Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)
Chapter Note: Karl Schwarz on Gerhard Kittel
By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University (Emeritus)
“Sie haben [. . .] geholfen, den nationalistischen Einbruch in unsere Kirche abzuwehren.” Anmerkungen zu Gerhard Kittel und dessen Lehrtätigkeit in Wien
This chapter by Karl Schwarz appeared under the above title in Uta Heil and Annette Schellenberg, eds., Theologie als Streitkultur, Vienna University Press (as published by Vandenhoek & Ruprecht), 2021, 319-339. This volume also serves as the entirety of the Wiener Jahrbuch für Theologie, vol. 13, 2021, “Herausgegeben im Auftrag der Evangelisch-Theologischen Fakultät der Universität Wien.”
Karl Schwarz, author of this chapter, has spent his career as a member of the Protestant Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna, while also filling important administrative positions at the university in several stages of his career. In addition, he has been a long-time member of the multi-national editorial board at Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, which is how I met him decades ago. In the early 1990s, Schwarz contributed a chapter on the Protestant Theological Faculty at Vienna in the important volume edited by Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz and Carsten Nicolaisen, Theologische Fakultäten im Nationalsozialismus, (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1993).[1] In the chapter reviewed here, Schwarz revisits a portion of that topic, focusing on Gerhard Kittel and the years from 1939 to 1943. This was a time when Kittel, famous as the founding editor of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, took leave from his position at Tübingen, moved with his family to Vienna, and lectured as a visiting member of the Protestant Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna.
Schwarz touches upon several aspects of this Viennese moment in Kittel’s career. For example, the Protestant Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna, since 1938 within German borders, imagined that it might become an enlarged, more important institution as a “Borderland Faculty” (“Grenzlandfakultät”), reaching out to the “volksdeutsche Diaspora” in southeastern Europe.[2] Adding someone with the stature of Gerhard Kittel might have been useful, and both the Theological Faculty and Kittel seemed to have had this in mind. However, Schwarz then highlights another issue in this piece. That is the contrast found between one major portion of Kittel’s oeuvre, his very harsh work regarding Jews and Judaism, ongoing during those years in Vienna, and the glowing letters of support and admiration he received from Bishop Gerhard May and others during his postwar confrontation with denazification.
Schwarz’s chapter appears under a title that begins with this direct quote, taken from a letter Bishop Gerhard May of Vienna sent to Gerhard Kittel on 29.11.1946: “You have … helped protect us against a nationalistic attempt to take over our church.” Kittel then used this letter along with several others (e.g., from the theologian Hans von Campenhausen, postwar Rector at the University of Heidelberg) as character references appended to Kittel’s own Meine Verteidigung.[3] That latter document, sent to numerous friends and colleagues to convince them (and denazification authorities) of his innocence, followed eighteen months of postwar experience that suggested his guilt: his arrest by French occupation troops at the end of World War II, his removal from his professorship at Tübingen, his six months in prison, his eleven months of internment, and then his “sort of ‘Klosterhaft’” at Beuron, a form of ongoing confinement at a monastery near Tübingen.[4]
For purposes of Kittel’s denazification defense, Gerhard May’s letter could be understood as a “Persilschein,” the sort of postwar attestation named for a famous brand of German soap. These testimonies were given the nickname to identify their main goal: to wash clean a person’s Nazi past and get him or her past the denazification process. Despite the “Persilschein” term, with its satirical implications that we might be tempted to apply to Gerhard May’s letter, it is possible, of course that Bishop May had something important and appropriate to say in Kittel’s defense. He was Kittel’s bishop during those years from 1939-1943 when Kittel lectured at the University of Vienna and he and his family lived in Vienna. May in this letter made the claim for Kittel that he, as a professor of New Testament in the Theological Faculty at Vienna, worked hard to protect the Theological Faculty and the Protestant Church from the worst excesses of Nazi ideology and practice.
