Tag Archives: Kyle Jantzen

Review of Manfred Gailus, ed., Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 1 (March 2016)

Review of Manfred Gailus, ed., Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015). Pp. 260. ISBN 9783835316492.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Manfred Gailus’ newest contribution to the history of the German churches in the Third Reich is a collection of case studies of theologians, church leaders, and clergy whose writings or activities place them into the categories of perpetrators in or accomplices of the National Socialist regime. The various contributions are the product of a series of public lectures at the Topography of Terror in Berlin in 2013 and 2014. As such, none of the chapters in Täter und Komplizen in Theologie und Kirchen 1933-1945 represent new research. Nonetheless, the volume is more than the sum of its parts, in the way that it demonstrates the depth and breadth of the Christian support for and participation in Nazi Germany. As Gailus notes at the end of his introduction, millions of tourists come to Berlin every year, eager to see the sites of Nazi power and commemorations of Jewish suffering. When they come to the Berlin Cathedral or other historic church buildings in central Berlin, they ask questions about the role of the churches in the Third Reich. Gailus argues it is vitally important that the churches work through the issue of Christian complicity in Hitler’s Germany, in order to provide honest answers to these questions and find a healthy way forward.

Gailus-TaeterFollowing Manfed Gailus’ introductory chapter, there are nine chapters (three by Gailus, six by a variety of other scholars) and a theological afterward by Christoph Markschies, church historian, theologian, and former president of Humboldt University. The various chapters link thematically with one another in fruitful ways. Gailus starts things off with an analysis of the Day of Potsdam (March 21, 1933), the day on which Adolf Hitler opened the German parliament in the Garrison Church which had served Prussian monarchs for two hundred years. Drawing on his work in the 2011 book Zerstrittene “Volksgemeinschaft”: Glaube, Konfession und Religion im Nationalsozialismus, Gailus describes the Day of Potsdam as a great, joyful “Yes” spoken by German Protestantism to Hitler and his National Socialism government. He describes in particular the key role played by Otto Dibelius, General Superintendent of the Kurmark and leading Protestant churchman in the region. It was Dibelius who was the main speaker at a special worship service in the Nikolaikirche in central Berlin, attended by a majority of Protestant members of parliament and Reich President Hindenburg before they made their way to Potsdam for the opening of the Reichstag. Dibelius chose Romans 8:31 as his text: “If God be for us, who can be against us.” Since this was the same text used by the imperial court preacher at the outset of the Great War in 1914, Dibelius was consciously connecting the patriotic spirit of the First World War to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. While there were quiet notes of criticism in Dibelius’ message, none other than Hermann Goering shook his hand afterwards and declared it to be the best sermon he had ever heard (35-37).

Gailus makes a strong case for the Day of Potsdam as an important component in the revival of institutional Protestantism during the opening months of Nazi rule. Here the German Christian Movement played the leading role. One of example of this is Gailus’ description of a special “patriotic thanksgiving service” held by the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Memorial Parish on March 22. Meant to be an “ecclesiastical Potsdam,” the event depicted the German Christians as a mass movement parallel to National Socialism and celebrated the salvation of Germany from the “hell” of the godless Weimar Republic (41-42). In the end, Gailus explains the victory of the German Christians in the July 1933 church elections as the result of the fact that the majority of clergy and church people wanted this völkisch transformation, while the forces of opposition within the church were weak (46). “On the ‘Day of Postdam,’ half of society celebrated and acclaimed their ‘national awakening,’ while the other half of society was on the verge of being excluded, shackled, muzzled, and displaced” (47).

Film historian Ralf Forster follows up Gailus’ examination of the Day of Potsdam with a chapter analyzing the occasion as a propaganda event. Forster assesses the media coverage, particularly on radio and in newsreel footage. He notes the importance of the live radio broadcast of the day’s events and the many “special editions” of newspapers, some of which were printed later that same day, and were thus almost as current as the radio broadcasts. He also provides a detailed description of the newsreel footage of the Day of Potsdam, which brought the spectacle of the events at the Garrison Church to German moviegoers (57-60).

Next, editor Manfred Gailus contributes a second chapter, which shifts attention from the Day of Potsdam to the history of the takeover of Protestant church governments by the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, especially in Berlin. German Christians united the National Socialist world view with the Christian tradition of belief, seeking to make belief in Jesus and belief in Hitler fully compatible. Gailus explains how the German Christian Movement cultivated mass ritual as its centerpiece, focusing of the Germanization of Protestant liturgy and the introduction of an ecclesiastical cult of flags (74). While the German Christians were initially successful in seizing the reigns of Protestant church governments, by 1934 they faced serious opposition, and over time they fell out of favour among the Nazi elites. This, Gailus suggests, makes it easy to believe they were insignificant. Rather, he argues they were a mass movement which dominated North Germany, Middle Germany, and East Elbian Prussia during the 1930s (78).

Horst Junginger, a professor of religious studies at Leipzig University, draws on his research on religion and antisemitism during the Nazi era to recount the career of theologian Gerhard Kittel, who joined both the German Christian Movement and the Nazi Party in 1933. Kittel’s publication The Jewish Question committed him to the antisemitic struggle against emancipation and equality for Jews in Germany and in turn elevated racial research to a central place in the University of Tübingen, making it into a “bulwark against Judaism,” as Kittel himself declared (87). As the “Jewish Question” became a subject of scientific and scholarly research, Kittel followed this agenda throughout the Third Reich, publishing articles and giving lectures as late as 1943 and 1944 for the Ministry of Propaganda and German universities. In doing so, he brought Christian anti-Judaism into the service of racial antisemitism (103-105).

Thomas Forstner, who recently published Priester in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Identität und Lebenswelt des katholischen Pfarrklerus in Oberbayern 1918 bis 1945, contributes a chapter on the phenomenon of the so-called Brown Priests. These pro-Nazi clergy were few in number compared to their Protestant counterparts—Forstner discusses fewer than 150 of them (123-124). He notes that the Roman Catholic hierarchy distanced itself from these priests, who were drawn to Nazism out of national sentiment or opportunism (not least to shed their celibacy) (129). Forstner discusses Joseph Roth and Albert Hartl as two examples of Catholic priests who engaged deeply with National Socialism.

Hansjörg Buss, author of “Entjudete” Kirche: Die Lübecker Landeskirche zwischen christlichem Antijudaismus und völkischem Antisemitismus (1918-1950), carries the Protestant story forward with an assessment of the role of Hanns Kerrl, Hitler’s Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, and his assistant, Hermann Muhs. He portrays Kerrl as a loyal servant, trying to accomplish the impossible task of unifying German Protestantism under church committees into order to fashion a centralized Reich Church adapted to National Socialism (148-149). This effort collapsed by 1937, and Christians like Kerrl lost favour year by year in the face of opposition from anti-Christian ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg and Martin Bormann. Kerrl’s assistant Muhs, a member of the radical Thuringian wing of the German Christian Movement, suggested “an administrative dictatorship” to “annihilate the Confessing Church” (162). This he attempted to do in part through the use of the church finance office to put serious pressure on Confessing Church pastors and parishes.

Susannah Heschel, whose book The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany has received extensive attention in this journal (here, here, and here), provides a useful overview of her important work on Walter Grundmann and his Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. Through the Institute, Grundmann and others worked to develop an aryanized Christian confession for the Third Reich. Despite his leadership in such an obviously antisemitic venture, Grundmann retained his position within the Protestant church after 1945, even serving as an informer for the East German regime.

Manfred Gailus follows Susannah Heschel with a chapter on Karl Themel, Berlin pastor and race researcher. Themel was a member of the German Christian Movement, the SA, and the Nazi Party, eagerly taking up the position of “Expert for Race Research” with the Reich Interior Ministry. Working closely with the Reich Office for Geneological Research, Themel created an Office of Church Registers, Old Berlin. There they transferred the genealogical information of thousands of Berliners from these church records onto new identification cards, which were in turn used to check the Aryan ancestry of those who needed to prove their racial purity in order to take up various government positions. By 1941, Themel’s office had processed over 160,000 requests involving over 330,000 individuals, and had discovered over 2600 cases of Jewish ancestry—almost two cases per day, as Themel boasted late that year (209). Despite this direct participation in the implementation of Nazi antisemitic policy, Themel was rehabilitated by 1949, eventually taking up a pastorate in rural Brandenburg, then migrating back into archival work for the Berlin-Brandenburg church province! Upon his death, his work collecting and copying church registries in Berlin during the Third Reich was lauded as a service to the archival branch of the church (213). Not until 2002 was Themel’s work publicly denounced by church leaders (215).

Thomas Kaufmann’s chapter on influential church historian Erich Seeberg’s connections to the Nazi Party and the German Christian Movement offers another window into the ways individual theologians and church leaders navigated the Nazi era. In Seeberg’s case, his career revolved around research into transconfessional “German piety” which could be adapted easily to Nazi ideology (228). Seeberg studied Meister Eckhart and German mysticism, then applied his völkisch approach to the study of Martin Luther. Seeberg wanted to turn the Luther Renaissance into a “Luther Revolution.” This meant preaching a Luther who was “dangerous” and not “bourgeois” (229). Importantly, Seeberg also sought to recast theological education in a Nazi mold. His plans included revising theological curricula by abandoning historical-critical methodology and the study of the Hebrew language, replacing them with a “history of German piety” (241).

Finally, to complete the volume, Christoph Markschies writes on behalf of the Humboldt University Faculty of Theology, arguing that his institution still needs to engage in a thorough assessment of its activities during the Third Reich. This is a call very much in line with Gailus’ purpose for this volume, which is to demonstrate the extent to which German Protestants and (to a lesser extent) Catholics voluntarily adapted themselves to Hitler’s regime and participated in the National Socialist quest to eliminate German Jewry and thereby “purify” the German racial community. Gailus is driven by the conviction that the German churches still have much work to do in coming to terms with this history. This volume contributes substantially to his project, by compiling some of the best of current research into the German churches in the Nazi era. It also demonstrates that there is still much to do before those Berlin tourists receive proper answers to their questions about the German churches in the time of Hitler.

Share

Ferdinand Schlingensiepen and the Quest for the Historical Bonhoeffer

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 4 (December 2015)

Ferdinand Schlingensiepen and the Quest for the Historical Bonhoeffer

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

The Quest for the Historical Bonhoeffer [1]

In recent years, the field of Bonhoeffer studies has been dominated by debates about two biographies: Eric Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy and Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.[2] While members of the popular media and Christian commentators have generally lauded these stylish works, historians of the period as well as many Bonhoeffer scholars have generally been critical of them.

One of the reasons for this difference of opinion, argue Victoria J. Barnett and Andrew Chandler, is that many recent interpretations of Bonhoeffer have been driven by theology rather than history. As a result, often “the dramatic historical events of Bonhoeffer’s era and the individuals he encountered in ecumenical, political, church, and resistance circles serve primarily as the backdrop for the poignant personal and theological story that is center stage.”[3] Related to this is the mythology which quickly grew up around Bonhoeffer in the years after the war, when his books Cost of Discipleship and Letters and Papers from Prison established him as a serious biblical Christian and martyr, both of which were especially attractive to a North American audience. For better or worse, Bonhoeffer has received more attention than his historical roles in the German church struggle, resistance, or ecumenical world would merit. It is surely the power of his life, writing, and testimony that has accomplished this, thanks in good measure to the tireless efforts of his best friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge. Still, it means he is an easy figure to lift out of his historical context. Finally, a third factor which influences recent interpretations of Bonhoeffer is the contemporary prominence of Holocaust studies, which tempts authors to make the subject of Jewish persecution and annihilation more important to Bonhoeffer and other Protestant leaders than it actually was back in the day.[4] As Stephen Haynes argued in his 2004 work The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint, theological radicals, liberals, and conservatives have all identified Bonhoeffer as one of their own, a tradition only continued by Metaxas and Marsh.[5]

Schlingensiepen-DBLost in all of the attention paid to Eric Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy is the fact that an English-language translation Ferdinand Schlingensiepen’s 2006 biography of Bonhoeffer was also published in 2010.[6] Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance is surprisingly unknown and seldom reviewed. Even this journal—dedicated to twentieth-century German church history and replete with Bonhoefferiana—failed to assess either the original German version or the subsequent English translation. Nor can this oversight be explained on account of any inadequacy in the qualifications of the author or the quality of the research. The following analysis is both a compensation for the absence of a more timely review and an attempt to reconcile differing views of Bonhoeffer through a close analysis of Schlingensiepen’s work.

In his own review of the Metaxas and Marsh biographies, Schlingensiepen echoes the criticisms of Clifford Green,[7] Victoria J. Barnett,[8] and others. Moreover, he sums up the German scholarly frustration with the two American interpretations:

Marsh and Metaxas have dragged Bonhoeffer into cultural and political disputes that belong in a U.S. context. The issues did not present themselves in the same way in Germany in Bonhoeffer’s time, and the way they are debated in Germany today differs greatly from that in the States. Metaxas has focused on the fight between right and left in the United States and has made Bonhoeffer into a likeable arch-conservative without theological insights and convictions of his own; Marsh concentrates on the conflict between the Conservatives and the gay rights’ movement. Both approaches are equally misguided and are used to make Bonhoeffer interesting and relevant to American society. Bonhoeffer does not need this and it certainly distorts the facts.[9]

As his comments suggest, Schlingensiepen’s approach to the Bonhoeffer story is shaped very much by his own history in the German Protestant church. It would be hard to find a scholar with better credentials for writing a Bonhoeffer biography. Ferdinand Schlingensiepen’s father Hermann was a Confessing Church pastor who knew Bonhoeffer, who directed one of the Confessing Church seminaries, and who participated in the German church struggle. A pastor and theologian himself, Ferdinand maintained a close, fifty-year friendship with Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s confidante and biographer. Indeed, in the Acknowledgements, the author notes that Bethge realized his thousand-page biography was too long for most readers and asked Schlingensiepen to compose a shorter version which would update his own interpretation. Moreover, Schlingensiepen worked for former Confessing Church leader Kurt Scharf for a decade, knew various members of the extended Bonhoeffer clan, and employed the same editor as Bethge had worked with in the completion of his magisterial biography decades earlier.

All this makes Schlingensiepen intimately aware of the context in which Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived, learned, served, thought, wrote, and acted. His rich contextualization of Bonhoeffer influences the biography in two ways: first, Bonhoeffer is understood not as a lonely genius but in relationship to the many family members, friends, mentors, and colleagues who enriched in his life; second, Bonhoeffer’s theology and politics are developed in close connection to the German church struggle.

Bonhoeffer’s People

Schlingensiepen has much to say about the many people who contributed to Bonheffer’s life. His parents Karl and Paula and siblings Karl-Friedrich, Walter, Klaus, Ursula, Christine, Sabine, and Suzanne nurtured him, inspired him, failed to understand his decision to study theology, travelled with him, conspired with him against Hitler, advised him, corresponded with him, and supported him during his final years in prison. So too did his in-laws from the Delbrück, Dohnanyi, Schleicher, Leibholz, and Dreβ families. Indeed, Bonhoeffer’s entrance into the resistance movement is inconceivable without his family connections, and in particular those of brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, assistant to federal justice minister Franz Gürtner, brother Klaus Bonhoeffer, a high-ranking lawyer for Deutsche Lufthansa, brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher, an important official in the air travel ministry, and uncle Paul von Hase, a high-ranking army officer and the city commandant of Berlin.

