agencies which enjoyed virtually no influence on decision-making. Its overall impact was minimal.

Lehmann’s useful assessment of this short-lived attempt shows the contradictions of an authoritarian and foreign military government trying to impose the ideas and ideals of democracy. Equally it shows the contortions of the Bavarian church leadership, apparently attempting to turn back the clocks of history to before 1789. Unfortunately this can only be an interim report. It will all have to be done again, if and when the church archives are opened. Only then will we be able to judge whether the misperceptions of each other’s intentions were justified, and gain a fuller appreciation of the church’s role in this traumatic and turbulent period.

University of British Columbia, Vancouver
John S.Conway

4) Denazification;

On a related topic, and with reference to the findings in Doris Bergen’s Twisted Cross ( see Newsletter no 15), and my review of Reichrath’s biography of Ludwig Diehl (see Newsletter no 12), Ronald Webster,Toronto, sent in the following clipping from the newspaper Rheinpfalz, Jan 6th 1996: Enkenbach [Pfalz] [epd]. “Die Entnazifizierung fur die Pfarrer verlief milde, ja sehr milde” urteilte im November 1949 der damalige Praesident der pfalzische Landeskirche, Hans Stempel. Dass viele trotz ihres NSDAP-Parteibuches glimpflich davonkamen, haengt nach Ansicht des katholischen Kirchenhistrikers Thomas Fandel, Heidelberg, damit zusammen, dass die Kirche die Entnazifizierung weitgehend in eigener Regie durchfuehren konnte. Fandel, der sich in seiner Doktorarbeit mit ‘Pfarrer und Nationalsozialismus in der Pfalz’ befasst hat, sprach gestern auf einer Tagung in Enkenbach.

In Mai 1947 habe die Protestantische Kirchenregierung insgesamt 76 Massregelungen beschlossen, berichtete Fandel. Es kam zu sieben Entlassungen, drei Suspendierungen und elf Versetzungen. Sechs Pfarrer wurden in den Ruhestand versetzt, funf Manner verloren ein leitendes Amt, weitere 6o Geistliche wurden zuruckgestuft oder zu Geldbussen verurteilt.

Wie stark die pfaelzische Pfarrerschaft politisch belastet war, zeigt nach den Recherchen Fandels, dass in den Jahren 1933 bis 1940 uber 20% der Seelsorger der NSDAP angehoerte. Diese seien nach Kriegsende reibungslose in die sich neu formierende Gesellschaft eingegliedert worden, so Fandel, der im Oeffentlichkeitsreferat des Bistums Speyer beschaeftigt ist.

Die Landeskirche habe nur die schwersten Faelle bereinigt und gehofft, auf diesem Weg andere belastete Pfarrer im kirchlichen Dienst behalten zu konnen. Auffaellig sei das gaenzlich fehlende Unrechtsbewusstsein bei der Gemassregelten, die sich als Opfer des NS-Regimes fuehlten. Fur einer Grossteil von ihnen erreichte die Landeskirche bereits 1948 bei der franzoesischen Militarregierung eine Amnestie.

Joining us is:

Timothy Williams, 103A Schellingstrasse,
80798 Munich
timothy.williams@bonn02.x400.gc.ca

Best wishes
John Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway,Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter no 15 (Vol II, no 3) – April 1996

Contents

Dear Friends,

Conference Report:

The Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, Minneapolis, March 3rd-6th.

Doris Bergen reports:

“The participation of some 250 people dedicated to studying the Holocaust and its implications generated an impressive energy. But the size of the conference had its disadvantages, since many speakers were limited to only 10 minutes(!) and so did not have time to make their points clearly or fully. Too many simultaneous sessions present a danger to the scholarly integrity of the conference. (As usual the Holocaust predominated over the churches’ responses). My own paper dealt with military chaplains and the Holocaust. I produced evidence that German chaplains were aware of genocidal crimes, that in some cases they promoted attacks on Jews, but that their most significant contribution was probably to “normalize” for many of their men the brutality in which they were implicated. I also touched on the role of British and U.S. chaplains after the opening of Nazi camps at the end of the war. In contrast to their German counterparts, Allied chaplains served to raise awareness of the scale of Nazi crimes, by organizing religious burials and memorial services and in some cases, by requiring local Germans to attend.”

Book reviews:

1) It gives me great pleasure to offer you a review of a book by one of our own members, and to congratulate her on her fine achievement. (This will appear later in German Studies Review) Doris Bergen. Twisted Cross: the German Christian movement in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill and London: U. of N.Carolina Press 1996. Pp. xiv, 341. Cloth $39.95, Paper $16.95.

In the historiography of the German Church Struggle, the group of pro-Nazis, calling themselves the “German Christians”, are usually dismissed as extremists, heretics, career opportunists, political adventurers disguised as clergymen, or in other pejorative terms. Their attempt to synthesize Christianity and National Socialism, and to purge it of all Jewish influences, was rightly regarded as a dangerous deviation. No one had a good word to say for them.

Doris Bergen is the first English-speaking scholar to take the movement seriously enough to produce an excellently-crafted analysis of the factors which gave rise to this attempt to unite Volk and Church, and which enabled them to maintain a significant presence throughout the Nazi years. As a Canadian, now teaching in the USA, she is far enough removed from the polemical in- fighting within the German Protestant Church, which fuelled the campaign of disparagement both before and after 1945. Her insights are therefore all the more revealing of the weaknesses apparent in German Protestant theology in these crucial years.

Germany’s defeat in 1918 and the expulsion of the Kaiser and his fellow sovereigns removed Protestantism’s overarching and governing rulers. Subsequently each provincial church body was engaged in heated and often conflicting theological debate about their identity and authority. No issue was more vital than the relations of church to society and to the newly-established secular democracy of the Weimar Republic. Confusion and contradictions resulted. Much of the support of the German Christians came from their appeal for a unified national church, overcoming these divisive tendencies, and hand-in-glove with the cause of national and political revival as espoused by the Nazis. Their adoption of ethnic Germanness as the essential characteristic of the church easily incorporated traditional anti-Jewish prejudices and added the new Nazi categories of blood and race as prerequisites for membership in the Volkskirche. They enthusiastically adopted Luther’s vicious polemic against “the Jews and their lies”, and vigorously attacked such debilitating Jewish survivals in the church as the Old Testament, the pharisaic morality of the Apostle Paul, or the “weakness” of the crucifixion iconography. Hence too their antagonism to their colleagues’ rigidly dogmatic defence of inherited orthodoxy. Instead they proclaimed the virtues of a strong, manly and heroic Christianity, and readily saw the Nazi revolution as issuing in a new era of “positive Christianity”.

The German Christians were in fact fighting on two fronts. They were attacked by the traditionalists in the Confessing Church for having sold out the Gospel by advocating such non-biblical criteria as blood and race. On the other hand, they were also attacked by the more radical Nazis, who, like Hitler, saw all branches of the Christian church as being “the illegitimate offspring of Judaism”. In fact, when it became clear that the German Christians could not unite all sections of the Protestant churches behind the Nazi Party, its leaders lost interest in them and withdrew their support. Despite their fervent claims to be the Fuehrer’s most loyal followers, the German Christians were subjected to the same discriminatory measures taken by the Party and/or the Gestapo to marginalize the churches, and to drive them out of the public arena.

Much of Dr Bergen’s account of this ill-fated movement has been told before, though she adds some well-chosen examples of its rhetoric. But the most novel and perhaps more interesting chapters of her book deal with the treatment of gender issues. She rightly recognizes the centrality of “manliness” in this male- dominated movement, with its extensive use of militaristic language and metaphor, its pronounced campaigning ideology against the threat of Judaism, and its portrayal of Christianity solely in heroic triumphant terms. These “storm-troopers of Jesus Christ” sought to keep alive the memories of their comradeship from the first world war, saw the Nazi movement as a continuation of masculine revival, deplored the effeminateness of much church life, and tried to persuade more men to return to the church. But why did so many women contribute legitimacy, energy and resources to such a movement in which their involvement was essentially ironic? In Bergen’s view, these women were eager to conflate their religious and political loyalties. They welcomed Hitler’s re-imposition of authoritarian leadership, and enthusiastically endorsed the Nazi adulation of motherhood as complementing the military virtues of their men-folk. The cult of motherhood provided a space and identity for such women. As the guardians of Christian morality, they willingly supported the ideas of racial purity and devotion to Nazi ideology which characterized the German Christian faith. But the prevalence of women’s groups and activities, though indispensable, challenged the male hierarchy. Prominent women leaders, such Guida Diehl, despite their political reliability, found themselves excluded from the inner counsels. They could never become Christian storm-troopers. This ambivalence was never resolved. Most shameful of all, and ultimately self-destructive were the German Christian’s resolute efforts to remove all traces of Judaism from church life. Ultimately the German Christians preached Christianity as the polar opposite of Judaism, Jesus as the arch-antisemite, and the cross as the symbol of war against the Jews. Their campaign found institutional form in 1939 with the founding of the Institute for Research into and Elimination of Jewish Influence in German Church Life. Prominent theologians lent their services to this Institute. Both directly and indirectly its publications and services underwrote the Nazi efforts to destroy Jews. Only the exigencies of the war brought its polemics to an end.

Doris Bergen steers a fine line between describing the German Christians’ activities and deploring the results. She rightly points out that their promotion of anti-intellectualism, anticlericalism and antilegalism produced only confusion The collapse of the Nazi regime put a quick end to all of their aspirations, and led to a general amnesia about their former exploits. Some of the more prominent clergymen were dismissed or relegated to distant rural parishes. But no general reckoning followed, as the victorious Confessing Church was anxious to incorporate the rank and file into the rebuilding of the new German Evangelical Church. There was never any open expression of regret that the German Christians for twelve years had tried to create an anti-Jewish people’s church, or acknowledgment of how much their polemics had contributed to blocking any more favourable opinion about Jews and Judaism. But just because such views were already present in German society before the Nazis came to power, so their romanticized notion of church doctrine and gendered version of the church flowed easily back into the mainstream of the society around them.

Doris Bergen’s account stands as a trenchant warning about the dangers which so easily then, and indeed still, beset a church which forsakes doctrinal orthodoxy in pursuit of popular political favour, or cultivates nationalist ethnicity at the expense of the Gospel. She is to be congratulated on so vividly depicting this dismal story.

J.S.Conway

2) Erich Loest, Nikolaikirche, Linden Verlag Leipzig 1995 A novel about the personalities around the Leipzig Nikolaikirche, the centre of events leading to the overthrow of the unlamented German Democratic Republic in 1989. A good knowledge of colloquial German is required. (See review by S.Hilsberg in DAS PARLAMENT, Nr.8, 16 Feb 96, p.22)

3)Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of mourning. The Great War in European cultural history. Cambridge University Press 1995. 310pp

In the Great War of 1914-1918, millions of young men were killed in action, unpredictably, without warning and often without any known grave. Jay Winter’s sad but splendid book is essentially about mass bereavement, and how the families and those who survived sought to come to terms with this unprecedented loss. The religious dimension was ambivalently present from the beginning. For many, the Christian Church’s endorsement of this bloody slaughter was too much of a contradiction, and the Christian message of hope and love too inadequate to console their despair and hopelessness. Even on the battlefield, the soldiers turned to an older tradition of folk-religion or fatalism; at home some of their relatives turned to spiritualism to retain their contact with the newly dead.

After the end of the war, the more urgent question was how to bury these fallen heroes in a fitting manner which could attempt to heal the sense of overwhelming grief. Winter’s descriptions of the commemorative art and rituals of the post-war period are brief but evocative. His chapters on the war memorials and the mourning process outline how both the victor and vanquished sought to preserve the memory of the fallen in tangible forms, as the places where some sort of meaning could be found for the inexplicable waste of young lives, and where individual and collective grief could be expressed. These frozen monuments scattered throughout Europe are still there today, silent witnesses of the strength of feelings of seventy or eighty years ago. Whether in traditional iconography or in more radical expressionist art, such memorials sought to give visible expression to the desire for transcendence, enabling the survivors to accept the brutal facts of death in war, and to help the bereaved recover from their sudden and irreversible loss.

In the second half of the book Winter explores the cultural codes and languages of mourning. In the new media of film, millions of viewers were able to share their common sufferings, often linked by mythic themes of redemption suffused with national pride. Artists like Otto Dix, Max Beckmann or Stanley Spencer tried to express the horrors and dehumanisation of war within more ancient traditions of allegorical and apocalyptic drama, in a language halfway between hope and despair. So too, in their anger and pain, the writers and poets of the war-time generation turned away from the sentimentalising of war to a more effective catharsis which might offer the possibility, if not of reconciliation then of healing. In the case of Henri Barbusse, for instance, the need to give an answer in the face of the silent and demanding dead was not just a matter of memory but of solidarity. Conventional religious or political sentiment was not sufficient.

In the prose and poetry of the war and post-war periods, the dead returned to the living, when these authors composed a series of meditations to keep the voices of the fallen alive, by speaking for them, to them, about them. They protested against civilian hypocrisy and self-deception, and expressed instead both the dignity and the revulsion of the lost against their inflicted degradations. They owed it to their comrades to ask the reason why. Patriotism was indeed not enough. But could they evoke compassion? The soldier-poets had witnessed fear and death and spoke about them to the yet unknowing world, seeking to find some meaning, and to proclaim the sacredness of life through the metaphors of resurrection. Yet the extent of the wreckage overwhelmed them. They remain ambivalent.

Winter’s argument is that, to the architects, artists and writers, the traditional vocabulary of mourning helped to mediate healing. The sites of memory faced the past not the future, for the past offered a form of aesthetic redemption, both remembering and forgetting, as the process of separation from the dead took place. In this task all of Europe was for once united by the bond of mutual bereavement. The galling irony was that it was not enough. When Germany marched again, the sacrifices of the dead indeed seemed to have been in vain.