That claim provides the essence of the question that Karl Schwarz pursues. Were Bishop May and other important figures in the Protestant Church in Austria (an integral part of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945) accurate in their defense of Gerhard Kittel? Were they correct postwar in separating professors of theology from Nazis? Were real Christians not Nazis? Did May’s description of Kittel as a fellow Christian really establish him as one who stood up for his faith and for his co-believers against Nazi encroachment? (Among other things, Bishop May in his postwar remarks repeatedly referred to the Confessing Church, almost certainly exaggerating its level of support in Austria as well as its actual level of opposition to Hitler and National Socialism.) Kittel did in fact grow up in a pietist family and continued that tradition within his own family. He also taught the normal things for a Protestant professor of theology. In his four years at Vienna, he lectured on the synoptic Gospels, as well as on various books of the New Testament: Romans, Ephesians, Philemon, etc.[5]
However, Kittel also held a second position at Vienna, giving lectures in the Faculty of Philosophy. That is where he dealt most directly with his theories about Jews, Jewishness, and the role of Jews in history and in Germany. In particular, Kittel presented his own theory, identifying a dramatic change from traditional Jews in the Old Testament to the diaspora Jews of the modern world. This distinction about Jews allowed Kittel to accept the Old Testament and its place in the Christian Bible, when many “Deutsche Christen” wanted to exclude it. He thus stayed within the boundaries of normal Christian beliefs. It also allowed him to accept the career of his father, Rudolf Kittel, a famous professor of Old Testament and the translator of a modern version that became well known. Kittel justified his respect for Jews of the Old Testament by developing a theory that modern Jews had changed entirely during the diaspora. From about 500 BCE to 500 CE, he argued (in line with modern antisemitic prejudice), Jews lost their healthy roots in the soil of their homeland and their occupation as farmers. They then spread out in all directions, becoming the uprooted, money-oriented, disreputable, and noxious Jews of medieval and modern Europe.[6]
Kittel presented this idea in his keynote talk at the opening conference in November 1936 of the Nazi-oriented Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands. It was here that Kittel described the alleged transformation from biblical Jews to modern Jews, how “the admirable Jews of the Old Testament degenerated into the loathsome Jews of the modern world.” This lecture, “Die Entstehung des Judentums und die Entstehung der Judenfrage” [“The Origin of Judaism and the Origin of the Jewish Question”], soon appeared in the first issue of Forschungen zur Judenfrage, the new journal of research on “the Jewish question” supported by the Reichsinstitut.[7] This journal published a total of seven annual volumes, with Kittel becoming the single most active contributor. It was the sort of work and alleged expertise that helped make him seem a suitable scholar also to work on the propaganda exhibition, “The Eternal Jew” in 1938 in Vienna, and “The Physical and Mental Appearance of the Jews” in 1939.[8]
Karl Schwarz considers two seemingly contradictory explanations for Kittel’s attitude toward Jews, either a Christian antijudaism with its 2000 years of history and its basis in religious belief, or a modern antisemitism with its more recent history, its racist underpinnings, and its significance within the now discredited Nazi Germany. The former could be the sort of distinction that might allow Bishop May—whether honestly or surreptitiously—to ignore the antisemitic side of Kittel’s academic work. Was Kittel simply a pious Christian, researching and writing a spiritual critique against Jews? That could be explained as part of a long Christian tradition, not least including a quite vicious version contributed by Martin Luther. From this point of view, Kittel was simply a professor of theology. Bishop May’s claim that Kittel had always tried to protect Christianity and the church, implied that he actually held an “anti-Nazi” stance. By this argument, it was only in his role in the Faculty of Philosophy–a role ignored by Bishop May–that he indulged in antisemitism, the sort of thing for which Nazis postwar were being condemned.
