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Conference Report: Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)

Conference Report: Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective, Washington, October 2024

By Kevin P. Spicer, Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Andrew Kloes, Victoria Barnett, Kathryn Julian, and Jonathan Huener

The conference “Christianity and National Socialism in International Perspective” was co-organized by the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History; and the Contemporary Church History Quarterly. It was held from October 2 – 4, 2024, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.

Session 1

Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., Stonehill College, Moderator

Martin Menke, Rivier University: French are Catholics, Poles are Slavs: German Catholic Views of Their Neighbors, 1900-1945

Dirk Schuster, University of Vienna: The German Christian Movement in Austria and Romania, 1933-1945

Based on published and archival sources from the period, such as Abendland, Hochland, Center Party publications and Center-related newspapers, Reichstag proceedings, and government records, Martin Menke’s paper compared the development of German Catholic views of France and Germany, mainly during the interwar period. While German Catholics considered French Catholics to be brothers and sisters in faith and co-heirs to the realm of Charlemagne, they considered Poles to be Slavs first and ignored the Poles’ strong Catholicism. While this perception of the French helped to overcome postwar animosity, the pre-1914 defense of Polish rights by the Center Party evaporated during the struggles over Upper Silesia.

Dirk Schuster’s paper examined the impact of the German Christians Eisenach Institute for Research and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life on the Protestant churches in Austria and Romania. In both countries, the Protestant churches were a religious minority, and already in the 1920s, they experienced a decisive turn towards National Socialism. The national church in Romania was a stronghold of conservative elites. Younger church representatives rebelled against this situation and joined forces with the National Socialists. Due to various scandals, high church levies, and a widening gap between clergy and laity, many younger pastors and theologians took advantage of the momentum of National Socialism. They ousted the conservative elites from the church leadership. In Austria, the massive turn to National Socialism followed Austrian fascism’s rise after 1932 but did not impact the church in the same manner.

In 1939, the German Christians established the Eisenach Institute. The degree of radicalization of the national churches impacted the outreach of the Eisenach Institute. In Romania, young pastors without advanced theological training made up the majority; thus, advanced scholarly research was impossible. Instead, the clergy regularly adopted the output of the Eisenach Institute, such as a de-Judaized Bible and hymnal. The use of these texts continued even after the war ended. In many ways, the Protestant church in Romania became a testing ground for implementing such publications.

In Austria, the German Christians did not experience the same influence. We know of only six parishes in which the de-Judaized Bible was introduced after 1941. The Protestant Theological Faculty situation was completely different, as ethnonationalism permeated their teaching and scholarship. In turn, these academics eagerly embraced the “scholarship” of the Eisenach Institute and willingly collaborated with it.

Session 2

Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University, Moderator and Respondent

Mark Ruff, St. Louis University, “Auxiliary Bishop Johannes Neuhäusler and his efforts to free convicted Nazi war criminals”

Suzanne Brown-Fleming, USHMM, “‘Love and Mercy’ after the Holocaust: The Vatican’s Postwar Clemency Campaign, 1945-1958”

Christopher Probst, Washington University in St. Louis, Continuing & Professional Studies, “Feindesliebe, ‘The Guilt of Others’, and the Jewish Question: Württemberg Protestant Clergy Coming to Terms with the Past”

These were three fine papers, each highlighting the roles of individuals in the immediate post-war era who worked within a world defined by crushing wartime defeat – the second in a generation – and all that entailed: a literally destroyed homeland; millions dead, wounded and missing; a Europe in ruins and dominated by the implacable ideologies of liberal democracy from the west and Soviet-style communism from the east. Many Germans, especially those with backgrounds like the subjects in these papers, had distrusted or feared both of these ideologies for decades. All three papers focus on individuals navigating courtrooms and judges and perpetrator-defendants, and questions about guilt and punishment and mercy. There seemed to be a shared understanding among them that the bad guys were not the Germans in the dock or in prison, but the Allies (read: the Americans), who at best were misguided and ignorant of what Germans had come through under Nazism and war, or at worst were hypocritical and vengeful.

I am struck that all three papers offer compelling evidence of continuity: the so-called “Stunde Null” of 1945 does not hold much weight in these accounts. Suzanne Brown-Fleming’s use of the recently-opened Vatican archives to investigate the involvement of Pope Pius XII and his “officers” – what she terms the “triumvirate” of Pius XII; Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope Paul VI; and Domenico Tardini, later Secretary of State under John XXIII — in attempts to gain clemency for convicted war criminals provides evidence of, among other persistent traits, both latent and manifest antisemitism in the Holy See. Her findings mirror other scholars who have also gained access to these documents, notably David Kertzer in his portrayal of the wartime papacy. Mark Ruff’s presentation of Bishop Johannes Neuhäusler highlights the persistence of certain traditions in Catholic moral theology: there is no sin too big that may not be forgiven; the spiritual journeys of all Christians but evidently especially perpetrators must be encouraged and supported by God’s representatives on earth (i.e. priests). I found this resonant with my own research more than a decade ago, when priests and seminarians in the military used multiple ways of justifying their service in the Wehrmacht, but ultimately they claimed that they were all part of the same chorus: the men with whom they were serving (not so much those on the receiving end of the Wehrmacht’s attentions) had great need of them. Christopher Probst tells of Ebersbach pastor Hermann Diem’s devotion to love above all else, even of one’s enemies, and of the fierce national devotion of Theophil Wurm, chairman of the Protestant Church Council in Germany, which led him to intercede on behalf of mass murderers like Einsatzgruppe leader Martin Sandberger.

The worldview to which our protagonists adhered left little room for any other kind of victim: Jew, Romani, communist, Slav. Christopher presents what may be an anomaly in this context, in the example of Diem, who helped to hide Jews during the Shoah as part of a Württemberg “rectory chain” and whose postwar sermons emphasized accountability, responsibility, and a condemnation of evil in all its forms through a kind of ferocious love. Apart from Diem, we are treated to an array of individuals displaying stalwart German nationalism or, to clarify the motivations of the Italians in Brown-Fleming’s presentation, a “brotherly understanding”; both nationalism and understanding (what we might otherwise call sympathy) led these individuals to agitate on behalf of convicted criminals who had said reprehensible things (the antisemite Gerhard Kittel) or who had facilitated or perpetrated war crimes or crimes against humanity (the SS leaders Oswald Pohl and Otto Ohlendorf; the foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath; the navy admiral Erich von Raeder; the field marshal Wilhelm List). In their view, these were good Christian men who had either (1) made mistakes that they now repented, (2) had simply followed orders, or (3) were perhaps guilty of some charges, but of far greater concern were the alleged abuses and irregularities of the American prosecutors. Of course, the three exonerative appeals could operate conveniently in tandem.

Such evidence leads us to agree with our presenters’ conclusions that, once more, Christian moral theology in the 1940s and early 1950s consistently enabled its adherents to advocate on behalf of those co-religionists that they viewed were most in need of their support, and that it was easier to encourage an affinity/sympathy with a “sorrowful” Christian perpetrator (and the extent of the sorrow is debatable) than with the perpetrator’s victim – many of whom were dead and therefore absent anyway. There was a time when I would have cast this kind of moral theological thinking as falling short of true Christian aims. But as I’ve become immersed in this particular history, I think these papers raise the question whether we, in the 21^st century, should continue to expect Christian leaders in the 1940s to have behaved otherwise, given the framework within which they had been raised and trained. Diem is the example that we wish was the standard, but instead he is the anomaly perhaps because he broke with tradition to articulate what he saw as the more pressing needs of his day, even if it went against his upbringing. I wonder if he recognized this, and felt like an outsider, even as he stood (somewhat alone) on the strength of his convictions.

Session 3

Andrew Kloes, USHMM, Moderator and Respondent

Andrea Strübind, Oldenburg University: “Baptists and the Persecution of Jews and Christians of Jewish Origin under the National Socialist Dictatorship”

Sandra Langhop, “Between Obedience and Resistance: The Basel Mission in National Socialism”

The second day of the conference began with presentations by two scholars from the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg in Lower Saxony. Professor Dr. Andrea Strübind spoke on “Baptists and the Persecution of Jews and Christians of Jewish Origin under the National Socialist Dictatorship.” In her paper, Strübind analyzed “central themes in Christian anti-Semitism and racist anti-Semitism in Baptist churches, as well as their conduct towards the Jewish-Christian members and office holders in response to the measures promoted by the National Socialist regime to persecute Jews.” Strübind emphasized during her remarks that she approached this topic as a historian and as Baptist pastor in the Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland. As an introductory focus, Strübind discussed the poignant case of Josef Halmos, who was a Jewish convert to Christianity and the member of a Baptist congregation in Munich. As a Sunday school teacher, Halmos was well-acquainted with the family of the pastor, Heinrich Fiehler, whose son, Karl Fiehler, served as the Lord Mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Munich from March 1933 through May 1945. Drawing upon entries from Halmos’ diary, Strübind was able to demonstrate that the Fiehlers and other members of the congregation, of which he had long been an active member, enthusiastically embraced National Socialism and concomitantly ostracized Halmos because of his Jewish background. Strübind convincingly argued that, while Baptists numbered only about 70,000 in Germany and were thus one of the smallest churches, the history of their response to the Nazi regime after January 1933 generally mirrored those of the much larger Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches. “Some Baptists hid Jews and Jewish Christians. Many did recognize that the planned destruction of the ‘people of the Covenant’ increasingly bore the signs of diabolical rule in Germany and that this would lead to a catastrophe. A few theologians expressed this apocalyptic thought in words in their sermons and addresses. But nothing was officially mentioned nor was there any sort of petition made to the authorities.” Strübind concluded by discussing the current efforts of Baptists in Germany to memorialize those members of their congregations who were abandoned during the Holocaust, including Josef Halmos, who was murdered at Auschwitz.

Sandra Langhop, a Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin at the Institut für Evangelische Theologie und Religionspädagogik of the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, presented a paper based on her ongoing doctoral research into the Basel Mission during the National Socialist period. Citing a June 1933 article published by Karl Hartenstein, a Universität Tübingen graduate and the German director of this Swiss missionary society, Langhop was able to show persuasively that National Socialist thinking had become influential among some German-speaking Protestant missionaries. Hartenstein wrote in his society’s periodical, Der Evangelische Heidenbote: “We can never thank God enough that he once again had mercy on our Volk. After years of great despair, he gave us new hope for our Volk and our Reich. He sent us a real Führer after the times of great confusion… He pulled our Volk back from the abyss of Bolshevism at the last moment. He made our Volk united… as hardly ever before in its history. He has begun a cleansing process with us, in which everything rotten and corrupt from years ago has been broken open and can be swept out.” Langhop further analyzed how völkisch thinking variously shaped certain Basel missionaries’ approaches to their work in India, vis-à-vis British colonial government officials and indigenous peoples, and between German and Swiss missionaries.

One theme that connected both papers was their analysis of the positive reception with which many Christian churches and Christian organizations in Germany welcomed National Socialism in 1933, believing it to be a preferable to both Weimar era-democracy and communism. Secondly, both papers demonstrated how, despite the historic bonds that had long connected them to Protestants in other countries, German Baptists and German missionary supporters adopted identities that emphasized their belonging to the German people and eschewed alternative conceptions of self that were international in nature, such as belonging to the global Christian community or to the spiritual body of Christ.

Dr. Andrew Kloes is an applied researcher in the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The views expressed here are the those of the author and do not represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Session 4

Victoria Barnett, University of Virginia, Moderator and Respondent

Blake McKinney, Texas Baptist College: “The Selberg Circle and Transatlantic Propaganda”

Friedericke Henjes, Oldenburg University: “The Reception of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories on the Internet”

These two papers cover different eras and topics—but their underlying theme (the dynamics of propaganda) led to an illuminating discussion.