J.S.Conway

New members: Wayne Holst,
Arctic Institute,
U. of Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4
wholst@acs.ucalgary.ca

Thomas Rightmyer,
Duke University,
North Carolina. USA
trightmy@acpub.duke.edu

Prof. Dr Gerhard Besier, Editor, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte,
Faculty of Theology,
Heidelberg University, Germany
aw4@aixterm1.urz.uni-heidelberg.de

Prof.M.Hadley,
Dept of Germanic Studies,
U. of Victoria, B.C.
mlhadley@UVVM.UVIC.ca

Dr Hilary M.Carey,
Editor, Journal of Religious History,
University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia
hihmc@cc.newcastle.edu.au

Dr Michael Berenbaum,
U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum,
Washington, D.C.

Ms Peggy Obrecht,
U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum,
Washington, D.C.

Dr John Flynn,
University of the South,Sewanee,TN 37383
jflynn@seraph1.sewanee.edu

Rev. Stephen E.Herbert,
St James’ Church,
303 East Cordova St, Vancouver B.C. V6A 1L4
103154.2721@compuserve.com

With best wishes to you all for Easter,
John Conway

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter no 16 (Vol II, no 4) – April 1996

In memoriam: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Vancouver, B.C.

Dear Friends,

For April 9th 1996

Fifty one years ago this month Dietrich Bonhoeffer was brutally murdered by the SS-Gestapo at Flossenburg concentration camp in southern Germany. Recent historiography has been concerned less with his theological legacy than with his status as a resistance figure, as can be seen in the latest issue to hand of Evangelische Theologie, 1995/6: “Dietrich Bonhoeffer heute”. The debates, however, about Bonhoeffer’s role and influence in post-war Germany continue to have ambiguous overtones. Since 1990, the reunification of the country has raised new issues about the role of resistance movements in both of Germany’s totalitarian dictatorships in this century.

After 1949, the newly-established Bundesrepublik in West Germany made enormous efforts to praise the courage and self- sacrifice of all those involved in the fatally-flawed July 20th 1944 plot. These men were depicted as seeking to overthrow Hitler’s evil regime, inspired by their moral convictions and appalled by the Nazis’ crimes against humanity. Bonhoeffer’s evident Christian motivation for his participation, even if peripheral, in this plot made him an excellent role model in the attempt to forge a new ideology and identity for the new state, along non-Nazi and non-Communist lines. Yet for many years these endeavours met with considerable scepticism. To many churchmen, obedience to the state and its leaders seemed a paramount obligation, according to a very literal acceptance of Romans 13: 1. To others, participation in such highly scandalous political activities was regarded with suspicion, since the Church’s prime duty was to worship God, not to become involved in the sinful area of day-to- day politics. When, for instance, the citizens of Flossenburg erected a plaque in Bonhoeffer’s memory, the then Bishop of Munich refused to give this his blessing, stating that Bonhoeffer had been executed as a political opponent not as a religious martyr. Even today, despite representations from leading theologians and bishops, the German Parliament has yet to declare all convictions by SS courts to be annulled, thus opening the way for the legal rehabilitation of Bonhoeffer and others convicted by these courts, including army deserters, and clearing their names of the charge of alleged treachery.

To counter such views, much was made of the idealism of the resisters, and of the high proportion of army officers and elitist individuals with respectably conservative nationalist backgrounds. Yet those who sought to claim that the Resistance movement incorporated a “truer” German national tradition were made uncomfortable when reminded that far more Communists than churchmen had perished in Nazi concentration camps. In any case, the more praise given to the “heroes of conscience”, the greater the accusation against all those who had failed to join them. But for West German politicians and historians, the exemplary Christian and western-oriented character of the Resistance was a necessary pillar of the state’s self-justification. This left no room for others to be honoured, such as Communists. It also glossed over the highly diverse ideas amongst these plotters about what sort of a government should be established afterwards. Virtually none of them shared Bonhoeffer’s view that, because of Hitler’s crimes, Germany would have to accept a penetential peace. As more research has delved into the diversity of the Resisters’ motives and aims, so the credibility of the “official” West German reception has been challenged. Consensus on the scope and significance of the Resistance Movement has yet to be achieved.

A very different picture was built up in the former East Germany. From the beginning its Marxist ideology stressed the contribution of all “anti-Fascists”, and included in its praise such churchmen as Dietrich Bonhoeffer who had sacrificed his life to this cause. Even when, i the 1950s, the Communist rulers launched their campaign against the churches as being “agents of imperialist and reactionary forces”, sponsored by similar groups in West Germany, some exceptions were made. Bonhoeffer could still be lauded since he had so clearly opposed the pro-Nazi policies of his own church. Indeed, in the analysis of his theology written by one of the regime’s appointees to the Berlin theological faculty, Hanfried Muller, Bonhoeffer could be made to appear as an advocate for the kind of egalitarian, non-religious, socialist society which the Marxists wanted. Total emphasis was placed on his advice to the church to rid itself of the privileged status of the past, to rely solely upon its witness in a secularized world, and to renounce the well-bolstered financial support of earlier years. By such means, Muller sought to project Bonhoeffer as a model for Christians in the land of “actually existing Socialism”.

But such a one-sided, and clearly politically-slanted, view was regarded as extreme, and was rejected by most East German Christians. Instead, they recalled Bonhoeffer the teacher from whom they had learnt much as they reflected upon the Church’s successes and failures during the Nazi period. Some of his former pupils or associates, such as Albrecht Schonherr, who later became Bishop of East Berlin, clearly drew their inspiration from Bonhoeffer’s ethical teachings, as they sought to live out their witness as an unprivileged and minority church under the repressive conditions of a Marxist state.

These churchmen accepted Bonhoeffer’s insight that “Christendom” had come to an end. They recognised that in a Marxist-dominated society – at least for the foreseeable future – their position was marginal. They could no longer count on the support of the state, nor rely on the inherited traditions and property of the past – just as Bonhoeffer had predicted. Yet they bravely adopted Bonhoeffer’s precept not to succumb to the temptation of retreating into becoming a pietistic sect, concerned only with its own personal salvation, or preaching only about the world to come. Instead they took up his more positive vision of Christian discipleship as a call to service to the marginalized, the poor, the weak and to be the voice of the voiceless. The sought to be “the church for others”, not merely for their own members but for non-Christians as well. As Wolf Krotke has argued in several articles, this legacy from Bonhoeffer was formative in determining the stance of the church in East Germany.

This attempt to accept the changed social and political conditions of life in a Marxist state, while rejecting its pervasive ideology, obliged the church leaders to tread a thin dividing line between compromise and opposition, seeking to safeguard the church’s institutional freedom while resisting the ever-present surveillance, harassment and often unpredictable onslaughts of the state, and especially of its secret police and its army of informers. Nonetheless, as Bishop Schonherr frequently reminded his congregations, the real question had been posed by Bonhoeffer in one of his enigmatic prison reflections:

“After 2000 years of church history, during which the church had often enough demanded that others should be there for her, rather than she for them, ‘are we still of any use?'”

Bonhoeffer’s positive answer, from his cheerless cell in Tegel jail, gave them courage to seek to forge new patterns of costly discipleship.

After 1961, when the Berlin Wall was built, East German Christians were even more isolated in the midst of an atheistically-controlled society. Bonhoeffer’s call for the church to be a community of service to others, but also to maintain a prophetic witness to another and transcendent system of values, now became even more significant. But, in one respect, his advice was not followed. The East German church never did abandon its traditional pattern of parish structures and live purely on the efforts of lay leadership and voluntary giving. Instead, it kept its organizational establishment, in part at least financed by some rather secretive deals with government-supported funding from West German sources. The churches survived. In these circumstances, they never regarded themselves as a Resistance Movement, but rather as standing in “critical solidarity” with the regime. At the same time, they still sought to b a Confessing Church, proclaiming the truth of the Gospel and its call to relevant service to those whom the all-powerful Communist state chose to ignore. And in the 1980s they became the focus points where spontaneous protest groups gathered to criticize the regime’s failings. Their debates about peace, ecology and international solidarity with the world’s poor had many Bonhoeffian overtones. And the contribution of these church- based groups to the eventual collapse of the regime in October 1989 is undeniable.

With the reunification of the country and of the church in 1990 and 1991, the question may well be asked: what remains of Bonhoeffer’s legacy today? The re-imposition of the well-funded west German church polity on the “new” eastern provinces seems to negate all the lessons of forty years’ diaspora under Marxist- Leninist rule. In the present circumstances, as Wolf Krotke noted, to talk of “participation in the sufferings of God” sounds like hypocrisy coming from the mouths of well-paid church bureaucrats, and Bonhoeffer’s vision of the church giving away all its wealth to those in need no more than a fanciful piece of wishful thinking.

Yet the questions Bonhoeffer left unanswered fifty years ago still remain. How to serve God in an ever increasingly secularized world? How to profess the Gospel’s truth in a society overwhelmed by the allurements of consumer materialism? How to rekindle the flame of moral idealism for which so many of the German resisters to Nazism had sacrificed their lives? How to share in the sufferings of God at a time when wars, racism, injustice and poverty are still so evident and widespread? Above all, how to mobilize the Church to take effective measures to forestall the misuse of the ominous powers of the modern state?

In such a situation, Bonhoeffer’s decisive calls for a repudiation of cheap grace, for identification with the outcasts and rejected in our midst, both nationally and internationally, for the vision to overcome the nationalistic and tradition-bound blinkers which have precluded the building of an ecumenical world-wide Christian community – all these are challenges which face Christians everywhere. And across the years we still hear the questions Bonhoeffer so pointedly posed: “Who stands fast?” and “Are we still of any use?”

Sincerely,
John Conway

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway,Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter no 14 – March 1996

Contents

Vancouver, B.C.

Dear Friends,

1) Dietrich Bonhoeffer

To mark Bonhoeffer’s ninetieth birthday, the International Bonhoeffer Society organised its 7th Congress in Cape Town, under the capable leadership of John de Gruchy, attended by 280 scholars from all continents, which undoubtedly helped to recognise that, in the new South Africa, the universities are now welcomed back as fully members of the international scholarly community.

John Moses reports that a number of African speakers who had been prominent opponents and victims of apartheid bore testimony to the relevance of Bonhoeffer’s witness in their situation. John himself delivered a paper on “Bonhoeffer reception in the GDR 1945-89”, which was much appreciated by several former East Germans, many of whom had formed cells of Bonhoeffer students, drawing inspiration from his works. The proceedings will be published by Erdmanns in the USA.

Meanwhile in Germany, new efforts are being made to overturn the legal rulings by SS courts, under which Bonhoeffer was condemned to death, which are still considered to be in force. Legal rehabilitation would finally put an end to the defamatory view that Bonhoeffer was a “traitor” to his nation, an opinion which was still widely held in the 1950s as for instance by a 1956 court which upheld “the right of the state to maintain itself” against such “dissident elements”.

In the United States and Canada, a new initiative has started a new Internet forum on Bonhoeffer. To subscribe, send a message to LISTPROC2@bgu.edu with the text
SUBSCRIBE BONHF-L Your name

2) New Books:

It gives me great pleasure to introduce to you a first rate study by a Canadian author, which has significant findings for us all.

Duff Crerar, Padres in No Man’s Land. Canadian chaplains in the Great War. (McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion, 16), McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal and Kingston 1995, xvi + 424 pp, Can$ 39.95 Duff Crerar’s excellent description of the Canadian military chaplaincy during the first world war does much more than cover a long-neglected and largely unknown chapter in Canadian ecclesiastical and military history. This account of how the Canadian church mobilized its manpower in response to the call to arms should be read by friend and foe alike, because the issues raised were, and still are, relevant not only to the events of eighty years ago, or to the troops of a minor overseas participant. Through his careful research, his generous and tolerant ecumenical tone, and his obvious sympathy for those involved, Crerar has given us a significant and heartfelt tribute to the men who served their country with such devotion. It deserves to be read and studied, not just by Canadians, but by anyone concerned with the successes and failures of Christian witness in the twentieth century.

The Canadian chaplaincy service began in a bumbling amateur fashion, high on inflated patriotic rhetoric, strongly influenced by political and social jobbery and lacking in support from either the military authorities or even its home church constituency. Crerar’s opening chapter describes the organization of the service under a self-seeking opinionated Anglican clergyman with connections to the Orange lodges of southern Ontario, whose inadequacies finally led to a revolt from his own staff. Not until 1916, when John Almond of Montreal took over, did the chaplaincy gain an effective presence, and establish its credibility with both the military and civilian authorities. By 1918 Almond had command of a multi- denominational force of dedicated priests, whose prowess in the field and the gratitude they had earned from the soldiers would, he believed, be indispensable for the spiritul regeneration of post-war Canada.

Crerar’s writing becomes more vivid as he describes the padres’ progress from home parish to battalion or division headquarters, to assembly points and training camps, to overseas staging areas, and to the initial and often prolonged stay in England. It was often a disillusioning process. The padres preached a heady mixture of personal consecration, moral purity, duty and self-sacrifice. But they were often appalled to find that their men preferred to find solace in drunkenness, profanity and sexual misconduct in order to alleviate the disruptions and boredoms of army life. Equally depressing was the frequent disdain and lack of support from commanding officers. A continuing battle ensued with the army medical service’s attempts to combat venereal disease by adequate prophylactic devices and lectures, which the chaplains could only regard as an open invitation to immorality. Compulsory church parades proved to be counter-productive to any real spiritual growth, as chaplains struggled to get a hearing from reluctant audiences, who increasingly resented this usurpation of their spare time. By contrast hospital visiting offered the chance to admire the quiet courage and heroic endurance of the wounded, which helped to relieve the chaplains’ sense of fatigue and discouragement. “In their progress towards the front, chaplains passed through a powerful psychological process in which they increasingly identified with the soldier, idealized his character and ascribed a sacramental quality to his endurance and loyalty.” (p.109).