Throughout the balance of Schwarz’s chapter, he pursues the abundant evidence that Kittel both participated in and contributed to the racial antisemitism of the Nazi regime. I recently noted in a publication about Kittel, edited by Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals in 2020, that Gerhard Kittel returned to Vienna in the summer of 1944 for a guest lecture on “The Race Problem in Late Antiquity and Early Christianity” [“Das Rassenproblem der Spätantike und das Frühchristentum”] In that lecture he described “Christianity as a bulwark against the Jewish threat” [“das Christentum als Bollwerk gegen die jüdische Bedrohung;” which I then described as proof of his “complicity in the Nazi persecution of Jews” [“Mittäterschaft an der Judenverfolgung der Nazis”]. I was pleased to see that Karl Schwarz quoted those two passages and affirmed my conclusion.[9]
I believe that Kittel describing Adolf Hitler as late as 1944 as a “twin bulwark” alongside the Christian church, saving Christian Europe from the Jewish menace–indeed from the Enlightenment as a whole–tells us all we need to know about where Kittel’s allegiance can be found. Karl Schwarz seems to agree. Though the title of his chapter begins with Bishop May defending Gerhard Kittel as a good Christian and an important defender of Christian culture, Schwarz concludes,
The most recent publications, calling back to memory a scholar with a worldwide reputation, show how he allowed himself, pushed by the spirit of the times, to instrumentalize the antisemitic politics of National Socialist rule—and indeed, they show how the proclamation of antijudaism turned into a Christian antisemitism. Added to that, the years of his work in Vienna register clear signals that no character references from the side of the church could hide.[10]
[Die jüngsten Publikationen rufen einen Wissenschaftler von Weltruf in Erinnerung; sie zeigen, wie er sich vom Zeitgeist getrieben für die antisemitische Politik der nationalsozialistischen Machthaber instrumentalisieren liess—und wie in der Tat aus dem proklamierten Antijudaismus ein christlicher Antisemitismus geworden war. Dazu sind auch in den Jahren seines Wirkens in Wien deutliche Signale zu registrieren, über die auch die Leumundszeugnisse der Kirche nicht hinwegtäuschen können.]
This chapter by Schwarz is a very useful treatment of the four years in which Kittel was based at the University of Vienna and also a part of the Protestant church in that region. It is interesting. It is important. And, as Schwarz shows, it confirms that the broad and deep critique of Gerhard Kittel that has developed in the past four plus decades is accurate and justified.
Notes:
[1] Additional publications by Schwarz on the Protestant Theological Faculty at Vienna include “’Haus der Zeit.’ Die Fakultät in den Wirrnissen dieses Jahrhunderts,” in Karl Schwarz and Falk Wagner, eds, Zeitenwechsel und Beständigkeit: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Evangelisch-Theologischen Fakultät in Wien 1821-1996, Schriftenreihe des Universitätsarchiv 10, Vienna 1997, 125-204; Karl Schwarz, “Zwischen kulturpolitishen Kalkül und theologischem Interesse: Die Ehrenpromotion von Nichifor Crainic an der Universität Wien,” ZBalk 56 (2020), 69-85; and Karl Schwarz, “Bejahung—Ernüchterung—Verweigerung: Die Evangelische Kirche in Österreich und der Nationalsozialismus,” JGPrÖ 124/125 (2008/2009), 18-38.
[2] Schwarz, 324-327.
[3] For a recent treatment of Kittel’s defense statement, see Matthias Morgenstern and Alon Segev, Gerhard Kittels Verteidigung: Die Rechtfertigungsschrift eines Tübinger Theologen und “Judentumsforscher” vom Dezember 1946, Berlin 2019.
[4] Schwarz, 320. Kittel died in the summer of 1948 at the age of 59, without having been given permission to return to his home (much less his position) in Tübingen.
[5] Schwarz, 330.
