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Conference Report: Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories, Professional Interpretations

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 18, Number 4 (December 2012)

Conference Report: Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories, Professional Interpretations, Capetown, South Africa, 20-22 August 2012

By Doris Bergen, University of Toronto

This conference, sponsored by the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research at the University of Cape Town in association with the South African Holocaust and Genocide Foundation, revolved around the theme, “personal trajectories, professional interpretations.” In keeping with this, the organizers – Susannah Heschel, Michael Marrus, Milton Shain, and Christopher Browning – invited participants to reflect on connections between their life experience and their scholarship. Each of the sixteen speakers tackled this challenge in a different way. The result was an intense and stimulating three days with a surprising number of presentations that addressed religion, specifically Christianity and Judaism. My report focuses on those parts of the conference most relevant to contemporary church history.

Robert Ericksen spoke most directly to the history of Christianity, in a paper titled “Pastors and Professors: Assessing Complicity and Unfolding Complexity.” Ericksen asked whether the churches and universities as a whole were complicit in Nazi crimes. “Yes,” he answered. Their praise for Hitler was genuine, he maintained; their lack of resistance was evidence of overall support; and they played a significant role by granting the regime a kind of public permission for its existence and its actions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s family never went to church, Ericksen noted, so “he didn’t catch that virus.” Ericksen’s presentation was not as personal as many of the others, although he began by presenting some formative moments, among them an hour-long conversation in 1989 with Emanuel Hirsch’s son. The topic: had Hirsch senior been a Nazi?

My paper was on “Protestants, Catholics, Mennonites, and Jews: Identities and Institutions in Holocaust Studies.” I used my research on the Volksdeutschen and the Wehrmacht chaplains to argue for the importance of ambiguous categories and institutional dynamics. Most relevant for our context, I analyzed how the chaplaincy served to legitimate the German war of annihilation. Rather than the familiar notions of “silent bystanders,” I showed Christians as participants – sometimes willing, sometimes reluctant – in the destruction of Jewish lives. I did not attribute these insights to the fact I am a “Mennonite farm girl from Saskatchewan” (as I was once introduced at a conference), but I did learn something about how religious institutions function from a decade at Notre Dame.

Karl Schleunes’s presentation, “Wrestling with the Holocaust,” looked back to publication in 1970 of The Twisted Road to Auschwitz. Often described as a foundational “functionalist” work, Schleuenes’s original edition did not even include the word “Holocaust.” But it did inspire him to contemplate teaching a course on the subject, which he began to do in 1988, under the heading, “Holocaust: History and Meaning.” His religious upbringing, Schleunes told us, played a key role. He grew up a German Protestant in small-town Wisconsin, where he heard echoes of the Nazi era. The gospel accounts of the crucifixion – “May his blood be upon us and our children” – the myth of Jews as Christ-killers – these notions were deeply embedded in Christianity, Schleuenes said, not only in Luther’s “On the Jews and Their Lies,” but in the American Bible belt. When he tried to answer the question, “Why the Jews?,” he found the only way to do so was to begin with Christianity, a painful confrontation for many of his students.

But if Christian anti-Judaism were so crucial, asked Steven Aschheim, why did the Holocaust occur only in the 1940s? You can’t have continuity and uniqueness at the same time, he insisted. In his presentation, “Autobiography, Experience, and the Writing of History,” Aschheim emphasized the “massively transgressive nature of the Shoah.” It is not so much Judaism as “Jewishness” that interests him, he said, and the Germans who appealed most to him – Marx, Freud, Einstein, Kafka – were makers of modern universal thought whom he long didn’t even know were Jewish. Instead they embodied a humanizing impulse. Aschheim, influenced by his childhood in South Africa and disillusioned with what he called the naïve Zionism of his youth, is currently writing a book on the political economy of empathy.

Antony Polonsky, who grew up just a few blocks from Aschheim, titled his talk, “From Johannesburg to Warsaw: How I Came to Write a Three-Volume History of the Jews of Poland and Russia.” Polonsky turned not to Zionism but to Communism, and he too grew disillusioned. In 1967-68 he identified with Polish students’ calls for democratic reform, and it pained him when the ANC supported the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia. Solidarity friends encouraged him to contact Jews in Poland, and in the 1980s he got involved in efforts to bridge the division between Jewish and Polish histories. His goal: to produce and foster scholarship that was neither sentimental nor negative.