The following chapters on the chaplain’s service in the field of battle are most moving. Despite Army regulations barring non- combatants from the trenches, chaplains increasingly recognized that their hold on the men grew as they shared the perils and dangers of the front lines In the face of so much death, the chaplains refused to accept their original relegation to the rear. >From 1916 onwards, the terrible demands of attritional trench warfare made morale a compelling concern to the military leaders, and the chaplains’ role was correspondingly upgraded. But despite their displays of heroism and valour, the mood of the chaplains’ reports shifted from optimism to grim endurance. The awful toll of the casualty rates, and the suffering they daily.witnessed in the dressing stations and field hospitals, belied the patriotic rhetoric of earlier years. Their underlying assumption that moral courage and spiritual devotion would surely triumph, and their constant sermons on the virtues of decency, duty, obedience and sacrifice, now had to be re-thought. Increasingly they came to place their hopes on the prospects of a post-war revival and renewal. Most of the chaplains testified that their years overseas had been an edifying and deepening experience for them, and were sure that the comradeship of the battle-fields would continue and give them strength in their post-war lives.

After November 1918 the chaplains were convinced that victory proved that God had been on their side. Their war-time idealism and fellowship could and should be transplanted to the parishes, and translated into a grand crusade for the realization of the coming Kingdom of God. They called for reforms in both church and state. They advocated the democratization of church structures, the updating of archaic liturgies, the abandonment of sectarian denominationalism, and the promotion of an active social gospel. They sought political reforms with a strongly socialist tendency. In short, as Crerar convincingly points out, the war confirmed the kind of national idealism and evangelical fervour they had learnt in the pre-war seminaries.

But the results were highly disillusioning. Neither the Church nor the state authorities were willing to take their advice. The government rapidly dismantled the chaplaincy service. The churches sidelined the returning veterans, and many were too burnt out to mobilize support for their millenial campign for post-war regeneration. Few Canadians seems to be listening for such a clarion call to action.

Crerar clearly takes the chaplains’ side in blaming the ecclesiastical and government leaders for not responding to this opportunity, even though he admits that the radicalism of many chaplains evaporated as they returned to parish duties. Their vision faded as internal struggles in both church and state took up more energy and attention.

But in fact Crerar’s charitable appreciation of the chaplains’ endeavours fails to look at the larger picture. After 1918, a world- wide wave of scepticism cast corrosive doubts upon the credibility of all Christian churches. Increasingly Christians were challenged to face the question they had avoided before – and which Crerar skirts around – how could such a war, with such appalling losses, be reconciled with the Gospel of Jesus, the Prince of Peace? How could each of the warring sides have made such confident, but mutually contradictory, appeals to the same God, or have claimed to have had divine approval for such murderous slaughter? The chaplains’ readiness to portray the war in moral and spiritual terms, the propagation of the idea of personal sacrifice and death as a means of moral regeneration, the invocation of the spirit of militarism, the demonization of the nations’ enemies, and the belief that the testing of war would lead the populations back to the churches, all now came back to haunt the proponents of this religious patriotism. The cynical anger expressed in the anti-war literature of the late 1920s and 1930s not merely attacked these warrior-priests as hypocrites, but more fundamentally challenged the faith they had sought to uphold. It would not be too much to say that much of Christianity has never recovered from these disastrous wounds.

John S.Conway
University of British Columbia

3) Just arrived today:

Doris Bergen, Twisted Cross. The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, University of North Carolina Press 1996.

Congratulations, Doris!.

To be reviewed in my next Newsletter.

4)The Church in the Palatinate (continued)

Following my review of H.Reichrath’s biography of Landesbischof Diehl (Newsletter no 12), I received a sharply critical letter from the publisher, accusing me of portraying the Pfalz Church in overly black (mainly) and white terms. Fortunately we now have a more scholarly, if brief, account in the two chapters by K.H.Debus in eds. G.Nestler and H.Ziegler, Die Pfalz unterm Hakenkreuz, Pfalzische Verlagsanstalt 1993, pp 227-292, which reproduces the text of Diehl’s declaration on the occasion of the National Plebiscite of 19 August 1934:

“Der evangelische Landesbischof an das Pfalzer Volk. Noch niemals ist ein Volk so nach den Grundlagen der christlichen Sittlichkeit regiert worden, wie es im Dritten Reich Adolf Hitlers geschieht. Es ist deshalb unbedingte Gewissenspflicht all derer, die es mit ihrem Volk und mit ihrem Glauben ernst nehmen, in unerschutterlicher Treue zu diesem Manne zu stehen, der in hochster Not uns als Retter von Gott gesandt worden ist. Ohne ihn waren unsere Gotteshauser in Rauch und Flammen aufgegangen, ohne sein Kommen wurden entmenschte Christenhasser uns verfolgen und knebeln. Wer wagt es als Christ, da noch teilnahmelos und gleichgultig beiseite zu stehen? Evangelisches Christenvolk der Pfalz! Sei nicht undankbar, bekenne Dich as Glied Deines Volkes, mit dem Du auf Leben und Tod verbunden bist, zu unserem unvergleichlichen Fuhrer. Fur uns gibt es am Sonntag nur eins: Wir stimmen freudigen Herzens:”Ja”.

5) Joining us are:

Wesley Smith, 210 Route 31 South,
Pennington, N.J. 08534, USA
(5th yr Ph.D stud.Princeton)
747WWS@ptsmail.ptsem.edu

Rev.Frans Nelson,
2155 Angus St. Unit#1,
Regina, Sask S4T 2A1
(co-organiser of the Bonhoeffer Network)
fnelson@gpfn.sk.ca

Scott Kline,
McGill University,
Montreal, P.Q.
cxkl@musica.mcgill.ca

Richard Wiggers,
Dept. of History,
Georgetown University,
Washington, D.C. USA
wiggers@gusun.acc.georgetown.edu

Professor Dr Josef Becker,
University of Augsburg,
Bavaria, Germany
josef.becker@phil.uni-augsburg.de

Peggy Obrecht,
1000 St George’s Road,
Baltimore MD 21210, USA
margmho@aol.com

Dr Chris Clark,
St Catherine’s College,
Cambridge. U.K.
cmc11@cus.cam.ac.uk

Dr H.Ritter,
Western Washington University,
Bellingham, Wash. USA
harryr@scooter.cc.wwu.edu

Karen A.Dunaway,
Kansas State University
dunawka@ksu.ksu.edu

A Lenten thought from 2 Timothy 4: 2-4:
Preach the Word; be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, will turn to teachers to suit their own desires. They will not listen to the truth, but instead will wander away to myths.

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

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway,

Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter no 13 – February 1996

Contents

1. Journals

2. Summer Seminar: 1 July – 9 August 1996

3. New Books

1. Journals

Belatedly we have to hand, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 1995/1, “Volkskirche im Aufbruch?” 247pp.

This issue contains the papers given at the 7th meeting of this group in Oslo in August 1994, and discusses the impact of contemporary democratic, secularist and pluralistic tendencies on the life of the churches. I particularly liked Bryan Wilson’s essay, “Religious Toleration, Pluralism and Privatisation,” which describes the rise and fall of the idea of Christian doctrine and authority as the integrative focus in European nations, and the emergence instead of pluralistic religious practices and private judgement as the norm. But if religion is no longer a communal property, by whom and how are social moral standards to be set? Dick Pierard gives an excellent account of how “civil religion” has developed in the USA, substituting secularized post-Christian ethical ideals, shorn of any specific denominational content. Rolf Schieder points out that, in Germany, after the Nazis monopolized “civil religion” for their racist ideological purposes, the post-war politicians have studiously vacated this field, leaving the churches to return to being the moral guardians of society. With the recent integration of the new provinces from the former East Germany, this situation is now being challenged. But this development may enable the churches to return from their pastoral role to a more prophetic – and Protestant – stance as critics of society’s economic and social functioning.

The lead address by the Norwegian anthropologist, Jan Brogger, can be taken as a strong expression of the conservative Scandinavian views found in other articles, with his appeal to the churches to resist the temptation to compromise with any of the offers of cheap grace promoted by today’s ideological supermarkets.

Interesting international comparisons with similar developments in the Netherlands and the Czech Republic are provided by Osmund Schreuder and Jan Smolik.

Freiburger Rundbrief, Neue Folge, Vol 3, 1996 no 1

This issue contains the tributes given at the funeral of Gertrud Luckner, the indomitable founder of this fine journal, whose articles and book reviews make it the foremost German-language voice promoting the cause of improved Jewish-Christian relations.

2. Summer Seminar: 1 July – 9 August 1996

The U.of California-Berkeley is offering, for credit, a six-week seminar under the leadership of Prof.s Holub and Markovits on the topic of “The new Germany and the new Europe”. Scholarships are available from DAAD to 20 advanced Canadian or US grad. students in any field. Would any of our grad. church historians/theologians like to apply? Deadline 15 March.

3. New Books

Both the Catholic and Protestant Commissions for Contemporary Church History have recently published further large volumes in their continuing series of Darstellungen, covering the Nazi period and beyond. The vitality of this enterprise amongst our German colleagues is commendable, though one has to note how seldom inter-church collaboration, even in historical investigation, is present. German church history, alas!, continues to be written along separate denominational lines, and is directed towards their respective constituencies. The value of ecumenical and international cross-fertilization is under-recognized. The huge bulk of these volumes means that the publishers require a hefty subsidy, paid – presumably – from these Commissions’ contributions from the Kirchensteuer. Despite such assistance, the prices remain horrendous. Ordinary mortals, even the distinguished subscribers to this Newsletter, will hardly be able to purchase these tomes. And with library budgets shrinking, it is difficult to see how long such endeavours can be continued.

a) ed. Joachim Mehlhausen, . . .und ueber Barmen hinaus. Festschrift fuer Carsten Nicolaisen (Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte. Reihe B: Darstellungen, Band 23), Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Gottingen 1995, 642 pp. DM158! This Festschrift for the Director of the Evangelische Arbeitsgemeinschaft fuer kirchliche Zeitgeschichte in Munich contains 39 contributions (3 by foreigners, 4 by Catholics) and thus well represents the spectrum of the writings of German Evangelical church historians today (with the sad absence of Prof.G.Besier – Heidelberg). Like most such collections, these articles are a mixture of insightful and/or occasional pieces. The unifying focus is the “heikle Thema” of “Vergangenheitsbewaltigung”. The tone of repentance is notable throughout, showing how far German church historians have come since the Barmen Declaration sixty years ago. I found notable the editor’s comparison of eight prominent Protestants’ statements after 1945 on the subject of guilt. Ursula Buttner’s tribute to Jochen Klepper was very moving. Martin Greschat’s description of the German Protestants in Poland during the Nazi period is a sad story of how nationalist feelings misguided church policies, as is Prof., now Bishop, Kretschmar’s account of the ruins of the Lutheran church in the former Soviet Union and its recent reconstruction. In my contribution I attempted to show how Christian attitudes towards Judaism have changed since 1945, and Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz similarly pleads for the re-writing of church history from the same perspective. Unfortunately there is neither a subject nor a name index, so the only way for these essays, and the much good scholarship, backed up by excellent footnotes, to find an audience is by serendipity or word of mouth. JSC

b) eds. Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz and Carsten Nicolaisen, Theologische Fakultaten im Nationalsozialismus, (Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte; Reihe B: Darstellungen Band 18), Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Gottingen 1993, 429pp, DM 108

A useful but rather spotty survey by various scholars,. The subject still needs to be handled by a single author to give a fully critical and comprehensive account.

c) T.M.Schneider, Reichsbischof Ludwig Muller. (Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Darstellungen Band 19), Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Gottingen 1993, 384pp, DM 94 – to be reviewed by Doris Bergen.

d) ed. Trutz Rendtorff, Protestantische Revolution? Kirche und Theologie in der DDR (Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte. Reihe B: Darstellungen Band 20), Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Gottingen 1993 – to be reviewed later.

e) Markus Huttner, Britische Presse und nationalsozialistischer Kirchenkampf(Veroffentlichungen der Kommission fur Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B;Forschungen Band 67, F.Schoningh, Paderborn 1995, 814pp, DM?