Beyond immediate and extended family members, Schlingensiepen weaves a host of other characters into his Bonhoeffer biography. He describes Superintendent Max Diestel as the “discoverer of Bonhoeffer” who watched over his theological development, sent him abroad for life-changing experiences in ministry and education, and introduced him to ecumenical work (33-34). In Schlingensiepen’s account of Bonhoeffer’s time at Union Seminary in New York, the author focuses on four deeply influential friends, both at that time and later. Paul Lehmann, an American of German-Russian ancestry, developed a friendship with Bonhoeffer that lasted from their student days to the war years, even though Bonhoeffer resisted his plea to stay in the United States in 1939 (63-64, 70, 230, and 267). Frank Fisher was the American student who introduced Bonhoeffer to the vibrant but marginalized black church in New York (65, 70). Erwin Sutz was a Swiss student who introduced Bonhoeffer to Karl Barth and became both an ecumenical partner and a vital communication link for Bonhoeffer in Switzerland during the war (67-70, 87-88, 262). Finally, Jean Lasserre, a French student at Union Seminary, profoundly influenced Bonhoeffer’s thinking about both pacifism and the Sermon on the Mount and became a long-running partner in international and ecumenical dialogue (70-73, 93, 173-174).

As Schlingensiepen explains Bonhoeffer’s life, thought, and work, there are scores of other influential and often overlooked characters who make their appearances: scholars like Adolf von Harnack, Reinhold Seeberg, and especially Karl Barth; friends and coworkers like Franz Hildebrandt, Hermann Sasse and Wilhelm Vischer, Gertrud Staewen, Julius Rieger, and of course Eberhard Bethge; ecumenical contacts like Wilhelm Visser’t Hooft and Bishop George Bell; the patron Ruth von Kleist-Retzow; and Bonhoeffer’s students from Finkenwalde. Whether he was developing his theology, writing confessional statements, combatting German Christian opponents in the church struggle, educating theology students, engaging in ecumenical dialogue, or resisting Hitler, Bonhoeffer never worked alone. Schlingensiepen always places him among people and regularly shows how dependent Bonhoeffer was on others.

Several examples illustrate this. In the summer 1933, though the formulation of the Bethel Confession was assigned as a joint project to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hermann Sasse, Schlingensiepen points out how it was in fact Swiss Old Testament scholar Wilhelm Vischer who contributed the vital section on the people of Israel (134-136). Similarly, the author notes that while Martin Niemöller and twenty other pastors (Bonhoeffer included) founded the Pastors’ Emergency League later in 1933, the idea actually came from two country pastors, Eugen Weschke and Günter Jacob (137).

In 1934, Bonhoeffer spent much of his time combatting August Jäger, state commissioner for the Prussian provincial churches and the violent implementer of the German Christian takeover of the Old Prussian Union Church and attempted creation of a centralized, authoritarian Reich Church. As Martin Niemöller and the Pastors’ Emergency League fought against Jäger’s boss, German Christian leader and Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller, Bonhoeffer agitated in the same direction from London, where he was pastoring. Here Schlingensiepen introduces Bishop George Bell of Chichester, who supported Bonhoeffer by writing German President Hindenburg about Müller and Jäger. Schlingensiepen explains how Bonhoeffer wrote forcefully but unsuccessfully to his ecumenical partners in Geneva, asking them to oppose the Müller regime. It was then that Bell, who was president of the Universal Christian Council for Life and Work, sent around a pastoral letter to the member churches of the Council, denouncing the radical unconstitutional seizure of authority in various provincial churches in Germany. Subsequently, after the Barmen and Dahlem Synods, it was the initiative of Bell and through him also the Archbishop of Canterbury—both of whom spoke in person to the German ambassador to England—that pushed Hitler’s government into jettisoning Jäger (152-154, 158-160, and 164-167).

Schlingensiepen also shows Bonhoeffer’s connections to key women in this history who are generally overlooked by other Bonhoeffer scholars. First, when Bonhoeffer began teaching theology in the Confessing Church seminary in Finkenwalde, he met and became friends with Ruth von Kleist-Retzow. She was a Pomeranian noblewoman who went on to introduce him to local aristocrats, to substantially support the underfunded seminary, and to open her home to Bonhoeffer for holidays and writing retreats (180, 244, 247, and 281). Finally, in 1941, after Bonhoeffer heard about various Jewish rescue operations from his ecumenical friends in Switzerland, he returned to Berlin and told close friends about them. Among these was Gertrud Staewen, who had been his friend since the two had worked together with Karl Barth, advocating on behalf of persecuted theology professor Günther Dehn in 1931 and protesting at the Protestant National Synod in 1933 (101, 141). Schlingensiepen suggests that Bonhoeffer asked Staewen to serve as the key link in the rescue of Berlin Jews sometime in the summer of 1941—in short, to take over the work of Heinrich Grüber and Werner Sylten, both of whom had been thrown into concentration camps. Based on her correspondence, Staewen accepted this call, working together with others in Berlin to support Jews being deported and to help some of them go underground. As part of this work, she maintained regular contact with ecumenical partners in Switzerland and with Bonhoeffer, who encouraged her but could not participate in the rescue work directly, because of his involvement in the resistance (263-264). These are just a few examples of the many ways in which Ferdinand Schlingensiepen places Dietrich Bonhoeffer within the larger context of activists engaged in church-political battles, theological writing and training, and subversive political activities.

The German Church Struggle

The second noteworthy aspect of Schlingensiepen’s contextualization of Bonhoeffer is in the careful attention he pays to the German church struggle, from the Nazi seizure of power and rise of the German Christian Movement in 1933 to the end of Bonhoeffer’s leadership of the Finkenwalde seminary in 1937. The author writes of “the many fronts on which [Bonhoeffer] was fighting and the many groups of people with whom he wrestled, … a bewildering abundance of events.” Significantly, he argues that “it was during the chaotic, fateful year, 1933, that the course was set for the 12 years of Hitler’s dictatorship, and thus for everything that was to follow in Bonhoeffer’s life” (116). Having established the significance of events in 1933, Schlingensiepen goes on to describe the events of the church struggle in their necessary detail, avoiding the confusion that so often accompanies this conflict. The author begins with Bonhoeffer’s leadership speech of February 1, Hitler’s seizure of power, the rise of the German Christian Movement, and Bonhoeffer’s essay on “The Church and the Jewish Question,” in which he proposes three possible responses to state injustice: to call the state to account, to give aid to the victims, and ultimately, to not only “bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel, but to seize the wheel itself” (126). The politics of the Young Reformation Movement, the rise of Martin Niemöller, the church constitution issue, the takeover of the Old Prussian Union Church government, the church elections of July 1933 and German Christian seizure of Protestant church governments, the emergence of an opposition movement, the drafting of the Bethel Confession, the fall 1933 Prussian and national church synods, and the formation of the Pastors’ Emergency League—all these are given appropriate attention in a single chapter on the year 1933.

From there, Schlingensiepen goes on to describe Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s service as pastor in London and then as director of the Confessing Church seminary in Finkenwalde. At the same time, however, he explains Bonhoeffer’s participation in the church struggle, including the campaign against the Reich Church and Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller, the Barmen Declaration and the formation of the Confessing Church, the establishment of church finance departments in the Prussian provincial churches, the appointment of Hanns Kerrl as Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, Kerrl’s attempt to govern the churches through Reich and provincial church committees, and the appointment of Dr. Friedrich Werner as director of the German Protestant Church chancellery and head of the Berlin High Church Council.

Especially noteworthy is Schlingensiepen’s understanding of the relationship between the Barmen, Dahelm, and Oeynhausen Synods of the Confessing Church. For Bonhoeffer and his colleagues, “the decisions of Dahlem were just the necessary ‘form’, the ordering of the Church required by the ‘content’ of the Theological Declaration of Barmen” (165). Indeed, the author argues that “there was no one in the Confessing Church who took the decisions of the Confessing Synod of Dahlem more seriously than did Bonhoeffer” (172). Bonhoeffer consistently refused to recognize the authority of the official church governments, emphasizing that the Confessing Church was the sole legitimate church government and even applying the old formula extra ecclesiam nulla salus to the situation: “Whoever knowingly separates himself from the Confessing Church separates himself from salvation” (189). He would not even make peace with Kerrl’s more moderate church committees taking the radical position that “Barmen [was] a tower against the subversion of church doctrine, Dahlem the tower against the subversion of the ecclesiastical order,” and Oeynhausen “our defence against the subversion of the church by the world as, in the shape of the Nazi state, it intervenes through its finance departments, Legislative Authority and committees, and is now tearing into separate groups the church of those who confess our faith. Here we cannot and must not give in one single time!” (194). This aspect of Schlingensiepen’s account is particularly important, since the divisions within the Confessing Church between Lutherans in the “intact churches” of Württemberg, Bavaria, and Hanover who were willing to work with the German Protestant Church government and the Dahlemites who rejected any authority outside the Confessing Church are often misunderstood or ignored. And it is precisely here that we see the radicalism of Bonhoeffer, rejecting both the enthusiasm of the German Christian Movement to fuse Nazism and Christianity and the unwillingness of the Lutheran wing of the Confessing Church to abandon the state church tradition of German Protestantism. Schlingensiepen helps us to make sense of Bonhoeffer’s theological and existential journey through the events German church struggle.

The Historical Bonhoeffer

But who is Schlingensiepen’s Bonhoeffer? The author’s short answer is that Bonhoeffer’s life, actions, and death cannot be explained solely according to traits he inherited, but must take into consideration his formation as a youth at home and in university. Above all, Schlingensiepen sees three key characteristics in Bonhoeffer: “intellectual curiosity, an incorruptible sense of right and wrong, and the courage to make uncomfortable decisions with potentially dangerous consequences” (xviii-xix). Moreover, he argues we must also:

become engaged with what, for Bonhoeffer, theology was. Bonhoeffer wanted to expose theology to ‘the fresh air of modern thinking’. He insisted that the message of the Church must always apply concretely to the reality of the world. Timeless truths he considered useless, for ‘what is always true is precisely what is not true today’. (xix)

This is what is so striking about Schlingensiepen’s Bonhoeffer. His combination of curiosity, moral courage, and theological creativity makes him so utterly unpredictable, so full of paradoxes (perhaps even contradictions), and so impossible to pigeonhole.

Bonhoeffer’s Formation

Bonhoeffer’s formation surely contributed to this. He grew up in upper middle class privilege, steeped in the education and culture of a professional family. While he lost an older brother in the First World War, his own wartime service was as a 12 year-old “messenger and food scout” for the family, secretly participating in the black market trading of which his siblings disapproved (11). From an early age, he was independent minded, and surprised his non-church going family by choosing to study theology (16). Time and again, Schlingensiepen highlights the unconventional and unpredictable aspects of Bonhoeffer’s journey, whether it was joining the non-conformist Hedgehog fraternity at Tübingen or quitting the group when they expelled their Jewish members (19). Later, this independent streak showed itself in his choice of Reinhold Seeberg as his doctoral supervisor, even though Bonhoeffer had worked far more closely with Adolf von Harnack, and though Seeberg had little time for Bonhoeffer’s interest in Karl Barth’s doctrine of revelation (29-30).

Bonhoeffer’s formation continued along unconventional lines. Already while an undergraduate, he had travelled throughout Italy and down into North Africa, experiencing both Islam and Roman Catholicism. Indeed, it was Bonhoeffer’s exposure to Catholic worship in Rome that fuelled his growing interest in ecclesiology (22-25). Then, following the completion of his doctorate in 1927, Bonhoeffer experienced more of the world, serving as a pastoral assistant in a German congregation in Barcelona for a year, then studying at Union Seminary in New York for another year. There he encountered the friends who introduced him to African-American Christianity and pacifism. During this time he travelled widely in the United States and Mexico, experiencing cultures far outside his own. And even before he went to America, he had also contemplated the idea of travelling and studying in India, in part due to the suggestion of his grandmother, who believed it would give him the benefit of a non-Western and non-Christian perspective (61). Later, of course, Bonhoeffer would continue to travel widely on behalf of the ecumenical movement, giving him relationships, experiences, and perspectives far different from those of most German Protestant clergy. Once again in 1934 he thought of India, and even received an invitation from Gandhi (171). In the fateful year of 1939, he journeyed a second time to the United States, only to break off his stay and return to Germany in order to be present during the crises in church and nation.

Radical Thinking

For Schlingensiepen, this combination of personality, upbringing, and educational formation lies behind Bonhoeffer’s habit of pursuing radical theological ideas and church-political positions. As early as 1928 in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer lectured on the need for an all-or-nothing decision concerning Christ in “the most profound matters we are facing, namely, concerning our own lives and the life of our people” (49). When he turned to the question of ethics, he argued that moral decisions involved the consciousness of the commandments of God, the watchful eye of God, and the grace of God in each moment of life. For Bonhoeffer, ethics were, from the beginning, about doing the right thing in every unique circumstance, not about following abstract principles. As he put it:

There are no acts that are bad in and of themselves; even murder can be sanctified. There is only faithfulness to or deviation from God’s will. There is no law with a specific content, but only the law of freedom, that is, bearing responsibility alone before God and oneself (49-50).

Bonhoeffer carried this same radicalism into 1933 and the events of the church struggle, whether in his February radio speech denouncing Hitler’s style of leadership as seductive and idolatrous (117), in his judgment that German Protestants had “totally lost both their heads and their Bible” when it came to the Jewish question (121), or in his now famous assertion that the church might have to “seize the wheel” and engage in the direct political action of resisting the unjust state (126). In a public debate at the University of Berlin, Bonhoeffer was the lone representative of the Young Reformation Movement, facing groups of professors and students from the German Christian Movement and the church-politically neutral camp before an audience of 2000 (131). In early summer, he and his friend Franz Hildebrandt even proposed a Protestant interdict—a collective refusal to perform Protestant funeral services until the church’s legal rights were restored. When their shocked colleagues refused to consider the idea, the two men considered leaving the church (132). Still in 1933, Bonhoeffer described the application of the antisemitic Aryan paragraph in the church as a false doctrine and (with friends) distributed protest leaflets at the Protestant National Synod in Wittenberg in September (137, 141).

By the beginning of 1934, by which time Bonhoeffer had taken up pastoral duties in two German congregations in London, he had begun to adopt a prophetic tone concerning the crisis in German Protestantism (154). He fully embraced the radical stance of the October 1934 Dahlem Synod’s resolution that “the constitution of the German Evangelical Church has been destroyed” and that “the Confessing Synod of the German Evangelical Church creates new organs of leadership” (165). At the ecumenical Youth Conference in Fanø that same year, Bonhoeffer mobilized his students to pass a resolution stating “that the rights of conscience, undertaken in obedience to God’s Word, exceed in importance those of any State whatever.” A second resolution noted that the state has attempted “to become the only centre and source of spiritual life,” asserted that the church and not the state must preach the Word of God, and concluded that “the Church works within the nation, but it is not ‘of the nation’” (169). At the main ecumenical conference in Fanø, Bonhoeffer argued forcefully that “the work of the World Alliance means work of the Churches for peace amongst the nations. Its aim is the end of war and the victory over war.” In a sermon at the conference, he continued on this same theme: “What God has said is that there shall be peace among all people—that we shall obey God without further question, that is what God means. Anyone who questions the commandment of God before obeying has already denied God” (171).

Throughout the balance of the church struggle, Schlingensiepen portrays Bonhoeffer as firm in his uncompromising radicalism. He drew more and more on the Sermon on the Mount as the basis of his thinking, adopted elements of monasticism as the basis for his seminary work at Finkenwalde, argued that there could be no salvation outside the Confessing Church, refused to participate in the moderate process of church committees, looked ahead to a “coming of resistance ‘to the point of shedding blood’,” and emphasized that the obedience and belief will lead the Christian into the image of Christ, including the image of suffering and martyrdom (173-174, 182, 189, 193-194, 198, 207-208). Furthermore, he prepared to refuse an expected call into military service (with the possibility of a death sentence) and sharply rebuked Confessing Church pastors who swore an oath to Hitler in 1938 (208, 212).

In contrast to his uncompromising moral and theological resolution, Bonhoeffer found personal decision making difficult. He often wavered, feeling “again and again that all the decisions I had to make were not really my own” (39). This was true of his time abroad in Barcelona and New York between 1929 and 1931, and again in 1939 when he briefly returned to the United States. He couldn’t identify exactly why he promptly returned to Germany, but was convinced the decision was in God’s hands (230). He saw himself as a sojourner on God’s path (235, 236). This was also true of his decision to enter the resistance and the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. More and more he came to understand that “with God we do not take up a stance—we walk along a path. It goes forward, otherwise we are not with God. God knows where the path goes, throughout its length; we know only the next step and the ultimate destination” (294).