David Cesarani gave one of the most personal presentations, under the tantalizing title, “Tony Judt and Me: Autobiographical Reflections on Writing History, the Holocaust, and Hairdressing.” Highlighting parallels between his youth and Judt’s, Cesarani offered a glimpse into what it meant to grow up Jewish in Britain, where immigrants from many parts of the world crossed paths and where class, accent, and district of origin obstructed mobility. (Judt’s mother Stella grew up in a working-class district speaking Cockney; she was “very discreet about her Jewishness.”)

In “Holocaust and Comparative History” Steve Katz took a different approach and brought in his personal details as jokes. (While at Cambridge Katz played cricket for his College, which made him “wicket keeper for Jesus.”) Katz’s main point was about the Holocaust’s singularity. With regard to the structure of mass murder, he contended, the Holocaust is distinct. In every other case, a central idea causes the violence but also limits it. Katz offered the example of the witch craze, which he described as rooted in Christian misogyny. But the Church found a way to domesticate the threat of women’s sexuality and offered not only Eve the seductress but also the Virgin Mary. The same is true of Christian antisemitism, Katz maintained: the Church did not murder the Jewish people; the Christian vision of Jews was dialectical. No comparable dialectic operated in the Shoah, Katz argued. For Hitler the Jewish issue was central, so every time there was a choice between the racially genocidal program and other options, the racially genocidal program won out.

In her paper, “From Lucy Dawidowicz to Timothy Snyder: Holocaust Studies Viewed from the Perspective of Jewish Studies,” Susannah Heschel provided a challenging and deeply humane perspective. She grew up among German Jewish refugees, and half her family are Hasidic rebbes. Yet her father’s friends included Christian theologians too, she noted, and he showed no bitterness or resentment. For him religion was the most important factor against racism and war. Heschel discovered the problems in Christian theology as a college student when she read Bultmann, she recalled. Protestant theologians were fascinated by racial theory and considered it modern and scientific. After the war the German Christians melted into the wider culture, and Christianity became a cover for old ideas – that the Jewish god was a violent god who commanded Jews to kill non-Jews; that Nazi obedience to authority came from Judaism.

Meanwhile, Heschel indicated, the field has its problems: Holocaust courses attract some people looking for an emotional experience, and instrumentalization of the Holocaust has become a “nightmare.” Where Dawidowicz promoted a sense of Jewish pride in being victims, Snyder’s book has a quality of ressentiment, and his explicit descriptions of horrors rob people of their humanity. For her part, Susannah said, she is returning to the sensibilities of her childhood. She misses the gentleness, piety, and holiness of the Hasidic rebbes and seeks to regain a sense of disbelief. At the same time, she concluded, yearning for religion cannot substitute for the hard work of democratic politics.

For those of us who were in South Africa for the first time, one of the most stimulating parts of the conference was the panel on “Nazism and Holocaust: Intersections with South African Experience.” Though religion was not a main focus, it came up here, too. According to David Welch, there is little evidence that Nazism had a direct influence on apartheid ideas. Certainly all of the rightist organizations were antisemitic, he observes, and the Afrikaans churches did not try to stop the Nazi virus from spreading in their communities. Still, apart from a few dissident clergy, they rejected the notion of a Nazi-style dictatorship. Milton Shain agreed that membership in South African Fascist groups was small but noted their high visibility. They exerted pressure against Jewish refugees from Germany and fueled wider attacks on Jews as promoters of miscegenation and enemies of the Afrikaner nation. When a ship with 500 Jewish refugees arrived in 1936, professors at Stellenbosch University led a protest.

An important intervention regarding Christianity came from a member of the audience, the freelance writer Claudia Braude. What about the discourse of forgiveness, she wanted to know. Hadn’t it been invoked in South Africa by people responsible for all manner of crimes, from corruption to murder, to push the burden of “reconciliation” onto the shoulders of those already victimized? In South Africa, Braude maintained, a Christian “template of forgiveness” has reinforced a culture of impunity.

Conference Report: “Christianity During the Era of Total War,” Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, January 7, 2011

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2011

Conference Report: “Christianity During the Era of Total War,” Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, January 7, 2011, Boston, MA.

Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

This session, sponsored by the Conference Group for Central European History and moderated by Donald Dietrich (Boston College), spoke directly to the theme of the 2011 AHA meeting: “History, Society, and the Sacred.” It was an international panel, with members from the United States,Canada, and the U.K. Although scheduled for the first time slot on the opening day, it drew an audience of some twenty people, among them military, diplomatic, and women’s historians as well as historians of British imperialism,France, and the U.S.In other words, in both content and participation, the session embodied the degree to which study of religion has entered the historical mainstream.