This enormous tome, the latest in the fine Catholic Commission’s series of Blaue Bander, suffers from the handicap that it limits its focus too narrowly on the British reactions to the Catholic church struggle, although necessarily acknowledging that the even-better known Protestant church struggle should be equally fully treated. An excellent description of the British correspondents in Germany, and the remarkable coverage they afforded, is balanced by an attempted analysis of the effect on the British appeasement policy. – to be reviewed more fully in German History (UK) by JSC.

f) Rainer Hering, Theologische Wissenschaft und “Dritte Reich”, Studien zur Hamburger Wissenschafts- und Kirchengeschichte im 20.Jahrhundert, Centaurus Verlagsgesellschaft, Pfaffenweiler 1990, 197, DM 29.80

This earlier shorter volume complements the above-mentioned book ed. by Siegele-Wenschkewitz, (to which Hering did not contribute!), by concentrating on developments in Hamburg, which in fact only established a full theological faculty in 1952. But Hering gives a good description of the earlier developments in the city, including a discussion of the prominent Mission Academy, which provided training for many of the German Protestant missionaries abroad. The opening chapter seeks to give a broad overview of the theological faculties in the Third Reich, prompted by Hering’s belief that “gerade die Untersuchung der Kirchengeschichte und der Geschichte der Theologie als Wissenscaft weisst sehr grosse Defizite auf”. He rightly points out that the continuity of the professoriate makes it necessary to look at a longer period than just 1933-45, and points out how catastrophically Nazi hostility affected the Protestant faculties, not least by the rapid decline in the number of students, and the readiness of some, but not all, leading theologians to compromise their beliefs in order to curry favour with the regime. Hering’s chapter on the development of Mission Studies in Hamburg is excellent, but also shows how strikingly political factors affected this academic enterprise, up to and including the Nazi attacks on all Christian missions overseas. In 1941 Bormann, Hitler’s secretary prohibited all further teaching of such subjects at Hamburg University, even though the renowned director, Walter Freytag, had openly supported Nazi racist views and raised no opposition to the persecution of the Jews. Nevertheless he was quickly restored to office in 1945, went on to build up the Mission school as part of the Arts Faculty again, and later became the first Professor of Missions in the new Theological Faculty, re- establishing this enterprise on a more ecumenical pattern. Similar political quarrels dominated the training of teachers of religion in Hamburg throughout this whole period. Hering closes his book with a short essay discussing the “Historikerstreit”, which shows how such politically-motivated views continue to plague any definitive attempt to come to terms with the Nazi past. JSC

g) Ulrich Schlie, Kein Friede mit Deutschland, Langen Muller, Munich 1994, 520pp

This voluminous account of the various peace feelers put out between 1939 and 1941 updates and expands Bernd Martin’s Friedensinitiativen und Machtpolitik (1972). Schlie does not however add anything new on the initiatives taken by Catholic and Protestant representatives. He recapitulates fully the soundings at the Vatican from November 1939 to March 1940, and agrees with the earlier view that Pope Pius XII’s stance clearly demonstrates how far he was prepared to go to support the German resistance, thus again refuting the claim that Pius was pro-Nazi. He also covers the moves made in 1941 by the leading Protestant social thinker, Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, a confidant of Carl Goerdeler, which were equally fruitless. His findings show, once again, that the German resistance was far too weak and divided to succeed. Their failure was not due to the refusal of the British government to give them promises of support or any statement of peace aims sufficiently generous to induce the generals to overthow Hitler. This was wishful thinking at the time, and remains so, despite many post-war claims to the contrary. JSC

h) Jurjen A.Zeilstra, European Unity in Ecumenical Thinking 1937- 1948, Boekencentrum, Zoetermeer,Holland 1995 454pp Dfl 65

This encyclopaedic study of the Protestant ecumenical elite’s speeches and writings first focusses on their ideas about the state of European politics in the 1930s as national rivalries and irreconcilable ideologies tore the continent apart. After the outbreak of war, these men sought to maintain their vision of a universal Christian civilization by preparing plans for a just and durable peace. They agonized about the future of Germany. They disagreed about the intentions of Russia. But there were too many ambivalences about their attitudes towards the existing nation states, or even about the value of parliamentary democracy, for any coherent policy on the future of Europe to emerge. Despite their highly visible role in society, and their genuinely-held moral fervour in defence of their Christian ideals, their numerous reports and memoranda were almost totally ignored by the victorious Allied politicians. Their hopes that Europe could be re-united and re-christianized proved to be no more than wishful thinking. A full review follows in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. JSC

Most of us in Canada have been having a severe winter with terrible cold and icy spells. We envy those like John Moses and Dick Pierard who had the opportunity of attending the International Bonhoeffer Conference in Cape Town. We hope to report on this event in the next Newsletter. Anyone who has recently read a new book in our field of interest, and would like to contribute a review (not more than 2 pages) is heartily welcome to do so. This is your Newsletter, and I welcome a diversity of views.

In the meanwhile, every best wish,
John Conway,
Dept. of History, UBC, Vancouver V6T 1Z1
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor.

University of British Columbia

Newsletter no 12 – January 1996

Contents

1. Forthcoming Conferences

2. Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany

3. Works in Progress

4. New Books

a) 1894-1982 Kreuz und Hakenkreuz im Leben eines pfalzer Pfarrers und Landesbischofs, reviewed by John S. Conway.

b) The rescue of Jews in wartime Poland, reviewed by John S. Conway.

5. Index for 1995: Books reviewed or noticed

1. Forthcoming conferences:

German Studies Association, Seattle, October 10-13th 1996.

Deadline for proposed papers, Feb 25.

2. Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany (contd.)

A German court ruled on December 14th 1995 that the J.Ws religious group can be defined as a church and must be placed on equal level with the major traditional churches in the country. The religious group thus obtains the right to receive income from the church tax, to provide a ministry for the prisons and send representatives to public radio boards. The court rejected an appeal by the Berlin city government, which argued that the group had adopted an “antagonistic attitude” towards the state and showed signs of “totalitarian behaviour”. There are about 166,000 (sic)Witnesses in Germany.

3. Work in progress

Dr Uwe Rieske-Braun, Theological Institute, Technical University, Aachen, is currently editing the letters of Adolf Harnack and Christoph Luthardt between 1873-1894, which shed light on Harnack’s methodology and insights regarding the early Christian “Dogmengeschichte”, and on his relationship with Albrecht Ritschl.

4. New books

a) Hans L.Reichrath, Luwig Diehl. 1894-1982 Kreuz und Hakenkreuz im Leben eines pfalzer Pfarrers und Landesbischofs, Evangelischer Presseverlag Pfalz GMBH, Speyer 1995, 207pp.

The Protestant Landeskirche of the Palatinate is a largely rural backwater, stretching westwards from its head office in Speyer on the middle Rhine to the French border. Despite its earlier significance in Reformation times, it has been largely unheard of since. During the Nazi period, this church had the misfortune of being led by the undistinguished figure of Ludwig Diehl, whose brief biography has now been written by Hans Reichrath, and published by the house press. (It is a pity the proof- reading was not better, i.e. in the Index, the section on the Jews is erroneously entitled “die Jugendfrage”.

Diehl came from very humble peasant origins, became a pastor during the first world war (from which he was exempt) and lacked any adequate theological training. His fervent personal piety and limited academic qualifications were however matched by considerable oratorical gifts. In the 1920s he was recruited by the incipient Nazi Party as a competent spokesman who could be relied on to denounce the evils of Bolshevism and to uphold a highly simplistic idea of German nationalism, especially against the danger of French incursions – the Palatinate being then occupied by French troops. As a reward he was given the Nazis’ Golden Party Badge, and became the leader in the Palatinate of the faction of so-called “German Christians” who gave their enthusiastic and uncritical support after 1933 to the new Nazi regime. Like so many of his colleagues, and also of his congregations, Diehl was deluded into thinking that Hitler was just the man to rescue Germany from her alleged humiliation under the Versailles settlement and from the threat of Bolshevik revolution. He was never a democrat, and so had no hesitation in accepting the Nazi view of the need for the Fuhrerprinzip, even in church affairs. On the other hand, theologically, his simple piety saved him from falling for some of the German Christians’ wilder heresies, like the view that Jesus was really an Aryan hero. It also led him to value the Old Testament as an essential part of his churchmanship.

As Landesbischof from 1934 onwards, Diehl played a lack- lustre role in keeping his church out of trouble. At first he had no hesitation in expressing his fantasy that the German Christians would be the soul and spirit of the Nazi Party, uniting church and people in the great work of national revival undertaken by Hitler. “All members of the Palatinate Protestant church are united behind the Fuhrer in unswerving loyalty and readiness to sacrifice in the assurance of God’s will”. But from 1937 Diehl began to recognise the true nature of the Nazis’ hostility towards the Church, and so was driven to take defensive measures to protect his pastors. Soon enough he began to feel the Gestapo’s heavy hand, and his disillusionment only increased. But his loyalty to Hitler remained. Although disturbed by such brutalities as the Crystal Night pogrom, and the so-called euthanasia action, he never considered abandoning his previous stance or supporting any more active opposition. Unfortunately for Reichrath, little documentary evidence survives to record this change of heart. Indeed, as an amateur historian, he is often forced to rely on family memories, which are obviously not the most critical source.

On June 1st 1945 Diehl resigned his position as Landesbischof, and retreated to his former rural parish in Mackenbach. As might be predicted, given the “restoration” climate prevailing in such provincial church circles in the immediate post-war period, his “denazification” trial ended in his favour, with only a small fine. The Court acknowledged that “he had always maintained his dogmatically correct and biblically- influenced belief in Christ. In his sermons, which often contained sharp criticism of the Party’s extremism, he was continually concerned to proclaim the Word of God”. He finally retired unwillingly in 1964, and died in 1982.

This little book demonstrates all the weakness of much of the current writings on German church history. The biography of a former leader of the Church, published by the church’s own press, is bound to be hagiographical in tone. Any more critical approach would certainly not be appreciated. Any more critical author would face having his work emasculated or even suppressed. Any critical reviewer has to ask therefore whether we are being given the full picture, warts and all, or whether more damaging evidence has been either ignored or toned down to suit present requirements. To this reviewer, Reichrath has steered a fine line in giving his subject the benefits of most doubts, and accepting a face value the claim that “er wollte nur das Beste”. What is unclear is whether he himself thinks that strident political anti-Communism, unsophisticated theological dogmatism and rural obscurity were sufficient or suitable qualifications for the leadership of Palatinate Landeskirche. One suspects that he does, and they were.

JSC

b) I. Tomaszewski and T.Werbowski, Zegota. The rescue of Jews in wartime Poland. Montreal: Price Patterson Press 1994, 171 pp.

In view of the continuing accusations and recriminations about the relations of Catholics and Jews in Poland, this brief but highly informative account of the efforts made to rescue Jews during the Nazi occupation is very welcome. The authors, now living in Canada, one Jewish, one Catholic, describe the work of the Zegota orgaisation, founded by two women, an ardent Socialist and a devout Catholic, who established a whole network of conspiratorial and highly dangerous activities to assist Jews in the most heavily policed, yet totally lawless, country in occupied Europe. Particularly helpful are the plethora of names, addresses and dates of those who shared in this significant inter-faith enterprise, such as the young Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, most recently Poland’s Foreign Minister, or the redoubtable Mother Superior, Borkowska, who not only hid arms in her convent but instructed young Jews how to use them. On the basis of personal interviews with survivors, both recuers and rescued, the authors give some poignant case studies, and document their efforts over many eyars to bring recognition to this small but indomitable band of Christian women and men, many of whom have now been recognized by such institutions as Yad Washem in Israel. Given the draconian measure taken against any Poles who risked their lives in this endeavour, the rescue efforts of Polish Christians and the resistance of Polish Jews were remarkably heroic, and deserve to be better known.

This short book supplements other accounts, such as those by A. Polonsky and Nechama Tec, in bringing this often-overlooked chapter to the notice of the English-speaking world. But, for a more critical assessment of Catholic relations with Jews in pre-war Poland, one should consult the new book by the American Catholic theologian, Ronald Modras, The Catholic Church and Antisemitism: Poland 1933-1939, Harwood Academic Publishers 1994.

JSC

5. Index for 1995: Books reviewed or noticed.
(Newsletter no.in brackets).

Anderson,J: Religion,State and Politics in the Soviet Union (5)
Baltaden,S.ed: Seeking God. Recovery of religious identity in Russia and successor states (6)
Blackbourn,D; Marpingen (2)
Blashke O.R.; Der Altkatholizismus 1870-1914 (11)
Bleistein, R; Alfred Delp (7)
Bordeaux,M ed; The politics of religion in Russia (5)
Brakelmann, G; Zwischen Widerstand und Mitverwantwortung;
” ” Carl-Friedrich Stumm
” ” Krieg und Gewissen. Otto Baumgarten (9)
Fabre H; L’eglise catholique face au fascisme et au nazisme (7)
Garbe, D; Zwischen Widerstand und Martyrium. Die Zeugen Jehovahs im Dritten Reich (11)
Grotefeld,S; Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze. (5)
Hellman, J; The Knight-Monks of Vichy France (10)
Horwitz,G; In the shadow of death. Mauthausen (8)
Janz,O; Burger besonderer Art. Evang.Pfarrer in Preussen (10)
Krondorfer, B; Between Remembrance and Reconciliation (6)
Kushner, T; The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination (6)
Longerich, P; Hitlers Stellvertreter (9)
Malinowski-Krum, H; Frankreich am Kreuz. Protestanten Frankreichs unter deutschen Okkupation 1940-44 (10)
Mitteilungen d. Evang.Arbeitsgem.f.kirchl. Zeitgeschichte (11)
Molette,C; Pretres, religieux et religieuses dans la resistance au nazisme (10)
Nowak,K and Raulet,G eds; Protestantismus und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (7)
Owings, A; Frauen (8)
Picard J; Die Schweiz und die Juden (6)
Pope,M; Alfred Delp im Kreisauer Kreis (7)
Rhodes,A; The Vatican in the age of the Cold War (7)
Schmidt, H-D; Anna Rosmus. Die ‘Hexe’ von Passau (7)
Schwelbach,B; Erzbischof C.Grober und die dt.Katastrophe (9)
Semelin, J; Unarmed against Hitler. Civilian Resistance (7)
Shaw,J; Turkey and the Holocaust (5)
Smith,H; German Nationalism and Religious Conflict (5)
Stehle, H; Geheimdiplomatie in der Vatikan (6)
Steininger,R; Der Umgang mit der Holocaust (6)
Thomas,T; Women against Hitler. Christian resistance in the Third Reich – review by D.Bergen, H-German 17 Nov 95 (11)

Best wishes to you all for 1996

John Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

P.S. [Technical note: So far the Newsletter has been produced at virtually no cost – either to you as subscribers, or to me, since I have an E-mail connection anyway. I have been exploring the possibility of creating a list-server facility, since this would obviate the printing of all your E-mail addresses each time on the first page. However, it appears that this would prove to be quite costly, an expense I don’t want to incur unless it is really necessary. So I hope you will bear with the fact that this largely indiscipherable list of E- mail addresses continues to appear, and that you will persevere to read the meat of the Newsletter which then follows.
JSC]

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway,

Editor. University of British Columbia

Newsletter No. 11, December 1995

Contents

1. Request for information

2. Gertrud Luckner in memoriam

3. New Books

4. New publications to note

5. Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Nazi period

Dear Friends,

May I take this opportunity to wish you one and all a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year, with all success for 1996. I am afraid that our list has now grown so long that I cannot send you individual messages for the festive season, but hope you will accept these anonymous but heartfelt greetings. We shall be particularly thinking of those of you who are taking part in the International Bonhoeffer Conference in Cape Town at the beginning of next month, (Littell, Moses, Schjorring, Burgess?) and hope you will get together to send me a report which I will then share with the whole list.