With the beginning of his knowledge about German resistance plans, beginning in 1938, Bonhoeffer entered a new phase, theologically. Much of this is reflected in his work on Ethics, and appears in his many reflections Schlingensiepen includes on decision making, ethics, and Christian responsibility. For instance, in rejecting inner migration as a response to the early successes of Hitler’s armies in the Second World War, Bonhoeffer embraced instead an earthy, situational view of ethics. For him, the world had been reconciled to God by Christ and God had chosen to fundamentally accept the world. As a result, Schlingensiepen explains, the world “can become the place in which human beings assume responsibility, make peace, protect life and overcome murder, violence, and atrocities.” Bonhoeffer did not pursue “principles, standards or duties as eternally valid,” but encouraged people “in every historical situation, to listen anew to God’s commandments and to follow Christ” (251). As a result, Bonhoeffer could both accept the necessity of the removal of Hitler by assassination and reject the euthanasia of handicapped Germans on the basis of the commandment not to kill. The key to this was Bonhoeffer’s radical understanding of freedom. As the theologian put it:

Jesus stands before God as the obedient one and as the free one. As the obedient one, he does the will of the Father by blindly following the law he has been commanded. As the free one, he affirms God’s will out of his very own insight, with open eyes and a joyful heart; it is as if he re-creates it anew out of himself. (251)

Later, as Bonhoeffer became more deeply enmeshed in the resistance, his brother-in-law and close friend Hans von Dohnanyi asked him about the permissibility Christian participation in murder, since God’s law condemned it. Schlingensiepen summarizes Bonhoeffer’s response: “Murder is still murder, even when, in the case of Hitler, it is absolutely necessary. One must be prepared to take the guilt for this sin upon oneself. Bonhoeffer added that if he could get near enough to Hitler, he would throw the bomb himself” (274). This corresponded with his earlier advice to General Hans Oster, a fellow resister, that treason could be morally necessary if it prevented further criminal atrocities as were taking place in Poland. Still Bonhoeffer was not without his doubts. He wondered whether he could still function as a pastor, if he was among those with Hitler’s blood on their hands.

Continuing his discussion of Bonhoeffer’s thinking about guilt and responsibility, Schlingensiepen quotes the famous section in Ethics in which Bonhoeffer confesses the guilt of the church—the guilt of leaving undone what should have been done, and of doing what should not have been done:

The church confesses that it has witnessed the arbitrary use of brutal force, the suffering in body and soul of countless innocent people, that it has witnessed oppression, hatred and murder without raising its voice for the victims and without finding ways of rushing to help them. It has been guilty of the lives of the Weakest and most Defenceless Brothers and Sisters of Jesus Christ. (277)

For Bonhoeffer, this sense of responsibility and need to confess was rooted in the relationship between obedience and freedom. As one who knew those involved in the assassination plot, he wrote about “the freedom of those who act responsibly,” declaring “there is no law behind which they could take cover. … Instead, in such a situation, one must let go completely of any law, knowing that here one must decide as a free venture” (281). The free and responsible person breaks the law, recognizes his guilt under the law, and so affirms the law.

During this time, and from 1943 on, when he was in prison, Bonhoeffer’s ethics evolved into a new understanding of Christianity. In this “journey to reality,” Bonhoeffer entered what Bethge called a “turning point from Christian to man for his times.” He focused increasingly on concepts like “earth,” “reality,” and “world,” which he meant in a positive sense (293-295). He amazed himself “that I am living, and can live, for days without the Bible,” at other times drinking in Scripture, but all the while growing in “opposition to all that is ‘religious.’” He added, “But I must constantly think of God, of Christ; authenticity, life, freedom and mercy mean a great deal to me. It is only that the religious clothes they wear make be so uncomfortable” (295).

Schlingensiepen devotes a good deal of attention to these developments in Bonhoeffer’s thinking, which culminated during his time in prison. Even as his romantic relationship with his eventual fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer was growing, even as his captors continued to interrogate and torture him, Bonhoeffer worked on theology for what he called a “religionless” time (349). Schlingensiepen insists this was not the product of the earlier prison shock which had tempted him to consider suicide as a kind of ethical extension of his resistance (324). Rather, it was a new forward-looking orientation, by which he understood that the gospel was always turned towards the whole world. Here Schlingensiepen quotes his own father, who reflected on Bonhoeffer’s prison writings after the war: “This world is, even though at enmity with God or far away from God, still the world that God loves. So there can only be a church which turns toward the world” (351). Bonhoeffer himself wrote of blessing the world, declaring its belonging to God, even as the world inflicts suffering on the Christian.

Schlingensiepen explains that for Bonhoeffer, the core question which emerged was “what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today?” (351). In his prison letters, Bonhoeffer began to wrestle with the concept of “religionlessness.” For him, the conduct of the German churches during the Nazi period was one more factor that invalidated traditional religious language. Beyond that, however, the older problem of the church’s refusal to face modern science and its explanations of the world apart from any reference to God meant that the church was always on the defensive, always turning God into a God of the “stopgap.” Grappling with what it meant to live in such a world come of age, he argued for the need to bring God into this very place of worldliness: “The same God who makes us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God, is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God, and with God, we live without God.” In this context, Bonhoeffer understood God as near, as suffering, as weak. Continuing, he wrote: “God consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross, God is weak and powerless in the world, and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us” (353). Schlingensiepen explains that, in his religionless Christianity, Bonhoeffer understood Jesus in the idea of presence. “Being-for-others” was both the essence of Jesus and the calling of the Christian who would live in faith (353-354).

Conclusion

There are many other rich thematic veins to be mined in Schlingensiepen’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945 which I have only touched on: Bonhoeffer’s consistent peace ethic; his pastoral activity; his ecumenical journeys to England, Switzerland, and Sweden; his approach to theological education; his participation in the rescue of Jews; his friendship with Eberhard Bethge; his romance with Maria von Wedemeyer; his doubt- and confidence-filled incarceration; his death; and his status as martyr.

What must be clear, however, from the detailed analysis of Schlingensiepen’s account of Bonhoeffer’s relationships, his participation in the German church struggle, his unconventional formation, and his radical theological ideas, is that Bonhoeffer is exceedingly complex. No biographer will portray him faithfully without a great deal of historical and theological spade work. Schlingensiepen focuses on Bonhoeffer’s intellectual curiosity, strong moral compass, courage, and creative modern theology. I have suggested that these characteristics make Bonhoeffer unpredictable, paradoxical, and impossible to pigeonhole. Conservatives value a Bonhoeffer who teaches the Bible, stands upon confessions of faith, and takes the lordship of Christ so seriously that he is willing to kill or die for it. He is, to be sure, a serious Christian. Liberals value a Bonhoeffer committed to peace, internationalism, and ecumenical Christianity—a cultured and curious man open to literature, music, and modern life, including an intellectually critical relationship with both the Bible and confessional theology. In Schlingensiepen’s biography of Bonhoeffer, we discover a man who encompasses both of these images and somehow holds them together in a life marked by a most radical, subjective, and challenging form of Christian discipleship. Here is someone worth knowing.

Notes:

[1] Although I arrived at the title for this review article independently, I later discovered that my colleague Andrew Chandler of the University of Chichester had written a review of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke (DBW) under an almost identical title. See Andrew Chandler, “The Quest for the Historical Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 54, no. 1 (January 2003): 89-96. It is with his kind permission that I continue to use it. I would also like to thank Victoria J. Barnett for her encouragement to examine Ferdinand Schlingensiepen’s biography of Bonhoeffer and for her helpful editorial suggestions.

[2] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010); Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).

[3] Victoria J. Barnett, “Interpreting Bonhoeffer, Post-Bethge,” Contemporary Church History Quarterly 20, no. 3 (September 2014), https://contemporarychurchhistory.org/2014/09/interpreting-bonhoeffer-post-bethge. See also Chandler, “The Quest for the Historical Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

[4] Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, “Making Assumptions about Dietrich: How Bonhoeffer was Made Fit for America,” The Bonhoeffer Center for Public Engagement, http://thebonhoeffercenter.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=37:schlingensiepen-on-metaxas-and-marsh.

[5] Stephen R. Haynes, The Bonhoeffer Phenomenon: Portraits of a Protestant Saint (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004).

[6] Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance, trans. Isabel Best (London: T&T Clark, 2010). See also the original German version: Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Eine Biographie (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2006). Henceforth all references are to the English edition and are noted parenthetically.

[7] Clifford Green, “Hijacking Bonhoeffer,” Christian Century, October 19, 2010, 34-35.

[8] Victoria J. Barnett, “Review of Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich,” Contemporary Church History Quarterly 15, no. 3 (September 2010), https://contemporarychurchhistory.org/2010/09/review-of-eric-metaxas-bonhoeffer-pastor-martyr-prophet-spy-a-righteous-gentile-vs-the-third-reich.

[9] Schlingensiepen, “Making Assumptions about Dietrich.”

 

Share

Letter from the Editors: September 2015

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Letter from the Editors (September 2015)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Greetings friends,

Once again we are pleased to offer a new issue of short articles, book reviews, and other notes relating to the contemporary history of German and European religious history. In this September issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly, two themes loom large: coming to terms with past failings of the Christian Church and finding hope in the life and practices of Christianity.

The Brandenburg Cathedral. Photo (cc) via Flickr user Steffen Zahn. https://flic.kr/p/nWVSrg.

The Brandenburg Cathedral. Photo (cc) via Flickr user Steffen Zahn. https://flic.kr/p/nWVSrg.

The ongoing challenge of coming to terms with the past informs Susan Zuccotti’s article on the relationship between Pope Pius XII and the Catholic church institutions which rescued Jews in and around Rome during the Holocaust (a response to William Doino Jr. and the film Lo vuole il Papa, reviewed last issue), just as it does Manfred Gailus’ public lecture (here translated and abridged by John S. Conway) on pro-Nazi Protestants associated with the Brandenburg Cathedral. In the same vein, Christopher Probst’s review of the George Faithful book, Mothering the Fatherland, explores how a spirit of repentance for the role of the Church in the Holocaust can lead to positive actions.

The second theme of hope in the life and practices of Christianity can be found in Patrick J. Houlihan’s study of sustaining Catholic practices during the First World War era, reviewed by Kyle Jantzen, and Keith Clements’ study of the importance of international and ecumenical church relations for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reviewed by John S. Conway. Similarly, Victoria Barnett reviews Heike Springhart’s analysis of the contribution of religion and church to the postwar reconstruction in West Germany.

Other contributions round out the issue: Matthew Hockenos reviews Mark R. Correll’s Shepherds of the Empire, which compares the ideas of two conservative Protestant theologians, Martin Kähler and Adolf Schlatter, and two conservative Protestant preachers, Adolf Stoecker and Christoph Blumhardt, all active in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. Victoria Barnett reviews an important contribution on the Nazi persecution of Christians of so-called “non-Aryan” descent. Heath Spencer alerts us to an article on the relationship between secularism and antisemitism in the late nineteenth century, and Victoria Barnett reports on two interesting research initiatives: a Bonhoeffer Conference in Flensburg and a summer research workshop at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

We hope you find this issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly stimulating, and wish you all a productive autumn season.

On behalf of the editors,

Kyle Jantzen

Share

Review of Patrick J. Houlihan, Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Review of Patrick J. Houlihan, Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Xiii + 287 Pp. ISBN: 978-1-107-03514-0.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Catholicism and the Great War is a transnational comparative history of everyday Catholicism. In it Patrick J. Houlihan sets out to revise the story of Roman Catholic theology and lived religion during the First World War era in both Germany (where Catholics were a minority) and Austria-Hungary (where they comprised a majority). His subjects include church leaders, military chaplains, front soldiers, women and children at home, and the papacy. And his scope is not only the war but also its immediate aftermath, which allows him to tackle the additional themes of memory and commemoration. This is an ambitious book.

Houlihan-CatholicismHoulihan’s argument is that conventional interpretations of religion in the First World War, which emphasize the secularizing effect of a shattering war experience as expressed in the voices of cultural modernists, do not capture the experiences of German and Austro-Hungarian Catholics. Rather, he asserts that Catholics adjusted to industrial warfare because their transnational faith and its practices helped them to cope relatively successfully with the upheaval and brutality of war—more successfully than Protestants, whose faith (in the case of Germany) was more closely tied to the defeated state.

The book begins with a dense introduction, demonstrating Houlihan’s remarkable historiographical knowledge. Here and throughout the book, the author interacts substantively with a wide array of scholarly literature on religion and war, the First World War, nineteenth- and twentieth-century European Catholicism, military chaplaincy, religion and nationalism, women’s experiences of war, and numerous other topics. It is indeed the strength of his work.

Methodologically, Houlihan eschews quantitative or institutional history, embracing a transnational approach to his subject, which fits well with the internationalism of Roman Catholicism and enables him to avoid the trap of viewing Christian religion only in terms of its instrumental service to national movements and state interests. He also pursues a comparative methodology, highlighting differences between the experiences of German and Austro-Hungarian Catholics, though often distinctions are blurred as examples are drawn freely from both regions. Still, it is worth noting that Houlihan finds Austro-Hungarian Catholicism to have been a vital component in maintaining imperial loyalty and social cohesion, problematizing commonly-held assumptions about the inevitable demise of the Habsburg Empire. Finally, Houlihan also attempts to incorporate elements of the history of everyday life of Central European Catholics, and to blur boundaries between battlefront and homefront, creating what he calls a “family” history of Catholicism in the First World War (16).

All of these streams of interpretation are worked out in a series of chapters on Catholicism before the war, Catholic theology during the First World War, the role of Catholic military chaplains, the experiences of Catholic soldiers, the circumstances of Catholic women and children at home, the influence of the papacy, and memory and mourning among Catholics after 1918.

Leading up to the war, Catholics in Austria-Hungary were overwhelmingly rural, living in traditional local communities of belief. At the same time, however, new imagined communities were emerging in Central Europe, thanks to the various national movements which were often connected to Catholicism. German Catholics, on the other hand, were influenced most powerfully by the legacy of the Kulturkampf, which drove Catholics into a defensive posture, as demonstrated by Catholic political and labour movements. But for most Catholics in Central Europe, the outbreak of war in 1914 was seen mainly as yet another trial to be endured, and as a threat to the coming harvest.

Once the war had begun, German and Austrian bishops were prominent public advocates of just-war theology. For German Catholic leaders, war was a patriotic test of faith. For Austro-Hungarian bishops, it was a call to defend Habsburg dynastic honour and therefore the divine order as they understood it. Military chaplains played a significant role in mediating this theology to ordinary participants, not least by praying for divine blessings on military weapons. As the war dragged on, though, public theology began to emphasize the war as a punishment for aspects of modernity that had drawn Europeans away from God and the Church. And after defeat in 1918, Catholics in former Habsburg lands found themselves reimagining themselves at the dawn of a new day of freedom and opportunity—at least those from minority groups formed into new nation states, such as Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Poles, and Slovenes. While the “new theologies” of Max Scheler, Romano Guardini, and Karl Adam would bear fruit only later in the 1960s, other “everyday theologies” were also emerging: positively, the rise of a feminine form of Catholicism; negatively, an upsurge of Catholic antisemitism which would later help to pave the way for Hitler and the Holocaust.

Military chaplains—of which there were 1441 in the Prussian Army and 3077 among the Habsburg forces—provided pastoral care among Catholic troops. This they did more effectively in Austria-Hungary than in Germany, according to Houlihan, who uses a case study of Tyrolean Catholics to support this point. Still, all chaplains were overwhelmed by the magnitude of industrial warfare. Houlihan notes that Catholic chaplains enjoyed better reputations than their Protestant counterparts, since they tended to serve closer to the front lines. In one of the best sections in the book, Houlihan explains how chaplains used the three sacraments of communion, confession, and extreme unction to minister to their troops. On the Western Front especially, the cramped quarters of static trench lines made holding a full Mass a rare event. In the end, Houlihan argues that 1916 was a watershed year. Triumphalist “God-with-us” pronouncements gave way increasingly to private doubts about God’s support in war and public reassurances of Christian hope and perseverance in times of suffering.