Because of a delay in setting up the PowerPoint projector, the papers were given in reverse chronological order, so that the presentation on World War II by Lauren Faulkner (U of Notre Dame) preceded the papers by Patrick Houlihan (U of Chicago) and Michael Snape (U of Birmingham) on World War I. This switch highlighted the benefits of discussing the World Wars together while it underscored the differences in how Christian responses to those two conflicts are assessed.

Under the title “Priests in Dark Times: Catholicism, Nazism, and Vernichtungskrieg, 1939-1945,” Lauren Faulkner examined the thousands of Roman Catholic priests and seminarians who served in the Wehrmacht as chaplains, medics, and in some cases, in active combat. She drew on personal accounts, including wartime correspondence and postwar memoirs and interviews, to argue that these men, led by the energetic and dedicated Catholic field vicar-general Georg Werthmann, aimed above all to care for the religious needs of soldiers. Devotion to their vocation and to the souls of the men they served drove them to make compromises with their Nazi masters to the extent that the contradiction they lived became all but invisible to them. Indeed, in Faulkner’s analysis, faith in God not only bolstered the courage of priests and seminarians and made them an anchor for the soldiers around them; it enabled them to exculpate Nazi crimes, justify their own lack of resistance, and present their participation in the war as suffering to preserve the “great Christian legacy.”

Patrick Houlihan’s focus was not failure but success, in this case the surprising effectiveness of Catholic chaplains in the Austro-Hungarian war effort of 1914-1918. In “Imperial Frameworks of Military Religion: Catholic Military Chaplains of Germany and Austria-Hungary during the First World War,” Houlihan called for a “more nuanced cultural history of religion for the losing powers.” Modernist depictions of the Habsburg chaplains as bumbling hypocrites – most famously, in Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Schweik – have influenced subsequent interpretations, but in Houlihan’s view they should not be taken at face value. In fact, he showed, chaplains of the Habsburg Army were well organized under the leadership of Emmerich Bjelik, commander of the apostolic field vicariate, and attuned to the changing needs of soldiers. In contrast to Prussian divisions, which were served by two chaplains, a Catholic and a Protestant, divisions of the Austro-Hungarian army had between twelve and twenty-six Catholic chaplains. In rural regions, notably Tyrol, Houlihan indicated, military chaplains, and Catholic religiosity in general, provided meaning and stability amidst the upheavals of war and defeat.

Michael Snape’s analysis of “The YMCA and the British Army in the First World War” showed the Young Men’s Christian Association as a major source of practical care for the British soldier. In makeshift huts and marquees, the Y’s workers provided postcards and notepaper, hosted recreational activities, distributed refreshments, sold cigarettes, held prayer services, and dispensed good cheer, not only on the Western Front but wherever the war took British forces, from the Dardanelles to Italy and East Africa. The result, Snape argued, was a significant contribution to sustaining British morale. Military commanders valued the Y as what Sir Arthur Keysall Yapp, the YMCA’s wartime National Secretary, called “the embodied goodwill of the British people towards its beloved army.” There was a cost, Snape showed: the Y ended the war in debt, its financial integrity under investigation (charges were eventually disproved), and dependent on the help of people previously outside its purview: women, liberal Protestants, and agnostics. Yet it also emerged from the war a truly national institution.

In her comments, Doris Bergen (U of Toronto) made four observations that linked these stimulating papers. First, she noted that all three presenters expressed their central arguments in terms of success and failure. But can a success-failure binary do justice to these complex situations? Second, she pointed out the contrast between the moral tone of Faulkner’s assessment and the more pragmatic nature of Houlihan’s and Snape’s conclusions. This difference mirrors tendencies in the historiography of the two World Wars, but hearing these papers together suggests how productive it might be to identify and interrogate conventions in our respective subfields. Third, Bergen emphasized the elusive nature of sources for studying wartime religiosity and the wonderful work all three speakers did to locate fascinating and challenging materials. Finally, Bergen highlighted the papers’ connections to “current events” – in their awareness of the ways Christianity is embedded in relations to its “others”; in their empathy for people who suffer in wartime; and in the increased public interest in the subject of our panel, given developments in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the lively Q&A that followed, almost everyone in the room spoke. Gerhard Weinberg reminded us that history is lived looking forward but written looking back. He and others thanked the panellists for giving us ways to address the challenges that fact poses for understanding the history of Christianity in the face of total war.