 
1. Request for information

Richard Pierard, Indiana State University wants your help as follows: “I have been asked to write an essay for a handbook on the research and literature of World War II to be published by Greenwood Press. The topic which the editor assigned me is “Christianity and the War in Europe”. What I am expected to do is a piece around 5000 words dealing with bibliography (books and articles) in English on this topic. There will be separate chapters on “the war against the Jews” and “the war and religion in the USA”, which means that my essay will be quite narrowly focussed. I have a good idea of the literature I want to discuss, but some of you may know of a good book or article which you would particularly like to see in such a reference work. If so, I would welcome your suggestions. I should add that the target audience is “college teachers and the general academic and serious amateur audiences interested in the war” rather than “experts in the war” as such.”

Many thanks,
Richard Pierard.
hipier@ruby.indstate.edu

2. Gertrud Luckner in memoriam

Michael Phayer, Marquette U. writes:

Gertrud Luckner, 1900-1995, the German Catholic who was one of her church’s foremost and energetic pioneers in Christian-Jewish relations, died in September at the age of 95.

During the Nazi era Luckner actively befriended Jews and helped them to escape during the Holocaust. She played a significant role as courier between the German bishops, warning them of the Nazi plans to persecute and deport Jews. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, she was sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp where she narrowly escaped being put to death on several occasions. After World War II, Luckner devoted herself to eradicating Christian antisemitism in Germany. She edited the magnificently informative Freiburger Rundbriefe, outlining all aspects of Christian-Jewish reconciliation, which she personally circulated to German churchmen Often viewed with suspicion by the Vatican, the Holy Office issued a Monitum regarding her work in 1950. As a new generation of bishops replaced those of the Nazi era, Luckner won supporters. By the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, German bishops acknowledged the faults of the church during the Holocaust – a fact which assisted the passage of the famous document, Nostra Aetate, which has done much to revise 2000 years of Christian antisemitism.

The state of Israel recognised Luckner as a Righteous Gentile in 1966. Eventually her own people, church and government bestowed local and national honours and distinctions on her. Alas! she could never be prevailed on to finish her autobiography.

3. New Books

Theodore Thomas, Women against Hitler: Christian Resistance in the Third Reich, Westport,CT: Praeger/Greenwood 1995, pp 216. $49.95US – see Doris Bergen’s excellent, but not uncritical, review on H-German Book reviews, 17th November 1995.

4. New publications to note

a) Mitteilungen der Evang. Arbeitsgemeinschaft fuer Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Folge 15 (Oct.1995), available from Geschaftstelle, Schellingstr. 3VG, 80799 Munich.

Contents:

p.2-4 U v.Hehl, “Aufgaben, Arbeitsziele und Arbeitspraxis der Kommission fur Zeitgeschichte” (A report on the German Catholic Church’s Commission and its work).

p5-60 M.M. “Lichtenfeld, Lutherische Theologie in Barmen”. “Georg Metz und das Betheler Bekenntnis 1933”. (A lengthy summary taken from his forthcoming dissertation).

pp61-4 “Zur Kirchenpolitik der SED und MfS” (Conference report organized by Gauck Authority).

pp 65-7 “Die Kirche und ihre Archive” (Conference report and discussion of tensions between open access and protection of privacy in church archives today).

pp68-71 “Das rheinische und westfalische Kirche in der Nachkriegszeit” (Conference report on reorganization in this region).

b) German Studies Review: Special Issue. “Totalitaere Herrschaft und totalitaeres Erbe”, Autumn 1994, pp 101-11. “Rainer Eppelmann Opposition und Kirche in der DDR” (A personal report by one of the leading figures in the Church’s opposition to the E.German regime).

c) Central European History – forthcoming.

The following note is contributed by Doris Bergen:

“I reviewed Rainer Hering’s “Theologie im Spannunsfeld von Kirche und Staat: Die Entstehung der Evang-Theol.Fakultat an der Universitat Hamburg 1895 bis 1955”, and Rainer Laechele’s “Ein Volk, Ein Reich Ein Glaube: die “Deutsche Christen” im Wurttemberg 1925-1960″. Both are very worthwhile. Hering offers a detailed account of the creation of a Protestant faculty of theology in Hamburg, but along the way manages to tell his readers a great deal about the post-war church and the ways it both inherited the legacy of the past and tried to break new ground. Laechele’s book is a careful regional study which nevertheless illustrates some issues about the “German Christian” movement at the national level. He is surprisingly silent about the subject of antisemitism and German Christian efforts to “dejudaize” Christianity, so that his otherwise balanced work shows some peculiar blind spots. But his treatment is both very human and eminently readable”.

d) Historische Zeitschrift, Vol 261, No. 1, August 1995. pp 51 ff. O.R.Blaschke, Bielefeld. “Der Altkatholizismus 1870 bis 1945. Nationalismus, Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus”. “Aus Protest gegen des vatikanische Unfehlbarkeitsdogmen (1870) entstand die Bewegung und schliesslich die Kirche der Altkatholiken. Heftig umstritten, versuchte sich der Altkatholizismus nicht nur theologisch, sondern im Fahrwasser des Antiultramontanismus auch ideologisch von der “Vaticanaille” abzugrenzen. So bekannte er sich von Anfang an zum Nationalismus, lehnte den Antisemitismus dagegen entschieden ab. Doch langsam verkehrte sich die vom Liberalismus gepragte Haltung in ihr Gegenteil. Der Altkatholizismus diente sich schliesslich, infiziert von antisemitischen und volkische Ideen, bereitwillig dem Nationalsozialismus an.”

5. Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Nazi period

A recent upsurge in interest in the fate of the J.Ws during the Third Reich led to an all-day seminar held in November at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which included a slide lecture entitled “The Spirit and the Sword – Jehovah’s Witnesses Expose the Third Reich”. The text is now available from the Watchtower Writing Dept, 25 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, New York 11201- 2483. The speakers on this occasion included Christine King, Detlef Garbe (Director of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Museum) and Wulff Brebeck (Director of the Wewelsburg Museum). In addition a compilation was made of all the articles printed in English in J.W. publications during 1933-45, amounting to some 1600 pages, for which an index is now available. These show not only that the fate of the German J.Ws was very closely followed at the American headquarters, but also that the Nazi persecution of the Jews was well documented, as a result of the J.Ws biblically-based sympathy.

Many of these articles describe the sufferings of J.Ws in concentration camps with graphic detail.

Virtually all accounts of the German Church Struggle (including my own) have given very little attention to the J.Ws, possibly because of denominational bias, or because the numbers involved were relatively few. But this defect has now been splendidly remedied by the appearance of Detlef Garbe’s new book – see below. An English translation is much to be desired.

Detlef Garbe, Zwischen Widerstand und Martyrium. Die Zeugen Jehovahs im Dritten Reich (Studien zur Zeitgeschichte Vol 42). Munchen: Oldenbourg 1993 577 pp.

Detlev Garbe’s excellent history of the J.Ws is the first full treatment of this small sect’s fate during the Nazi period, combining extensive research into the remaining Nazi records with a sympathetic analysis of survivors’ testimonies. The result is a convincing scholarly description which supersedes all previous accounts. He rightly stresses the unique character of the Nazis’ hostility, which fully merits such a thorough treatment.

The J.Ws were the first religious group to be forbidden and continued to suffer unremittingly throughout the Nazi era. No other religious community demonstrated its resistance in so decidedly an uncompromising fashion, or so steadfastly refused to bow down to the Nazi wishes. Thousands were incarcerated in concentration camps, where their resolute determination to keep on witnessing to their faith gave them an extraordinary reputation, and even finally earned a grudging respect from Himmler himself.

Church historians have largely ignored this marginal group, baffled by the oddities of their religious beliefs, offended by their anti-clerical polemics, or confused by their inability to be counted as part of the wider Resistance Movement. Garbe skilfully depicts not only the extent of the Nazi persecution but also the reasons for this brutal mistreatment. Some Nazis believed the J.Ws were part of a communist conspiracy; others suspected them of being Jewish or American infiltrators. In any case the Nazi authorities proceeded promptly in 1933 to ban their activities throughout Germany – measures which were greeted with approval by the main-stream churches, who had long been aggravated by the J.Ws sectarian proselytism. The J.W. leaders protested that they were entirely unpolitical, and even got energetic representations made by the U.S. State Department on their behalf, which successfully regained their American-funded property and printing presses. But all future activities were prohibited. The members however refused to obey, or to make any compromises with Nazi ideology. Already by the end of 1933, the Gestapo reported widespread evasion of their edicts. Stronger measures were therefore taken.

Theologically the J.Ws had long been prepared for persecution by the “satanic” forces of the Church, especially the Roman Catholics, and the state. Repression only made them more resolute. This steadfast obstinacy only increased the Nazis’ determination to suppress the sect entirely, and gave them an explicitly political excuse to stamp out “subversive agitation”. Already in 1933 J.Ws were dismissed from their jobs in both the public and private sector, their pensions confiscated, and their livelihoods restricted. Their children suffered daily mistreatment in school for their refusal to join the H.J. or to give the “Hitler greeting”. In approximately 1000 cases, children were taken into “care” to preserve them from “religious fanaticism”, and were separated from their parents for years. Even more severe were the penalties inflicted on the J.Ws in 1936-8 after two nation-wide distribution of anti-Nazi pamphlets had been successfully and conspiratorially organised. By 1939 the Gestapo had arrested almost the entire leadership and sentenced them to lengthy terms of imprisonment in concentration camps, where they were further subject to degrading and brutal treatment and forced to wear the distinguishing “violet triangle”.

But the J.Ws recruited new leaders, often women, and carried on their witness, secretly and underground as best they could. Illegal pamphlets continued to be produced, calling for a total refusal to compromise with the “satanic” rule of the Nazis and their “gangster” associates, including the Pope. Martyrdom was openly welcomed as proof of their devotion to the coming Kingdom of Jehovah. The outbreak of war and the J.Ws unwavering determination not to take part in any military activities led to even more severe repression, and to numerous death sentences, not only for men of military age but also for women, often imposed by the notorious People’s Court. Doubts expressed by some of the justice officials were brutally overruled by Hitler himself in favour of exemplary deterrent measures against all such “defeatist traitors”.

Garbe comes to the conclusion, on the basis of his detailed examination of the official archives and the “Watchtower’s” careful tabulations, that previous estimates of the J.Ws’ total losses were set too high (including Conway’s!) He regards the J.W 1974 Yearbook as giving the most reliable figures. Out of 25,000 to 30,000 J.Ws in Germany in 1933, approximately 10,000 were imprisoned for longer or shorter periods; 2,000 were sent to concentration camps; approximately 1200 lost their lives, including at least 250 sentenced to death by the courts, principally for their conscientious objection to military service. Even if these figures are lower than previously believed, the fact remains that – apart from the Jews – the J.Ws were persecuted, proportionately, more severely and brutally than any other religious-ideological group.

JSC.

Wishing you all a very happy New Year
Yours sincerely,
John Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway,

Editor, University of British Columbia

Newsletter No. 10, November 1995

Contents

1. Book Notices

2. 19th Century German Protestant Church History

3. Next issue

Dear Friends,

Now that I have returned from India, I am glad to resume our correspondence. Unfortunately I seem to have picked up a case of amoebic dysentery there, which is making life a bit tough. So it is good to have the chance to write to all my friends world-wide.

1. Book notices

Here are three new books on the French churches during the Third Reich, in three different languages, which I have not seen reviewed elsewhere:

a) Horsta Malinowski-Krum, Frankreich am Kreuz. Protestanten Frankreichs unter deutschen Okkupation 1940-1944, Wichern Verlag, Berlin 1993

b) John Hellman, The Knight-Monks of Vichy France Uriage 1940- 1945, McGill-Queens U.P., Montreal 1993

c) Charles Molette, Pretres,Religieux et religieuses dans la resistance au Nazisme 1940-1945, Fayard, Paris 1995

At the end of the 17th century, the Elector of Brandenburg built a church in Berlin for the Hugenots expelled from France by Louis XIV. By 1933 this congregation had become so assimilated that it had forgotten its origins as a persecuted minority, gave willing supported Hitler’s rise to power, and even approved the Nazis’ antisemitic campaigns. As an act of reparation, the present pastor Horsta Malinowski-Krum has provided for German readers a short lively account of how the French Protestants remained true to their Hugenot heritage despite all the sufferings imposed on them by their German conquerors during the second world war. French Protestants were, and are, a small elite minority. But, especially in the rural areas of southern France, the memory of the persecutions endured by earlier generations remained very much alive. Hence their readiness to resist for both national and theological reasons.