Among front line soldiers, Houlihan argues that Catholic religion served them better than has often been assumed, in light of the prominent modernist literature of authors like Jaroslav Hašek, Robert Graves or Erich Maria Remarque. Rather, Catholicism was surprisingly resilient in modern conflict, as ordinary soldiers coped with their circumstances by means of a mix of transnational Church institutions, sacramental practices, correspondence with home, superstition (including amulets, talismans, and letters of protection), and popular piety focused on saintly and Marian intercession.

On “the unquiet homefront,” Catholic women and children both suffered and benefitted from the war. Wartime disrupted traditional gender roles. Though public roles for women included war relief, nursing, and industry increased markedly, Houlihan argues that Catholic women in rural Central Europe tended to embrace more conservative, traditional roles. Just as the Virgin Mary was a powerful symbol for frontline soldiers, so too was Mary was a powerful symbol for Catholic women, either in her virginity or her motherhood. Above all, the home front was a nostalgic ideal of piety and peace. Family networks provided comfort—both for soldiers at the front and their wives and family members left at home. And although the First World War opened up new public opportunities for women, Houlihan finds that most rural Catholic women remained focused on local and domestic concerns and traditional religious practices.

Stepping back from the history of everyday religion, Houlihan argues that the Holy See remained fairly impartial during the early years of the war, “nearly bankrupting itself through its devotion to its caritas network of care, especially for POWs, displaced persons, and children” (188). Pope Benedict XV forecast a bloody, brutal war, but argued that the bonds of common humanity and the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church could serve as a force for peace and unity. To that end, his Papal Peace Note of August 1917 called upon the belligerents to embrace peace and civilization. Benedict also oversaw a major revision of Canon Law (1917) designed to strengthen papal power and reinvigorate the Church. Lastly—and here Houlihan returns to his ordinary Catholics—Benedict was important as a symbol. Indeed, many ordinary Catholics wrote to him, hoping he could personally intervene on their behalf or bring peace and reconciliation to a war-torn world.

In his final chapter, Houlihan carries his examination of German and Austro-Hungarian Catholicism into the postwar era, arguing that traditional religious imagery helped Europeans make sense of the war. Themes of collective sacrifice, deference to authority, and universal suffering, grief, and consolation were manifest in monuments and commemorative services, as they had been in the Mass in Time of War. Clergy played an important pastoral role in comforting families of fallen soldiers, just as relics, votive tablets, and other physical objects of memorialization honoured the war dead.

As wide-ranging and as steeped in the secondary literature as Houlihan’s book is, it suffers from a significant lack of primary source evidence. The author acknowledges this in his preface, noting how hard it is to find archival traces of “prayers, fears, and suffering.” As a result, he asserts that his book “is a religious history that gives an impressionistic portrait” (15). It is of course true that this kind of source material is hard to come by, which is why studies of the interior lives of ordinary people are so often local or micro-historical in nature. Repeatedly, Houlihan makes large generalizations based on scant evidence, as in the case of his assertion that Catholics were worried about the impact of the outbreak of war on the coming harvest. This stands to reason, but the statement, “To many Catholics, war was another cyclical plague, redolent of the sinful human condition; it was not cause for celebration” is supported only by one memoir from a Lower Austrian domestic servant and three secondary sources (48). To give another example, a single diary from an Austrian soldier provides the supporting evidence for the conclusion that “soldiers who had to experience the daily horrors of battle often used their faith to cope” (70). Similarly, a single photo of a church service in Weimar Germany along with two references to secondary sources serves to counter the prevailing historiographical view of declining public piety after the First World War (260-261). And no explanation is provided for why a case study of Tyrol would serve to explain the relationship between military chaplains and soldiers throughout Germany and Austria-Hungary (81-82). In sum, while there is little reason to doubt that traditional Catholic religious practices persisted in rural Central Europe during and after the war, Houlihan’s wide-ranging study of this topic makes overly large claims which rest on overly thin evidentiary foundations. Simply put, it is impossible to discern whether or not the phenomena he describes are generally true for early twentieth century Catholicism in Germany and Austria-Hungary, since the his source material is drawn unsystematically from a wide array of regions and positions within Catholicism. He would be far more successful building his case through a series of studies like his useful regional analysis of German military chaplains in occupied France (Houlihan, Patrick J. “Local Catholicism as Transnational War Experience: Everyday Religious Practice in Occupied Northern France, 1914–1918.” Central European History 45, no. 2 (June 2012): 233–67), where his mastery of the secondary literature is combined with a solid and representative collection of evidence.

Share

Article Note: Friedrich Weber and Charlotte Methuen, “The Architecture of Faith under National Socialism: Lutheran Church Building(s) in Braunschweig, 1933-1945”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 2 (June 2015)

Article Note: Friedrich Weber and Charlotte Methuen, “The Architecture of Faith under National Socialism: Lutheran Church Building(s) in Braunschweig, 1933-1945,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 66 no. 2 (April 2015): 340-371.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In their article, the late Friedrich Weber, former university theologian and Lutheran Bishop of Braunschweig, and Charlotte Methuen, church historian at the University of Glasgow, consider the nature of church building in the Lutheran regional church of Braunschweig during the National Socialist era. This article had its genesis as a presentation by Weber at a Glasgow research seminar. This is reflected in the structure of the article, which begins with a brief explanation of Braunschweig church politics in 1933 followed by a general overview of the responses of the German Protestant churches to National Socialism. When Weber and Methuen turn to the discussion of church building in Hitler’s Germany, they begin not in Braunschweig but in Berlin, with a description of the Martin Luther Memorial Church, built between 1933 and 1935. In recent years, this church building, long neglected, has been studied by historians and preserved as a historic site.[1]

Weber and Methuen use the building and renovating of churches as a window into the relationship between the churches and the National Socialist state. They do this by asking questions about “the motivation for embarking on building projects, the mood in which they were received, and the architecture and decoration that resulted” (p. 341). Their understanding of the complex church-state relationship begins with a consideration of the events of 1933, which they see as “a re-Christianization of Germany and a rejection of the principles of the Weimar Republic” (p. 345). Drawing on the work of Manfred Gailus, they argue that distinctions between the Confessing Church and the German Christian Movement were not absolute, and that many clergy embraced the Confessing Church without abandoning their ties to the German Christian-led state churches. Conversely, many Nazis considered themselves Christians.

When it came to church building, Weber and Methuen note that while the construction of churches was in places forbidden by the Nazi regime—as in the cases of various National Socialist model estates and of the expansion of industrial centres like Salzgitter and Wolfsburg—in other cases, church building was celebrated as a public work which helped reduce unemployment. As Weber and Methuen delve into the history of German church architecture in the 1930s, they note that even members of the Confessing Church called for traditional Christian Germanic art rooted in “blood and soil, family and community” (p. 354). Indeed, the churches were allies in the National Socialist drive to expunge “degenerate” modern art, and the growth of “Christian imagery … was one aspect of the process of re-Christianization under National Socialism” (p. 355).

With this extended preliminary discussion complete, Weber and Methuen turn to the topic of Braunschweig church building under National Socialism. The six Lutheran churches built in Braunschweig between 1933 and 1940 share similarities of design and intent, celebrating the German Volk community and embracing simplicity and modesty. Weber and Methuen use excerpts from dedication ceremonies to emphasize that church building was portrayed as symbolic of the protection of Christianity in Nazi Germany (as opposed to the destruction of churches in godless, communist Spain and Russia), the blessing of God upon Germany, and the important contributions of Protestant Christianity to the Third Reich (p. 360-361).

If these simple new church buildings were supportive of the Nazi ideal of national community without embodying Nazi imagery, such was not the case with the reordering of the Braunschweig cathedral, which was transformed in a most radical way: worship services were suspended in 1936, the pews, altar, and pulpit were removed, and the cathedral was reimagined as a “national memorial” to the medieval German prince Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria. In 1939, Hanns Kerrl, Reich Minister of Church Affairs, took the additional step of requisitioning the cathedral on behalf of the state. The memorial to Henry the Lion—in Nazi eyes, an early champion of German interests in Eastern Europe—was greatly enlarged, and Nazi symbols were introduced alongside depictions of Henry’s military campaigns in the East. Only a few remnants of the pre-existing Christian content of the cathedral remained after the “Braunschweig cathedral had undergone a process of almost complete de-Christianization, much more extreme that the co-existence of Christian and National Socialist imagery found in the Luther Church in Berlin-Mariendorf” (p. 367). Beyond the creation of a National Socialist shrine, though, Weber and Methuen argue that the stripping away of “superfluous” décor from the gothic era onwards was itself part of a Nazi attempt to cast off the degeneration of un-German influences and return the building to its original (“the healthy, the strong, the unspoilt”) Romanesque condition (p. 368).

Using these examples, Weber and Methuen show how church building in National Socialist Braunschweig demonstrated both the potential of church-state partnership under Hitler and the danger of Nazi ideological usurpation of church spaces. Yet “as a whole the building programme in Braunschweig testifies to the extent to which the aesthetic interests of the National Socialist regime were at one with those of the majority of German Protestants” (p. 371). These conclusions certainly mirror the outcomes of the construction of the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin-Mariendorf, a highly collaborative venture between the parish clergy, council, and congregation, along with higher church officials, the wider Mariendorf community, and the state. Like the church building in Braunschweig, its design, construction, and celebration exemplify the symbiosis and symbolic fusion of Christian faith and National Socialist politics.[2]

Notes:

[1] Stefanie Endlich, Monika Geyler-von Bernus, and Beate Rossié, Christenkreuz und Hakenkreuz: Kirchenbau und sakrale Kunst im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2008); Kyle Jantzen, “Church-Building in Hitler’s Germany: Berlin’s Martin-Luther-Gedächtniskirche as a Reflection of Church-State Relations,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 27, no. 2 (2014): 324–48.

[2] Jantzen, “Church-Building in Hitler’s Germany,” 348.

Share

Journal Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History 27, issue 2 (2014)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 1 (March 2015)

Journal Report: Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History 27, issue 2 (2014)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

The latest issue of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History (Volume 27, Issue 2, 2014. See http://www.v-r.de/en/magazine_edition-0-0/kirchliche_zeitgeschichte_2014_27_2-1010266/#section_inhalte) is devoted largely to the publication of papers presented at the conference “Myths – National Borders – Religions,” held at the Akademie Sankelmark, Flensburg, Germany, in September 2014. Several articles will be of interest to our readers.

In “Myths of Religious Reconciliation,” Andrea Strübind of the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg explores the aftermath of the 1965 reconciliation ceremony in which Roman Catholic Pope Paul VI and Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras mutually revoked the excommunications of their predecessors. Through this act of “brotherly love,” the Great Schism of 1054 was to have been set aside. Strübund asks the important question of whether this event had any actual historical influence on the church-political relations between the two churches. Simply put, did it lead to greater unity? In her analysis, she finds that there was little theological consciousness of the events of 1965 in either church, and she notes that tensions even increased after 1989, when the two churches found themselves in competition with one another in post-communist Eastern Europe. In fact, in its year 2000 declaration “Dominus Iesus,” the Roman Catholic Church reiterated its self-understanding as the “mother church,” while Greek metropolitans recently signed a profession of faith in which Roman Catholicism is described as the “womb of heresies and fallacies” (p. 253-254). In other words, the 1965 gesture was a singular event which Strübind interprets as a reconciliation myth, just as the 1999 joint declaration on the Doctrine of Justification between the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation seems to be turning out to be (p. 255).

Anders Jarlert of Lund University has written an interesting article entitled “The Myth of Sweden as a peace-power state and its religious motivations.” In it he explores the history of Sweden’s self-identification as a peace-power state, an identity taken up forcefully by Archbishop Nathan Söderblom of Uppsala during his years of service from 1904 to 1931. Söderblom himself and Sweden more generally were to be mediators between churches and even states during and after the First World War. Söderblom understood “Sweden’s task and position as a God-given vocation” (p. 258). During the Second World War, however, Sweden was largely unable to use its neutrality for any purpose other than to stay out of the fighting, save that the country served as a site for international meetings and that Swedes took in the roughly 7000 Danish Jews rescued during the Holocaust (p. 259). Instead, a series of Swedish “modern martyrs for peace” (Count Folke Bernadotte, Dag Hammarskjöld, Raoul Wallenberg, Olaf Palme and Anna Lindh) served as heroes and “secular saviours,” becoming in the process the new basis for Sweden’s ongoing self-understanding as a country of peace and justice.

In his article “Norwegian National Myths and Nation Building,” Dag Thorkildsen of the University of Oslo explores the role of national religion in Norwegian identity. He describes the creation of the Norwegian national myth as a “secular salvation history” mimicking the story of ancient Israel, complete with migration story, founding myth, golden age, period of inner decay, and promise of regeneration (p. 269). Along the way he explains how both the cult of St. Olaf in Trondheim and the Cathedral of Nidaros have become components of Norwegian national identity.

Along similar lines, Inge Adriansen of the Museum Sønderjylland in Sønderborg, Denmark, analyzes the national-religious myth of Dannebrog (the Danish flag) in her article “The Danish national flag as a gift from God.” Formerly a symbol of the Danish monarchy, in the course of the nineteenth century Dannebrog was adopted by middle class Danes as a national symbol. According to tradition, the flag saved Danish King Valdemar II “the Victorious” during the 1219 crusade against heathen Estonians. As the Danish archbishop knelt in prayer for flagging Danish troops, Dannebrog floated down from heaven into his arms as a gift from God. Not surprisingly, the battle turned and the Danes were victorious (p. 277-278). As Adriansen points out, this Dannebrog myth is very like other ancient and medieval myths of flags and crosses in the sky leading to miraculous military victories (p. 279). She goes on to explain how Dannebrog became woven into Danish national identity, in school textbooks, as a royal and military symbol, as the people’s flag, in art and poetry, and on Valdemar’s Day—a civil-religious flag day. Two interesting aspects of Adriansen’s article are the special role of the flag in the Danish-German border region and as a tool for recruitment during the Second World War.

Kyle Jantzen of Ambrose University in Calgary, Canada, explores the relationship between German Protestantism, traditional religious nationalism, military patriotism, and National Socialism, in the construction of the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin-Mariendorf between 1933 and 1935. One of over 900 churches constructed or renovated during the Nazi era, the Martin Luther Memorial Church contained physical elements which fused Nazi, nationalist, and Christian ideology, including a crucifix portraying Jesus as an Aryan hero, a baptismal font ennobling the ideal Nazi family type, a pulpit depicting the Sermon on the Mount as an expression of the Nazi ideal of Volksgemeinschaft, and a triumphal arch comprised of ornamental tiles which included Christian, cultural, and National Socialist symbols. In analyzing the process by which this church was constructed, Jantzen finds that it was the product of a collaborative and largely local decision-making process that demonstrated the penetration of Nazi values into German Protestantism and the eagerness of German Protestants to work with the new Nazi state, from which they sensed little, if any, hostility.

In “Legendary Martyr: Maximilian Kolbe,” Christian Pletzing of the Akademie Sankelmark in Flensburg, Germany, has written a fascinating assessment of the problematic legacy of this Roman Catholic priest, editor, monastery director, and martyr. Kolbe is most famous for offering to take the place of a Polish family man sentenced to death in Auschwitz, in reprisal for an escape from the camp. In dying this way, Kolbe became “Poland’s martyr” (p. 365). He was subsequently beatified in 1971 as a “flower of Polish Catholic religiosity” and canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982 (p. 366). It would be hard to overstate the symbolic importance Kolbe came to hold in Poland. He was “an essential link between Poland’s national and religious identities;” the nexus of Catholic pilgrimage to and understanding of Auschwitz; the inspiration for the naming of well over a hundred churches, chapels, altars or other memorial sites; the symbol of resistance to dictatorship adopted by the Solidarity labour movement; and a general spiritual emblem of the vindication of death by sacrifice and the conquering of hate through brotherly love (p. 366-368).