Blake McKinney discussed a little-known pro-German group in the United States, led by an American businessman, Emil Selberg, that pushed Nazi propaganda during the 1930s. Selberg was sympathetic to post-1918 German resentments, including the view that the Versailles Treaty had placed an impossible burden on the German people, whose resentment and anger led them to see Adolf Hitler as a leader offering new hope.

Selberg wanted to promote a positive image of the new regime in the United States. His allies were U.S. Senator Royal Copeland from New York and a prominent Methodist layman, Paul Douglass (who later became president of American University). Copeland suggested early on that Selberg might find a receptive ear for his work in American churches, including staff members at the Federal Council of Churches in New York who were focused on promoting reconciliation with Germany after the First World War.

Selberg’s main point of contact in Berlin was August Wilhelm Schreiber, an official in the Church Federation office. Both men seem to have seen this as an opportunity to advance their own careers. Having a high-ranking church contact in Berlin gave Selberg an entry point to the FCC staff. In turn, an important American church contact made Schreiber useful, both to the Deutsche Christen as they sought to create a new Reich Church and to the Nazi regime, which was already creating propaganda aimed at the U.S. McKinney’s research offers some insight into why, by the end of 1933, FCC officials like Henry Leiper were backpedaling from their early forthright condemnations of German church silence about Nazi measures to a “both-sides” approach, as they navigated the divisions within German Protestantism.

Ultimately, Selberg’s attempts were sidelined by the events of the Church Struggle itself and growing international outrage at Nazi policies. Adolf Hitler abandoned the Reich Church project in October 1934 because of the domestic and international backlash. In the United States, there was growing attention (much of it focused on Martin Niemoeller and the Confessing Church) to what people saw as the Nazi persecution of Christians. Copeland and Douglas, however, continued to defend the “new Germany” throughout the 1930s, and Douglas even published a book in 1935, God Among the Germans, which gave a sympathetic picture of Nazi Germany and the Deutsche Christen.

McKinney’s research provides an interesting new piece of the puzzle in our understanding of international Protestant reactions to the events unfolding in Nazi Germany. It is also a revealing glimpse of German and American cooperation in spreading propaganda on behalf of National Socialism, long before the rise of the internet.

The Russian antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion also reached a worldwide audience in the pre-internet era, but as Friedericke Henjes’ paper illustrated, modern social media has brought it to new audiences. The most striking aspect of her research is that the Protocols itself is no longer even necessary. Its message has been incorporated into modern conspiracy theories.

The Protocols is a case study in how conspiracy theories spread because of underlying prejudices. As Henjes noted, even in the 1930s the Protocols were recognized as a forgery—but in a conspiracy theory, the truth doesn’t matter. What matters is how the conspiracy theory is used to explain popular resentments about world events. The Protocols did this by drawing on the long history of Christian anti-Jewish tropes and their historical legacy in terms of “otherizing” Jews through various anti-Jewish legal restrictions, etc. The dog whistles have not changed since the first copy of the Protocols appeared, for example: the “wandering Jew” who infiltrates society leading to the collapse of moral standards, and the conviction that there is a secret society of “Jewish bankers” who manipulate world history.

Henjes explores how these prejudices dovetail neatly with more modern dog whistles about “globalism,” the purported influence of George Soros, etc. The core of her argument is that “the content of the ‘Protocols’ is largely disseminated on the internet via the keywords and antisemitic narratives they contain.” She offered two modern examples from two activists in the German anti-vaccine movement: Attila Hildman and Oliver Janich. Hildman literally quotes the Protocols but links its various antisemitic tropes to recent developments like the Covid pandemic and the anti-vax movement. Janich does something similar, tying the Protocols to current issues, quoting the Gospel of John, and promoting conspiracy theories.

As Henjes notes, many modern conspiracy theories may not immediately be recognized as antisemitic—but they share a common language with the Protocols, now over a century old. Even without using the actual text of the Protocols, there are numerous slogans and images in the digital ecosystem that convey antisemitism and incite violence against Jews.

Session 5

Kathryn Julian, USHMM, Moderator and Respondent

Katharina Kunter, University of Helsinki: “Anne Frank in Frankfurt: Entangling the Holocaust, Local Memory and Civil Education”

Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University: “The Sound of Evil: Imagining Perpetrators”

Carina Brankovic, Oldenburg University, “Conceptions of Remembrance in Leyb Rochman’s Chronicle of Survival”

In all three of these projects, there’s an interplay between intersecting memory cultures: international/ globalized memory, national/ local, civic/ confessional. Each panelist discussed how the subject changed depending on the context in which a text or memorial is being read, watched, or listened to, which indicated how memory culture can be politicized and also find interesting overlaps between various groups. For instance, Katharina discussed how the memory of Anne Frank evolved in Frankfurt in response to both international and local politics, from Adenauer’s conservative West Germany of the 1950s to a reunified Germany that emphasized humanitarianism to a more recent globalized vision of Anne Frank. There were a variety of global connections that could be made about Katharina’s project (e.g. how the memory of Sadako Sasaki has been used in the same way in Hiroshima and in global peace movements). In all three projects, there could be important interventions if discussed in a global context.

Historicization and temporality was also incredibly important in each of these talks. They showed that engagement with Holocaust memory is vastly different whether the 1950s, 1989/ 90, or in 2024. Carina, for example, showed how Leyb Rochman’s chronicle was read and reimagined in the immediate postwar period by the survivor generation as a yizkor book and memorial vs. how his writing was read by the second generation and implications for the future. In this same vein, Björn discussed how silence was used in the 2023 film Zone of Interest. He contended that this film in its omission of violent imagery was even more chilling to audiences in 2023, because what occurred during the Holocaust and at extermination camps has long been established in public memory and discourse. Each of these papers illuminated how Holocaust memory continues to be interpreted and reimagined in a variety of temporalities, civic, and religious contexts, whether in museums, local education, texts, film, or even in quotidian interactions.

Session 6

Jonathan Huener, University of Vermont, Moderator and Respondent

Rebecca Carter-Chand, USHMM, “The Historical Turn in Interpreting Rescue during the Holocaust: Reevaluating Religious Motivations and Religious Networks”

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University, “Bending Christianity to Far-Right Politics in Nazi Germany”

The final session was devoted to presentations by Dr. Rebecca Carter-Chand, Director of Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the USHMM, and Dr. Kyle Jantzen, Professor of History at Ambrose University. The session was a fitting capstone to the conference, as both papers encouraged reconsideration of conventional approaches to church history in the Nazi era, even as they proposed new avenues of inquiry.

Carter-Chand’s contribution, “The Historical Turn in Interpreting Rescue during the Holocaust: Reevaluating Religious Motivations and Religious Networks,” began with a historiographical overview emphasizing that traditional analyses have tended to focus on the individual rescuer’s motives, personality, courage, and sacrifice. Carter-Chand, however, encourages a redirection in the scholarship away from rescue as a psychological phenomenon and toward rescue as a historical phenomenon, focusing more on circumstances and context in the form of “structural” and “situational” factors – factors that might include landscape, victim and rescuer networks, or the nature of occupation and coercive state power in a given setting. As an illustration, Carter-Chand concluded with a brief video interview with Holocaust survivor Zyli Zylberberg, inviting consideration of what contextual factors moved Zylberberg to make the choices she did, and how we are to evaluate her own personal agency in the complex process of rescue.

Kyle Jantzen’s presentation, “Bending Christianity to Far-Right Politics in Nazi Germany,” also offered a novel approach in our attempt to understand the place of the churches and Christianity in Nazi Germany. Reflecting on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay “After Ten Years,” Jantzen urged consideration of how the current growth of Christian nationalism and the so-called “culture wars” might help us in understanding the churches during the Third Reich. We are accustomed to drawing upon the lessons of the past to inform the present, but Jantzen suggested an inversion of sorts, that is, letting the challenges of the present inform our approach to the churches in the Nazi era, considering broadly how Christianity and its institutions adapt to politics and, more precisely, the “bending” of Christianity to the politics of the right. For Jantzen, this “bending,” both in Nazi Germany and in the present, is to be understood not in static or linear terms, but as a complex dynamic process, often improvised and experimental. Moreover, Jantzen emphasized that, in attempting to understand this process, we need to “look to the middle,” that is, between the categories of support, compliance, and defiance, and to local contexts.

Review of Jeremy Best, Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture in the Age of Empire

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Review of Jeremy Best, Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture in the Age of Empire (University of Toronto Press, 2021). Pp. 322. ISBN: 9781487505639.

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

Questions around the legacy of German colonialism and how its racist ideologies and genocidal campaigns against the Maji-Maji in German East Africa (1905-1908) and the Herero in German Southwest Africa (1904-1908) influenced Nazi exterminationalist policies in World War II and the Holocaust have been debated in scholarship and public discourse for a good two decades. In the same decades, public awareness of the persistence of reflexive, uncaring repetitions of colonial patterns in postcolonial nations has steadily grown, not at least because of recent protests against vestiges of colonialism that led, to name just two examples, to the repatriation of stolen cultural artifacts from European museums and the removal of public monuments in countries like Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. The presumption that Christian missionary activities were deeply embedded in the colonial enterprise, working in tandem with secular colonialist rulers, sounds like a truism today. And yet, Jeremy Best’s new book on German missionary culture questions a facile alignment of colonial economic exploitation (by secular nations states) with missionary ambitions to win souls for Christ.

Best, a historian at Iowa State University, pleads for a careful analysis of historical documentation related to German Protestant missionary activities in the nineteenth century within the context of German religious and political culture. His study of “the vast corpus of texts produced by the German missionary movement…between 1860 and the First World War” (7) arrives at the insight that relations between Protestant missionaries and German secular colonial elites were tense and fractured. They did not see eye-to-eye with regards to the purpose of establishing colonies in Africa. German Protestant missionaries aimed for a global Christian community in which the indigenous population (the colonized subject) was given some agency. They recognized the value of indigenous subjectivity that, in their imagination, would blossom economically on local levels, thus protecting them from becoming objects of brutal exploitation in the interest of European nation states, including the late colonial aspirations of the Wilhelmine Empire. What indigenous Africans were missing, according to German Protestant missionaries, was education, and that meant, of course, Christian education.

Following in the footsteps of text-centered Lutheran traditions—even if not all German missionaries were Lutherans—it may not surprise that education, learning, and reading were centerpieces for German missionary activities. They included bringing the word of God to “heathens,” translating the Bible into indigenous languages, publishing multiple mission journals, and creating the new academic discipline of Missionswissenschaft. Hence, with a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the Gospel of John, Heavenly Fatherland opens with the following lines: “In the beginning were words. Words said, words written, words read by German Protestants seeking knowledge of God, knowledge of the world, and knowledge of other people” (5). From the very first page, the reader gets prepared for an exploration of a German Sonderweg of missionary activities, a path distinct from mission aims of other colonial empires like Britain or Spain, but also distinct from German Catholic activities in German Southwest and East Africa.

The author presents his arguments in six chapters. Though he is mostly focusing on German East Africa (surrounded by British, Belgian, and Portuguese colonial territories) and on the work of the Berlin Mission, his perspective is always directed at the larger political picture. The book brings together, Best states, “religious history [and] the history of German colonialism” (18). Seamlessly woven into his overall thesis are materials from other mission societies and Hilfsvereine at home as well as larger political tensions and competitions between various actors (between European colonialists; Protestant missionaries and German colonial elites; German national politics and Protestant dreams of a global “heavenly fatherland”; German Protestants and their anti-Catholic crusade during the Kulturkampf).

Chapter 1 focuses on the development of German Protestant mission ideals that pursued not national interests but the preaching of the Gospel. Important figures like Gustav Warneck and Carl Mirbt advocated for the Gospel of Mark’s Great Commission: mission work should not create “Germans” among colonized people, but “Christians” among “heathens.” These men followed an international vision with “economically self-sufficient…colonized communities” (45) in Africa as well as aspirations for a worldwide Christian mission network. At the turn of the century and before the outbreak of World War I, a younger generation of mission leaders, like Karl Axenfeld and Julius Richter, followed, however, a new direction, pushing more forcefully to align Christian mission work with the German nation.