[6] Loyal to Nazi norms, Kittel also emphasized in his Nazi publications that the “pure” racial identity of Old Testament Jews was destroyed by sexual mixing during the diaspora. Several of his contributions to Forschungen zur Judenfrage tried to identify and prove this proclivity, in line with bizarre Nazi ideas about the imagined racial purity of “Aryans,” and hence, the special danger of racially mixed (and even sexually predatory!) diaspora Jews. See my chapter on Kittel in Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (Yale University Press, 1985), especially 61-68. See also my first article on Kittel, “Theologian in the Third Reich: The Case of Gerhard Kittel,” Journal of Contemporary History, 12 (1977), 595-622.
[7] See Robert P Ericksen, “Schreiben und Sprechen über den ‘Fall Kittel’ nach 1945,” Manfred Gailus and Clemens Vollnhals, eds., Christlicher Antisemitismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Der Tübinger Theologe und “Judenforscher” Gerhard Kittel (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2020). The actual quotation here comes from this chapter of mine, note 7, p. 33 in the Gailus and Vollnhals volume. This volume by Gailus and Vollnhals, based upon a conference on Kittel they convened in 2017, is a very important recent contribution on the “case” of Gerhard Kittel.
[8] Schwarz, 319.
[9] Schwarz, 333, and Ericksen, “Schreiben und Sprechen,” 27, note 7.
[10] Schwarz, 338.
The focus on the regions of Central and Eastern Germany is a response to the current dearth of research on that region. Because denominational institutions were relatively autonomous at that time, such a regional delimitation makes perfect sense. Due to the denominational character of the region, then, most of the contributions deal with institutions and actors from the Protestant (evangelisch) spectrum, which is understandable. This will allow comparisons to be drawn between the various actors and institutions in different regions of Germany at a later point in time. It is regrettable that the editors did not succeed in soliciting contributions on the Thuringian region. They have focused on Silesia, however, which has also been rarely examined by research so far. A positive point to be emphasized here is the approach of the editors, acknowledging that the “relationship between the Christian-denominational institutions and the Nazi rule [are] not to [be understood] from the outset as dichotomous” (p. 11). Even if this approach should be a matter of course from this reviewer’s point of view, recent works show again and again that an ideological opposition between Christians and National Socialists is frequently assumed from the outset. Therefore, as self-evident as it may be, the editors’ basic attitude as it is formulated and implemented in the book is to be appreciated.
Loth argues that much relevant scholarship has rested on Rainer Lepsius’ theory of a closed Catholic milieu, largely dominated by ultramontane clergy.
The film features several academics familiar to CCHQ readers, including members of the editorial team Kevin Spicer and Suzanne Brown-Fleming. Interviews with Robert Ventresca, Susan Zuccotti, Michael Phayer, Maria Mazzenga, and many others are interspersed with historic footage, and occasional re-enactment to explore the actions of popes Pius XI and XII and some of the innerworkings of the Vatican. Pressman offers a range of voices, including a few outliers like Norbert Hofmann, Secretary of the Holy See’s Commission for Jewish Relations, who views Pius XII in a sympathetic light. We also hear contrasting viewpoints from Sister Maria Pascalizi of the Roman Convent of Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori and Micaela Pavoncello, a local Jew, about the Vatican’s role in sanctioning or encouraging the hiding of Jews in churches.
Because this is a work of social science, it employs a methodology very different from how historians approach research and thus warrants some explanation. Braun begins with a hypothesis that religious minorities are more likely to assist or rescue persecuted groups from mass violence or genocide. In this framing, religious minorities could hold minority status on a national level because of their small size (e.g., Quakers) or they could be a minority in a given region—Catholics in a majority Protestant region and vice versa. This minority theory is based on the idea that religious minorities recognize a shared vulnerability with other minorities, which triggers empathy. Braun posits that all religious communities seek security and self-preservation. When they cannot achieve this through religious dominance, then pluralism is the next safest option to ensure survival. So, a commitment to pluralism accounts for the willingness factor but minority status also enables capacity. Minority communities are able to engage in clandestine collective action while reducing exposure because of their members’ commitment and their relative isolation (more on isolation below). (40)
The book is divided into five sections, beginning in occupied France, with stories of “resistance par excellence” focusing on the lives of Canon Felix Kir (of blanc de cassis aka “Kir” fame) and Abbe Pierre (born Henri Marie Joseph Groues). Both of these individuals engaged in acts of sabotage, rescue work (especially of persecuted Jews), and generally served as thorns in the sides of the Nazis and their French collaborators.