Lost in this appropriation of Kolbe’s heroic act of martyrdom was the fact that his career as writer and editor for two papers, the monthly Rycerz Niepokalanej (Knight of the Immaculate) and the Catholic tabloid Mały Dziennik (Small Newspaper), included numerous antisemitic articles. Under Kolbe’s editorial watch, these papers portrayed Jews as “Poland’s cancerous ulcers” and “a threat to the Polish state.” He himself wrote an article in which he “accused the Jews of striving for world domination.” Other articles warned of Jewish conspiracy, noted the economic rivalry between Jews and Catholics in Poland, described Jews as “vermin” and called for a boycott of Jewish shops (p. 370). This legacy is counterbalanced somewhat by the fact that Kolbe’s monastery took in 1500 Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. Still, “most of the biographies and collections on the lives of saints about Maximilian Kolbe published in Catholic publishing companies essentially conceal his anti-Semitic publishing activities,” even as they highlight positive contributions he made as a publisher (p. 370-371). Pletzing also explains how Kolbe grew to become a symbol of German-Polish understanding, particularly in the years after 1971.

Finally, Katarzyna Stokłosa’s article, “Nationalism and the Church in the German-Polish border region after World War II,” explains the nature of the compulsory integration of the northern and western regions of Poland regained in the settlement of the Second World War. She describes a strongly nationalistic policy of Polonisation amounting to the “comprehensive destruction of all evidence of foreign elements that were reminiscent of the German era” (p. 375). This affected all manner of objects, including “pictures, maps, ash trays, plates, packaging, graves, crosses on the roadside, chapels, churches, religious images, etc.” in every kind of public space, including schools.(p. 375). Stokłosa demonstrates how the Roman Catholic Church played an important role in integrating these new territories into the rest of Poland. Indeed, “the Polish Catholic Church belonged to the strictest anti-German forces as it aimed to extinguish all remnants of German-ness in the new western and northern areas” (p. 381). The German language was forbidden for masses, in religious education, and at the cemeteries. Poles replaced Germans as parish priests, and the position of even Polish Protestants was so tenuous that many converted. In ways like these, the Polish Catholic Church played an important role in the Polonisation process of the post-war era.

Share

Article Note: On Christian Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Article Note: On Christian Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Robert Morgan, “Susannah Heschel’s Aryan Grundmann,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 32, no. 4 (June 1, 2010): 431–94.

Susannah Heschel, “Historiography of Antisemitism versus Anti-Judaism: A Response to Robert Morgan,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33, no. 3 (March 1, 2011): 257–79.

Many of our readers will be familiar with Susannah Heschel’s important and widely-reviewed work, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Fewer may know of these two articles from the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, which take up the long-standing debate over the use of “anti-Judaism” and “antisemitism” in the context of Christian hostility towards Jews and Judaism, whether in pre-modern Christian history or in the history of the Holocaust. This exchange between New Testament scholar Robert Morgan and Jewish Studies scholar Susannah Heschel highlights key disciplinary differences between theological and historical approaches to this question. Morgan hopes to distinguish between various theoretical categories of Jew hatred, while Heschel focuses on the historical confluence of theological, cultural, and racial attitudes and language of hostility towards Jews.

In his sixty-page critique of Heschel’s book, Morgan argues that The Aryan Jesus presents a one-sided impression of 1930s German church history,” based on a “failure to distinguish clearly between the churches and the völkisch movement that stands behind Nazi antisemitism.” (431) In contrast to her, he makes the case for a conceptual distinction between medieval Christian antisemitism, theological anti-Judaism, and modern secular antisemitism.

Morgan minimizes the connection between modern German theological developments and the participation of masses of German Protestants and Catholics in the Holocaust–simply put, for Morgan, the failure of Christians of the Nazi period to live up to their beliefs was nothing unusual in the history of Christianity, and didn’t require an associated failure of theology. In that vein, he argues that the efforts of theologian Walter Grundmann and his Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (established in 1939) had little if anything to do with the Holocaust (434).

With this as his starting point, Morgan raises the broader question of the historical relationship between theological anti-Judasim and secular antisemitism. His answer revolves around setting theological scholars like Grundmann and those involved in the Institute, who “introduced the racial issue into their older liberal Protestant theology,” into a separate category from the masses of Christians who supported the Hitler movement during and after 1933. He maintains that Heschel fails to examine Grundmann’s theological context in sufficient detail or to assess carefully enough his relationship to and responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust.

In contrast, Morgan argues that the Institute was an outgrowth of a particular radical Thuringian wing of the German Christian Movement. Apart from this development, most Germans were caught up in “a pervasive antisemitism” which was fueled by factors like “nationalism, hostility to modernity, to secularism, to left-wing politics, resentment against rich bankers at a time of national distress, and a perceived disproportionate influence of assimilated Jews in the professions and national life. But little of this passive antisemitism was ideologically driven, as it was in the völkisch movement and its political expression in the National Socialist party” (441). Morgan goes on to distinguish what he calls “this (passive) cultural antisemitism” from both “the more aggressive völkisch racist antisemitism” and “theological anti-Judaism” (441). Morgan admits that “some modern antisemitism surely included religious and tribal echoes and memories along with its more obvious social, political and economic ingredients,” but argues we still need more investigation about “how far (when at all) it was fuelled by theological anti-Judaism” (441). As a way to distinguish between older and newer eras, he introduces a new term for medieval and Reformation-era Jew hatred, which he calls “theological antisemitism,” and which occurs “where monstrous religious beliefs such as the guilt and curse of Israel for the death of Christ lead directly to antisemitism.” Moving forward to the Nazi era, Morgan argues that theologians like Grundmann and Gerhard Kittel were not guilty of this “medieval ‘theological antisemitism'” but rather promoted a “poisonous modern antisemitism” which was “distinct from the results of their New Testament scholarship” (441). Their scholarship, which contained a measure of “theological anti-Judaism,” was “less inflammatory, and concerned with Christian self-definition, not (in principle) defamation of Judaism” (441-442).

What emerges from this detailed process of categorization is the sense that Morgan would like to rescue the term “theological anti-Judaism” and redefine it to mean simply the disagreement of Christians with Jews concerning the one God they both worship–in other words, criticisms of the religion, not the people. As an example of his granular approach to categories of hostility towards Jews and Judaism, Morgan describes the Confessing Church leader Martin Niemöller as “untouched by racial theory,” but sharing in “the pervasive cultural antisemitism of the time, which was presumably reinforced by the tradition of Christian theological anti-Judaism and even contained residual traces of ‘theological antisemitism’.” This was, Morgan adds, “social and cultural non-violent antisemitism” (444).

Morgan continues in this vein throughout the rest of the article, criticizing Heschel for not distinguishing clearly between various scholarly theological developments, cultural antisemitism, the rise of the völkisch movement and Nazi party, nationalism, and racism (461). He is willing to admit to the indirect influence of theology on popular belief, but attempts to keep these areas as distinct as possible (465). In his conclusion, he reasserts that Heschel has not properly demonstrated the “contributions of theological anti-Judaism to Christian antisemitism,” that Christianity is not racialist, nor a kind of anti-Judaism, nor antisemitic, though Christians themselves have acted in those ways (488-489).

Not surprisingly, Heschel disagrees with Morgan’s critique, particularly with respect to his categories of theological anti-Judaism, and modern, racial antisemitism. In her article, she argues “that the texts of pro-Nazi German Protestant theologians integrate race and religion with a fluidity that obviates a sharp distinction between the two terms. Antisemitic propaganda produced by Christian theologians during World War II leaves the strictly theological realm in its use of Nazi language and concepts, even when framed in a Christian context, and demands a different kind of conceptualization by historians” (257).

In the first instance, Heschel highlights the significant difference between her approach and that of Morgan, noting how she and many other scholars “no longer find the distinction between theological anti-Judaism and antisemitism to be helpful.” She argues this categorization tends to “mask rather than illuminate the historical material we are studying,” and that she and many other scholars are now “less interested in establishing definitions and boundaries than in finding slippages, similarities, influences and parallels” (258). More concretely, Heschel demonstrates how intertwined Christian and Nazi racial ideas were with one another. For instance, she characterizes Morgan’s view that Martin Niemöller exhibited cultural antisemitism, theological anti-Judaism, and theological antisemitism as “quite a brew” (258). To drive this home, she asks how we should understand the mixture of ideas in the speech of Siegfried Leffler, a well-known leader in the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement, who stated in 1936: “Even if I know ‘thou shalt not kill’ is a commandment of God or ‘thou shalt love the Jew’ because he too is a child of the eternal Father, I am able to know as well that I have to kill him, I have to shoot him, and I can only do that if I am permitted to say: Christ” (258-259). Simply put, Heschel doesn’t find Morgan’s taxonomy useful as a means to historical explanation. Instead, she points out how the historical context of Leffler’s words–the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws prohibiting sexual relations between “Aryan” Germans and Jews and the widespread fear-mongering about the dangers of Jewish impurity–goes a long ways to explaining the passion in Leffler’s outburst against the dangers of Jews and Judaism for German Christianity.

Heschel also questions Morgan’s chronological differentiation between anti-Judaism and antisemitism, with theological anti-Judaism giving way to secular racism and antisemitism. Indeed, she notes how this view has been abandoned by many scholars, who prefer to describe all hostility to Jews and Judaism as antisemitism. Religious hostility, which might be called anti-Judaism, is just another kind of antisemitic discourse, alongside economic, political, nationalistic, or racial modes of speech. For instance, Heschel quotes a New Testament scholar, who explained: “The problem is that even in the patristic and medieval eras, long before the coinage of the term antisemitism as such, it is almost impossible to distinguish between the racial and religious/ethnic elements. Form many of these authors, as I’ve seen in my Caiaphas research, Jews were by their nature evil, and their rejection/killing of Christ is evidence of that evil nature” (260). Heschel adds that racial language and imagery were used to describe Jewish degeneracy in the Middle Ages, creating “an otherness of the Jewish body … that, already by the thirteenth century, was believed to be immutable and incapable of erasure even by baptism” (260).

As for the Nazi era, Heschel lists four reasons why scholars increasingly employ “antisemitism” to describe Christian hostility to Jews and Judaism: 1) explicitly Nazi language plays a central role in Christian discussions of Jews, while older terms took on new connotations in the Third Reich; 2) negative theological statements about Jews have to be understood in their wider social and political context; 3) “‘das Judentum’ is an ambiguous term in German,” meaning “Judaism, the Jews, or Jewishness,” which in turn creates an ambiguity in German theological language; and 4) “given the Nazi regime’s policies towards the Jews, terms such as ‘Entjudung’ (dejudaization) of Christianity or ‘Beseitigung’ (eradication) of Jewish influences insinuate practical implications and not just theoretical allusions” (261).

Heschel goes on to criticize Morgan for an outdated historical understanding of the German Christian Movement and an outdated theoretical understanding of the relationship between racism and nationalism, providing examples to show how racially-oriented German Protestant leaders were. For instance, she notes how Walter Grundmann “spoke about fighting on the ‘spiritual battlefield’ to protect Germans from Jews, Christianity from Judaism,” how he described “Jews as the underlying enemy of Germany,” and how he wrote that “‘the Jew’ is ‘the Antichrist [who] wants to unleash itself and overthrow the Reich’ through the war, Bolshevism and liberalism” (264). Heschel adds that this mixture of theological and racial antisemitism can be found in Grundmann’s scholarly and popular writing, making it impossible to separate his words and ideas into different categories of antisemitism.

Heschel restates the interpretation she puts forward in The Aryan Jesus: Grundmann and his colleagues “were theologians predisposed to accept the nationalism, antisemitism, anti-liberalism and anti-Bolshevism of Hitler and to view politics through religious lenses.” They viewed Nazism as a means to revitalize Christianity and sought to support Nazism with spiritual means. “To that end, Nazism had to be defined as embodying Christian values, and Christianity as embodying Nazi values.” They sought “to eradicate Jewishness from Christianity, just as the Reich sought to eradicate Jews from Europe” (265). And Nazi theologians need to be understood not only in their theological context, but also in their political and social context. She illustrates this last point by reminding Morgan (and her readers) of the wide-ranging evidence of Grundmann’s Nazi affinities and activities and the broad consensus of scholars such as Robert Ericksen, Guenter Lewy, and Kevin Spicer. In the end, Grundmann and his theological allies provided Hitler with ideological and propaganda support for “the disenfranchisement, deportation, and murder of the Jews,” (268) just as so many other academics and functionaries did throughout German institutional life.

To summarize, Heschel argues persuasively that the older distinction between theological anti-Judaism and racial antisemitism is increasingly difficult to sustain, given current scholarship on either historic Christianity or the churches in the Third Reich. This is certainly the interpretive path most historians now follow. Taken together, the Morgan and Heschel articles outline the two main perspectives in this terminological debate.

Share

Article Note: New Contributions on Nazism and Christianity

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 2 (June 2014)

Article Note: New Contributions on Nazism and Christianity

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Samuel Koehne, “Nazism and Religion: The Problem of ‘Positive Christianity,’” Australian Journal of Politics and History 60 No. 1 (2014): 28-42.

Samuel Koehne, “Nazi Germany as a Christian State: The ‘Protestant Experience’ of 1933 in Württemberg,” Central European History 46 No. 1 (March 2013): 97-123.

In this past year, Samuel Koehne has published two new articles, both of which are interesting contributions to the ongoing debate over the relationship between Nazism and Christianity. One looks at the question from the perspective of the National Socialist movement, probing the party’s use of the term “Positive Christianity”. The other examines the relationship from the perspective of conservative Christians in Württemberg, analyzing their early responses to Nazi rule.

In “Nazism and Religion: The Problem of ‘Positive Christianity’”, Koehne challenges Richard Steigmann-Gall’s interpretation of “Positive Christianity”—the term used in Point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform. Koehne rejects Steigmann-Gall’s view, as presented in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, that “Positive Christianity” was a kind of Nazi Christianity which was supra-confessional (uncoupled from any Protestant or Catholic dogmatism), antisemitic (rooted in the German racial community), and socially ethical. Noting that Steigmann-Gall never considered the pre-history of the term, Koehne argues convincingly that from the nineteenth-century on, “Positive Christianity” emerged in juxtaposition to liberal, rationalistic Christianity. Right into the Weimar era, the term was widely used to mean conservative, orthodox, doctrinal (i.e. dogmatic) Christianity. It had appeared in Meyers Konversationslexikon, then in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart as well as in Brockhaus, and was featured in church election campaign coverage in the Weimar period—even in the Völkischer Beobachter. Though Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller tried to redefine “Positive Christianity” on behalf of the German Christian Movement, Koehne points out (following the lead of James Zabel) that there were other meanings floating around, including “orthodoxy, neo-paganism, heroic faith, anti-intellectualism and moderation” (32). Indeed, this “lack of definition” may have been an important reason the term was adopted by Hitler for the NSDAP Platform.

Koehne finds a great deal of diversity in the use of “Positive Christianity” among National Socialists. Some meant it in its older sense of “not liberal,” while others linked it to cultic or neo-pagan movements. In Mein Kampf, Hitler himself emphasized the role of traditional dogma in turning religious or political belief into faith, and in generating both certainty and intolerance, which Hitler felt to be important for any movement, including his own. In short, it was as “doctrinal faith” that the Führer understood “Positive Christianity” (39). Nonetheless, it is precisely here that Koehne identifies:

the paradox of Hitler’s dogma. In his most public statement it is clear that Hitler defined Christianity as a religious system precisely in terms of dogmatic faith. It is equally clear that those leading Nazis who declared themselves to be Christian adhered not to a dogmatic form like that of the Catholic or Protestant orthodox position, but to a radical and “Aryanised” form of faith (40).