Chapter 2 pays attention to the importance of language and education that Protestant Germans ascribed to regarding their missionary ideals. Rather than replacing native languages and culture with those of the colonizer, Gustav Warneck understood that “Christianity [as] a foreign religion can only become indigenous…if they grasp it in their mother tongue” (68). To some extent, Warneck and others wanted a less-intrusive cultural exchange, respecting indigenous languages while organizing the newly found African-Christian communities as Volkskirchen—this very German idea that a particular church community is constituted by a particular Volk (a people/ethnos/ nationality/race). What Warneck and others did not grasp—according to Best—is that their professed global outlook nevertheless implanted particular national concepts in Africa, and thus inadvertently participated in the national colonial enterprise they resisted.

Chapter 3 examines tensions between missionary aspirations and secular state interests regarding the indigenous work force. While the state wanted cheap labor (and at best allowed for something like trade schools), the theology of missionaries aimed for a broader education to create communities for African Christians, in opposition to demands for producing “a proletariat toiling for European colonialists” (111). Chapter 4 provides a gripping analysis of the clash between three parties: secular, national imperialists focused on exploiting indigenous peoples and lands, Protestant missionaries wanting to create local indigenous Volkskirchen as Christian agrarian communities, and Catholic missionaries somewhere in between (according to Protestant polemics, the Catholic Church “satisf[ied] the needs of trading companies [and] plantation owners”; 120). The chapter briefly reviews the history of anti-Catholic sentiments in Germany and how this conflict spilled over into the African continent, with the result of Protestants and Catholics jostling over land. To that end, missions, like the Berlin Mission, acquired land as protection zones from economic exploitation. This process was, of course, just another colonial “paternalistic plan” (127) of land appropriation—albeit in the form of benign paternalism with the goal of protecting Christian-African communities.

Chapters 5 and 6 return “home” to the European continent. While Chapter 5 shows the tremendous effort of Protestant missionaries to build up support networks in German localities through presentations, exhibits, testimonies by Christianized Africans, and publications, Chapter 6 introduces the reader to the Protestant efforts of creating international Christian mission networks. It focuses on the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, where the German participants hoped, for good reasons, to take a leading role in future global mission outreach. Those dreams were shattered with World War I. By 1918, Germany did not only lose its colonies, it also lost its moral standing in international settings, and that included the churches. The rise of Hitler and eventually World War II and the Holocaust confirmed to the world that Germans could not be trusted.

Compared to other colonial empires (like British, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese), German colonial rule was short-lived. It lasted for about half a century. Whatever long-term dreams national-secular elites and Protestant missionaries followed when they expanded into African territories, they all came to an abrupt end after World War I. The question remains: Were German Protestant missionaries and their theologies entangled in a racist and colonial enterprise in Africa that may have laid the foundation for the rise of racist antisemitism and the eventual genocidal campaigns in Europe after 1939? Jeremy Best’s work provides evidence that this is not the case. Generally, he sees nineteenth century German colonial history having more “in common with its contemporaneous Western empires than it does with the Third Reich” (11). Specifically, he makes us aware of significant differences between the aims of German Protestant missionaries and national interests of secular colonialists. The former resisted colonialist economic exploitation.

Nowhere does Best claim that German missionaries were free of colonialist and racist thoughts and practices; only that they “imagined racial differences differently” (10). He concludes that they “rejected the most extreme elements of racism and imperialism” (217). Best has no interest in glorifying or morally elevating German missionaries. He is fully aware that he is approaching his study through the eyes of the documentation left behind by the missionaries themselves, not through the eyes of the indigenous African population, thus privileging a European perspective. Hence, a study like this, he writes, “cannot pretend to be the whole truth of German colonialism” (218).

Framed within an awareness of the limitations of his study on colonialism and missionary activities, this is an excellent book—motivating, perhaps, someone else to write a response based on historical documentation by the indigenous population of German East and Southwest Africa, however scarce. Even when assessing some of Best’s interpretations differently, Heavenly Fatherland is an important read.

If there is any flaw (on a more formal level), then we can point to a certain kind of repetitiveness related to the author’s main thesis and sub-theses. Too often do we find central insights repeated in slightly different wordings, holding back the flow of the text and the reader’s attention when we were already prepared to move onward.

Webinar Note: Christian Nationalism – A Conversation

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Webinar Note: Christian Nationalism – A Conversation

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

At the time of this writing, the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville is battling for its soul: Should they adhere to their conservative interpretations of biblical values to fight back against the perceived evils of secular modernity? Or should they confirm a politicized evangelicalism that is deeply rooted in southern white culture and epitomized by a categorical support of Trumpism? Put differently, will southern Baptists continue to battle their century-old “culture wars” for the sake of individual salvation, or define themselves as fighting a “political war” for the soul of the nation?

While, for decades, scholars and observers have read the anti-modernist, anti-humanist, and scripturalist impulse of American Christianity as an expression of religious fundamentalism, the analytical (and popular) literature has recently shifted its discourse to speak about Christian nationalism: the idea that it is more important to defend a particular—and, no doubt, mythologized—version of America as a divinely-ordained nation than limiting one’s mission to the preaching of a biblical-ordained lifestyle. As Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry put it in their study, Taking America Back For God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (2020), “The ‘Christianity’ of Christian nationalism represents something more than religion, [such as] assumptions about nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism.”

Because of the relevance of this topic—and propelled by the insurrectionist violence we witnessed at the U.S. Capitol on January 6—the Martin-Springer Institute* put together a 4-part Zoom conversation series on Christian nationalism in April 2021. Titled Unholy Alliance: Nationalism and Christianity, the series took a comparative approach by bringing in voices from different national contexts: Victoria Barnett on “Protestants and Ethno-Nationalism in Nazi Germany”; Sarah Posner on “The Rise of Christian Nationalism Among American White Evangelicals”; Annamaria Orla-Bukowska on “Roman Catholicism, the Church, and Polishness in Contemporary Poland”; and Katya Tolstaya on “Post-Soviet Patriotism, Nationalism, and Russian Orthodoxy.”

Though the focus of the series was not to directly address the links between religiously inspired anti-democratic groups across different nations, it is important to note that such transatlantic networks exist between American ultra-conservative evangelicals and their Orthodox and Catholic counterparts in Eastern Europe. We could call this cooperation a new kind of ecumenical alliance that seeks common ground on anti-abortion, anti-LGTBQ, anti-woman health, and anti-democratic platforms; their leaders believe that strong, autocratically-ruled states will promote their religious values, such as in Putin’s Russia, Orban’s Hungary, and Poland’s Law and Justice party. In the U.S, the Institute for Cultural Conservatism or the World Congress of Families, founded and promoted by people like Paul Weyrich, William Lind, and Brian Brown, have embraced the authoritarian style of Putin and Orban as models for a renewed America.

Victoria Barnett, former director of the USHMM’s Program on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, started the series with an analysis of the Protestant churches during the Third Reich, geared toward an audience of non-specialists. Given the historical proclivity of German Protestants to identify with a German nation-state, it was not surprising that many Germans—after the defeat in 1918 and the perceived national humiliation of the Versailles Treaty—had high hopes that Hitler would restore Germany to its rightful (and superior) place among nations. In 1933, when Hitler took power, there was little opposition by the churches, until the moment when some theologians and clergy began to fear the Nazi encroachment on church autonomy. Those familiar with this history would quickly recognize the distinctions Barnett drew between the three evolving movements: the Deutsche Christen (German Christians), the Confessing Church, and the patriotic middle (the so-called “intact churches”). The Deutsche Christen, Barnett explained, was a “Christian nationalist, pro-Nazi group within the German Protestant church.” Its “politically nationalistic, right-wing” supporters “developed an understanding of Protestantism that was strongly ethnicized.” They emphasized “the Germanic nature of their faith [and] affirmed much of the Nazi platform.” When asked about lessons learned for today, Barnett pointed to the failure of the church to find a strong oppositional voice to Nazism. She mentioned the tragedy of becoming bystanders—of what Bonhoeffer bemoaned as the “silent witnesses of evil deeds.” Her presentation can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=msc6ZV4eT94&list=PLvTDA4SpA8Z408WLA4D68ZXlzrY3z5aM-

Our second speaker, Sarah Posner, author of Unholy Alliance: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump (2020), introduced our Zoom audience to the development of American fundamentalist evangelicals and their battles since the 1950s. She asked how a religious movement that presented itself originally as a defender of religion and family values turned into a political force. “The conceptualization of America as a Christian nation that is under threat by secularism,” she argued, “accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century.” She concluded by pointing out the danger of anti-democratic convictions among white evangelicals who deploy religion for their own political agendas. Given these developments, she cautioned that “complacency is not an option.” Her presentation can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCUvl3EkoZU&list=PLvTDA4SpA8Z408WLA4D68ZXlzrY3z5aM-&index=2&t=3775s

“Out of the frying pan into the fire” (literally, “from the rain into the eaves”), this cartoon critically depicts Poland’s transition from communist to Catholic (state) ideology.

Anna Maria Orla-Bukoswka from Jagiellonian University in Krakow introduced our audience to the contemporary landscape of Polish Catholicism, with its split between, what she called, the “open and closed” church. Whereas the former promotes openness to dialogue with civil society and embraces diversity (including Catholic-Jewish relations), the closed church refers to the clerical hierarchy working in tandem with nationalist themes promoted by the Law and Justice party. Referencing the “founding myth of Polish history as the Chrzest polski, the Baptism of Poland in 966,” she presented a more complex history of the slow Christianization of Poland with its multicultural and ethnically diverse population. Only as a result of the Holocaust and the redrawing of borders after 1945 did Poland become a majority Catholic population, though religion remained repressed under Communism. “The entire modern Polish history,” she argued, “has taught Poles not to trust the State but the Church.” As a result, Roman Catholicism and Polish nationalism became entangled entities, which led to the current marriage between church and state authorities pursuing an illiberal agenda and discriminating against minority groups. Her presentation can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=21V-gVCRkyc&list=PLvTDA4SpA8Z408WLA4D68ZXlzrY3z5aM-&index=3&t=18s

Katya Tolstaya, Professor of Religion and Theology in Post-Trauma Society at the Vrije University of Amsterdam, introduced current themes of nationalism and Russian Orthodoxy in post-Soviet Russia. Briefly delineating some key differences between Orthodoxy and Catholicism and Protestantism (such as the central role of icons and martyrs), she traced the alliance of Russian patriotism and Orthodoxy to Dostoyevsky who had stated that “to be Russian is to be Orthodox”—a phrase, according to Tolstaya, that is often quoted by extreme Russian nationalists today. Despite religious and ethnic diversity in post-Soviet society, “Orthodoxy has become the national church in Russia.” Orthodoxy is not only a powerful force shaping society but is also deployed to legitimate national expansion into other regions today, such as Ukraine. Tolstaya lamented the lack of transparency regarding suspected collaboration between the KGB and the church in the Soviet Union, the lack of a “civil society” in Russia today, and the participation of theologians in “operationalizing sacred liturgical texts” for xenophobic and nationalist purposes. Her presentation can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYrDTHP9NWk&list=PLvTDA4SpA8Z408WLA4D68ZXlzrY3z5aM-&index=4&t=25s

Though in no way exhaustive, this series brought attention to the fact that religion—which in the second half of the twentieth century was seen as a waning force—has resurfaced as a main player in society and politics, often supporting illiberal and nationalist visions of governance and policies.