Based on extensive archival source material, Linden describes Paul Leo’s early professional career. When the National Socialists came to power, Leo faced increasing difficulties due to his Jewish ancestors. Why Linden then adopts the racial biological interpretations of the National Socialists in this regard and describes Paul Leo as the “Jewish pastor of the regional church” (p. 19) is disturbing, however. Unfortunately, Linden also makes significant mistakes in terms of content: The Confessing Church did not form due to alleged state and National Socialist (where should a dividing line be drawn here?) interventions in church affairs (p. 18). This apologetic church historiography of the 1950s has been refuted many times in recent years, which should be taken into account when dealing with such a topic.
In his foreword to the book, Mark Lindsay welcomes Moses warmly into the realm of contemporary theological angst, affirming the proper place of a historian in all such things. This may seem all too obvious, but then the authority of the historical craft, and of historical knowledge altogether, has for some years now become increasingly obscure to those who oversee the life and work of most of our Protestant churches. When a moment of vital significance turns up historians are seldom to be found in the counsels of authority. If anything, they are likely to be deliberately excluded from them, though they might now and then be recruited to write introductory paragraphs. Evidently, we are all expected to return to a vigorous state of primitive Christianity as though nothing of significance has occurred across the intervening centuries. But there may be other reasons to maintain this state of ignorance. The historian of the modern church is not quite a tame creature. The churches prefer a show of loyalty, while those in charge of them care not at all to be criticised. Historians tend to do this rather freely, particularly when provoked. The historian of the Reformation may unhelpfully point out doctrinal contradictions or emphasize acts of violence. The historian of secularization will certainly prove to be bad for morale. As for the historians of the Third Reich, it is much safer to leave them in their university departments than to invite them to observe patterns and parallels. And why should there be any, after all?
Many studies on the existence of churches under National Socialism point to the Warthegau as a blueprint of the Nazi state’s plans of actions for the future of all churches in Germany. Generally, however, historians have drawn such conclusions prematurely, basing them on select archival documents without examining the broader context of Nazi policies for the Warthegau and for Poland as a whole. By setting right these ill-considered assumptions, Huener situates his analysis of the church’s plight in the Warthegau clearly in the Nazi state’s Kirchenpolitik and Volkstumskampf or ethno-racial struggle. Dominating this regional policy was Arthur Greiser, a native of the region and the Warthegau’s long-serving (1939-1945) Gauleiter (district leader) and Reichsstatthalter (Reich governor), and his deputy, August Jäger, whom historian Klaus Scholder had previously identified as instrumental in intensifying state involvement in Protestant Church affairs in the initial years of Nazi rule. Huener mentions but does not explore this connection. Greiser and Jäger did not act alone. From Munich, Martin Bormann, chief of staff in the Office of the Deputy Führer and, after May 1941, head of the party chancellery, and from Berlin, Heinrich Himmler, SS Leader and Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood, influenced Warthegau church policy while also allowing Greiser freedom to craft and implement it locally. The result revealed competing concerns between the ethno-racial struggle against Poles and an existing distrust of Catholicism. What historians have traditionally interpreted as attacks on Christianity by limiting or prohibiting Masses, Huener explains, were primarily security measures implemented by the occupiers to “prevent Poles from congregating and fomenting dissent or resistance” while they continued their policy of “undermin[ing] Poles’ sense of national identity and community” (6). Amid such motivations, strong anti-church sentiments also existed.