In his conclusion, Koehne argues convincingly that the Nazis were trying to have it “both ways”, a tension revealed in Gottfried Feder’s official commentary on the Nazi Party Platform. In it, Feder asserted that National Socialists supported: 1) “Complete freedom of conscience”, 2) “Special protection of the Christian creeds”, and 3) “Suppression and obstruction of doctrines which are contrary to the German moral sense and whose content is of a character destructive to the state and Volk” (40-41). Clearly, these were not mutually compatible.

Though Koehne has effectively demonstrated that “Positive Christianity” was not a coherent “religious system” (à la Steigmann-Gall), his findings don’t exactly clarify the relationship between Nazism and Christianity. Near the end of his article, Koehne argues that “Hitler’s own definition [of “Positive Christianity”] meant that the Nazis were decidedly “un-Christian” (40). That may be, but as Steigmann-Gall has demonstrated, many leading Nazis self-identified as Christians. By both affirming traditional doctrinal Christianity and reinterpreting it in light of National Socialist racial ideology, Hitler and his Nazi colleagues created a great deal of confusion, both then and now. As a result, whether Point 24 and its affirmation of “Positive Christianity” was merely a smokescreen for Nazi anti-Christianity or whether it represented a willingness to accept the Christian churches as subordinate partners in the remaking of Germany is still open to debate. Koehne rightly calls for more research into how ordinary Christians understood the “Positive Christianity” of Nazism, in order to better define the relationship between Nazism and Christianity.

In “Nazi Germany as a Christian State: The ‘Protestant Experience’ of 1933 in Württemberg” (the earlier of the two articles, in terms of publication dates), Koehne engages in just the kind of research he calls for. This article is a response to Manfred Gailus’ call for new micro-histories of Christianity in Nazi Germany, and especially of the upsurge in Christian nationalism during the Nazi seizure of power—what Gailus, studying Berlin, calls the “Protestant Experience” of 1933 (97). Koehne attempts to discover whether a similar phenomenon occurred in Württemberg, and he does so by analyzing parish newsletters and pastoral correspondence, particularly from conservative (Pietist) Protestants in the Pastors’ Prayer Group (Pfarrergebetsbund) headquartered in Korntal. His goals are to discover how they viewed the Nazi regime in 1933 and how they responded to Nazi antisemitism.

As in the article on “Positive Christianity”, Koehne begins with a historical review—this time, of the relationship between politics and religion during the pivotal years of German Unification (1870) and of the outbreak of the First World War (1914). What he finds is that the conservative Protestants like the Korntal Pietists tended to view political events in religious terms, so that, “as Hartmut Lehmann has noted, events such as the foundation of the German Reich, World War I, and the rise of the Nazis could be read as indicating divine will” (100). Germany was, according to this perspective, a Christian nation.

In light of this, conservative Protestants came to see the Weimar era as a time of spiritual crises and godlessness, the product of the collapse of the Christian state that was Imperial Germany. As his 1933 speeches make clear, Hitler leveraged this fear. He called for a fight against communism and a duty to reestablish national unity and revive the German spirit. He declared his support for the Catholic and Protestant churches, proclaiming that they would play a key role in the moral and national renewal of Germany. He even announced that National Socialists “would create a state in which there could be a really profound revival of religious life” (103).

The Korntal Pietists Koehne studied responded favourably to Hitler’s overtures. Koehne quotes Regional Bishop Wurm, in the Korntal Parish Newsletter, drawing a parallel between the German Wehrmacht and the Christian Church, both of which stood above the conflict of the parties, served the entire nation, and fought “for good against evil and for the well-being of the whole Volk” (105). Similarly, the Korntal Parish Newsletter editors welcomed Hitler’s ascension to power, giving thanks for a Führer as a leader not seen since Bismarck, and one who was saving Germany from Marxist terror. As they put it, “Hitler and his regime have proclaimed the Christian State” (106). For Koehne, this was a revival of the spirit of 1914, a combined national and religious revival in the wake of powerful political events. Here he reviews the excitement of conservative Württemberg Protestants from that time, who saw the outbreak of war as a “spiritual springtime” complete with large upswings in church attendance. He quotes Gailus’ argument that both 1914 and 1933 were seen as “God’s hour” and interpreted “as a reunion with God of a people who had strayed from the true faith, a change of direction toward re-Christianization” (107).

If conservative Württemberg Protestants were pleased with the national-spiritual revival of early 1933, they grew increasingly concerned throughout the course of 1933 over the increasing politicization of the German churches. Whether it was the attempt by Premier Wilhelm Frick to place the Mecklenburg church under state control, the appointment of August Jäger as commissar over the Old Prussian Union Church, or Hitler’s support for the German Christian Movement, the Korntal Pietists understood that the state was interfering regularly in the life of the churches. There was, quite simply, a significant inconsistency between Hitler’s assurances that the inner religious life of the churches would be protected and his advocacy of the German Christians, the group who sought to “bring the Protestant Church in line with National Socialism—taking extreme positions on religious questions in doing so” (109). If, as the Korntal Pietists believed, the churches were to act as “the conscience of the Volk,” then the essential question was not about the national revival, but about the spiritual one: Would the Volk “listen to the voice of the Word of God proclaimed by the church, which does not simply awaken the slumbering good in our Volk but also judges the evil” (111)?

In addition to his findings concerning the attitudes of conservative Protestants towards the new Nazi state, Koehne also probes his sources for evidence concerning Christian attitudes towards antisemitism. He finds almost no mention of antisemitic events like the April 1 boycott of Jewish shops, and beyond that, little opposition to the persecution of Jews or other victims of Nazism. Rather, the emphasis among Korntal Pietists was invariably on the role of the Nazi state in working toward national renewal, leaving the spiritual renewal to the churches. They believed Hitler’s state was creating the conditions for spiritual renewal in four ways: 1) by fighting immorality, 2) by promoting a Christian concept of community, 3) by publicly supporting the Christian churches, and 4) by sparking general enthusiasm in German society, a “spring storm” of sentiment (112). Writers in the Korntal Parish Newsletter called on the German Protestant Church to use this enthusiasm to create a national mission (Volksmission) and hoped Christians would enter into and take on leadership roles in the National Socialist movement. In reality, as Koehne notes, the proselytization went the other way, as Nazi values reshaped the Christian churches. He also describes how conservative Protestants viewed the neo-pagan German Faith Movement as a growing threat.

Koehne finds that, in contrast to the Korntal Parish Newsletter, the correspondence among members of the Pastors’ Prayer Group was more circumspect, a mixture of joy and concern. Yes, Hitler was a God-given saviour, but the German Christian Movement, the totalitarian claims of the state, and the growing prevalence of the “racial question” in the Church was disconcerting. Indeed, one member of the group wondered whether the “‘Aryan question’ … was possibly a satanic devise to prevent ‘a genuine awakening’” (115). In terms of antisemitism, Koehne found allusions to the persecution of Jews, but didn’t seem to uncover much material on the “Jewish Question.” In fact, he wonders whether antisemitic measures had any real impact on these pastors or their congregations and concludes that their “willingness to overlook antisemitic policy” or other “less pleasing” actions of the state (here he is quoting one of the pastors) “meant that they were actively passive, having made a choice to remain passive, to abide” (118).

Overall, the members of the Pastors’ Prayer Group exhibited a mixture of political joy but religious concern. While they saw Hitler as a “God-given Führer” for the nation, they lamented the absence of a “spiritual leader” for German Protestants (119). They worried about the extensive politicization of religion and the growth of a media culture which created a sensory overload and left no room for spiritual reflection. In terms of racial politics, their narrow focus on the national rebirth meant that they found National Socialist antisemitism tolerable. Again, they were “actively passive,” viewing their interests as limited to the ecclesiastical realm and deciding that the positive aspects of National Socialism overwhelmed the negative ones.

In his conclusion, Koehne quotes the Korntal Parish Newsletter’s description of the experience of 1933 like a national-spiritual wave, a return to the high point of 1914 after the low ebb of the Weimar era. Once again, Koehne has demonstrated the complexity of relations between Nazism and Christianity, particularly at the outset of the Third Reich. His conservative Protestants from Württemberg clearly welcomed the new Nazi state and saw themselves as participants in a spiritual revival that ran alongside Hitler’s national revival, as had been the case in earlier moments of national importance, such as 1870 or 1914. Their sense of partnership with the new regime enabled them to ignore the regime’s antisemitism, though the growing politicization of religious life concerned them. Still, in 1933, they expressed “belief in a national revival under the Nazis” and “belief that Nazi Germany was a state in support of religion” (120).

Share

Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “Reassessing The Holy Reich: Leading Nazis’ Views on Confession, Community and ‘Jewish’ Materialism”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 1 (March 2014)

Article Note: Samuel Koehne, “Reassessing The Holy Reich: Leading Nazis’ Views on Confession, Community and ‘Jewish’ Materialism,” Journal of Contemporary History 48 No. 3 (July 2013): 423-445.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Samuel Koehne is a young Australian scholar who has been researching on the twin topics of how liberal and conservative Christians interpreted and responded to the rise of the National Socialist movement and how the Nazi movement developed its official policy on religion (see our summary of his research in Contemporary Church History Quarterly 18, no. 4 (December 2012)). In his recent article in the Journal of Contemporary History, Koehne revisits the controversy surrounding the Richard Steigmann-Gall book, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945—a controversy which featured prominently in the pages of the same journal back in early 2007. Koehne examines one of Steigmann-Gall’s key arguments in The Holy Reich, that the “positive Christianity” of Point 24 in the 1920 NSDAP Programme represented a coherent Nazi version of Christianity, which was supra-confessional (uncoupled from any Protestant or Catholic dogmatism), antisemitic (rooted in the German racial community), and socially ethical (placing common interest before private interest). In contrast, Koehne argues that “the notion of ‘positive Christianity’ as a Nazi ‘religious system’ has been largely invented” (423). Koehne makes his case by analyzing the public statements of Nazi leaders Adolf Hitler, Gottfried Feder, and Alfred Rosenberg on confession, community, and “Jewish” materialism, finding that all three ideas were “openly depicted as part of Nazi a racial-nationalist ideology,” and not portrayed as part of some kind of Nazi Christianity (424). In terms of source material, Koehne focuses on Hitler’s statements prior to the Munich Putsch and his writing in Mein Kampf, along with published explanations of the party programme by Rosenberg and Feder, from 1933 and 1934 respectively.

Koehne makes his case well. By the end of the article, there is little question that German racial purity, antisemitism, and Volksgemeinschaft were essential components of Nazi ideology, as opposed to core beliefs in a kind of Nazi Christianity. As a result, the “positive Christianity” of Point 24 remains ambiguous—social cohesion in Hitler’s Germany would not be achieved through an “’interconfessional’ religion but by a kind of salvational nationalism” (444). But if Koehne’s conclusion casts doubt on one of Richard Steigmann-Gall’s key arguments in The Holy Reich, it doesn’t clarify the questions the latter raises about individual Nazis’ attitudes towards Jesus or Christianity (444) or about the nature of National Socialist ecclesiastical policy. Amid Koehne’s examples of Hitler’s criticisms of the churches for the insufficiency of their Germanness and antisemitism are other references that suggest Christianity and the churches could play a positive role in German political life, as they had during the First World War (432-434). Nonetheless, Koehne’s article is an important reminder that religion was of minor importance to Hitler and other leading Nazis as they formulated and later implemented their antisemitic völkisch ideology, even if the their movement posed difficult challenges to Christianity and the German churches.

Share

Letter from the Editors: September 2013

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 3 (September 2013)

Letter from the Editors: September 2013

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Dear friends,

An altar from the Mainzer Dom (St. Martin's Cathedral), set of the Archbishop of Mainz.

An altar from the Mainzer Dom (St. Martin’s Cathedral), set of the Archbishop of Mainz.

It is always a joy for me to announce the publication of a new issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly. It has been a busy summer for the members of the editorial board of CCHQ. In late July, fourteen of the sixteen editors gathered together with a small group of German and American scholars for a conference, “Reassessing Contemporary Church History,” held on the University of British Columbia campus. Mark Edward Ruff, who led the effort to organize the conference (along with Steven Schroeder, Lauren Faulkner, and John Conway himself), has written an extensive report on the papers presented in Vancouver. It is the highlight of this issue of CCHQ.

At the conference, sponsored by both the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the editorial board took advantage of the opportunity to meet for a discussion about the future of the journal. This was a very positive exchange, the result of which is a renewed commitment to provide “news, reviews, and commentary on contemporary religious history with a focus on Germany and Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” We want to continue John Conway’s tradition of prompt reviews of new books written in language that reaches (indeed, brings together) experts in modern German church history with members of the broader public who are interested in this subject. But we also want to gradually expand the scope of our work (as we have been doing over the past couple of years) by publishing editorials, talks, new research reports, and other similar kinds of writing.

As ever, we hope you enjoy this edition of Contemporary Church History Quarterly, even as we have already begun to plan for a full slate of reviews in our upcoming December issue.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Share

Letter from the Editors: June 2013

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 2 (June 2013)

Letter from the Editors: June 2013

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Dear friends,

Four church fathers in the Stiftskirche St. Goar, Germany

Four church fathers in the Stiftskirche St. Goar, Germany

Once again I am delighted to announce the new issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly. This June issue is somewhat shorter than past issues, in large part because many of the members of the CCHQ editorial board are busy preparing for our upcoming conference, “Reassessing Contemporary Church History,” coming up this July 25-27 in Vancouver, BC (Steven Schroeder’s conference announcement has all the details).

This issue features reviews on the issue of rescue via the “Büro Pfarrer Grüber” in Berlin, on the voluminous correspondence of the German Bishops in the years after 1945, on the relationship between religion and the Cold War, and on religious transformation in the modern world. In addition, there are two shorter notes on recent publications, as well as the conference announcement.

We hope you enjoy this edition of Contemporary Church History Quarterly, and look forward to bringing you an extensive report from our summer conference.

On behalf of the editorial team,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Share

Review of Christopher J. Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Review of Christopher J. Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), xiv + 251 Pp., ISBN 978-0-253-00098-9.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Probst-DemonizingChristopher Probst has written an insightful analysis of the ways in which Protestant reformer Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish writings were used by German Protestants during the Third Reich. Fundamental to Probst’s work is his consistent use of Gavin Langmuir’s distinction between non-rational anti-Judaism (antipathy rooted in theological differences or other symbolic language which stand apart from and not against rational thought) and irrational antisemitism (antagonism rooted in factually untrue and slanderous accusations against Jews). In contrast to the idea that pre-modern anti-Jewish thought was generally religious and therefore anti-Judaic while modern anti-Jewish thought is political or racial and therefore antisemitic, Probst sees both anti-Judaic and antisemitic elements in the language of Luther and the twentieth-century German theologians, church leaders, and pastors who invoked him (3-4, 6, 17-19). In light of this, Demonizing the Jews is a book about historical continuity.

One of Probst’s important contributions is to show how complex and paradoxical antipathy towards Jews could be in Nazi Germany. Indeed, Demonizing the Jews begins with two snapshots from the life of Pastor Heinrich Fausel of Heimsheim, Württemberg. First, we learn that in 1934 Fausel gave a public lecture on the “Jewish Problem” in which he recycled Martin Luther’s harsh pronouncements against the Jews of his day. Then, we discover that in 1943 Fausel and his wife sheltered a Jewish woman during the Holocaust. What was it about his attitudes towards Jews, Probst wonders, that enabled him to condemn Jews as a “threatening invasion” of a “decadent” people and yet rescue one of them? (1) Was Fausel antisemitic or anti-Judaic?