* The Martin-Springer Institute attends to the experiences of the Holocaust in order to relate them to today’s concerns, crises, and conflicts. Our programs promote the values of moral courage, tolerance, empathy, reconciliation, and justice. Founded by Doris, who survived the Holocaust, and her husband Ralph Martin, the Institute fosters dialogue on local, national, and international levels. http://nau.edu/martin-springer

Review of Konstantin Hermann, Gerhard Lindemann (Hg.), Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz. Biografien von Theologen der Evangelisch-lutherischen Landeskirche Sachsens im Nationalsozialismus

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

Review of Konstantin Hermann, Gerhard Lindemann (Hg.), Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz. Biografien von Theologen der Evangelisch-lutherischen Landeskirche Sachsens im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), pp. 328, ISBN: 978-3-8471-0726-2

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

This review was originally published in theologie.geschichte, Bd. 13 (2018) and is reprinted with the kind permission of the publisher. The original version can be found here.

The volume is a collection of chapters on the roles of individual clergymen during the Nazi regime in the Protestant church of Saxony. It is a fairly specialized study for those concerned with regional church history in what in Germany is called Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte. This branch of church history focuses on the twentieth century, with a particular interest in the impact of the Third Reich (though the field has over time widened in scope and perspective). The aim of this volume is to introduce the biographical-professional pathways, political choices, and theological justifications of men working in the church of Saxony in the 1930s and 1940s. The research is based on the evaluation of new archival materials, and all the case studies follow a consistent framework. They show the spectrum of positions these men took during the Nazi regime and the Kirchenkampf (church struggle), from the moment Hitler took power and the Nazification of German society to the outbreak of World War II and its end in 1945. They also situate each of the clergymen in their family histories and theological training before 1933, followed up briefly by notes on their personal and professional lives after 1945, including the de-Nazification process and accommodations with the new East German socialist government.

Commendably, the editors cover the various levels of complicity and resistance in their selection of biographical reconstructions. They do so systematically by dividing the volume into four parts. The first and longest part introduces the biographies of clergymen who embraced Nazi ideology and identified with the Deutsche Christen – the “German Christians,” a group within the Protestant parishes that saw no contradiction between Hitler and Luther, between Nazi ideology and church teachings (Knabe; Münnich; Coch; Fügner; Bohland; Axt). The second part covers four men belonging to the so-called “Mitte,” the center, who tried to walk a middle path between radicalized and Nazi-supporting clergy and those who opposed the Nazi takeover of church and society (Herz; Bruhns; Loesche; Gerber). The third and shortest part introduces two biographies of men of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), who prioritized faith in Christ over nationalist and völkisch ideologies and (partially) resisted the Nazi regime (von Kirchbach; Delekat). The last part documents the biographies of churchmen who were persecuted by the Nazis for political and racial reasons, including Protestant ministers who were classified as Jews (or mix-blooded) by the 1935 Nuremberg Laws (Stempel; Kaiser; Gottlieb; Starke; Grosse).

The volume’s internal structure – from Nazi sympathizer to active resistance – guides the reader well through the many choices these clergymen made and the degree to which they used their clerical authority to position themselves vis-à-vis a dictatorial regime. What, in hindsight, looks like an unambiguous verdict – after all, how would any Christian minister be able to support a racist, murderous, and genocidal regime? – turns into a more complicated maze of decision making, career ambitions, and ideological convictions when examining how biographical motivations intersect with political developments. Given the longstanding German tradition of fusing Lutheran theology with national aspirations, many believed that Hitler would revitalize the Protestant churches and strengthen the German nation against common foes: secularization, Bolshevism, and those responsible for the Versailles Peace Treaty. Such expectations enticed clergy to join the Nazi Party and the Deutsche Christen (DC). Some held on to both memberships, others left the DC but not the NSDAP; some moved from the DC to the Confessing Church over time, others joined the German army as military chaplains. Yet others never affiliated with any of these groups because they identified with religious-socialist circles or the political party of the Social Democrats. It is worth delving into the continuities and discontinuities we see played out in these individual biographies.

As a reviewer, it is tempting to introduce some of the characters by name and to follow their life stories within the church environment of Saxony. However, for readers unfamiliar with the particulars of Saxony’s regional church administration and struggle, the amassed archival details of each chapter would quickly overwhelm. Experts in church history will have, no doubt, an easier time in grasping the significance of certain names and nuances, and they will welcome this volume as an addition to the literature on the German church struggle. Yet, not only specialists should read Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz, a point I will return to at the end.

A few areas of concern need to be mentioned for they weaken the otherwise meticulous research presented in this volume.

More help could have been provided to the reader to make sense of the many historical details mentioned in the chapters. At times, the biographical material is just a long list of data; this is especially true for the men’s family histories and their university studies and early career pathways preceding 1933. Though the contributors claim that this information is important to understand their subjects’ later choices, this is not always evident. More explicit interpretative models would have been useful. The criticism that Philippe Lejeune once voiced against autobiographical prose can apply here to some degree. Autobiographers, Lejeune lamented, sometimes write as if they fill out a “questionnaire sent by a punctilious administration.”[1] The copiousness of biographical data does not automatically contain explanatory power.

More help could have also been provided for weighing the significance of particular choices and attitudes. How should we assess, for example, someone’s genuine Heimatliebe (love of one’s home-nation) when it goes hand-in-hand with anti-Jewish resentments (as in the case of Oskar Bruhns with his Baltic-German roots and völkisch identification)? How should we distinguish between an ambitious career move and membership in the NSDAP? Some chapters offer clear assessments, but generally the volume errs on the side of caution.

A few of the contributors are too close to their subjects, with the result that they lose critical distance and present them with undue loyalty. Generational affinity might be one reason for this shortcoming (the contributors’ birth years range from 1929 to 1988). This is especially the case for contributors born before 1945. Their own linguistic style (Sprachduktus) occasionally resembles those of their subjects – and those styles carry embedded value references. This is true, for example, for the issue of gender and gender relations. Wives and children of the churchmen are mostly introduced as an aside, such as in the case of the death of von Kirchbach’s wife after his return from World War I, which is commented with the laconic entry: “He left in good care his children, eight and six years old. For him now, the decision to study theology was firm” (208).[2] Another example is the cavalier way of commenting on behaviors questionable by today’s standards, such as the beating of students for educational purposes: “In extremely rare cases it is told that emotional stress apparently led him to slap [his students]” (313).[3]

There is also little discourse analysis of the theologians’ autobiographical writings that were consulted for this study. This lack is particularly glaring with respect to self-exculpations during the de-Nazification process (Selbstreinigung) after 1945. Ego-documents often require a reading between the lines, listening not only to what is said but also to how it is said and what is not being said, and to paying attention for the less obvious elements of emotionality, narrative patterns, and omissions.

Related to these issues is the absence of the Holocaust in the presented biographical reconstructions. Anti-Jewish tirades and antisemitic stereotyping as well as the Arierparagraph and the case of pastors of Jewish origins find mentioning in the chapters, but the Holocaust itself is largely absent. It might very well be that the archival materials do not contain any such references, but this silence in the documentation should have been addressed and problematized.

17 of the 18 churchmen introduced in this volume were born between 1877 and 1895, 12 of them between 1882 and1890 (with one outlier who was born in 1906[4]). Little is done with the opportunity to study these men as members of the same generational cohort, the 1890ers (born between 1870 and 1890).[5] This political-generational cohort shared identifications and worldviews that united them beyond their individual biographies. These men lived through a number of political dreams and upheavals, from the Wilhelmine era to the end of the Kaiserreich, from colonial ambitions to the end of imperial dreams after World War I. It was a time characterized by social tensions between workers, industrial capitalism, and the middle class. These themes (especially World War I and the attempts at re-binding the working class to the church) appear frequently in the chapters, but they are not woven into a more cohesive instrument of interpretation.

Finally, what works well for this volume – namely the ordering of the biographies according to the conventions of contemporary church history (Deutsche Christen – the Center – Confessing Church – persecuted theologians) – is also a limitation. This framing follows a progression from most complicit with the Nazi regime to least complicit. This makes sense. Yet, its reliance on a well-worn traditional framework, which categorizes individual choices along the organizational venues of the Kirchenkampf, strains the possibilities of assessing culpability and complicity differently. What if we were to apply to the biographies of Protestant clergy and theologians more fine-tuned categories of culpability, such as perpetrator, accomplice, opportunist, enabler, bystander, beneficiary, victim? What if we read the archival material through an analysis of power and male agency? What if we foregrounded in these biographies the question of male subjectivity in the gray zone of moral and political choices and opportunities? An analysis of levels of culpability might compel us to reconfigure the historical and ethical assessment of these men’s choices, and this might be particularly relevant for the men of the Mitte (center).

A volume like Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz cannot accomplish all these tasks or satisfy these desiderata; the concerns raised above merely indicate how detailed historical research can be expanded and enriched. The two volume editors write in their brief and solid introduction that “the political agenda of the NSDAP found wide and positive resonance in [German] Protestantism.” Among the reasons for Christians supporting the Nazi party, they list the following: rejection of the “Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, the strengthening of the state, measures to increase employment, [securing] of national borders [Volkstumsgrenzen],…legal discrimination of Jews,…fears of Bolshevism and also discontent with a pluralistic society” (10). If we were to replace some of the historical references in this passage with contemporary political agendas, a number of countries would come to mind where politicians currently stoke fears and hate – with the support and vote of large numbers of Christians. Replace the Versailles Treaty with the Paris Agreement of Climate Change, Volkstumsgrenzen with national border security, legal discrimination of Jews with legal discrimination of immigrants, or Bolshevism with Islam, and we find ourselves in the midst of Trump’s America and Orbán’s Hungary. As illiberal democracies spread, are Christians today any better prepared to resist than the Protestant theologians in the church of Saxony in the 1930s? This is why the book, Zwischen Christuskreuz und Hakenkreuz can and needs to be read by people beyond a circle of specialists.

Dr. Björn Krondorfer, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Martin-Springer Institute, Northern Arizona University, USA

Notes:
[1] Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography. Edited by Paul John Eakin (Minneapolis 1989, p. 235).
[2] In the original: “Nach Dresden zurückgekehrt, fand er sie nicht mehr unter den Lebenden. Seine Kinder, acht und sechs Jahre alt, konnte er in guter Obhut lassen. Für ihn stand nun der Entschluss zum Theologiestudium fest.”
[3] In the original: “In äußerst seltenen Fällen wird berichtet, dass ihm offensichtlich als Affekthandlung die Hand ausgerutscht sei.”
[4] The outlier is Horst Ficker, a parish minister of the Confessing Church. Born in 1906, he belongs to the generational cohort of the 1933ers (see note 5). Indeed, his biography – which is juxtaposed to Bohland, a parish minister affiliated with the DC – reads quite differently from the other biographies presented in this volume.
[5] Björn Krondorfer, “Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust in Autobiographien protestantischer Theologen. ” In Mit Blick auf die Täter: Fragen an die deutsche Theologie nach 1945. Edited by Krondorfer, Katharina von Kellenbach, and Norbert Reck (Gütersloh 2006, pp.. 23-170).

Review of J. J. Carney, Rwanda Before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 4 (December 2014)

Review of J. J. Carney, Rwanda Before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era (New York: Oxford University Press 2014), Xi + 343 Pp., ISBN 978-0-19-998227-1.

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

Much attention has been paid by contemporary church historians to questions of complicity of the German churches during the 1930s and 1940s and to theological responses to racist Nazi ideology that led to the genocidal murder of European Jews. Now J. J. Carney is shifting our focus to a similar set of questions regarding the role of the Catholic Church in Rwanda, asking how certain patterns of ethnic discourse and late-colonial missionizing efforts exacerbated the Hutu-Tutsi divide that culminated in the 100-day slaughter of an estimated 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu in 1994. “One of the most Catholic countries in Africa suffered the worst genocide of the late twentieth century,” Carney writes in the opening lines of his fine study. “Christians slaughtered Christians in Christian schools and parishes” (p. 1). What accounts for the failure of the church to uphold unity among Christians? How did clergy and missionaries contribute to dividing the banyarwanda (Rwanda people) along the lines of politically contested labels of ethnicity?