France’s defeat in 1940 led many Frenchmen to give their support to the policies of collaboration adopted by Marshal Petain and his henchman Laval. But the more resolute wing of the Protestants drew their inspiration from the witness of the German Confessing Church, and from the writings of its chief theological champion, Karl Barth. His younger disciples drew up in 1941 their Pomeyrol theses, which owed much to the earlier Barmen declaration, but which added an express condemnation of all edicts against the Jews, conspicuous by its absence in the German case. Their role as guardians of Christian morality and active critics of the government’s actions was matched by heroic service to the Nazis’ victims.

We are given the story of the intrepid rescue efforts for Jews, not only in Chambon-sur-Lignon, made famous by Philip Hallie’s “Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed”, but also in the internment camps such as Gurs. Madeleine Barot recapitulates the work of CIMADE, the Protestant youth group which actively organised escape routes to Switzerland. Several survivors, Jewish and Christian, record their experiences in the resistance movement. Pastor Roland de Pury recalls how he was dragged from his pulpit and imprisoned for months. Aime Bonifas spent two years in the brutal hell of Buchenwald. The book concludes with a moving poem written by a survivor of the women’s concentration camp, Ravensbruck. Here was costly discipleship and impressive witness to the strength of the Hugenot faith.

A large-scale history of the French Church and parish in Berlin during the Nazi years has been written by Ursula Fuhrich-Grubert, Hugenotten unterm Hakenkreuz (Veroff. d. Hist. Komm., Berlin no 85) 1994.

John Hellman who teaches at McGill presents us with another side of the story, namely an account of those Catholics who saw France’s national humiliation as an opportunity to bring the people back to the Catholic faith, under the leadership of a charismatic and aristocratic group of Knight-Monks, who founded a kind of training school/monastery at Uriage. The history of the Vichy years remains highly controversial, not least among those Catholics, who like Fr Molette (see below) would like to claim that all good Frenchmen were on the side of the Gaullist resistance. But in fact, there were numerous Catholic intellectuals, who wanted to reform society by getting away from the selfish individualism of the Third Republic, and by mobilising the idealism of youth for a totally new vision, drawn from ideas long hostile to the legacy of 1789. The Uriage school resulted from the dream of a new knighthood, a chivalrous order of the young, who would exercise leadership – the shock troops of the spirit. This venture was designed to celebrate their own religious culture’s authoritarianism, dogma, discipline, doctrinal coherence and dedicated celibate clergy-elites, even though with very apparent anti-democratic, anti-parliamentary, and even antisemitic overtones. Manly virility was a cherished virtue. They wanted to create communities which would neutralize the poisons of permissive liberalism, rampant individualism, communism and the erosion of spiritual values, while restoring prestige and influence to the Catholic Church. The Uriage graduates were to create the guidelines of, and become the leaders for, a post-liberal and post-Republican society. They enjoyed the full support of the Marshal.

John Hellman’s study is the first book in English to describe the activities of this ambitious, though fatally flawed experiment. The headquarters were in a seventy-room 12th century castle high up in the Alps, where the great knight-hero Bayard was supposed to have spent time. The man in charge, Captain Pierre Dunoyer de Segonzac, saw himself as the embodiment of the best mediaeval tradition, combining the military, aristocratic and spiritual values which he sought inculcate into his teams. The Catholic altruism which permeated the place had a strong social conscience, drawn from the writings of prominent Catholic intellectuals of the 1930s. Uriage saw itself as becoming the “spiritual university of French youth”. Daily life was a mixture of the soldierly and the contemplative. Both were needed to forge the destiny of the new France.

This promise of a kind of idealistic communism that, as in great orders of the Middle Ages, could transcend theological and political differences enjoyed a highly successful first year, was lavished with support from Vichy, and gave its cohorts great hopes for the future. But this backward-looking ideology, which hardly mentioned anything since 1789, and never spoke well of the Third Republic, was hardly likely to appeal to other groups – workers, peasants, women and Gaullists. Its absolute loyalty and total submission to Marshal Petain proved to be handicaps as the Vichy regime proved only too weak and compliant with the Nazis. After 1942, as the progressive deterioration of the Vichy experiment became obvious, so Uriage and its ideals disintegrated. The church hierarchy remained cool to what it saw as a state-directed totalitarian youth organisation. The more progressive Catholic intellectuals found no room for their more critical insights. Loyalty to Petain was not enough.

With the German invasion of southern France in November 1942, and Laval’s complete subordination to Nazi wishes, Uriage’s days were numbered. Segonzac withdrew to another mountain fortress, and dreamt of keeping alive the idea of a better national revolution. In late 1943 he secretly made his way to Algiers to see De Gaulle, who was not surprisingly cool to this Vichy supporter. But Segonzac returned believing that, now, De Gaulle was the saviour France needed, and urged his supporters to join the resistance and to lend their efforts to combat the danger of the communists, Americans and old-style Republican politicians.

Uriage graduates came to play significant roles in the post-war France, such as Beuve-Mery who led the newspaper Le Monde to world-wide fame. It was part of the need to educate Frenchmen to a new discipleship. As such its successes were striking,even though the legacy of its Vichy past and totalitarian temptation still reverberates.

John Hellman’s excellent analysis of this movement, though sometimes repetitive, is an important study of one section of French opinion, and its search for a deliberate French Sonderweg, which deserves to be better known.

Fr Charles Molette leaves no doubt that his sympathies are entirely with those French clergymen, monks and nuns who threw themselves wholeheartedly in the struggle against Nazism and its evil racist and anti-Christian policies. This short book is designed to expurgate the record of those Frenchmen, who by serving the Vichy regime, assisted the machinations of the nefarious Nazi anti- Christian ideology. Instead he seeks to honour those insufficiently remembered Catholic priests and nuns who took up the challenge to defend the “true” faith.

Two Nazi-imposed policies prompted the greatest display of such resistance – first, the Nazi brutality in rounding up and deporting the Jews, and second, the compulsory transfer of young Frenchmen to work in Germany. Fr Molette gives numerous examples of the mercy and charity extended towards the Jews, including those “righteous Gentiles” already recognised by Yad Washem in Israel, but suggests that there are many others still to be honoured. So too should be those priests who volunteered to accompany the young slave workers to Germany as well as those martyrs who died in Nazi concentration camps. According to his findings, 231 priests and nuns lost their lives at German hands, as well as 400 others deported to Germany, and 500 more interned in France. He also pays tribute to those, like the authors of Temoignage Chretien, who gave theological leadership against the insidious infiltration of Nazi ideas. Here was the truly Christian basis for the whole resistance movement, which he feels has been overlaid by purely political or national considerations.

Despite their undoubted sincerity and dedication, Fr.Molette’s style of hagiography makes his heroes seem uni-dimensional, like saints in stained glass. By contrast, John Hellman’s description of his knight-errant-monks portrays them as modern Don Quixotes, with their mistaken political romanticism and their delusions of mediaeval mysticism. His success in depicting the vagaries of modern French Catholicism is all the more commendable.

2. 19th Century German Protestant Church History

John Moses of Canberra has very kindly contributed the following review:

Oliver Janz, Burger besonderer Art. Evangelische Pfarrer in Pruessen 1850-1914, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1994, pp. xv+615. No price given.

Much of German historical research since 1945 has been designed to answer the question, “In what ways were the Germans different from other Europeans?” The search for the roots of German “peculiarity” has, of course, encompassed the various professions. One thinks of the studies by Charles McClelland, Konrad Jarausch and Fritz Ringer, all of whom have focussed on aspects of German university life in the 19th and 20th century. Others such as Michael Kater and Paul Weindling have advanced knowledge of the German medical profession. Scientists and engineers have also attracted their investigators, and the behaviour of some theologians in the Third Reich has been explained by scholars such as L. S- Wenschkewitz and Robert Ericksen. Now, our knowledge about the Prussian-German pastorate as a discrete professional group has been vastly enhanced by this work by Oliver Janz, a former student of Prof. H. Kaeble at West Berlin’s Freie Universitat

Janz’s wide-ranging study is a milestone in the social history of the clergy as an “academic profession”. It is not only distinguished by its thoroughness, but also by its methodological rigour. An impressive range of archives has been consulted and most useful statistics compiled. All this is narrated in an unpretentious, accessible style. The work exhibits all the virtues of Sachlichkeit, no embroidery, only hard supporting evidence which illustrates the social transformation of the “first estate” in Prussia-Germany throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. This process saw the gradual diminution of a professional group which at the end of the 18th century enjoyed the highest prestige by virtue of the government duties it performed alongside of the normal clerical ones, to one of seeming insignificance a century later.

Janz notes that on the eve of the industrial revolution the pastors constituted beside the military, the judiciary and the public service one of the main pillars of Prussian social and political order. Indeed, at mid-nineteenth century every fourth university educated man in Germany was a Protestant pastor. As highly educated Burger the pastors had made significant contributions to German science and letters since the Reformation. Not only in theology and in the Church, but also through the education system and the public service, the sons of pastors were represented to an overwhelming degree right down to recent times. The cultural impact of this social group was enormous. It was a section of the Burgertum, however, which has been overlooked by historians, a deficit which Janz has now more than adequately made up for.

Burgertum is usually translated by “middle class” or “bourgeoisie”, but neither of these render the essential meaning of the German adequately. This is because in both French and English the terms have a distinct commercial connotation which is not applicable to the German situation until after the industrial revolution. And even thereafter in Germany one has to distinguish between Besitz- and Bildungsburgertum, i.e. the bourgeoisie of property on the one hand and education on the other. The pastors, while obviously part of the latter, increasingly formed a separate and distinctive sub- group during the evolution of the 19th century. It is Janz’s great merit to show how this happened.

As noted, prior to industrialization and urbanization in Protestant Germany, the pastorate occupied the dominant social position by virtue of their semi-government function in rural parishes. How did they lose it? Largely because by mid-century other professions were emerging which not only drew off young male talent to serve in alternative vocations, but also these in turn rivalled the clergy as the Honorationen (i.e. the local dignitaries) especially in the countryside. With the advancing modernization/urbanization of Prussia-Germany the professional group which had once exerted a virtual leadership monopoly in bourgeois society became increasingly marginalized. Its previously obvious influential status all but disappeared.

What Janz portrays is the evolution of a kind of intellectual- spiritual ghetto which on the surface seemed to be an irrelevance to the wider community. There were self-perpetuating theological faculties at the numerous universities which themselves, by virtue of the over-intellectualization of theology as a discipline, became alienated from the basis of the still religiously committed elements within the population. The so-called liberal theological enquiry pursued in the faculties contributed little to the pastoral needs of the relatively narrow hard core of church people and their particular spirituality (Frommigkeit), both in town and country. They required traditional ‘orthodox’ pastors, and these, increasingly, came to be trained in exclusively church-run seminaries with little or no contact with ‘university’ theology. As in all denominations, the gulf between the spiritually committed and the nominal adherents was great, and to the degree that the liberal (read: intellectualized) theologians manifested a spirituality, it was of an essentially different nature from that of the ‘ orthodox’.

All this is important for the history of Protestantism in Germany. The process of industrialization not only effected the marginalization of the clergy as an influential professional class, it precipitated a kind of schism within Protestant culture, which on the one hand was extremely scholarly and hence remote to the people in the parishes, and on the other led to the ghetto-ization of the parishes where only a Protestant orthodox piety could be practised. Interestingly, even at the universities, the theological students became largely isolated from the mainstream. The concentrated in Christian student fraternities, predominantly in the non-duelling Wingolf association, with the result that they were socialised differently from the law and medical students who did duel and who lived by the quasi military code of honour then in vogue.

Here, the re-production of “burgers of a special kind” became most evident. Even more so does it become evident when Janz investigates the social origins of the pastors and whom they married. By the mid-nineteenth century one third of pastors were the sons of pastors. Additionally, many were the sons of daughters of the parsonage, which was traditionally a place where extremely large families were raised. All this contributed to the development of a church-parsonage sub-culture which characterized the Protestant life of Germany, running parallel to the mainstream of the commercial and other educated bourgeoisie, but with very little over-lapping. The pastors’ enforced social isolation was compounded by an increasing loss of function (diminishing congregations) which tended to transform the pastor into a mere ‘parish manager’. Nevertheless, as Janz competently illustrates from his statistical analyses of all the above-mentioned relationships, the pastors formed a unique and enduring section of the German bourgeoisie. Because of their peculiarly Prussian- German Lutheran orientation towards the State, and the quasi bureaucratic way in which they ‘managed’ their parishes, this group made their own contribution to what has become known as the German ‘Sonderweg’.

Like Anthony Russell’s The Clerical Profession (1980), which investigates how the Church of England clergy were affected by similar social changes during the same period, Janz’s study is not concerned with the sacramental or liturgical functions of the pastorate, and does not investigate how, for example, they ministered or preached to their dwindling congregations. Theological issues are not touched upon here. The content of what they taught about the State is the subject for another kind of book But what has been unequivocally demonstrated is that, although the pastors lost both status and function over the decades, they remained in their self-perception a special kind of state official. By contrast to the English clergy, with whom many parallels can be identified, they remained a far more homogeneous group both socially and politically. In the Church of England before 1914 there were some 5000 priests affiliated with one of three Christian socialist groups. No comparable clerical pluralism existed in Germany. The pastors were infinitely more conservative, and the institutional church far more an arm of the State, than in England, and was at the base of what the Germans call cultural Protestantism. Although this Protestantism had long ceased to be a ‘people’s religion’, the history of the Landeskirchen where the monarch was ex officio the summus episcopus meant that Protestantism defined not only the ecclesiastical but also the political culture.