More importantly, Probst asks what role Luther’s writings about Jews and Judaism might have played in the life of Fausel. More broadly, he wonders: “Was the generally anemic response to anti-Jewish Nazi policy on the part of German Protestants due at least in part to the denigration of Jews and Judaism in Luther’s writings, to a more general traditional Christian anti-Judaism, or to some other cultural, social, economic, or political factors particular to Germany in the first half of the twentieth century?” (8). Here Probst has identified an important gap in the literature, for he has found no study which has thoroughly analyzed the use of Luther’s anti-Judaic and antisemitic writings in Nazi Germany (6). This he sets out to do, employing not the classic texts of Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Karl Barth, but rather less prominent writings which he argues more completely capture the “conventional views” of German clergy (7, 19-20). No doubt many scholars will assume, with the author, that “surely many Protestants in Hitler’s Germany might have read Luther’s recommendations and sensed the congruities with the gruesome antisemitic program unfolding around them” (13).

Probst analyzes the history of German Protestant anti-Judaism and antisemitism in six well-organized chapters. And overview of Protestantism in Nazi Germany and a careful examination of Luther’s writings about Jews set the stage for his analysis of the twentieth-century appropriation of the sixteenth-century reformer’s ideas. Four chapters make up the heart of the work—one devoted to academic theologians from across the church-political spectrum and three devoted to clergy from the Confessing Church, the German Christian Movement, and the non-affiliated “middle”—the largest group within the German Protestant clergy of the Nazi era.

Overall, what Probst finds is that German Christian clergy, theologians, and church leaders “consistently embraced Luther’s irrational antisemitic rhetoric as their own, frequently pairing it with idealized portraits of ‘Teutonic’ or ‘German’ greatness, anti-Bolshevism, and anti-Enlightenment sentiment” (14). Confessing Church clergy and theologians tended to emphasize “Luther’s non-rational anti-Judaic arguments against Jews” but generally remained silent about his antisemitic outbursts and usually tried to distance themselves from the racial antisemitism of the German Christians and the Nazi state. Clergy from the middle of the church-political spectrum drew on both anti-Judaic and antisemitic aspects of Luther’s Jewish writings, often sliding into xenophobic stereotypes of Jews, such as the Jew as usurer (14).

In his opening chapter on Protestantism in Nazi Germany, Probst draws on Shulamit Volkov’s argument that antisemitism became a “cultural code” in Wilhelmine Germany, deeply embedded in society even during times when political antisemitism waned. He also highlights the importance of the ongoing publication of the Weimar edition of Luther’s Werke, including volume 53 containing On the Jews and Their Lies and On the Ineffable Name and on the Lineage of Christ, which was published in 1919. Probst also explains the importance of the “Luther Renaissance,” the revival of scholarly interest in Martin Luther which unfolded in the interwar era, noting its openness to nationalistic and antisemitic sentiments (26). As an example of the nationalistic, political, and even racial nature of German theology in the Weimar and Nazi eras, Probst assesses three works of the Erlangen theologian Paul Althaus: “The Voice of the Blood” (1932), Theology of the Orders (1934), and Völker before and after Christ (1937).  What stands out here is the importance Althaus gave to the notion of the racial or blood-bound Volk as an elevated community established by God. It is in this context that Luther became important for German Protestants during the interwar era, both as national hero and (less so) as an antisemitic model (37-38).

Many readers will appreciate Probst’s careful analysis of Luther’s Judenschriften. Importantly, Demonizing the Jews strives to place Luther and his anti-Judaic and antisemitic rhetoric in proper historical context, noting the prevalence of negative stereotypes of Jews in the later Middle Ages, the frequency of accusations of host desecration leveled against Jews, the extent of anti-Jewish prejudice among church leaders (including reformers like Martin Bucer and Andreas Osiander), and the presence of important anti-Judaic and antisemitic publications, including Anthonius Margaritha’s The Whole Jewish Faith, in which a converted Jew made numerous provocative charges about his former coreligionists. Probst surveys Luther’s writings on Jews from the moderate and somewhat philosemitic That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew (1523) to the sharply anti-Judaic and crudely antisemitic On the Jews and Their Lies and On the Ineffable Name and on the Lineage of Christ (both 1543), demonstrating both the importance of Luther’s theological opposition to Judaism and the extent to which his harsher attacks were “steeped in late medieval anti-Jewish paranoia” (50). While Probst places Luther carefully in his sixteenth-century context and cautions against various simplistic interpretations of Luther’s anti-Jewish writings (early vs. late Luther, anger over the absence of Jewish conversions, declining health and increasing upset in old age), he refrains from offering a decisive explanation for Luther’s antipathy towards Jews and Judaism (51-58). What is clear is that the Luther’s antisemitic social program was ignored for over three hundred years, until it was revived in a completely decontextualized manner by Nazi propagandists and Weimar-era Protestant writers.

Turning his attention to academic theologians from both the Confessing Church and the German Christian Movement in chapter three, Probst again sets his historical discussion carefully in context, briefly explaining the politicization of German universities and academic theology in the Third Reich. Surveying four theologians—Eric Vogelsang of Königsberg University; Wolf Meyer-Erlach of Jena University; Hermann Steinlein, pastor of Ansbach; and Gerhard Schmidt of Nuremberg Seminary—the author finds that “German Christian theologians usually adopted Luther’s irrational antisemitic rhetoric as their own, often coupling it with notions that included idealized portraits of ‘Teutonic’ or ‘German’ greatness and anti-Enlightenment sentiment” (81). Confessing Church theologians tended to employ Luther’s anti-Judaic arguments only but still usually supported the Nazi state’s antisemitic program, which mirrored Luther’s own antisemitic recommendations. As Probst concludes, “We have seen here that a Confessing Church pastor, a Confessing Church theologian, and two German Christian theologians all agree that Luther was ‘correct’ to be antisemitic, or at least ‘anti-Jewish’” (82).

Chapters four through six ask how Confessing Church, German Christian, and non-aligned parish and higher clergy used Luther’s anti-Jewish writings in the course of their parish duties or church leadership. Probst returns to the subject of the opening pages of the book, Pastor Heinrich Fausel, who was in fact a member of the Confessing Church. The Heimsheim pastor espoused a relatively apolitical theology, though one marked by the theology of the orders of creation. Like so many of his colleagues from across the Reich, Fausel advocated the close connection between the German Volk and the Christian God. The resurrection of Germany “after bad times” (Probst’s words, not Fausel’s) depends on Christian devotion to God, which Probst describes, perhaps optimistically, as “explicitly scriptural and spiritual—and in no way political.” (94) Probst goes on to explain how, in the course of wartime suffering and the destruction of property, Fausel proclaimed the name of Jesus to be the source of forgiveness, healing, and victory. Statements like these, I would argue, are in fact much more political than the author suggests, given the context in which they arise.

When Fausel gave a public lecture on the Jewish Question in 1934, he refused to engage with biological notions of Jewishness but limited his discussion to the spiritual realm, where the person of Christ determined the fate of the Church, the peoples of the world, and the Jews. Fausel highlighted Jewish disobedience and stubbornness, using Isaiah 5 and its description of God’s vineyard, which Israel neglected to care for. Even as he began to discuss Jews in the New Testament, Fausel explained the “Jewish Question” as a “besetting” problem and described the “terrifying foreign invasion” of Jews since the nineteenth century as a threat Germany had to defend itself from. That said, Fausel affirmed that opposition between Jews and gentiles in the New Testament was only about Christ and not about race. Still, Israel’s rejection of Christ was, in Fausel’s words, a “unanimous rejection by an entire Volk, its leaders included,” even though (as the pastor explained) Jesus came to earth as part of the Jewish Volk (96). When Fausel discussed Luther’s views about Jews, he noted the reformer’s early positivity, but then explained how Luther dissociated himself from Jews and later unleashed his “full wrath” on them (96-97). Fausel noted how Luther saw the Jews as Christ’s enemies, how he recommended that the political authorities undertake severe measures against them, and how he lost hope for their conversion (97).

Throughout this section, Probst is careful to note that Fausel drew not only on Luther’s theological (non-rational) anti-Judaic sentiments, but also on his socio-political (irrational) antisemitic recommendations. Indeed, Fausel went on to speak approvingly of the state’s efforts to protect the German Volk from the Jews. He opposed Jewish-gentile intermarriage and supported restrictions to the number of Jewish civil servants in Germany. Though his arguments derived primarily from theology (for Probst, non-rational anti-Judaism), the practical outworking of this theology was Fausel’s approval of the distinctly antisemitic social and political measures undertaken by the Nazi state.

Most curiously (again), despite these views, Fausel and his wife later hid and cared for a Jewish woman during the Second World War, an act Probst has no real explanation for, on account of the lack of clear evidence. Rightly, he notes that people often act at variance with their stated beliefs, noting also that Fausel may have had something of a change of heart, given that he later signed the Württemberg Ecclesiastical-Theological Society’s 1946 Declaration on the Jewish Question—a frank confession of collective guilt from Protestants who realized they had been bystanders to the persecution of Jews (97-99, 171-172).

Probst agrees with Wolfgang Gerlach that even Confessing Church clergy did not support protection for Jews in Nazi Germany (113). Though he argues that they focused primarily on the biblical or theological aspects of Luther’s anti-Jewish writings, he adds that they reached “too easily for irrational and/or xenophobic reasoning in their writings and lectures” (116). If this was the case for Confessing Church clergy, Probst demonstrates that German Christian clergy were even more likely to draw on the explicitly antisemitic aspects of Luther’s writings. “The German Christian literature is overwhelmingly laden with strident attacks on Jews based on irrational conceptions about them. They are said to possess ‘fanatical hatred’ and ‘pernicious power.’ They are the ‘scum of mankind.’” Indeed, German Christians used terms like “Jewish Bolshevism” while urging the Nazi state to wage a “defensive struggle” against Jewish “Volk-disintegrating” power. Probst concludes: “Ultimately, many in the German Christian movement believed it was a matter of annihilate or be annihilated.” (142) As might be expected, non-aligned clergy from the Protestant middle landed somewhere between the Confessing Church and German Christian positions—more likely to invoke Luther’s non-rational anti-Judaic arguments against Jews but also more likely to elevate the German Volk as an order of creation and generally ready to support National Socialism and to identify Jews with Bolshevism (168-169).

One criticism of Demonizing the Jews might be its limited research base. It is to the author’s advantage that he analyzes individual anti-Jewish writings in good depth, but it is somewhat problematic to draw nuanced conclusions about the differences between Confessing Church, German Christian, and non-aligned clergy from such a small sampling of theological writings. That said, nothing I have seen in the parish archives of church districts from diverse regions of Nazi Germany would contradict Probst’s findings.

In the end, it is easy to agree with Probst’s conclusion that the anti-Judaic and antisemitic writings and lectures of German Protestant clergy “reinforced the cultural antisemitism and anti-Judaism of many Protestants in Nazi Germany” (172). Most importantly, however, by applying Langmuir’s more sophisticated definitions of anti-Judaism and antisemitism—both sentiments existed in the writings of Martin Luther and in those of his twentieth-century followers in Nazi Germany—Probst has demonstrated how deeply the continuities of anti-Jewish sentiment stretch from Nazi Germany back through the centuries to Luther and beyond. Surely there can be little question that Christian anti-Judaism and antisemitism contributed significantly to the dehumanization of the Jews, fueling the ideological fire that became the Holocaust.

 

Share

Review of the Internet website “Evangelischer Widerstand”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Review of the Internet website “Evangelischer Widerstand,” http://evangelischer-widerstand.de.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

EvangelischerWiderstand01The interactive website “Evangelischer Widerstand” (www.evangelischer-widerstand.de) is a powerful presentation of the Protestant Christian resistance to Hitler in both German and English. Automatically detecting my country of origin, the English website loaded a moving audio-visual introduction: “Imagine that your desperate exhortations go unheard. Would you nevertheless repeatedly call for solidarity with persecuted individuals?” The answer to this question is a short narration about Elisabeth Schmitz, a Berlin high school teacher who appealed to Confessing Church leaders to help Jews, wrote an important memorandum on the topic, aided persecuted Jews, and quit her teaching position in protest against the National Socialist system. Three similarly worded questions follow, on the subjects of refusing to endorse the Nazi regime, rejecting the values of the Nazi legal system, and voicing anti-war convictions during the Second World War. In turn, these questions are answered with biographical snippets about Otto and Gertrud Mörike, a pastoral couple; Martin Gauger, a Confessing Church lawyer; and Johannes Schröder, a Confessing Church military chaplain who became an anti-war activist. Bridging to the motto, “Resistance!? Protestant Christians under the Nazi Regime,” the splash page dissolves to reveal an attractive map of the Third Reich covered in icons of men and women.

EvangelischerWiderstand02This is the website developed over the past couple of years by the Evangelische Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte (Protestant Working Group for Contemporary Church History) in Munich, under the leadership of Dr. Claudia Lepp, along with Drs. Siegfried Hermle, Harry Oelke, and a host of other notable German scholars. It is sponsored by the Evangelical Church in Germany, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria, the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau, and the Köber Foundation of Hamburg, and supported by a long list of academics, Protestant notables, archives, memorial sites, and other institutions. It contains information on no less than three dozen (as of March 2013) individual or group resisters, along with a timeline, a series of fundamental questions, photos, documents and audio clips. It is a rich and growing set of resources, tied to a substantial bibliography of German-language publications on the topics of resistance and the German churches under Hitler. (Hopefully, over time, the bibliography will grow to include many of the important English-language studies on the German churches in the Nazi era.)

There is much to commend about “Evangelischer Widerstand.” The Protestant Working Group for Contemporary Church History is entirely correct in its awareness of the need to tell the story of the German churches under Hitler in new ways to new generations. This website is far more likely to reach young German Protestants than any of the excellent histories which continue to be written by scholars in Germany, Britain, North America, and elsewhere. The compelling questions posed in the introduction to the website raise fundamental moral questions and anticipate a website that presents meaningful stories of unambiguous Christian resistance to Nazism.

The inclusion of photographs, documents, and audio clips adds to the interest, and the decision to tell the story of Christian resistance largely through bite-sized biographies of famous (and not so famous) Germans is surely the most engaging approach available. Included are the expected personalities like Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, Wüttemberg Protestant Bishop Theophil Wurm, and the Kreisau Circle, along with Catholic Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen and Anglican Bishop George Bell, to provide some international and ecumenical flavour. But there are also lesser known Christians: attorney Hans Buttersack, vicar and teacher Ina Gschlössl, teacher Georg Maus, and vicar Katharina Staritz. The witness of their lives and opposition to Nazism within the ecclesiastical realm demonstrate that there were indeed members of an “other Germany” who did not bow to Hitler or abandon persecuted Jews.

EvangelischerWiderstand06In the “About the exhibition” section of the site, Claudia Lepp and her colleagues explain their historical assumptions and methodology. They argue that the resistance against National Socialism “continues to be one of the most volatile chapters of twentieth century German history,” express their concern about “the progressive loss of communicative memory from eyewitnesses to events,” and note “the problematic nature of resistance.” Delving into the historiography of the German churches under Nazism, they identify a shift during the 1980s away from a focus on the Confessing Church and towards four new issues: 1) the role of resistance in the everyday life of Christian congregations and the question of who was motivated by their Christian faith to aid the victims of persecution; 2) the significance of “less noted” groups like the Religious Socialists, liberal Christians, Christians in the National Committee for Free Germany, conscientious objectors and those who deserted on account of their Christian faith; 3) the personal faith of resistance members and its relationship to their ethical and political thinking; and 4) the proper historical presentation of resistance “detached from forms of heroization.”

In response to these questions, the Protestant Working Group for Contemporary Church History hopes their online academic exhibition will cover “the entire range of Protestants’ resistance under the Nazi regime, including its manifestations and ambivalences.” Here the scholars behind the exhibition focus on “Christian resistance,” which they define as “resistance engendered by the Bible and bound by traditional fundamental Christian values.” And they identify several forms of resistance,

from partial discontent to disobedience and protest up through coup attempts, resistance in the narrower sense of the word. At issue was defending the Church’s right of existence and the authenticity of the Christian message from the threat of ideological dictatorship as well as defending the rule of law and human dignity in an unjust regime.