After the genocide, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray asked church leaders in Rwanda if “the blood of tribalism proved deeper than the waters of baptism”—a question that seems to speak deeply to Carney’s investigation of the role of the church. Carney quotes it both in the Introduction and the Epilogue (pp. 2, 207), though not in support of the idea of “tribalism.” On the contrary, he argues that the Hutu-Tutsi division was mobilized ideologically for defining Rwanda’s national independence from colonialism. As a historian, however, he wonders why people of the same faith ended up slaughtering each other. As a matter of fact, whereas Catholic parishes served as sanctuaries during anti-Tutsi violence in the years 1959 to 1964, this protection utterly failed in 1994, when “more Tutsi died in churches than anywhere else” (p. 197). An estimated 75,000 were slaughtered in the Kabgayi parish alone, the center of Catholic life since the early twentieth century. Throughout Rwanda, more than 200 priests and people from religious orders (mostly Tutsi) were killed, while other priests actively endorsed or supported the interahamwe militias, like diocesan priest Fr. Athanase Seromba, who burned down a church with 2,000 Tutsi inside (p. 308, n.124). How can we account for the dramatic shift from Catholic sanctuary to mortuary?

As the book’s title indicates, Carney does not focus on the1994 genocide itself but investigates Catholic Church politics in early decades, especially in the 1950s and early 1960s. Carney identifies this period as essential for setting up patterns that later get utilized and mobilized in the genocide. He carefully avoids pronouncing a sweeping judgment that either blames or exonerates the church. He also does not pursue a deterministic view of history: the patterns he identifies contributing to the increasingly hostile rift between Hutu and Tutsi do not point to a predictable (and therefore preventable) future genocidal outcome. Carney presents a nuanced picture of multifarious voices within the Catholic Church. Situated between, on the one hand, the church’s alliance with the Rwandan nobility and Tutsi elites dating back to successful early missionary efforts and, on the other hand, its growing support of social reform politics in the 1950s in favor of impoverished peasants (largely, but not exclusively Hutu), missionary and church leaders presented varying explanations for the woes plaguing Rwanda’s social and political landscape. Despite advocating unity in the church and condemning the sporadic pre-1994 violence, many of these leaders nevertheless actively participated in an ethno-political and national-reform discourse that, at least in retrospect, aggravated the conflict.

Carney suggests revising the standard explanation of the complicity of the churches. He distances himself from the more popular view of a “primordial tribal hatred between Hutu and Tutsi” ( p. 2) as well as from majority scholarly explanations that argue that colonial officials and Catholic missionaries taught Hutu and Tutsi “to see each other as separate racial groups” (p. 2). Whereas the former view has been debunked as a colonialist narrative, the latter simplifies complex historical developments and reduces the Rwandan people to puppets of colonial powers, thereby denying them active political agency. Carney also notes that current scholarship on Rwanda’s church history does not pay attention to the important decades of the 1950s and 1960s. According to Carney, the standard narrative correctly points to the missionary alliance with the Tutsi elite before the 1940s, but “then skips to the 1980s and 1990s” (p. 2), when the church had already realigned itself with the Parmehutu, the Hutu national party that assumed political power. Before the outbreak of genocide in 1994, the church had formed close ties to Hutu President Habyarimana and Hutu Archbishop Vincent Nsengiyumva.

This standard narrative, according to Carney, is present in the works of Mahmood Mamdani (When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, 2001) and Timothy Longman (Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, 2010). Carney does not dispute their observation that institutional church interests contributed to the entrenchment of ethnic labeling, but he suggests that the 1950s have been largely neglected, although they were crucial to the politicization of ethnicity. It was in the 1950s, Carney argues, that all other identities (such as clan, patron-client, religious) were “subsumed under the Hutu-Tutsi dynamic” (p. 3); it was also in the 1950s when major players in the Catholic Church and European missions shifted their sympathies to Hutu social reform ideas that advocated a “more egalitarian Rwanda society marked by social justice, democracy, and economic equality” (p. 3).

The shift of church politics from pre-1940 alliance with Tutsi elites to post-1950s Hutu sympathies (and subsequent close church-state relations to the Hutu political regime, first under President Kayibanda, then Habyarimana) deserves close attention, as Carney persuasively argues. This shift, however, seems contradictory, given the old colonial race theory as articulated in the Hamitic thesis. The Hamitic thesis perceived Tutsi as racially superior. Based on the biblical curse of Ham (Genesis 9), combined with nineteenth century race theories, European missionaries and colonial explorers considered the Tutsi as civilizers of the Bantu African population, the Hutu. Europeans felt an affinity to the Tutsi, described by some as “Caucasians under a black skin” (p. 11), ignoring the fact that social class divisions crisscrossed the Hutu-Tutsi difference (since many Tutsi belonged to the landless peasantry as well). According to the Hamitic thesis, the missionaries should have kept their loyalty with the Tutsi. But this is not what happened. Early missionaries actually poured their conversion efforts into the landless class—the disempowered, largely Hutu peasants, who, in turn, hoped that the Europeans would advocate on their behalf against their mostly Tutsi patrons. Yet, the missionaries did not succeed with their conversion program until the Tutsi king Mwami Musinga allowed them to establish missions in central Rwanda, like the above-mentioned Kabgayi. It eventually led to la tornade, a French term for mass conversions of mostly Tutsi in the 1930s, and to the establishment of Rwanda as a “Christian kingdom” in the 1940s.

The White Fathers, a French missionary order, played a crucial role in these developments. Carney’s study presents several leading figures among the White Fathers and analyzes their writings with respect to political and ethnic rhetoric. For example, Charles Lavigerie, the earlier visionary of the White Fathers in the 1880s, advocated that missionaries sent to Africa were to adopt indigenous customs and languages. His motto: “to the weak I became weak, to win over the weak” (1 Cor 9:22). Yet, Lavigerie also insisted on a model of top-down evangelization, a preference continued by Mgr. Léon Classe, another influential White Father, who therefore allied himself with the royal court of Mwami Musanga. By all accounts, this strategic choice paid off: by the 1940s, Rwanda had become a majority Catholic country.

In the 1950s, however, those sympathies began to shift toward the Hutu cause of social reform, and here the decisive role fell to White Father André Perraudin. Fearing communism and secularism more than anything, Perraudin and other White Fathers embraced Catholic social teachings (based on the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum) with which they sought to stem communist ideas. They advocated abolishing traditional feudal systems, like the ubuhake, in favor of Western economic and democratic policies. The ubuhake bound a landless client population to the protection of their mostly Tutsi patrons. In the early 1950s, White Fathers and Hutu leaders shared visions of a pan-ethnic, democratically reformed nation that would lead to equality among the banyarwanda and neutralize of what was feared as a godless communist revolution. Strangely—at least in retrospect—the Tutsi nationalist party UNAR (Union Nationale Rwandaise, formed in 1959), with its strong anti-colonial and anti-missionary rhetoric, was condemned as communist.

These contextualizing historical developments are covered in the first three chapters, setting the stage for the years 1956-1962, which are at the heart of Carney’s analysis. Chapter 4 looks at the period of 1956-1959, in which tensions between Hutu and Tutsi grew due to the political mobilization of ethnic divisions. Chapter 5 covers the period of 1959-1962, when the Tutsi monarchy was replaced by a democratic republic. De facto, however, this republic was a Hutu dominated one-party state, leading to the first waves of severe anti-Tutsi violence and expulsions.

In these two central chapters, Carney proves himself a prudent observer who skillfully weaves together material from an abundance of primary sources. I limit myself here to three salient points. First, Carney repeatedly refers to the role of the évolués, the indigenous African elite trained in European-style missionary schools and seminaries. The évolués are conceptually important for Carney’s study because they validate the role of indigenous Africans as major political agents (over against a simplified thesis of an all-powerful European dominance). The évolués are historically important since both Hutu and Tutsi students were groomed in the seminaries. Yet, instead of building a cohort ensuring the unity of the Christian church, they became leaders in separate and later antagonistic organizations, like the Parmehutu and UNAR. Some of the leaders became the first indigenous African priests and bishops in the then Belgian colony; other turned to secular politics. In either case, personal ties forged in the seminaries often extended into later political loyalties in church-state relations.

Second, Carney weaves into his historical analysis a comparison between two key figures, Aloys Bigirumwami, the first indigenous bishop in Belgian Africa, and André Perraudin, a Swiss White Father and Archbishop of Kabgayi from 1956 to 1989. These two men became protagonists in the church’s struggle, personifying two different perspectives as to the cause of, and remedy for, Rwanda’s increasing ethnic-sectarian discourse. Bigirumwami, from a mixed Hutu-Tutsi background, had been seen at his time as a conservative leaning bishop not swept up in the promotion of Catholic social teachings in support of the Hutu social reform movement. Instead, he incessantly cautioned “against the darker side of these movements” (p. 123), perceiving the real danger not coming from traditional feudalism or modern communism but from violence lurking in Rwanda’s growing ethnicism. Perraudin, in contrast, kept pushing the social reform agenda and aligned himself with the Hutu cause (and later with the Hutu one-party state). Though both Perraudin and Bigirumwami issued joint pastoral letters against the violence they witnessed, they had strikingly different views of the events. Perraudin kept downplaying the anti-Tutsi violence, justifying it as an understandable outburst of Hutu anger. As late as June of 1994, Perraudin, from his retirement home in Switzerland, laid blame for the genocide on the RPF, the Tutsi Rwanda Patriotic Front, that ended the genocide in July of 1994. Bigirumwami, for his part, was replaced in 1974 by Hutu bishop Vincent Nsengiyumva, who two years later became Archbishop of Kigali, with close ties to President Habyarimana’s government. Here, Carney allows himself an ethical judgment, articulating his frustration with Perraudin’s unwavering “air of self-righteousness” (pp. 200-01), while repeatedly calling Bigirumwami a lone prophetic voice. Bigirumwami, Carney laments, has been all but forgotten in the standard narrative, but he wants to rescue him from oblivion.

Third, Carney’s study teaches us to be careful about the abuse of a one-sided partisanship regarding social movements. Carney makes clear that the Hutu sympathies espoused by Perraudin and others were not rooted in liberation theology but rather in the conservative form of Rerum Novarum. He criticizes Perraudin’s church politics as a short-sighted support for the impoverished Hutu majority, falling prey to the “political instrumentalization of ethnic identities” (p. 206). Carney coins the term “analytical partisanship” to describe Perraudin’s ill-guided support of Parmehutu’s politics, preventing this churchman from naming accurately the “link between ethnicism and political violence” (p. 173).

In chapter 6, Carney presents, in quick strokes, developments after 1962, especially the escalating anti-Tutsi violence of 1963-1964 and 1973 as well as the 1972 genocide in neighboring Burundi, where a Tutsi government killed an estimated 200,000 Burundians—all leading up to the 1994 carnage. As important as these developments are, Carney makes a good choice by keeping his focus on the neglected 1950s and early 1960s—a choice partially driven by pragmatic reasons, as he explains in a footnote: the archives he consulted in Rome and Rwanda had restricted his access to materials after 1962 (p. 306, n.2).

In an eight-page epilogue, Carney ventures briefly into theological territory, drawing out some lessons for church and theology. Among others, he mentions the lack of “prophetic distance” to state power as main reason of the church’s complicity—surely a lesson learned from Bigirumwami’s lone prophetic voice; a lesson also, I might add, for many conflict zones today.

Conference Report: Reassessing Contemporary Church History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, July 25-27, 2013

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

Conference Report: Reassessing Contemporary Church History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, July 25-27, 2013

By Mark Edward Ruff, St. Louis University

This three-day conference brought twenty scholars from Canada, the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany to the campus of the University of British Columbia on the shores of Vancouver Bay to take stock of the current state of German church history in the 20^th century, plot out the future direction for the new electronic journal, Contemporary Church History Quarterly and to honor the eighty-three year old Anglo-Canadian scholar and pioneer in the field, John Conway.