One would have wished, perhaps, for more investigation of the question of how, despite the apparent irrelevance of the church in everyday life in Prussia, because of its diminished status, Protestantism nevertheless retained its defining cultural hegemony. If, however, this question is to be answered, the scholarly world will have to start with this important study.

3. Next issue:

I hope to be able to send you another Newsletter before Christmas, which will feature the Jehovah’s Witnesses and much more!

In the meanwhile, do send in more contributions, and have a blessed Advent.

All the best,

John Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway,

Editor. University of British Columbia

Contents

1. Notices from the International Bonhoeffer Society

2. Work in progress

3. Book notices

1. Notices (from the International Bonhoeffer Society Newsletter)

The Presbyterian Church U.S.A.’s July-August 1995 edition of Church and Society Magazine is a special issue commemorating the 50th anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s death. It contains articles by the Bethges, Barbara Green, Bishop Schonherr and L Rasmussen, and can be ordered from Distribution Management Service, Presbyterian Church USA, 100 Witherspoon St, Louisville, Kentucky 40202-1396.

In connection with the International Bonhoeffer Congress in Cape Town next January 7-12, Explorations Travel of Atlanta is offering a special fare from Miami to Cape Town on Jan 4th, as well as two safari tours around the country. Contact: Explorations, 4200 Paces Ferry Rd, Suite 357, Atlanta GA 30339, 1-800-451-9630.

2. Work in progress

Kyle Jantzen of Montreal kindly sent us a resume of his paper delivered to the International Historical Congress:
“Getting the Message: German Protestant Pastors and their parishes during the Nazi era.”

The history of the Kirchenkampf is, on the Protestant side, the history of the conflict between the Nstional Socialist regime, the German land churches and the two main church-political groups, the pro-Nazi German Christians, who strove to establish a centralized Reich Church conforming to Nazi leadership principles, and the Confessing Church, which held to the purity of faith and doctrine, based on the Word of God and the Reformation Confessions. While scholars have interpreted the Kirchenkampf primarily at the national level, much less has been done to investigate its development within the individual land churches. In fact, very little attention has been directed at the effect of the national church struggle on local church life, especially in the smaller cities and the rural parishes. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the Kirchenkampf in three church districts: Nauen in Brandenburg, Pirna in Saxony, and Ravensburg in Wurttemberg. In particular it will examine the nature of the Kirchenkampf at the parish level, as demonstrated in the career of a prominent Wurttemberg pastor, Karl Steger. . . .

My conclusions point to a broader principle for religious historical research. It is not enough to interpret a church-state conflict such as the Kirchenkampf only at its highest level. In order to create a full and legitimate historical picture, the conflict in question must be followed down to its lowest levels, into the districts and the parishes. Only then can there be an understanding of its effect upon the ordinary Christians and citizens who comprise both the church and the larger body politic.”

(N.B. This last point has already been well made by Herwart Vorlander,NS-Staat und Kirchen als Thema des Historikers, in G van Norden ed., Zwischen Bekenntnis und Anpassung, Cologne 1985, and by Kurt Meier, Kirchenkampfgeschichtsschreibung, Theologische Rundschau 46 (1981) and 54 (1989) Ed.)

David Diephouse, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Mich. is in the early writing stage of a comprehensive biography of Wurttemberg bishop Theophil Wurm. His working title is: Between Fatherland and Kingdom of God – Theophil Wurm and German Protestant Identity, 1868-1953.

Michael Phayer, Marquette U, Milwaukee, Wisconsin is about half finished writing a book on The Catholic Church and the Holocaust 1940-1965.

Marion Grau of Tubingen is writing a short essay on the “Stuttgart Churches and the Jews”, and is finding the volumes by Rohm and Thierfelder, Juden-Christen-Deutsche very helpful.

3. Book notices

As a sequel to his earlier study, Erzbischof Conrad Grober und die nationalsozialistische Diktatur (Karlsruhe 1986), Bruno Schwalbach has now published Erzbishof Conrad Grober und die deutsche Katastrophe. Sein Ringen um eine menschliche Neuordnung, Badenia, Karlsruhe 1994. This consists largely of the official statements and pastoral letters issued by this bishop in the post-1945 years, and tributes after his death in 1948, in order to show his considerable efforts to alleviate the plight of his fellow Germans in their hour of need. Among these activities are printed the texts of various Persilscheine the bishop wrote on behalf of keen Nazis, whose behaviour he nonetheless found to be consonent with their Catholic beliefs, as well as his pastoral letter protesting the forcible evacuation of Germans from eastern Europe. The editor seeks to defend Grober’s sympathy for Heidegger and to excuse his insensitive treatment of those of his priests taken off to concentration camps, and even quotes with approval Grober’s own view of 1946 that “ich zu den bevorzugten Opfern des Nationalsozialismus gehorte und durch die Gestapo und ihre Helfershelfer seelisch mehr gelitten have als viele von jenen, die in Dachau misshandelt wurden oder starben” ! Given “Brown” Conrad’s well-known sympathy for the Nazi regime in 1933, it is interesting to find here the full text of his 1947 recollections “Meine Mitarbeit am deutschen Konkordat” (p. 120-183) Grober’s point of view is well summed up in his conclusion: “Wenn man in der Atmosphare der ersten Jahres des Dritten Reich noch hoffte and auch spater sich bemuht, das drohende Unheil aufzuhalten, das zuletzt auch einem Blindgeborenen die Augen geoffnet hatte, so erachten wir es fur vollig verkerht und sogar fur beleidigend und ungerecht, die Erkenntnisse der spateren Jahre auch fur die noch ungeklarten und heuchlerischen des ersten Jahrfunft vorauszusetzen. Oder was es ein Unrecht, was man kirchlichseits optima fide im Anfang der Hitlerherrschaft erstrebte?.” How far this kind of ecclesiastical apologia and hagiography will convince outsiders remains to be seen.

Peter Longerich, Hitlers Stellvertreter. Fuhrung der Partei und Kontrolle des Staatsapparates durch den Stab Hess und die Partei- Kanzlei Bormann, K.G.Saur Verlag, Munich 1992

This careful study of the office of Hitler’s Deputy examines the ways in which this party office sought to gain increasing control over all aspects of the Nazi state. The section on the churches (p.234-255) will be of interest to our members. Longerich points out that, in 1933, the Nazis had three contradictory ideas about how to deal with the churches. First, there was a policy for the synthesis of Nazism and Christianity by incorporating the churches into the new regime, as with the Reich Concordat, or the victory of the “Deutsche Christen” in the Protestant churches. But by the end of 1933, this gave way to a policy of neutrality, which would lead to an eventual separation of Church and State. But this in turn gave way to a much more hostile policy, which believed that the Churches’ day was done, and that they were destined to be replaced by the glorious apotheosis of Nazi ideology.

Hitler’s Deputy Hess, and even more so his deputy, Martin Bormann, were ardent advocates of this last policy. Longerich gives a detailed analysis of the various steps taken to achieve this end, which was only restrained by Hitler’s desire not to provoke the churches into active opposition. By a shrewd policy of administrative measures, little by little the churches’ position in public life was restricted or squeezed out, even during the war, when Hitler himself recognized the need for public harmony. This did not stop the radicals from attacking church property, church schools, the church tax, divorce and health laws, and of course all attempts by the churches to curry favour with the ruling party. In summary, Longerich states: “Es kann kein Zweifel bestehen, dass Bormanns Kirchenhass nicht hinter der antikirchlichen Einstellung Himmlers, Rosenbergs und Goebbels’ zuruckstand; zusammen mit diesen fuhrenden Naztionalsozialisten bildete er den radikalen Flugel in der NS-Kirchenpolitik. Bormanns Ausserungen uber die christliche Religion und die Kirchen zeigen eine Gehassigkeit, die sich durchaus mit seinen antisemitischen Ausfallen vergleichen lasst; beide Feindbilder verschmolzen in seiner Vorstellungswelt. Im Staats- wie im Parteibereich besass seine Dienstelle eine relativ starke Stellung in der Kirchenpolitik, die er konsequenz nutzte. Auch wenn Bormann seine kirchenpolitische Massnahmen offiziell mit der Zielsetzung einer “Trennung von Kirche und Staat” begrundete, so kann dies nicht daruber hinwegtauschen, dass fur ihn das Ausloschen der Religionsgemeinschaften das Endziel der NS-Kirchenpolitik bildete. (p.239-40). The text of Bormann’s notorious directive, stating unequivocally that “Nationalsozialismus und Christentum sind unvereinbar” will be found in Conway, Nazi Persecution, p.383-6.

Gunter Brakelmann, Zwischen Widerstand und Mitverantwortung. Vier Studien zum Protestantimus in sozialen Konflikten, SWIVerlag, Bochum 1994
” ” Carl-Ferdinand Stumm, Chrisstlicher Unternehmer, Sozialpolitiker, Antisozialist, Bochum 1993
” ” Krieg und Gewissen. Otto Baumgarten als Politiker und Theologe im Ersten Weltkrieg, Vandenhoeck,Gottingen 1991

Gunter Brakelmann is one of the more forceful and radically critical amongst our German colleagues. He continues to write against the main stream, as in these three books. The first seeks to show how some 19th century Protestants sought to come to terms with the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of Germany by proposing new courses for Protestant witness in the increasingly “de-christianized” cities. They did not get far, since their superiors and the majority of their fellow Protestants still clung to the image of the rural parish where the church could follow its traditional course, slumbering under the sound of church bells ringing across the fields. But these men tried to see some alternatives to the growing dangers of secularisation intellectually and social democracy politically. At least they were aware of the problem. As Friedrich Naumann warned: “Keine Zeit und keine Kirche hat in kirchlicher Versorgung der getauften Massen verhaltnismaessig so wenig getan als unsere Tage und unsere Kirche… Wir evangelischen Deutschen muessen es uns vorwerfen lassen: Berlin ist die kirchlich verwarholseste Stadt auf der ganzen Erde”. The second and third of these books have been extensively reviewed inKirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Vol 6,no 2, 1993, p 585. The book on Baumgarten would seem to be necessary reading for all those who assume that German Protestantism lacked any critical approach to the excesses of German nationalism.

N.Stoltzfus, History Dept, Florida State U.,Tallahassee “Widerstand des Herzens” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Vol 21,no 2, April-June 1995,p 218-247.

This excellent article describes the successful protest by German wives against the imprisonment of their Jewish husbands in Berlin in April 1943, and analyses the dynamics of the possibility of “resistenz” by such spontaneous demonstrators. Stoltzfus asks whether the churches could not have carried out the same tactics, not just to prevent the removal of crucifixes, or against euthanasia, but on behalf of the wider Jewish population. There were limits to the Nazis’ power, as this incident shows. The churches’ failure to call their followers to the same kind of defiant behaviour as taken by these wives remains a sore comment on their lack of human solidarity with their persecuted fellow Germans of Jewish origin. A personal note: I had a most pleasant visit from one of our members, Marion Grau of Tubingen, who resolutely promised to try and recruit more of our German fraternity to take up E-mail. She thinks this is largely a generational question, so we can’t hope for quick results. But if any of you know of Germankirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler who have E-mail addresses, I will be glad to send them an invitation to join us.

Another personal note: I shall be away on holiday in India for the next month. But don’t hesitate to send me messages to be stored on my computer, so that I can then resume our correspondence on my return and make use of your contributions.

Every best wish
John Conway,
Dept of History, UBC, Vancouver V6T 1Z1, Canada
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

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Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor.

University of British Columbia

Newsletter no 8 – September 1995

Contents

1. Conferences

2. Books

Dear Friends,

Most of you will now have started the new semester/term in the northern hemisphere, so I trust you will still have time to read the enclosed, which comes with best wishes for the new academic year.

I am glad to say that, at the 18th International Historical Congress in Montreal (see below) I was able to recruit some new friends for our Arbeitsgemeinschaft. I believe it would be very helpful to use one issue of this Newsletter to give an outline of Work in Progress, so that we can all become better acquainted with each other’s interests.

So may I ask each of you to send me a short statement, which I will collate together for this purpose, and will post whenever a sufficient number have been received. This is your Newsletter, so please find the time to send me something which may be of interest to us all.

1. Conferences

The 18th International Congress of Historical Sciences held in the Congress Centre, downtown Montreal from August 26th to Sept 3rd brought together some 2000 historians from Europe, North America, Japan and Australasia. Virtually absent were any representatives from China, Africa and the rest of Asia. Since all possible subjects were covered, there wasn’t much on our special interests, though Kyle Jantzen outlined his preliminary findings about three Evang. parishes in the Third Reich. We look forward to hearing more from him. A general discussion of present Holocaust research was interesting for its inclusive character, when the other victims of the Nazi mass murder programme were suitably remembered. In fact, it was notable that one distinguished Holocaust historian made the point that “too much emphasis has been placed on Christian antisemitism as a root cause of the Holocaust”. We can expect that this topic will be taken up further at subsequent conferences.

Forthcoming conferences:

7th International Bonhoeffer Congress, Cape Town, South Africa, January 7-12th 1996, under the auspices of Prof John de Gruchy, JDEG@socsci.uct.ac.za

26th Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, March 3rd-5th 1996, University of St Thomas, St Paul, Minnesota, organiser: Karen Schierman, 2260 Summit Ave, St Paul, Minn 55105. Topics include: The Holocaust and the Vatican, Educating the Clergy,Perpetrators Bystanders Victims Rescuers Survivors and much more

Commission Internationale d’Histoire Ecclesiastique Comparee (CIHEC) Regional meeting, Lublin, Poland, 2-6th Sept 1996 under the auspices of Prof Jerzy Kloczowski, whom I first met at the Oxford CIHEC meeting in 1974, and who one of the leading lights when CIHEC held its 1978 regional meeting in Warsaw in 1978. Was anyone else on our list there?