The rationale closes with the claim that “the exhibition clearly establishes that resistance motivated by Christian faith was invariably the exception among the wide range of options for Christian and ecclesiastical action in the Nazi era.”

Except that it doesn’t. Visitors to the “Evangelischer Widerstand” website are unlikely to leave with the impression that Christian resistance was the exception in the Third Reich. I have quoted extensively from “About the exhibition” because it explains two basic flaws that run right through the website: the definition of resistance and the assumption of resistance.

Concerning the definition of resistance, nowhere does the site actually define the term. This is baffling, given that historians have been debating the definition of resistance intensively since the 1970s, employing or critiquing terms like resistance, opposition, non-conformity, dissent, protest, or immunity. Throughout the English website, however, resistance is employed almost universally; opposition is used a handful of times, but non-conformity and dissent are absent. There is one article on “Everyday Protest” in which discusses “minor forms of social disobedience,” but also uses both the words “resisted” and “protest and assertion,” avoiding clarity on the issue. On the German site, Widerstand is used throughout, with Opposition, Resistenz, and Verweigerung showing up occasionally, though they are never defined. The German article equivalent to the “Everyday Protest” article is even more confusing, for the article itself is called “Verweigerung im Alltag,” but includes the words “widersetzten sich,” “sozialen Ungehorsams,” and “Nichtteilnahme.”

The result of the near-universal employment of Resistance and Widerstand is to suggest that every church protest against some specific Nazi policy or particular encroachment into the ecclesiastical realm was akin to a principled opposition to National Socialism as a movement or to a forcible attempt to overthrow the Hitler regime. The professional historical scholarship on the German churches in the Third Reich abandoned this simplistic interpretive approach decades ago. There’s no good reason why the Protestant Working Group for Contemporary Church History, filled with excellent scholars, should employ such an outdated interpretive concept of resistance today.

The second weakness of the website is the assumption of resistance. The treatment of individuals and topics runs from heroic resistance to compromised resistance, but never to indifference, compromise, or collaboration, which were in fact the normative responses of Christians in Nazi Germany. For instance, in the “Fundamental Questions” section of the site, the introduction begins with a window called “Action at the Margins,” which states that “Resistance in totalitarian regimes means action at the margins: The divide between (un-)lawfulness and justice, between courage and foolhardiness, between reasons of state and conscience. Christians’ resistance against National Socialism is no exception here.” The introduction moves on to discuss “Christian Resistance” within the context of a totalitarian Nazi regime, “Action in Obscurity.” Another window on “Fundamental Questions” briefly mentions that the questions of resistance are not merely about “black and white or good and evil.” After that, however, there follow several more windows on motivations for resistance, Christian and Church resistance, and denominational and ecumenical resistance.

Further along, a “Contradictions” area notes how Christian faith could also “crush the potential for resistance.” Yet even here the authors of the text do not consider indifference, compromise, or collaboration. They only note that resisters grappled with the command of Romans 13 to obey political authorities and debated “the ethical justifiability of tyrannicide.” The text continues: “This ambivalence is reflected in many biographies, even ones where faith initially made supporters of the NSDAP out of individuals who later turned their backs on National Socialism and became its opponents.” So ambivalence is present, but generally appears to have been overcome in the lives of Christian resisters. Other parts of the “Fundamental Questions” section treat issues such as Christian ethics, defense of others, consideration of consequences, gender-specific resistance, and contrasts between clergy and laity. But the net result is still a site devoted only to resistance, and not to a consideration of the wider range of responses to Nazism among Protestants—or Catholics, for that matter.

EvangelischerWiderstand05A similar analysis could be made of the timeline. Here the web historians offer up three streams of articles—on the “Regime,” on “Majority Protestantism,” and on “Christian Resistance.” There are entries about Hitler’s misleading pro-Christian statements, the German Christian Faith Movement, and other aspects of the history of Protestant collaboration with the Hitler state. Still, in the crucial 1933-1934 section, the 19 articles devoted to aspects of Christian Resistance are almost double the 10 entries given over to the compromised majority Protestants, once more creating the impression that Christian Resistance was, in fact, the most obvious Christian response to the Nazi dictatorship.

One might protest that the aim of “Evangelischer Widerstand” is just that—to highlight Protestant resistance. Fair enough, but when the stated goal of the Protestant Working Group for Contemporary Church History is to “appeal to users with different educational backgrounds and interests and of different ages” (i.e. to engage a younger, web-surfing generation) for the purpose of “educating the general public about the problematic nature of resistance,” such an unbalanced telling of the story creates a false impression on uninitiated viewers of the website. Coupled with the misleading use of the term resistance for all forms of ecclesiastical opposition, “Evangelischer Widerstand” as a flawed educational resource.

EvangelischerWiderstand03Because of these two weaknesses in the website’s approach to presenting the history of the German churches in the Third Reich, “Evangelischer Widerstand” works best when it tells the stories of the heroic, deeply-principled Christians who acted decisively against the regime and its policies. Elisabeth Schmitz is a good example. Just as Manfred Gailus has recently argued in his fine history Mir aber zerriss es das Herz. Der stille Widerstand der Elisabeth Schmitz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), Elisabeth Schmitz was a remarkable figure. A member of the “World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches” from 1928 on, she conscientiously taught religion, history, and German to high school students but refused to join the National Socialist Teachers’ Association. Instead, she joined the Confessing Church, soon criticizing its spokesmen for their disparaging comments about Jews and challenging its leaders to intervene on behalf of “non-Aryan” Germans. This protest culminated in her 1935 memorandum “On the Situation of German Non-Aryans,” described by the website as “arguably the most explicit protest within the Confessing Church against the persecution of Jews.” Schmitz wrote that the German Church was “inescapably entangled in this collective culpability” and could hardly expect forgiveness when “it forsakes its members in their desperate straits day for day, stands by and watches the flouting of all of God’s commandments, does not even venture to confess the public sin, but instead—remains silent?” Alongside this work within the Confessing Church, Schmitz courageously quit her teaching position in 1938. Applying for early retirement, she informed the Berlin school board that, “I have become increasingly doubtful whether I can teach my purely ideological subjects—religion, history, German—as the Nazi state expects and demands of me,” adding that, “this constant moral conflict has become unbearable.” She spent the rest of the war years aiding persecuted Jews, returning to the classroom once again after the Hitler regime had been swept away.

“Evangelischer Widerstand” is less effective in more complex situations, as in the case of the journal Junge Kirche (Young Church). Ralf Retter’s thorough study of the Confessing Church periodical, published as Zwischen Protest und Propaganda: Die Zeitschrift “Junge Kirche“ im Dritten Reich (Munich: Allitera Verlag, 2009), argues that the journal was engaged in Resistenz (non-conformity) though not Widerstand (opposition) between 1933 and 1936. During this time, it opposed the German Christian takeover of the church governments, promoted the Barmen Confession, opposed both the introduction of the Aryan Paragraph in the churches and the abandonment of the Old Testament, affirmed the traditional historical narratives defending the long-standing presence of Christianity in Germany, supported the emergent ecumenical movement, and even criticized Nazi interference in the realm of the church. However, Retter also details the ways in which Junge Kirche abandoned the more radical Dahlemite branch of the Confessing Church after 1936, and how by 1939, its pro-Nazi editorial tendencies were growing clearer and clearer.  When Junge Kirche linked its embrace of Hitler’s war aims with its mission to foster piety and provide spiritual encouragement among German Protestants during the Second World War, it’s editors turned it into a stabilizing presence in the Third Reich—quite the opposite of a force for resistance.

In contrast to Retter’s nuanced portrayal, the online article “The Magazine ‘Junge Kirche’” (part of the “Christian Resistance” stream) explains how the church press “played a crucial role in communication and the exchange of information within church opposition.” It explains how Junge Kirche served as a “forum for opinions within the Confessing Church” and a source of information about wider German church life. It describes, quite rightly, how Nazi censorship limited the journal’s ability to report on church news and how the editors circumvented regulations by quoting Nazi or German Christian press reports, publishing the journal under a separate “Verlag Junge Kirche” in order to protect the real publisher, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. However, the decline of the journal as a forum for protest is greatly minimized, while there is no mention of its support for aspects of Nazism. The online text reads as follows:

Pressure on the editorial staff of the “Junge Kirche” to conform increased steadily, especially after the Nazi government changed its church policy in 1935. The balancing act between conformity and self-assertion grew more and more challenging. Government regulations had become so drastic by 1938 that the still remaining independent church press no longer had any latitude to report independently. The Reich Chamber of the Press eventually ordered the discontinuation of all religiously motivated magazines in the summer of 1941 on account of the war.

In the end, then, the website “Evangelischer Widerstand” is a bold and innovative attempt to present the history of Christian resistance to a new generation. It holds great potential to become the leading online educational site for the history of German Protestantism under Hitler. For that very reason, it is incumbent upon the editors from the Protestant Working Group for Contemporary Church History to define and contextualize their use of “Christian Resistance.” Doing so would make their dynamic website into the premier Internet source of information about all aspects of the history of German Protestantism in the Third Reich—from the heroic to the disgraceful.

Share

Conference Report: German Studies Association Conference, October 4-7, 2012, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Conference Report: German Studies Association Conference, October 4-7, 2012, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

GSAOnce again this past year, the German Studies Association conference included a number of interesting panels or papers devoted to contemporary church history.

The panel “Questioning Nazism as a ‘Political Religion'” offered new research relating to debates around the questions: was National Socialism a fundamentally anti-Christian political movement?  Was Nazism itself a political religion, a rival to traditional forms of Christianity?  Or, as Richard Steigmann-Gall has argued, was the Nazi Party led by politicians who understood themselves as Christians and even attempted to forge an unorthodox partnership with German Protestants and (to a lesser extent) German Catholics?  Three papers approached these questions from complementary directions. Beth Ann Griech-Polelle examined how Nazi ideologues viewed one of Germany’s allies, General Francisco Franco, whose collaboration with the Spanish Catholic Church inspired commentary which was sharply critical of “political Catholicism.”  Daniel A. McMillan argued that secularization constituted a significant cause of the Holocaust, in part because the concept of Nazism as a political religion helps explain why the Holocaust, more than any other genocide, was driven by ideology divorced from “practical” considerations.  Kyle Jantzen explored the efforts of a Berlin Protestant pastor to fuse Christianity and National Socialism, provoking opposition from both Nazi Party activists and leaders of the pro-Nazi German Christian movement, in the process revealing the many complexities of the relationship between National Socialism and organized religion.

In all, four members of the Contemporary Church History Quarterly editorial team presented papers in three panels scattered throughout the conference. Along with Griech-Polelle and Jantzen, mentioned above, Robert P. Ericksen presented “Antisemitism through the Lens of Denazification: Examples from Göttingen University,” as part of a panel which considered postwar assessments of pro- or anti-Nazi activities during the Third Reich. Here Ericksen continued to develop his recent research on the failings of the denazification process, highlighted by cases concerning  German academics. Finally, Steven Schroeder presented “‘The World Will Not Leave Us Alone’: Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in Germany, 1945-1949,” one of the papers in a panel on “Discourses of Victimization and Reconciliation Amid the Rubble.”

Another panel of interest was “The Work of the State and the Work of God: Religious Groups, Social Vocation, and State Violence.” Martina Cucchiara of the University of Notre Dame presented her paper, “Beyond the Concordat: Women’s Religious Negotiation of Free Spaces in Hitler’s Germany.” She discussed the notion of selective accommodation–complying with externals such as the Hitler Greeting and embracing the Nazi vision of community, nationalism, and heroism, while downplaying racial and antisemitic aspects of the regime. Stephen Morgan, also from the University of Notre Dame, contributed the paper “Between Reservation and Extermination: Rhenish Missionaries and the Herrero Genocide,” which explored the complex and compromised relationship between the German missionaries and the Herrero people. Missionaries approved of the reservation system, because it made the Christianization of the African people somewhat easier to accomplish. When the Herrero War ended this experiment, missionaries adapted to the changing conditions, but in the process lost credibility both with Europeans who found them too friendly to the Herrero and with the Herrero, who did not appreciate the missionaries’ encouragement to cease their rebellion. In the end, the missionaries were caught between their Christian interest in evangelism and the government’s interest in mobilizing colonial labour. Suzanne Brown-Fleming, another member of the Contemporary Church History Quarterly editorial team, commented ably on the papers, noting the common process of Christian adaptation to state interest and ideology and pointing out that–at some point–selective accommodation simply turns into assent.

One other paper of interest was James McNutt’s “‘They sought world domination … so he died’ Adolf Schlatter, Deicide, and Der Stürmer.” McNutt compared Streicher’s and Schlatter’s racial and theological attitudes towards Jews, noting linkages between racial hatred and religious antipathy. He argued that Schlatter was an important figure in German Protestantism, and that his social alienation of Jews contributed to their defamation as the evil other, enemies of God, and allies of Satan.

Share

Letter from the Editors: June 2012

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2012

Letter from the Editors: June 2012.

Dear Friends,

Once again we are pleased to present you with a new issue of the ACCH Quarterly. As is so often the case, our attention returns to two prominent themes in modern German church history: Dietrich Bonhoeffer (and more broadly, the Confessing Church) and the Holocaust.

On the former theme, John Conway reviews the newest (and final) volume of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition, which considers Bonhoeffer’s work in theological education during the later 1930s. Alongside this, we have included Matthew Hockenos’ interesting reflection on Confessing Church leader Martin Niemöller’s relationship with post-war America, and Manfred Gailus’ memorial address celebrating the life and death of Friedrich Weissler, the first member of the Confessing Church to have been murdered by the National Socialist regime in the course of its campaign against the German churches. We hope to bring you further reflections of this sort in the future, as we seek to broaden the ways in which the ACCH Quarterly interacts with the history of German and European church history over the past century.

The second theme – the relationship of the Christian churches to the Holocaust – is taken up by Victoria Barnett, who reviews two monographs on the subject of the complicity of the churches and other institutions in the Holocaust. This subject also appears in a review of the conference “Betrayal of the Humanities.” John Conway reviews Israeli politician Avraham Burg’s meditation on the legacy of the Holocaust in Israel, while Matthew Hockenos reports from the Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, which took place recently in Rochester, NY.

We believe that these and other contributions to the journal contribute to the ongoing historical, theological, and moral dialogue about the relationship between church and state and the responsibilities of Christians in times of crisis.

On behalf of all the ACCH Quarterly editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University College

Table of Contents

From the Editors

Letter from the Editors – Kyle Jantzen

Reviews

Review Article: Academic and Ecclesiastical Complicity in the Third Reich – Victoria J. Barnett

Review of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theological Education Underground: 1937-1940, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 15 – John S. Conway

Review of Avraham Burg, The Holocaust Is Over. We Must Rise From Its Ashes – John S. Conway

Review of Bryn Geffert, Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans: Diplomacy, Theology, and the Politics of Interwar Ecumenism – John S. Conway

Review of Mark Jantzen, Mennonite German Soldiers: Nation, Religion, and Family in the Prussian East, 1772-1880 – Robert Beachy

Articles

Conference Paper: Matthew D. Hockenos, “Martin Niemöller in America, 1946-1947: ‘A Hero with Limitations’,” Plenary Session: Disputed Memories of Complicity and Righteousness, 42nd Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches – Matthew D. Hockenos

News and Notices

Conference Report: Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches – Matthew D. Hockenos

Memorial Speech: Friedrich Weissler (1891-1937) and the Confessing Church. Remembrance and Commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of the Death of Friedrich Weissler – Manfred Gailus

Conference Report: Betrayal of the Humanities: The University during the Third Reich – Bernard Levinson, Melissa Kelley

Article Note: Manuel Borutta, “Genealogie der Säkularisierungstheorie. Zur Historisierung einer großen Erzählung der Moderne,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft – Heath Spencer

Call for Papers: Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations

Share