The keynote address from Thursday evening, “The Future of World Christianity” was delivered by Mark Noll, Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. In his hour-long presentation, Noll contrasted the situation of Christianity in the Western and non-Western worlds for the years 1910 and 2010. Christianity has exploded numerically in Africa, Asia and Latin America, eclipsing its presence in what had at just a century earlier had been its European heartland. Noll began by highlighting the dramatic scope of recent changes. In 1970, there had been no legally open churches in China in 1970; China may now have more active believers attending church regularly than does Europe. Noll argued that it was raw life-and-death struggles of poverty, disease, tribal warfare, social dislocation, and economic transformation that help explain this surge in religiosity outside of the western world. He urged historians of Christianity to learn more about the work of African prophet-evangelists of the early 20^th century like William Wadé Harris and Simon Kimbangu instead of focusing exclusively on better-known western theologians and churchmen.

Friday’s proceedings were divided into three distinct panels. The first, “The Changing Historiography of the Church Struggle, 1945 – 2013” highlighted the changing hermeneutics, value-systems, theological categories and historical methodologies that have been employed to instill meaning into the struggles of the churches against the National Socialist state. Mark Edward Ruff’s paper, “The Reception of John Conway’s, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches” analyzed why Conway’s pioneering work evoked profoundly different reactions in the English-speaking world and in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the Anglo-American world, it garnered praise; in Germany, it was largely met with criticism or indifference. Ruff argued that the very factors that ensured its mostly positive appraisals in the United States guaranteed its harvest of criticism and silence in Germany from those professional historians or churchmen charged with compiling the history of the churches under Nazi rule. Three dynamics contributed to the divided response to the work of a practicing Anglican – a confessional divide, a national divide and a methodological divide. Reflecting ongoing confessional fissures, non-Catholic politicians, churchmen, journalists, playwrights and scholars had shown a consistent willingness to enter into or launch public discussions about the Catholic past in the Third Reich, while their Roman Catholic counterparts in the press, ecclesia, intelligensia and academy rarely, if ever, spoke out openly about the Protestant past. Negative reviews in Germany, moreover, reflected a heightened sensitivity to criticism not just from non-Catholics but from the Anglo-Saxon world, from where the majority of the non-German critical accounts of the recent past had come. And finally, Conway’s German critics assailed him for what they regarded as deficient methodologies, and in particular, his unwillingness to show the necessary empathy for his subjects and to employ what can be described as a Quellenpositivismus and refrain from making larger moral and historical judgments not born directly out of the sources he used.

Ruff’s account of the confessional dynamics in the German historical profession of the 1960s set the stage for Robert Ericksen’s paper, “Church Historians, “Profane” Historians, and our Odyssey Since Wilhelm Niemöller.” Wilhelm Niemöller was the younger brother to Martin Niemöller, an important leader of the Confessing Church during the Nazi era and a widely known prisoner of the regime after his arrest in 1937. Martin went on to serve in various church leadership positions after 1945, while Wilhelm emerged as the most important historian of the Protestant Kirchenkampf, or “Church Struggle,” in the first postwar decades. He quite consciously styled himself a “church historian,” separating himself from those historians designated “profane” in the German usage. In the 1960s he wrote, “It almost seems as if one could be satisfied with the rather shortsighted conclusion that church history and ‘profane’ history do not differ from one another.” Ericksen argued that Wilhelm Niemöller, in his effort to bring his faith to the task of writing history, distorted the history of the German Protestant Church under Hitler. He described the history of the Confessing Church, representing approximately 20% of Protestants, as if it were the history of the entire church. He also ignored those within the Confessing Church who supported Adolf Hitler and those who shared the antisemitic prejudices of the regime. Finally, Wilhelm Niemöller ignored the fact that both he and Martin had voted for the Nazi Party, and that he had joined the Party as early as 1923. Ericksen concluded by insisting that historians of churches must work as “profane” or secular historians, if they are to create a more usable and reliable history.

Manfred Gailus’ paper, “Ist die “Aufarbeitung” der NS-Zeit beendet? Anmerkungen zur kirchlichen Erinnerungskultur seit der Wende von 1989/90,” examined how the Protestant church dealt with its own past from the Third Reich. Focusing on the state church of Berlin-Brandenburg-schlesische-Oberlausitz (EKBO), Gailus focused on how Bishop Wolfgang Huber, one of the leaders of the Protestant church, practiced a politics of the past that can be regarded as representative for the Protestant church as a whole. In November 2002, Huber delivered a committed and self-critical sermon for the annual „day of repentance,“ a sermon which he dedicated to the memory of those Christians of Jewish heritage who had suffered and died in the Third Reich. This sermon can be regarded as a sign of Huber’s committed engagement with the past, one comparable with his efforts to compensate church slave laborers from the Second World War. But his subsequent efforts to come to terms with the past began to flag almost immediately thereafter. In 2005, he chose to take up the theme of the „church and the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s“ – and not the church struggle of the 1930s – as the major theme for the fiftieth anniversary of the „Evangelische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte.“ He also stayed out of the longstanding debates about the future of the Martin-Luther-Memorial- Church in Berlin-Mariendorf, a church that had been built during the Third Reich, decorated with sundry Nazi symbols and now enjoyed the protective status as a „historical landmark.“ The church under Huber, Gailus concluded, has certainly come a long way forward in its approach to the Nazi past but still lags behind the standards set not only by professional historians but by the larger public. It remains in urgent need of powerful initiatives to kick-start its reassessment of the past.

The second panel, „Theology, Theological Changes and the Ecumenical Movement“ brought to the table the fruits of recent research. Victoria Barnett’s paper, “Track Two Diplomacy, 1933-1939: International Responses from Catholics, Jews, and Ecumenical Protestants to Events in Nazi Germany,” showed how events that unfolded in Nazi Germany and Europe between 1933 – 1939 sparked a number of significant and ongoing initiatives among international religious leaders. This was particularly true of religious bodies whose scope was international and touched on ecumenical or interfaith issues; such bodies included the Holy See in Rome, ecumenical offices in Geneva and New York, and the conferences of Christians and Jews in the UK and the United States. Such initiatives were also driven by individual Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who were committed to fighting against National Socialism and helping its victims. Many of these individuals, Barnett pointed out, became involved early in refugee-related issues. Other issues of common concern included the ideological and political pressures on both Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany and the desire to prevent another European war. After the war began, many of these same circles had contacts with different German resistance circles, and some of these leaders wrote “think pieces” on the necessary moral foundations for a postwar peace. Although the Catholics and Protestants involved in these activities represented a distinct minority within their respective churches, an examination of their interactions, including their contacts with representatives of Jewish organizations, offers a much fuller picture of the international religious responses to Nazism and show the extent of interreligious communication even before 1939 as an attempt at “track two diplomacy.”

Matthew Hockenos’ paper “‘Blessed are the Peacemakers, for They Shall be called Sons of God’: Martin Niemöller’s Embrace of Pacifism, 1945-55” focused on the theological transformations in the decade from 1945 to 1955 for the former Confessing Church leader and hero, Martin Niemöller. Niemöller, Hockenos showed, jettisoned the Zwei–Reiche–Lehre (Doctrine of Two Kingdoms) and championed a political role for the Church. He abandoned German nationalism and became a leader of the ecumenical movement. He denounced war and the remilitarization of Germany and gradually came to adopt pacifism. Hockenos, however, made clear that Niemöller’s embrace of pacifism did not occur over night, as Niemöller had implied in his own account of his meeting with the German scientist Dr. Otto Hahn. It was a gradual process that one can trace from the time of his liberation to 1955. It appears to have been the result of a number of factors and events. These included including his own reflection on the destructiveness of WWII and the imminent danger that the Cold War posed to Germany, the outbreak of the Korean War, contact with ecumenical-minded church leaders abroad, and the deliberate efforts of pacifists in the United States and in Europe to convince Niemöller that the only position a true Christian could take on war was to be against because it was inimical to the message of Christ. From 1954 on Niemöller made it his primary goal to expand the circle of pacifists person by person through education and example. Just as his pacifist colleagues had slowly reeled him in through conversations and dialogue, he traveled the globe, frequently visiting Communist nations, preaching the way of non-violence and extolling the teachings and example of Mahatma Gandhi.

Wilhelm Damberg’s paper, „Vergangenheitsbewältigung und Theologie nach dem Konzil: J.B. Metz, die politische Theologie und die Würzburger Synode (1971-1975),” drew the attention of conference participants to a major theological paradigm shift in how the Roman Catholic Church in Germany came to terms with its past under National Socialism. Ironically, Damberg noted, this seismic shift has largely remained unknown to historians. It took place during the Würzburg Synod of 1971 to 1975, which was charged with implementing the resolutions and decrees of the Second Vatican Council in Germany. The central document for these changes was one bearing the name „Our Hope: A Commitment to Faith in our time.“ It prepared by the renowned German theologian, Johann Baptist Metz, and bore the hallmarks of Metz’s own so-called „Political Theology.“ This document met with the overwhelming approval of the synod. Metz shaped its content around the concept of a collective „examination of conscience,“ which confessed the guilt and failure of „a sinful church“ particularly towards the Jews of the Third Reich. In the formal debates about this document, disagreements broke out about the appropriate way to understand history. Metz defended himself against criticism of his historical judgments by insisting that historical consciousness and actual reconstructions of the past remained two separate things. For the church of the present, it was the former that matter. Metz, Damberg argued, was deconstructing historical narratives that Metz himself saw as being in direct opposition to the epochal theological change of „theology after Auschwitz.“

The third panel on Friday, “Expanding the Borders: Inter and Intra-National, Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Narratives” pointed out new directions for historical research. Thomas Großbölting led off with his paper„‚Kirchenkampf gibt es immer‘: Memory Politics as a Point of Reference for an inner-ecclesiastical Counter-culture.” Großbölting made his focus those moments in the 1960s and 1970s when special groups within the churches and individual Christians referred to the Nazi past. How, he asked, did they draw connections between themselves and the church struggle from the 1930s? He argued that the silence of the 1950s regarding the Nazi past was replaced in the second half of the 1960s by greater openness – and even bluntness. For the new social movements and special interest groups within the churches, in particular, the politics of remembrance became a major point of orientation and mobilization. Organizations as disparate as Una voce, Unum et semper, the confessional movement “No other gospel”, the German branch of Opus Dei and “Christians for socialism” all sought to find new ways of living the personal faith and to radicalize the Christian Gospel. For conservatives, radicalization meant bring the Christian Gospel back to its roots; for left-wingers, it meant rediscovering the communist ideals of the early church. Großbölting, in turn, showed how such groups like Catholic student parishes and Protestant confessional movements referred to the Nazi-past in general and to the Church struggle, in particular, as a way to realize these aims. In spite of the enormous attention they found from the media at the end of the 1960s, the impact of these movements remained limited. The Protestant counter-movement took up the battle cry, “Kirche muss Kirche bleiben” –Church must remain the Church.” But even these stirring words, Großbölting concluded, never found much resonance among the ordinary members of the Protestant and the Catholic Church.

In his paper, “Conflict and Post-Conflict Representations: Autobiographical Writings of German Theologians after 1945,” Björn Krondorfer showed how the questions of gender, and male gender in particular, and of retrospective historical representatives, are central to our analyses of the postwar church. Krondorfer argued that gendered roles and identifications allowed German men in institutions like the church to adjust to a new environment after 1945. His paper critically analyzed the autobiographies of two Protestant German male theologians published after 1945, and in particular, those of Walter Künneth ( Lebensführungen: Der Wahrheit verpflichtet; 1979) and Helmut Thielicke (Zu Gast auf einem schönen Stern; 1984.) Realizing that their autobiographical act of remembering placed them into a morally and politically charged historical context, these two theologians carefully crafted their memoirs, employing apologetic and eluding strategies when accounting for their lives during the 1930s and 1940s. The theme of “German suffering” often looms largely in these memoirs, while Jews are mostly absent; hence, the boundaries between victim and perpetrator are constantly blurred. As “helpless victims,” these men might run the risk of being effeminized, as “acting subjects” they might run the risk of being accused of moral failure. Versions of this mental split, Krondorfer argued, are to be found in almost all post-1945 autobiographies of German male theologians.