Review of Richard Bonney, ed. and trans., Confronting the Nazi War on Christianity: The Kulturkampf Newsletters, 1936-1939

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 16, No. 4, December 2010

Review of Richard Bonney, ed. and trans., Confronting the Nazi War on Christianity: The Kulturkampf Newsletters, 1936-1939. Studies in the History of Religious and Political Pluralism, Vol. 4 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), 578 pp. ISBN 978-3-03911-904-2.

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

This volume presents a fascinating primary source on church-state relations in National Socialist Germany from the remilitarization of the Rhineland in early 1936 to the eve of World War II. The full title of the newsletters collected here was “Kulturkampf: News Bulletin of the Religious Policy of the Third Reich.” As Bonney explains in his introduction, these newsletters were published in London in English by the Kulturkampf Association, also known as the League for the Defence of Christianity, with funds from Erwin Kraft and encouragement from Bishop George Bell. Bonney estimates a circulation of about 2,500 copies. The English edition was translated from a French original, the work of German Catholic exiles in France. Karl Spiecker, a former chief of the German press service, was the editor. No doubt his experience was key in giving the bulletin its professional quality. Some of the newsletters have already been published in German, edited by the distinguished church historian Heinz Hürten: ‘Kurturkampf, Berichte aus dem Dritten Reich, Paris’. Eine Auswahl aus den deutschsprachigen Jahrgängen 1936-1939 (Regensburg: F. Pustet, 1988). Bonney’s book now makes this material available in English, along with some portions that Hürten did not include.

The newsletters are remarkable in their depth of coverage and analytical sophistication. Spiecker and his contributors, none of whom are identified, were surprisingly well informed on everything from international affairs to local developments. They devote what comes to almost 150 pages in the book to the Anschluß of Austria and its ramifications for the churches yet also note the significance of quotidian matters, such as the July 1938 attempt by a German merchant to “Aryanize” his daughter’s name, Judith, by lopping off the “h.” Consideration at three levels of courts left the outcome uncertain (416-7). Many of the newsletters reproduce passages, some of them extensive, from Nazi speeches and publications: Der Stürmer and Das Schwarze Korps, but also others that are no longer well known. Readers interested in any aspect of life in Nazi Germany in its understudied “middle period” are certain to find pertinent tidbits and possibly even major insights here.

The broad outline of the position presented in the newsletters is fairly predictable. Informed readers will be able to anticipate the central claims already from the titles – of Bonney’s volume, with its reference to the “Nazi War on Christianity” and of the newsletter, with its invocation of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf. The newsletters depict National Socialism as an ideological, institutional, and moral assault on Christianity that evolved from crude frontal attacks led by pagans and neo-pagans to a much more dangerous scheme to create a nazified, national church. For the people who assembled and distributed the bulletins, what must have been incredibly difficult and also risky work held out the promise of rallying forces beyond Germany in support of the churches, in particular the Roman Catholic Church and its most beleaguered elements. For Bonney, publishing this material now is a way to pay tribute to clergy who did not give in to Nazism (the book, like the German edition of Raul Hilberg’s Täter, Opfer, Zuschauer, is dedicated to Bernard Lichtenberg). It also appears to be a response to Richard Steigmann-Gall’s “revisionist position” (23), to which Bonney refers at numerous points.

Like every rich primary source, the Kulturkampf newsletters also contain surprises. The authors demonstrate an impressive grasp of the complex and dynamic connections between Nazi treatment of the churches and Hitler’s foreign policy. They devote a significant amount of space and understanding to developments within German Protestantism and to fostering a spirit of Christian solidarity. Rather than preaching the now familiar contention that the Roman Catholic hierarchy, led by an anti-CommunistVatican, settled for Hitler as the “lesser of two evils,” the newsletters explicitly reject that view. National Socialism was totalitarian, they insist, and as an ideologically conceived religion or substitute for religion, it posed an absolute and mortal threat with which there could be no compromise. The authors of the newsletters clearly recognized the centrality of antisemitism to the Nazi program, but in their analyses, the persecution of Jews is always a point of departure for discussion of the position of institutionalized Christianity. Most telling perhaps is the lengthy coverage of Hitler’s infamous speech of January 30, 1939, in which he “prophesied” that the next world war would result in the annihilation of Jewry. That part of Hitler’s tirade goes unremarked here, as the newsletters focus on another threat he made: that continued “misbehaviour” on the part of the churches would result in complete separation of church and state in Germany (488).

The usefulness of Bonney’s volume is unfortunately limited by the brevity of the introduction – much more could have been done to explain exactly what the newsletters were and how they were produced and received – and the paucity and unevenness of the footnotes. Nevertheless, this is a valuable contribution that provides much to ponder for all students of National Socialism.