The title for 1996 is: Christianity in East Central Europe and its relations with the West and the East. There are to be six sections: Antiquity,The Middle Ages,Modern Times (6th-18th Century),The Nineteenth Century, The 20th Century, Atlas of Christianity. The programme looks most interesting, and more details can be obtained from Institute of East Central Europe, Czartoryski Palace, Plac Litewski 2, Lublin 20-080, Poland.

E-mail: europasw@golem.umcs.lublin.pl

2. Books

Although it is not new, I can recommend Gordon Horwitz, In the Shadow of Death, 1991, which is a study of the concentration camp of Mauthausen near Linz, Austria. I have seldom read a more desolate or terrifying study of brutality, hatred and murder. Actually Horwitz’s aim was to study the reactions of the people who lived around this camp and its dependencies, but the widespead amnesia or indifference meant that his surviving witnesses had little to report that was uplifting. In essence, his story depicts the appalling conditions and sufferings inflicted on the inmates, and the sad absence and/or incapability of the local population to do anything against the Nazi terrorism. A profoundly depressing book.

Alison Owings, Frauen: German Women recall the Third Reich, Penguin Books 1993.

This series of interviews with German women has much of interest, since Owings has been able to gather interviews from the whole spectrum including some still fervent admirers of Hitler. The role of the churches is a repeated theme, by no means all of it glorious. And although serious scholars may doubt how far Owings’s understanding of the Third Reich extends, the book has many insights which will be of interest to krchlicher Zeitgeschichtler.

On a personal note: to fill the time during my extended air trip to Montreal and back, I read Oscar Maria Graf’s Das Leben meiner Mutter, a wonderfully insightful account of the Bavarian countryside around the southern end of the Starnbergersee at the end of the last century. Particularly good were his observations on the religious practices and attitudes of the local peasantry, with their intense Catholic devotion, mixed with archetypal superstition and bigotry. I especially liked his pointing out that in 1866 on the occasion of the Prussian-Austrian war, provoked by Bismarck: “In jenen Jahren naemlich beteten die Leute in allen bayrischen Kirchen, der Allmachtige moege ihr Land vor diesem ‘finsteren, grundfalschen, verderbten luthrischen Antichrist’ gnadigst bewahren”. Alas, they lost.

Do please send me any short items you may want to, about your reading and/or experiences over the summer. I look forward to hearing from you all, especially about your research interests.

Yours sincerely
John S.Conway
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca

Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

John S. Conway, Editor.

University of British Columbia

Newsletter no. 7 – August 1995

Contents

1. Enquiry

2. H-Net.

3. Book Notices

a) Kurt Nowak and Gerard Raulet eds., Protestantismus und Anitsemitismus in der Weimarer Republik, Campus, Frankfurt 1994.

b) Roman Bleistein, Alfred Delp, Knecht, Frankfurt 1989, and Michael Pope, Alfred Delp S.J. im Kreisauer Kreis. Die rechts- und sozial-philosophischen Grundlagen in seinen Konzeptionen fuer eine Neuordnung Deutschlands. Veroff. d. Komm. fur Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B. Forschungen Bd 63, Mathias Grunewald, Mainz 1994 Reviewed by Michael Phayer.

c) Jacques Semelin, Unarmed against Hitler. Civilian resistance in Europe 1939-1945, Praeger, Westport Conn./London 1993.

d) Henri Fabre, L’eglise catholique face au fascisme at au nazisme. Les outrages a la verite, Brussels 1994, and Anthony Rhodes, The Vatican in the age of the Cold War, London 1992.

e) Hans-Dieter Schutt, Anna Rosmus – die ‘Hexe’ von Passau, Dietz, Berlin 1994.

f) Jerusalem

Dear Friends,

Welcome back – especially for those of us in the northern hemisphere, and I hope you have all enjoyed a period of rest and /or research before the beginning of the new term. This Newsletter will be somewhat longer, because of the large number of new books which have appeared, or which deserve notice. Many thanks to those of you who have sent in contributions. These are always welcome, in order to make this Newsletter as reciprocal as possible.

1. Enquiry:

Frank Baron, University of Kansas would like to have more information about a Professor Hans Schwerte. He writes: “An article appeared in the N.Y.Times on June 1st about the prominent Germanist Hans Schwerte who turns out to have been a former SS-officer. I am interested in his earlier history. Although he denies having taken part in medical matters, there is evidence that he had something to do with experimentations performed in Dachau. Can anyone provide more details?”

2. H-Net.

As most of you will be aware, one of the recent developments on the academic Internet is the institution of book reviews. H- German is now doing these twice a month. They will be of the same quality and comprehensiveness as those appearing in scholarly journals, and presumably by equally qualified reviewers. The great advantage to readers, authors and publishers is that they will appear months, even years, before the equivalent review in a printed journal. Indeed one can foresee the end of that genre before long.

Unfortunately German journals, with the exception of the Historische Zeitschrift, don’t do many book reviews (though Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte is trying hard!) Consequently German publishers don’t send out many review copies, and N. American journal editors have not always been able to get copies easily into the hands of reviewers. Theological publishers are even slower in responding to requests for review copies. And given the snail-like acceptance of computerization and hence E-mail in Germany, we may be a while before the kind of books of interest to our Arbeitsgemeinschaft will be so treated. But the possibilities might be worth exploring. Does anyone have connections with publishers such as Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Gottingen, or Chr.Kaiser in Gutersloh?

3. Book Notices

A flood of recent books in our area would seem to indicate that our particular field is flourishing. Here are brief notices of those to hand.

a) Kurt Nowak and Gerard Raulet eds., Protestantismus und Anitsemitismus in der Weimarer Republik, Campus, Frankfurt 1994.

This selection of essays is the result of Franco-German collaboration in a series of conferences, and concentrates on the reactions within German Protestantism to the so-called “Jewish question” in the period of the first world war and its aftermath. As the editors point out, the debate was actually part of the wider repercussions within the church to what was perceived as the crisis of modernization. Conservatives from Treitschke onwards were ready to see Jews as sinister agents of change, a view greatly enhanced by the disasters of the first world war. Liberal Protestants were trying to find a suitable theological response, but the result was often cacophony and confusion. This was reflected in their attitudes towards Judaism. In particular the irreconcilable gulf between the advocates of assimilation to a German nationalist consensus, and those who tentatively argued for religious and social pluralism only widened in the 1920s. Some Protestant theologians were ready to accept a broader participation in society for assimilated Jews, and hence adopted a more open stance between the faiths in the constitutional, legal and employment fields. Nevertheless virtually no German theologian argued for a pro-semitic attitude in theology. Adolf von Harnack’s well-known belief that Judaism was destined to be replaced by the more modern presence of Christianity lingered long in liberal minds, since it fitted so well with their view of social, political as well as theological evolution. For their part, many German Jews were attracted by the individualism of Protestantism, and its openness to liberal debate and democratic reforms.

The chapters of Leo Baeck, Walter Rathenau and Ernst Troeltsch show their affinity, politically and intellectually. But the only Christian scholars to take Judaism seriously, who contributed significant works attacking the popular kind of vulgar antisemitism, were all supporters of Mission to the Jews and believed the Jews would sooner or later recognise that their due destiny lay in conversion. Wolfgang Wiefel presents as excellent chapter on the various N.T. scholars who dug deeply into its Jewish roots, but sadly admits that communication with Jewish scholars was non-existent. Instead we find the most prominent Tubingen N.T. scholar, Gerhard Kittel, giving his full support to the Nazi regime and drawing a line between ancient Israel and modern Jewry. The ambiguities of this unfortunate legacy are still reverberating today.

b) Roman Bleistein, Alfred Delp, Knecht, Frankfurt 1989. (contributed by Michael Phayer, Marquette U., Milwaukee)

This well researched exhaustive biography is well worth the time of those interested in resistance. Bleistein covers a great deal of ground: the Jesuit resistance circle in Munich and its relationship to the Kreisau Kreis; their efforts to get the bishops involved with the Kreis or at least to collaborate with it; Delp’s contacts with other resistors like the Scholls (meeting planned but they were already executed by that time) and with Stauffenberg. Delp differed from other Jesuits and bishops in that he did not oppose killing Hitler. Bleistein suspects this is because Delp knew what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. Did Delp know that Stauffenberg intended to plant a bomb at Hitler’s feet? Delp maintained at his trial that he did not know (but he was executed anyway in January 1945). Bleistein concludes that Delp and Stauffenberg had discussed the morality of assassination in general terms only. The book includes an interview with the prison guard who was assigned the duty of beating Delp with a spiked board to get him to divulge information.

Michael Pope, Alfred Delp S.J. im Kreisauer Kreis. Die rechts- und sozial-philosophischen Grundlagen in seinen Konzeptionen fuer eine Neuordnung Deutschlands. Veroff. d. Komm. fur Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B. Forschungen Bd 63, Mathias Grunewald, Mainz 1994

Michael Pope’s dissertation gives a comprehensive view of Delp’s contributions to the Kreisau Circle. It is not uncritical. He notes that many of Delp’s ideas were drawn from his earlier involvement in Catholic youth groups with their romantic idealization of Germany’s Catholic traditions. He was still in 1944 pursuing an organic view of society which had numerous anti-democratic and anti-pluralist overtones, and which now appear as utopian or even reactionary. Nevertheless he was a fearless defender of Catholic viewpoints who rightly rejected the allurements of Nazism as well as the shameful compromises of some of his Catholic colleagues and superiors. As such he is rightly honoured among the noble army of martyrs

c) Jacques Semelin, Unarmed against Hitler. Civilian resistance in Europe 1939-1945, Praeger, Westport Conn./London 1993

This essay by a French sociologist discusses the political limitations of non-violent opposition and non-compliance by civilians for “civilian” i.e. non-military reasons against Nazism. Semelin makes clear that there are wide variations in the concept of resistance and in the particular settings in each country. Nevertheless he affirms that the churches played a significant role, in such matters as the protest against the Nazi euthanasia decrees, whereby their mobilization of a “protective screen” could be deployed for moral reasons. But in the case of the murder of the Jews, such a tactic came to play in far fewer circumstances, revealing the fact that as a whole the Christian churches manifested contradictory attitudes which prevented adequate resistance or deterrent measures against the Nazis’ systematic and deliberate use of violence.

d) Henri Fabre, L’eglise catholique face au fascisme at au nazisme. Les outrages a la verite, Brussels 1994

Henri Fabre’s blockbuster is a splendid piece of polemic, which takes aim at the Catholic Church, the Vatican and Pope Pius XII in a tone of exasperation and vituperation for over 500,pages. As a rational atheist, he has no use for the hypocrisy, self-serving or prevarication which he believes characterized the church’s officials in their response to the Fascist and Nazi dictators. In particular he is dismayed by their perversion of the truth about the Catholic reactions to the Holocaust. He examines minutely the record not only of the Holy See, but also of the Church in various European countries, in order to demonstrate that the Church failed miserably to stand up for the Jews. He especially analyses the 11 volumes of Vatican documents, put out in response to the earlier charges made by Hochhuth and others. Here he seeks to expose the “outrages” against the truth, and to accuse the Jesuit editors of these volumes of gross hypocrisy. Needless to say, he has no sympathy whatsoever for the self-imposed silence of Pius XII about war-time atrocities, and instead denounces the Papacy for not protesting the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews on every possible occasion. His assumption that, had such a prophetic stance been adopted, more Jews would be alive today not only overestimates the potential power of the Papacy, but comes rather oddly from one who derides the institution with such acrimony. But he has certainly done his homework in subjecting the Vatican documents to a fine- toothcomb analysis.

Anthony Rhodes, The Vatican in the age of the Cold War, London 1992

By contrast, Anthony Rhodes’s sequel to two previous studies of the Vatican in this century is positive and affirmative. He accepts at face value the Vatican’s own view of its policies, overlooks or excuses its glaring failures, and sees the Papacy as a valiant champion of the free world in face of the Communist threat. He is well-informed but dispenses with footnotes. As well, his story stops short at the end of the 1960s, and fails to take the story up to its more fitting ending in 1989-90. But he does include chapters on Latin America which are an interesting innovation.

e) Passau:

Anyone who enjoyed the film “The Nasty Girl”, with its satirical portrait of the difficulties confronting researchers into recent German history, may want to note the appearance of the small book by Hans-Dieter Schutt, Anna Rosmus – die ‘Hexe’ von Passau, Dietz, Berlin 1994. This is an extended interview in which Ms Rosmus explains her reasons for wanting to expose the hypocrisy and break the taboos about the Nazi period which characterized the elite of Passau, including the clergy and professoriate. As a modern Savonarola, she is suffering much the same fate, and was last heard of in New York. A lively picture of an uncompromising searcher for truth.

f) Jerusalem:

Even though Jerusalem does not figure largely in the debates of contemporary church history, many of us will have been there. All, I believe, will not have failed to see how deeply the atmosphere of the city has been imprinted upon by the legacy of earlier disputes, not least amongst the various Christian denominations. One such legacy is to be found in the so-called “Garden Tomb”, that delightfully pleasant green oasis just north of the Damascus Gate. Its history and the resultant controversy is well described by Sarah Kuchev “The Search for a Protestant Holy Sepulchre. The Garden Tomb in 19th century Jerusalem”, J. of Ecclesiastical History, Vol 46, no 2, April 1995, pp 278ff.

This Newsletter has already grown like Topsy, so I will send it off now, and will continue with more book reviews and notes next month. Don’t hesistate to let me know what you have “discovered” this summer.

With best wishes to you all,

John Conway,
Dept of History, University of B.C.,Vancouver
jconway@unixg.ubc.ca