Suzanne Brown-Fleming’s paper, “Real-Time Narrative Responses to Nazism: March/ April 1933 in Germany and Rome” focused on the Catholic diplomatic response to the earliest antisemitic measures of the Nazis. On April 1, the Nazis ordered a boycott of Jewish businesses, department stores, lawyers and physicians on April 1, 1933, the first centrally directed action by the National Socialists against Jews after the Seizure of Power. The Civil Service Law of 7 April was the first to contain the so-called “Aryan Paragraph,” stipulating that only those of Aryan descent could be employed in public service. Brown-Fleming Using drew upon the recently-released records of the Vatican nunciature in Munich and Berlin during the tenure of Pope Pius XI. She discussed the exchanges between Pope Pius XI, then-Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII, 1939-1958), his diplomat in Germany, Cesare Orsenigo, German bishops, and ordinary Catholics and Jews. The elections of March 5, 1933, she argued, revealed a dissonance between the Nazi party, Catholic Center Party voters, and Catholics who hoped to find some way to be both true to their bishops and to Hitler. That dissonance, she concluded, affected the response of the Vatican Secretariat of State and German bishops to the first anti-Jewish laws in April 1933 in ways that still need to be further explored.

The third day of the conference was devoted to a discussion of the future direction of the electronic journal, Contemporary Church History Quarterly. This journal had its origins in the electronic brainchild of John Conway, what he upon his retirement from the University of British Columbia in 1995, modestly called “The Newsletter.” This was an eclectic mixture of book reviews and notices about events dealing with contemporary international and ecumenical church history. A recipient of a Humboldt Research fellowship in 1963-4 and a founding member of the Scholars’ Conference on the German Church and the Holocaust in 1970, Conway was best known for his masterwork from 1968, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-1945, the first extensive history in English of the National Socialists’ campaign against the German churches and the responses of both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. He developed this free monthly electronic newsletter to provide a speedier flow of information on new publications on the history of the churches in the 20th century. Traditional quarterly journals were far too slow in informing readers of new publications and works in progress. In addition, they tended to reach only specialized academic audiences – and not the lay and religious audiences just as keenly interested in the highly charged topic of the churches’ conduct during the Nazi era such as the conduct of Pope Pius XII and the responses of the churches to the Holocaust. Sent out by email to a list-serve of subscribers, Conway’s newsletter went by the name of the Association of Contemporary Church Historians (ACCH), or Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler.

In 2009, Conway turned over the helm of the Newsletter to an editorial board, which now includes sixteen theologians and historians based in Germany, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. The editorial board members, almost all of whom were gathered in Vancouver, discussed future directions for the journal, and in particular, how to further transatlantic cooperation. Kyle Jantzen, who almost single-handedly engineered the journal’s technical transformation from a newsletter sent out by an email list-serve to a web-based presence, gave an overview of the journal’s new features and the number of hits recent issues and articles have been receiving. Members also discussed the possibility of developing a continuously updated on-line data base that will compile the new publications in the field – journal articles, articles in edited volumes, edited volumes and monograph – from both sides of the Atlantic.

Last and most significantly, the concluding evening of the conference honored the pioneering work of John Conway, who has distinguished himself not only through his scholarly work but in his tireless efforts to bring together scholars from multiple disciplines and nations. Doris Bergen, Robert Ericksen, Steven Schroeder, Kyle Jantzen, and Gerhard Besier offered formal tributes in the course of Saturday evening.

Article Reprint: Björn Krondorfer, “Review of Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 2, June 2010

Article Reprint: Björn Krondorfer, “Review of Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.”

By Dr. Björn Krondorfer, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, USA

(This slightly corrected review appeared first in theologie.geschichte 4 (2009), http://aps.sulb.uni-saarland.de/theologie.geschichte/inhalt/2009/126.html, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.)

Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, 384 p., U$ 29,95, ISBN: 978-0-691-12531-2.

Just recently, Germany celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which brought to an end the GDR (East German government) and began the unification of Germany. This momentous political change quickly turned into debates about judicial and moral responsibility and the roles of history and memory—discursive ingredients quite familiar to postwar German attempts at coming to terms with the past. But from now on (1989 onwards) one could no longer talk about Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the singular but in the plural: making sense of the past now referred both to Nazism/Shoah as well to the dictatorial regime of the GDR.

For historians, the opening of the Wall translated into archival access not only to the staggering number of files bearing witness to the surveillance apparatus of the Stasi but also to documents related to the Nazi past in the neue Bundesländer (Eastern regional states) that had hitherto been stashed away. The old East German propagandistic argument that the Nazi past was a problem only in the capitalist West crumbled in light of the evidence of the popularity of Nazism in those Eastern regions in the 1930s and 1940s. For church historians, the states of Saxony and Thuringia became of special interest since these regional churches had propagated theologies that blended völkisch-nationalist inspirations with racist-antisemitic ideologies. Back then, theologians and men of the church had weighed in heavily in support of the National Socialist regime. After 1989, it became inevitable that a new chapter on contemporary German church history would be written: it would reassess the degree of complicity of the churches with völkisch ideologies—a project undertaken by a number of German researches on the history of church and theology on local and regional levels.

In the United States, theologians and religious studies scholars have had a long-standing interest in questions of ideological complicity of the German churches in the Nazi regime, not least spurred by Robert Ericksen’s Theologians under Hitler (1985). In 1996, historian Doris Bergen’s Twisted Cross expanded the research to a social and gendered analysis of the movement of “German Christians” (pro-Nazi faction of Protestant churches). In the last ten years, a new generation of American historians (not theologians!)–among them Matthew Hockenos, Kevin Spicer, Beth Griech-Pollele, Richard Steigmann-Gall, and James McNutt —has further probed the infiltration of Nazism into church and religion and investigated the continuing effects of antisemitism on postwar Germany theology.

With Susannah Heschel’s 2008 publication, The Aryan Jesus, the scholarship will yet again move a significant step forward. Heschel, who is professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, synthesizes the various strands of scholarly approaches by looking at a specific group of “theologians under Hitler” within their historical embeddedness in the Nazi regime and the German university system. Her research does not stop in the year 1945 but also traces the postwar careers in West and East Germany of the men who had espoused antisemitic and völkisch theologies. In the sense that The Aryan Jesus could not have been written earlier, it is a groundbreaking work and a culmination of Heschel’s long research (which she started in 1991). The book is also the result of political changes that gave access to secreted-away church documents in the GDR as well as of new scholarly developments in the United States that created fresh conceptual frameworks for the assessment of historical material.

In her previous work, Heschel has repeatedly called attention to the many instances of theological and moral failure of German theologians during the rise of National Socialism. Rather than providing a bulwark against ideologies of hatred and exclusion—ideologies that were eventually translated into a genocidal program—churches and theologians frequently participated in and contributed to ruthlessly exclusionary systems of thought and action. Heschel frequently inserts a passionate voice into her meticulous research, which is also discernible in The Aryan Jesus. Here, she hones in on the complicity of a group of Protestant theologians who were instrumental in the creation and operation of the Entjudungsinstitut inJena, the “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence of German Church Life” (from now on “Institute”). Under the political/organizational leadership of pastor Siegfried Leffler and the academic/theological leadership of Walter Grundmann, the Institute was the product of a concerted effort to unite the “German Christians” of Saxony and Thuringia and, beyond this regional goal, to “forge an alliance [with] the larger world of academic scholarship in the field of theology” (201). The Institute became, in today’s language, a kind of think-tank for articulating a theology that aimed at reconciling Christianity with the racist-völkisch agenda of Nazism. Furthermore, it provided scholarly credentials to the efforts of dejudaizing Christianity, thus legitimizing the removal of Jews from German society.

Heschel’s archival research is placed alongside a conceptual grid of race theory and of modernizing trends that advance antisemitic research agendas. This makes for engaging reading. What emerges is a dense and fascinating portrait of a segment of Nazi Germany about which, until recently, not much had been known. Rich in detail about the lives of individual theologians and the institutional work of an organization, The Aryan Jesus also provides conceptual perspectives for understanding the historical narrative in a larger frame. Overall, these two strands (archival research/conceptual grid) complement each other well, but at times the book suffers from interpretive claims that sweep aside a more careful look at the historical data. It is at these junctures that Heschel’s passionate voice seems to get the better of her scholarly prose.

Historical Narrative

The primary substance of The Aryan Jesus rests on two pillars: the work of the Institute as well as its academic director, Walter Grundmann.

Grundmann, professor of New Testament inJena, who had completed his dissertation under Gerhard Kittel, was a prolific writer who wanted to prove the non-Jewish identity of Jesus and the pro-völkisch nature of Christianity. No other theologian better exemplifies the personal involvement in the ideological enterprise of dejudaizing German Christianity. Grundmann was actively engaged in formulating a völkisch theology and in widening the Institute’s political reach, eager to make Christianity palatable to a Nazi leadership—even when the Nazi elite increasingly distanced itself from the Institute’s work. After 1945, Grundmann portrayed himself as a victim of Nazism and, surprisingly, managed to regain respectable positions in the Thuringian church—a fact that demonstrates the successful reintegration of compromised men in the GDR. Perhaps even more surprisingly, Grundmann became an informer for the Stasi, partly because of his continued animosity toward former Confessing Church members. His successful postwar rehabilitation also sheds light on the continuity of anti-Jewish thought patterns in postwar German theology–albeit now cleansed from any overt racist and antisemitic attitudes.

As important as Grundmann’s role had been in the work of the Institute, he was not the only influential figure in its creation. Conservative pastors, some of whom had been members of the paramilitary Free Corps and later became spokespeople for various nationalist causes, were instrumental in the establishment of the Institute. Foremost among them were Siegfried Leffler and, earlier, Julius Leutheuser; both men knew that they could count on the support of people in the church hierarchy, among them Martin Sasse, bishop of Thuringia. Once established, the Institute drew on the wide support of academic theologians across Germany, among them the more notorious theologians Wolf Meyer-Erlach, Walter Birnbaum, Heinz Erich Eisenhuth, and Heinz Hunger as well as people like Johannes Leipoldt (New Testament) and Johannes Hempel (Old Testament). A younger cohort of theologians did their academic work under the mentorship of these men, like Hans-Joachim Thilo, doctoral student of Grundmann and Eisenhuth, who later made a name for himself as practical theologian and therapist in Hamburg. In Heschel’s words, these theologians “represented a spectrum of generational and demographic patterns as well as areas of research within theology” (166). Much of the information on the careers and attitudes of individual theologians is contained in Chapter 4, where Heschel introduces a host of theologians compromised by National Socialism beyond the Institute itself (including Grundmann’s teachers Adolf Schlatter and Gerhard Kittel). Chapter 5 looks at the faculty of Jena where the Institute had found its home, and Chapter 6 describes the reintegration efforts of many of the compromised theologians in East and West Germany.

The second pillar of Heschel’s archival research is the Institute itself: how it came into being, what function it had, and what role it aspired to assume within National Socialism. Chapter 3 describes the multiple projects that the Institute staff initiated and oversaw. It was a huge operation of cleansing and purging: it encompassed the Gospels, prayers, hymnals, catechism, liturgy, and Sunday school materials. References to Judaism and Jews were expunged or exchanged for a new nationalist-völkisch language. Words like Zion, Hosanna, or Jerusalem became victims of the obsessively anti-Judaic and antisemitic censors, indicating how wide a net the Institute tried to cast in its efforts to dejudaize Christianity, far beyond mere academic theologizing.

Heschel mentions the important elements of the Institute’s work, and her research might be detailed enough for an English-speaking audience to understand the extent of the Institute’s ambitions without getting lost in the complexity of local and regional proceedings. Indeed, the English language reviews of The Aryan Jesus that have appeared so far repeatedly praise the thoroughness of her research and frequently provide content summaries of the book’s findings (most extensively in Kevin Madigan’s review in JAAR 77/3 [September 2009], but also in Paula Fredriksen [www.tabletmag.com] and Daniel Harrington [America Magazine, Feb. 16, 2009]).

It may be helpful to know that during the same year as the publication of The Aryan Jesus, another comprehensive study on Grundmann and the “Entjudungsinstitut” was completed. This study relied on the same archival sources and was conducted during the same time period as Heschel’s work. In 2008, Oliver Arnhold, who had first reported on his findings in a 1994 Examensarbeit, submitted his dissertation on the subject at Paderborn University. The 800-page manuscript, to be published in two volumes in the series of “Studien zu Kirche und Israel,” is entitled Die Entjudung des religiösen Lebens als Aufgabe deutscher Theologie und Kirche: Die Thüringer “Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen” und das “Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben” (Berlin: Institut Kirche und Judentum, 2010). Arnhold, like Heschel, introduces the lives and careers of important figures within the inner and outer circles of the Institute, studies their internal differences and spheres of influence, and traces some of their postwar fates.

At the core of Arnhold’s thesis—and here it differs from The Aryan Jesus—is the organizational structure of the Institute. Arnhold reconstructs in minute detail the Institute’s various branches and projects, its financial structure and internal hierarchy, the infightings and rivalries. Saturated with quotes and footnotes, the picture that emerges in Arnhold’s thesis is far more complex than that of The Aryan Jesus. Although the details sometimes make for tiring reading, the attention given to the various factions and rivalries within the German Christian movement and among the political and spiritual founders of the Institute disallow for the same linear and unifying narrative that Heschel presents. Three valuable appendices complete Arnhold’s study: one lists the names of the Institute staff (according to Arnhold, about 180 people worked at one time or another for the Institute); a second contains short biographies of people relevant to the German Christian movement and those within the Institute’s reach; and the third provides a systematic overview of the Institute’s research projects, committees, and work groups. Arnhold’s work will be another indispensable source for understanding the place and influence of the Entjudungsinstitut.

Conceptual Grid

Besides the difference in emphasis—with Heschel widening the lens to take in the larger landscape of Nazi-infested theologies, and Arnhold focusing the lens on the Institute’s organizational structure and micro-historical development—the two authors differ in yet another way. Whereas Arnhold keeps his study very much within the limits of the history of the “Kirchenbewegung Deutsche Christen” (the branch of German Christians in Thuringia), Heschel reads the theological debates as part of a modernization effort, arguing that German Protestant theologians under Hitler used racial thinking as a way to stay relevant for “the new political and cultural atmosphere of the Third Reich” (26).

Two strategies, according to Heschel, were operative in the theological battle for recognition: First, Protestant theologians racialized Christianity and, second, aryanized Jesus. This is the conceptual grid laid out for the reader in the Introduction and Chapter 1 of The Aryan Jesus. Heschel locates the crucial role of the Institute within this grid. “The theology of the Institute,” she writes, “[took] over elements of Nazi racial ideology to bolster and redefine the Christian message” (8), while a non-Jewish Jesus became the “anchor of the Christian identity of Germans, and as Aryan, of the Germanic identity of Christianity” (65). Thus, the “Institute theologians” were able to legitimate “the Nazi conscience through Jesus” (66).

By conceptualizing the issues beyond the pale of a narrow church study, Heschel can apply to her archival materials theoretical frameworks sensitive to gender issues and (post)colonialism. The aryanization of Jesus, for example, is read within a history that began with German romanticism in the nineteenth century, rendering Jesus increasingly nationalist and masculinist over against a stereotyping of a disloyal, feminized Judaism. Keeping this context in mind, the racial construction of a Jesus devoid of Jewishness, which Grundmann and others proclaimed, must be seen less as a Nazi invention but, rather, as a radicalization and racialization of anti-Jewish ideas already present in German culture. “Nazi ideology,” Heschel writes, was itself a “form of supersessionism, a usurpation and colonization of Christian theology, especially its antisemitism, for its own purpose. The theology of the Institute was a similar effort at supersessionism in reverse” (8).

These are helpful suggestions for thinking through the bizarre maze of theological thought that strikes today’s readers as fanciful aberrations and lethal fantasies. It is altogether plausible to regard modernity’s antisemitism as a secular version of supersessionism: the theological supersessionism of old was replaced by racial supersessionism that emerged in the nineteenth century. Under Nazism, in turn, racial supersessionism was retranslated into theological paradigms, seeking removal of the Jewish “stain” from its traditions. For German theologians who bought into and promoted such a racialized Christianity, there was little left that would have enabled them to oppose or resist a program that eventually called for the physical annihilation of Jews.

Limitations

The explanatory power of Heschel’s conceptual grid, however, has limits due to her occasional circular reasoning and a tendency to make sweeping claims. For example, Heschel argues that Nazism is an inverse form of Christian theological supersessionism (“Nazism itself sought a supersessionist position in relation to Christianity”; 23), while also asserting that racialized Christianity is an inverse form of Nazi racial supersessionism. The inherent circularity of such argumentation recalls the irresolvable chicken-or-egg question (what came first: Nazi racialism or theological antisemitism?). Such indeterminacy permits Heschel to allude to the Institute’s and its theologians’ implication in the Holocaust without backing it up with more documentary evidence. On the one hand, the author suggests that the Institute’s influence was instrumental in the implementation of the genocidal program. She writes: “the Institute statements regarding Jews and Judaism were mirrors, in Christianized language, of the official propaganda issued by the Reich during the course of the Holocaust” and they had a “far deeper resonance than that spoken by a politician or journalist.” On the other hand, she inserts disclaimers about any direct linkage, cautioning the reader that “one cannot prove that the Institute’s propaganda helped cause the Holocaust” (14-16). Such rhetorical wavering remains on the suggestive level; it also results in an overestimation of the political effectiveness of the Institute. Readers need to keep in mind that despite the radicalization of the rhetoric coming out of the Institute after 1940, it increasingly became politically ineffective during the war years. German historian Manfred Gailus writes in his review of The Aryan Jesus (H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net [Sept. 2009]) that Heschel’s conclusion about the Institute is not sustainable: It did not, as Heschel argues, reach its “zenith of influence and power” (282) during the war—despite the fact that its staff, and Grundmann among them, mightily vied for such influence. The German Christian movement, within which the Institute must be seen, had passed its peak by the time the war started. What Heschel and Arnhold successfully point out, however, is that the German Christian movement did not simply fade away after 1936 (as it sometimes is assumed), but remained a strong and organized force throughout the Nazi regime.

On other occasions, one senses the author’s moral impatience with the material. When, for example, she quotes Siegfried Leffler—a dangerously ideological and unsympathetic figure—she jumps to a conclusion that seems to be driven more by her passionate dislike of Nazi theologians than by her discernible eye as a scholar of the history of theology. At a meeting of theologians in Dresden in 1936, Leffler—one of the driving forces behind the Institute and the Thuringia German Christians–voiced his opinion that, as a Christian, one might have to kill Jews. The attending theologians (Paul Althaus among them) apparently did not take Leffler to task and, as far as the documents reveal, remained silent. Such silence is, in hindsight, a troubling moral failure. But does it support Heschel’s judgment when she writes that this “lack of outrage is evidence that ridding Germany of Jews had become an acceptable point of discussion among theologians, even when murder was proposed as a technique for achieving it” (10)? Does a non-response to an outrageous opinion already prove acceptance of such a position? Does it really make sense to claim that Protestant theologians already considered the murder of Jews five years before the Nazi leadership decided on the Endlösung, their final genocidal program? Most theologians under Hitler–despite their racism and antisemitism and their wish to dejudaize Christianity and, concomitantly, remove Jews from Germany—usually shied away from articulating support for the physical murder of Jews. It does not diminish the outrage we should feel today about Leffler’s homicidal imagination (and, perhaps, intent), but it does not yet prove genocidal consent. Similarly, a sentence like “the Nuremberg Laws could easily be read as upholding classical Christian values” is prone to too many misunderstandings to be helpful, especially since the author does not elucidate this sweeping claim. In my own work on German theologians, I know of the temptation to disrupt with moral disapproval the callousness that speaks through historical documents of this time, so I understand how such statements can enter into scholarly prose. Yet as scholars we need to indicate when we assess a situation historically and when we insert our personal judgment.

The different conceptual frameworks in the studies of Heschel and Arnhold lead the authors toward drawing different conclusions even when they arrive at a similar analysis. Both studies make clear that it is no longer viable to portray the Protestant German church struggle in terms of starkly opposing groups—here the steadfast Confessing Church, there the corrupted German Christian, and in the middle the non-committal “intact churches.” Both Heschel and Arnhold agree that the study of the archival materials on the Institute and Grundmann demonstrates how deeply antisemitic thought had penetrated German regional churches and academic theologies. The question of whether the Institute played a key role in Nazism or whether its radicalization of a völkisch-antisemitic theology had limited political impact may not be fully answerable yet. But, as Arnhold points out, we know now that the Institute enjoyed the initial support of eleven (!) regional churches.

Arnhold and Heschel generally agree on the fact that multiple layers of antisemitic, völkisch, nationalist, and racist thought had affected to some degree most German theologians, bishops, pastors, and lay people during the Third Reich. This mixture of poisonous discourse was, to use Heschel’s phrase, the “lingua franca of the Nazi era” (7) and it was employed across a wide spectrum of people, even those who opposed Hitler. Arnhold and Heschel, however, interpret the function and role of this “lingua franca” differently. While Arnhold uses the widespread employment of a racist-völkisch-antisemitic language to emphasize the rivalries between different factions of the German Christians, Heschel uses it to argue for the unifying power of such discourse. According to Heschel, the importance of the “lingua franca” was its exclusionary function: by removing Jews and dejudaizing Christianity, German Christians succeeded in proclaiming unity with their own national community. “Antisemitism,” she writes, “was the glue that joined the various theological method and impulses and also brought passion to religion” (66). Though Heschel occasionally concedes that antisemitism was also used as a “tactic in the rhetorical battles among the different Christian factions” (7), she really emphasizes the unifying effect of the theologians’ racialized discourse. In the Third Reich, theologians “translated the often inchoate meaning of Nazism into a substantive discourse on Christian ritual and theology, giving Nazism religious and moral authority” (16).

Arnhold, on the other hand, does not see so much unity as disunity at work. Although his study is not sufficiently deliberate in teasing out this issue in theoretical terms, throughout he points to the multiple differences among the various völkisch-racist-nationalist positions. Theologians across a broad spectrum referred to a lingua franca which–however appallingly similar and bizarre to modern ears–was then understood in its nuances to stake out competing theological and political claims. The Institute was not free from such competition: it was not an exemplary place for völkisch unity but was steaming with political conflicts and personal rivalries. Arnhold emphasizes—more pronouncedly than Heschel—that the Institute was eventually neglected by the Nazi leadership. The more the Institute was ignored, the more its founders and theologians radicalized their thinking in the hope that, one day, they would regain favor in the eyes of the party. The firmer the secularized Nazi leaders proceeded with the implementation of the genocidal program, the less relevant church and theologians became in their eyes.

Together with previously published studies on aspects of Grundmann and the Entjudungsinstitut (by scholars like Siegele-Wenschkewitz, Roland Deines, Peter von der Osten Sacken), both Heschel’s and Arnhold’s important works contribute to a fuller understanding of German church history in general and of the Nazi-infested German Christian movement in particular. The special merit of Heschel’s book, in addition to her historical research, lies in the broadening of the issues, whether these concern patterns of antisemitism in modernity, race and colonialism, and the gendered dynamics hidden away in the formation of national and religious identities. Future research on the effects of genocidal and totalitarian mentalities on theology and the church cannot sidestep The Aryan Jesus.